Guardian photo-journalist Adam Gabbatt was told "No press today for security reasons" for the Occupy Movement's November 17 Day of Action.

Think about that for just a few seconds. News helicopters are being told to stay out of the Wall Street area according to WNBC radio. What is it we're not supposed to see?

Android phones may have overtaken Apple's iPhones in the marketplace. Then again, maybe they haven't. And to you, as a developer, what may matter most is which smart phone OS is going to be the biggest player a year or two from now, and fellow IT Knowledge Exchange writer Ron Miller (no relation) thinks Google may have hurt future Android adoption badly by buying Motorola's mobile phone unit. Still, it's probably prudent to put at least as much effort into Android app development as into developing iOS apps. Read the Rest .

When I was a kid our school textbooks and the general societal belief (what we would now call a âoememeâ) led us to believe in a future where machines would do the heavy manufacturing and agricultural tasks, which meant humans would be freed to do fulfilling tasks instead of drudgery. We were all going to work 20 hours a week and spend the rest of our time choreographing ballets or writing poetry or something, and lots of serious think-papers were written about how weâ(TM)d use our growing leisure time. -- Read the Rest.

On June 27, the IT Ladder headline was, Tired of IT? Become a Private Investigator. Today weâ(TM)ll look at a few other responses to my âoepanel of expertsâ question, which was, âoeWhat new fields should IT professionals consider?â Read the rest.

After the bankruptcy "reform" of the last decade (which only applied to the lower income levels), we knew it was only a matter of time before the return of debtors' prison and forced work camps. There was never any question that this was where Reaganomics would take us.

I guess I just didn't expect that we'd see it so soon. When the new privatized prison system meets debtors prisons, something very very ugly is going to emerge. And it appears it's going to happen within the next couple of years.

If you are very very wealthy, and you find yourself unable to pay your debt, the government will force citizens to make you whole. If you are part of the working or lower classes and find yourself unable to pay your debt, you have become an enemy of the New Corporate State and will be treated accordingly.

I know a guy, Lee Drake, who has an IT business in Rochester, New York, called OS-Cubed. He's also part of a chamber of commerce-type group that touts Rochester as a great place to start and run a high-tech business. Why Rochester? Why not? And why not look at a lot of places besides Silicon Valley if you want to be involved with exciting, cutting edge technology? Read the rest...

Unless there's a system failure (which is a distinct possibility), Jeremiah Cornelius, an iconoclastic and highly prolific Slashdot journal writer has packed it in and closed his account. Links to his journals are dead and his account only shows the UID number, not his user name.

While sometimes his opinions were the kind that made me uncomfortable (which is something, being iconoclastic and a pain in the ass bordering on the trollish myself), I will miss his energy and his strongly held sincere beliefs.

If he's gone elsewhere, I'd like to know which online community a guy like him would join. We;ve lost some long-time Slashdot users recently. I hate to see a good one go.

Iâ(TM)ve had a couple of management consultants tell me that if you want to move into management, itâ(TM)s better to change jobs or change where you work within your current company than to stay where you are. What if you have to fire one of your old friends? Not cool. Or are you better off starting your management career surrounded by peope who know and (hopefully) like you? Read the rest .

Have you heard about Walker, Wisconsin Ranger? He's busily busting unions and making sure those awful people who work for the state don't make hardly any money. Except...

Just in his mid-20s, Brian Deschane has no college degree, very little management experience and two drunken-driving convictions.

Yet he has landed an $81,500-per-year job in Gov. Scott Walker's administration overseeing environmental and regulatory matters and dozens of employees at the Department of Commerce. Even though Walker says the state is broke and public employees are overpaid, Deschane already has earned a promotion and a 26% pay raise in just two months with the state.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has the rest of the story.

Of course, here in Florida, this wouldn't be news, would it? Our Republicans have been pulling this kind of crap for decades and still manage to con morons into voting for them.

Read other inflammatory articles at Roblimo.com.

Youâ(TM)re a great person and a valuable worker. Your peers and your supervisors know this. But do the folks in Human Resources who set your salary know how good you are? Probably not. And what about HR people at companies where you are applying for a job? They know nothing about you other than what they see in your resume or on an application form. Impressing these people is the main reason for taking (and passing) certification exams. Read the rest.

When I was a young teenager, one day my father took me to visit the then-new San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. I recall quite clearly that the basic atomic pile control system was a series of control rods that would drop into the Uranium core in the event of a power or steam pressure loss and automatically shut down the reaction. WTF is up with reactors built since those early-generation Westinghouse ones that don't have this simple and obvious safety shutdown feature? Crazy.

From roblimo.com

Rick Scott was elected governor of Florida by a narrow margin, propelled into office by a campaign he financed with $78 million of his own money that was aimed at mentally handicapped citizens and Alzheimerâ(TM)s sufferers. Since we have plenty of these people in Florida, Scott won. And now heâ(TM)s letting us down. Heâ(TM)s supposed to be the tea-est of tea partiers, but Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is getting so much tea party glory that thereâ(TM)s hardly any left over for Rick Scott. The thing is, on the surface Scott is just about as loonie a tea partier as you can find outside of a mental hospital. He claimed he was going to bring 700,000 new job to Florida, then made it clear in his first budget proposal that he was going to lay off a whole bunch of state employees â" except in his own office, which he wants to grow by 91 employees and $343 million in funding.

Read the rest at Roblimo.com

So there you are, liberaling away, maybe doing a little protest over Wisconsin's Koch-sponsored Governor's attempt to impoverish state employees. And then an assistant attorney general in Indianapolis advocates using live rounds on people like you. Folks, it's time to buy guns -- and to get good at using them, too.

Read the rest at Roblimo.com.

Years ago, when my wife was finishing her PhD in Math, I helped her with putting her dissertation into the required format, which was a TeX document. The main thing I remember about it was how much trouble it was just to lay out a document. It was hard enough for her to do all the very difficult Math work and get ready for her PhD defense, but to then require her to learn TeX just seemed like piling on.

The other day, my daughter, who's now a Math grad student, came to me and asked if I knew anything about TeX. It caused a sickening deja vu as I realized that after all this time, TeX is still the required format for technical documents.

Now, I understand the elegance of TeX, and I can appreciate the need for a standard way of typesetting such documents. I've seen the Chinese students taking class notes in TeX and I'm aware of the place TeX holds in the Math, physics and engineering communities.

But jesus christ on roller skates, can no one come up with something a little easier to learn and use? I'm a musician and composer and arranger. I score films. Creating formatting and typesetting a music manuscript is at least as exacting and formalized as setting up a document to show some equations, some graphs and a figure or two. I've got a handful of excellent professional software that makes writing (and printing) music as easy as writing a business letter. I don't have to write code just to put in a D.S. al coda for heaven's sake.

When I was working on my own dissertation decades ago in critical theory, I remember using the DOS version of Nota Bene, because that was what my adviser used and by gawd, that was what I was going to use. It was like an even more baroque version of Wordperfect with all sorts of code and macros and packages for diacritical marks. But the world has moved on since then and now there's open office to fill all my document needs.

I guess I'm just venting a bit, thinking about my daughter having to learn tex on top of everything else she's got going on, and I know I'm going to get hit with questions, which means I'm going to have to go back and brush up. I'm about to install LateX on my machine for the second time in over 20 years and if nothing else, can I get some encouragement? Maybe an explanation of why time has stood still in this one area?

Now let me go get some aspirin.

Wait until Saturday evening, when the point spread hits 5, then take the Bears and the points.

Send my share of the winnings to the EFF or the ACLU.