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The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison: Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels

Another fun piece written by Barrett Brown from federal prison, this time about Purity.

Here are some older articles along similar lines.

This is a reposted submission with editing.

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Anonymous Coward-28 writes:

Incomplete list.

Overlord. (13 episodes) Too short. Ending yelled "our production budget is too small". Really, felt like an advertisement to learn WRITTEN japanese, and buy the raw manga from amazon.co.jp; to find out what happens next.

Chaos Dragon. (12 episodes) Beautifully dark; at least for the first few episodes. The "happily ever after" ending felt tasteless and disgusting. Doesn't anybody know how to write a good tragedy anymore ?

Normally, I wouldn't submit trash like this; but the queue's empty, so . . .

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AniChart Summer 2015 anime

LiveChart Summer 2015 anime

Original Submission

Throughout the Great Charter School Debate on SoylentNews recently, I was amazed that I retained a 50 point karma standing, in spite of showing no mercy to mercenaries, and fellow travellers of the John Birch variety. But recently I did criticize a certain Soylentil, and saw my karma drop precipitiously. I suspect a mod-bombing, but my home-boy the Mighty Buzz has recently posted a diary https://soylentnews.org/~The+Mighty+Buzzard/journal/ saying that such things are not happening on the SoylentNews. Who am I to argue that.

But that is not why I am writing this. I write this to suggest to Soylentils everywhere that we slightly modify our modification. As is well know, and lauded in the annals of the internet, it is the member modification of slashdot that made it great. That is, until they started pushing ads. We are heirs to that greatness. And well it has worked so far, especially as judged by the numbers of Sad Puppies, GamerGaters, and Libertarians who complain that nobody likes them. (Hint, guys: it is just that nobody likes you!) But for my suggestion: when you find a poster that is patently offensive, or moronic, and is outraged that the rest of us do not see what they are so outraged about, may I suggest a mod of "funny". Kind of deflates the whole thing, which in the case of the GamerGaters is both a double entendre and a sad state of affairs.

And if, when you find someone has totally failed to understand a refutation of their position, the type of thing one would normally use a "whoosh" mod for, consider using Touché, just to preserve the irony of the moment. Other variants no doubt exist, using "interesting" for something that is obviously not, "insightful" for things that are not (but maybe this will not work, since the target will never understand the irony). Work some out on your own. Use "disagree" for flat-earthers, just for yucks. Use "Troll" for actual beings who live under bridges and turn to stone if exposed to sunlight. (I recommend the Fremont Troll as an example.) And we could go on from there, but, I will not. Stay critical, my friends. Do not believe anything but that your own understanding tells you it is true. Or a ex-prince from Nigeria.

• A London Cereal Café Was Attacked by an Anti-Gentrification Group Called 'Fuck Parade'
• The hipster Cereal Killer Cafe owners aren't the East End's real enemy
• Cereal Killer protest: police investigate threats against cafe owners
• Cereal cafe defended by Boris Johnson after gentrification demo

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34358380

Los Angeles police said Majed Abdulaziz al-Saud, 28, was arrested on Wednesday and released the following day after posting a $300,000 (£197,000) bond. He is scheduled to appear in court on October 19 to face a charge of "forced oral copulation". Al-Saud does not have diplomatic immunity, police said.

http://www.cnn.com/ (right on the front page, no Fox BS)
Or an audio stream.

Starts at 5:10 PM PT, 8:10 PM ET.

Wikipedia:

The undercard broadcast took place at 3 PM PDT, while the main card broadcast will occur at 5 PM PDT. The candidates in the main debate are Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, and John Kasich. The candidates in the undercard debate are Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham, Rick Santorum, and George Pataki. Rick Perry suspended his campaign on September 11, effectively ending his candidacy. The two-tiered CNN broadcasts will be consecutive, with the primetime debate planned to immediately follow the second-tier broadcast. The moderator is Jake Tapper of CNN, with side-by-side participation by Hugh Hewitt of Salem Radio.

Other stuff:

• NYT live coverage
• PolitiFact
• Republican Party presidential debates, 2016
• Twitter live

Pushing To Attract Millennials, Taco Bell Will Offer Beer And Wine

[Image]

On Tuesday, Taco Bell announced it is launching a new concept that "redefines fast food experience." The first of these "experiences" will open in Chicago next week, and another one will follow later this month in San Francisco.

In a statement, the company says:

"Taco Bell Cantina restaurants will be the first and only Taco Bell restaurants to serve alcohol to customers who are of legal drinking age. The San Francisco restaurant will serve beer and wine only, while Wicker Park will serve, beer, wine, sangria and twisted Freezes. Cantina restaurants will also feature a new tapas-style menu of sharable appetizers — including nachos and rolled tacos — during designated hours each evening, in addition to the standard Taco Bell Menu."

These new cantinas won't have drive-throughs and will have open kitchens, according to a press release. They will also have digital menu boards, television monitors and an option for customers to use a mobile app to order and pay for their food.

[...] As USA Today reports:

"The company knows that its Millennial customers increasingly are attracted to urban areas, where real estate is pricey. Company officials think that selling a stiffer drink might pad the receipts — the typical Taco Bell receipt is in the $7 range — and in turn help make their urbanization push more doable.

" 'To put in a drive-thru you need land,' Neil Borkan, the Taco Bell franchisee who will operate the Chicago test location, told USA TODAY. 'Can you imagine buying an acre of land in a neighborhood like [Chicago's] Wicker Park? You couldn't afford it. As real estate becomes more and more expensive, this kind of concept makes more sense.'

"Taco Bell is treading carefully into booze. While quick-service rival Starbucks recently announced it would accelerate its push of its beer and wine program and has applied for liquor licenses for hundreds of stores across the USA in recent months, Taco Bell spokesman Rob Poetsch said the company could potentially open 10 locations selling hard drinks next year."

The day I met Rio’s favela master: the drug lord who championed the poor: Misha Glenny tells of his prison meetings with Nem of Rocinha, the slum crime boss who channelled some of his cocaine profits into running a welfare state for 100,000 people

After his arrest, I wrote to Nem in prison and asked if he would speak to me. He agreed. The story that emerged was fascinating: once he reached the top, Nem was, in effect, mayor, police chief and director of the chamber of commerce for a community estimated at 100,000 residents. With the receipts from the cocaine trade, he ran a business that supported nearly 1,000 people. He also channelled some of his profits into a basic welfare state. He could do this because he paid close attention to accounting and budgetary matters.

“The food baskets and the support we gave to extracurricular school activities, such as the Thai boxing or capoeira classes, were all accounted for as part of our business expenses,” he explained. “But the burials, prescription costs or if anyone who couldn’t afford it needed gas, these were all extra payments.”

In the absence of any regular police, law was maintained by 150 armed men, most in their teens and early 20s. But while the man known locally as Mestre, or master, decided over life or death, he usually opted for the former. Under his rule, homicide rates dropped by more than two-thirds.

This was part-calculation, part-intuition. Rocinha was so profitable for the cocaine trade because it is surrounded by the three richest areas of Rio – Leblon, São Conrado and Gávea. By turning Rocinha into the safest and most attractive favela in Rio, business boomed. “He was not a man of violence,” said Detective Bárbara Lomba, who led the three-strong team that patiently investigated the Rocinha drugs operation for four years. “He had a policy of avoiding confrontation wherever possible and of not facing down the police. Rather the opposite, he was in contact with them in a corrupt relationship.”

Nem’s policy paid off. Rocinha became a fixture on the tourist route; Brazil’s biggest pop stars such as Ivete Sangalo and Claudia Leitte were happy to include the favela on their tours, boosting their popularity with Brazil’s poor. Politicians including former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the current incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, were keen to tour, as were members of Brazil’s national football side. Above all, the youngsters from the surrounding middle class areas went to buy coke.

Beltrame knew that he would have to “pacify” Rocinha because of its symbolic power and its location. As the World Cup and the Olympics approached the pressure grew. But by taking Nem out of the equation, Rocinha’s character has changed. The relationship between the police and residents is uneasy at best. In July 2013, a group which included the chief of Rocinha police murdered an innocent bricklayer, and the favela came close to open insurrection.

Since then the drug cartel has been edging its way back and there are sporadic shootouts with the police. Homicides remain at historic low levels but domestic violence, rape, assault and burglary have increased fourfold.

So I just got this message from Aaron Hoag at the DOJ.

It looks like we're fucked.

My original letter to the FTC, which was then forwarded to the DOJ, is here.

Mr. Hopson,

Thank you for your e-mail regarding changes to Microsoft's Secure Boot policies in Windows 10, which was forwarded to the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice by the FTC given our history with our cases against Microsoft.

I spent many years working on enforcement of the Division's judgment against Microsoft. As a result, this is an issue that I personally have followed since it initially arose, as you note, in Windows 8. While I appreciate your concerns and those raised by the open source community at large, from an antitrust point of view it is difficult to build a viable case in light of, amongst other factors, Microsoft's willingness to work with the largest Linux vendors to ensure their operating systems will be able to load when Secure Boot is enabled. Without disputing or diminishing the fact that in your own case this solution has not been sufficient to allow you to install your preferred variety of Linux, I can only note that to build an antitrust case, we would be required to show a market-wide effect, which would be exceptionally difficult given the ease with which a user can install Fedora or Ubuntu, to take two of the largest Linux flavors, on a machine even where the OEM has chosen to prevent users from disabling Secure Boot.

We will of course continue to watch this market and will take appropriate action if Microsoft engages in anticompetitive behavior in violation of the antitrust laws.

Thank you again for taking the time to ensure that we were aware of this issue, and do not hesitate to contact us again should future events warrant it.

Yours truly,
Aaron Hoag

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Aaron Hoag
Assistant Chief
Networks & Technology Enforcement Section
U.S. Dept. of Justice, Antitrust Division
450 5th St, NW, 7th Floor
Washington, DC 20530
Phone: (202) 307-6153
E-mail: aaron.hoag@usdoj.gov

If you have something to say to him, be civil, rational, and kind. No good will come to our cause by being a dick.

So I converted my /home to btrfs, because I'm quite tight on space and thought the compression would be a benefit.

I had to compile btrfs-progs myself, which also included compiling libext2fs from e2fsprogs. Once I started the conversion, it took 3 hours to convert.

It was successful. I rebooted, logged in, and all my data was intact. The transparent compression I had asked for in my fstab was working.
There was a noticable performance penalty, but that's to be expected with compression.

I use compressed btrfs on my portable SubLinux thumbdrive I keep on my keychain. I've had no problems there,
However, once I started copying data to and from the newly converted filesystem in any size, I noticed a padlock had appeared on everything in Thunar file manager. I suspected a problem, so I went to dmesg. There was a backtrace from btrfs. The kernel's driver had crashed, and it had remounted my new filesystem read-only.

I panicked, fearing the worst. I quickly went to a tty, killed Xorg, unmounted /home, and ran btrfs-convert -r on the partition to undo the conversion.

Thankfully, the un-conversion was successful. I remounted /home and restarted my login manager, logged in, and everything was normal again, running from ext4. No data loss I can see. I ran md5sum on files I suspected might be damaged, they match. No harm done it appears.

Lesson for today: While the filesystem's disk format is indeed stable, the drivers and utilities for managing the filesystem are NOT. Use btrfs at your own peril.

I still like ext4. It's so hard to kill an ext4 filesystem.