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Engineering
        The company's co-founder, largest stockholder, and CEO was annoyed; this was certainly not his best day, golf aside. He'd spent too much time on the course and only had time for a little more of Knolls' report, and now he had to chew out that incredibly stupid chief engineer, who was knocking on his door and in danger of losing his job. This could have crippled the company. "Come in," the CEO said.
        It seemed the company he and Charles had practically built from scratch was falling apart. God damn it, quality was deteriorating badly, and he was starting to think he needed a new head engineer.
        "Talk to me, Gene."
        "Sir?"
        God damn it, he thought. He opened a folder and handed a piece of paper to the engineer. "I'm talking about this schematic wiring diagram. How in the hell did this happen, and why was it spotted by someone who wasn't even an engineer?"
        Richardson said "I honestly don't know, sir."
        "Your teams are getting really sloppy, Richardson. This has been built into ten ships already and they're all going to have to be rewired because engineering screwed up on the blueprints. How in the hell could your team miss this? How the hell could you miss it? An intern discovered it! And he wasn't even an engineering student, he was just an electronics hobbyist."
        Richardson hung his head. The CEO continued. "If these ships had been operational a lot of people would have died and it would have caused the company great financial hardship; we're self-insured. One more mistake like this and you're fired, Richardson, and I'll get someone competent.
        "Now tell me, who programmed our robots to make coffee?"
        "Sir?"
        "Robot," Mister Green said, "Make this man a cup of coffee. Richardson, I got a report from a ship's captain complaining about the coffee so I had one of the ship robots sent here to check. He's right, this is the worst coffee I've ever tasted."
        "Well, sir, I don't like coffee myself, I had Larry Jones program it."
        "Why in the hell didn't you test it? That's the kind of sloppiness I'm talking about."
        "We did do chemical tests, sir..."
        "But you never thought of having anyone who actually drinks coffee try it? Look, Richardson, I'll be blunt: you're on the verge of losing your job. We have paying customers booking passage on our boats and they don't expect to make their own coffee and they expect the coffee they're served to be good coffee. I want a program for a robot to make not just drinkable coffee, which this isn't, and not just good coffee, but great coffee. I want the program in a week and a demonstration in two weeks and updates sent to all the coffee robots as soon as it's tested, and by that I mean by a group of people who enjoy coffee. Put Jones on a project he's good at. This is unacceptable. Am I understood, Richardson?
        "Yes sir."
        "And I want you to weed out the incompetents in your shop. This sloppiness is inexcusable."
        "Sir, the union..."
        "Tell the union that if they give you any trouble there won't be a new contract, I'll replace every engineer and programmer in the shop as soon as the contract expires. The union is supposed to give us quality employees, and it doesn't look to me like we're getting them.
        "Now, one more screw up and your career is over, Richardson. Now get out of here and get to work, I have a report to finish reading."
        After Richardson left, he buzzed his secretary. "Get Human Resources on the fone. And schedule a meeting with all the department heads for nine tomorrow morning. And I don't want to take any calls unless it's the company President, my wife, kids, or an emergency after I talk to Human Resources." He drummed his fingers for a few seconds and the fone buzzed again. It was Osbourne.
        "What's up, Charles?"
        "Have you tasted our robots' coffee, Dewey? I was curious after reading Knolls' report. That's the nastiest coffee I ever drank. And I was in the Army."
        "Yes, I did, and Richardson got a good ass chewing. I threatened to fire him, and I might still. And his might not be the only head to roll, Knolls' report was an eye opener. I want reports from all the Captains after each run from now on."
        "So do I, I already ordered it. I'm leaving for Mars tomorrow on whatever of our first class passenger boats can get me there the fastest right after the meetings. I wish I could skip the board meeting.
        "I'm especially worried about engineering, that's our most important function. I'm not too happy about financial, either. How did we let this slip past us, Dewey?"
        "Hell if I know, Charles. Both of us are going to have to be more vigilant. Look, I have to finish reading this report. I may not finish it this afternoon so I want you to mostly take charge in the meeting since you've read the whole thing and have more information. I'll see you in the morning. Goodbye."
        "See you, Dewey."

Sorry I haven't been here lately, but I've been working furiously on the book. There are five more chapters ready to post, followed by a few that haven't been written yet, then six more written chapters that go at the end of the book. The manuscript stands at 40,261 words as of this writing.

For a few weeks there in May and June I was doubtful that the SN experiment was going to succeed. I saw an awful lot of stories that had single-digit comments and found myself jumping over to /. frequently.

However, lately activity has seemed to pick up and the comments have been great. In fact, just this morning I realized I had not visited /. in over a week.

I, for one, am glad about this development.

UPDATE: let me know what you lost to Microsoft's stupidity - details at www.nerdcore.org.uk

Having been a little under the weather over the last few days, I've been less than diligent reading my usual news sources and rather averse to playing Minecraft with a splitting headache. Today I discovered that Microsoft have been very heavy handed in dealing with a botnet they wanted to take down and have used a US federal warrant to seize 22 domains belonging to dynamic DNS server No-IP:

Soylent News Article: http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/07/01/1353230

Microsoft Statement: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/06/30/microsoft-takes-on-global-cybercrime-epidemic-in-tenth-malware-disruption.aspx

No-IP Reply Statement: http://www.noip.com/blog

Microsoft's intentions are laudable - many companies would have decided that a botnet was "someone else's problem", shrugged and ignored it. Going after it themselves to protect their customers is a Good Thing (TM) and shows a good awareness of their responsibilities as a good corporate citizen.

Unfortunately, all of those sentiments and the good will they would have earned by doing this were dashed to the floor and smashed into a billion pieces when they heavy-handedly decided the best way to go after these scumbags was to close down the entire dynamic DNS service their C&C system was built on. Never mind the vast majority of legitimate users, never mind that No-IP has a long history of helping chase down and catch people doing exactly this, never mind the shaky international legal grey area they've just thrust themselves into, Microsoft themselves have just launched what could well go down in history as the biggest DoS ever deliberately launched by a corporate entity in history.

I live in England. In 2006, the Police and Justice Act was passed. Clause 40 was specifically crafted to make Denial of Service attacks illegal. Here's some of the relevant language from the passage in question:

"Clause 40: Unauthorised acts with intent to impair operation of computer, etc"

"A person is guilty of an offence if"..."he does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer"..."to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer"..."whether permanently or temporarily." (3, 3.1, 3.1.a, 3.2.b, 3.2)

"The intent need not be directed at"..."any particular computer"..."any particular program or data" (3.3, 3.3.a, 3.3.b)

"For the purposes of subsection (1)(b) above the requisite knowledge is knowledge that the act in question is unauthorised." (3.4)

"A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable"..."on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years or to a fine or to both." (3.6, 3.6.c)

From my position as not-a-lawyer, Microsoft has by definition in UK law illegally DoS'd my Minecraft server, a criminal act that could see folks go to prison.

1 - Can the Microsoft in the UK be held accountable for the actions of it's parent company in the US?
2 - Does the US Federal warrant count as authorization seeing as it's worthless in the UK?

So far, I've sent an email to the EFF asking for any advice they may be able to give on this matter, and I'd be interested to hear their take on what's going on here. I'm also preparing a letter to Microsoft UK about this, as well as currently setting up a blog (on my own server again, good work No-IP for bagging some new domains asap!) to detail everything that happens.

At some point I'll be asking for anyone else affected in to the UK to let me know who they are, what got taken down and how much of an impact it's had on their lives and businesses. Microsoft should be brought to account for the huge amount of trouble they've caused - I'd wager a lot of money that the seizures have caused far more damage than the botnet they sought to take down would ever have been capable of.

Microsoft must pay!

I'm finishing up a project for a client that does some pretty neat stuff w/ IP cameras. Everything is running on a CentOS 5 box and I needed a newer version of ffmpeg to get everything working as I want it to. I found step-by-step instructions to do this. So I'm sitting here, watching gcc commands fly by on the screen while compiling everything and I start thinking, egad, open source has really come a long, long way from my days in the late 90's using Red Hat 6.2 and Ximian desktop. None of the stuff I'm working on would have been possible back then and I really don't want to think about what it would take to do all of this on a proprietary system like Windows.

When I'm done w/ this project and it's fully debugged and in production I plan on writing a series of journal entries about what I've done, the problems I overcame, etc.

Anyway, I just wanted to give a shout out to all the people who make open source possible. I would be a broke, poor soul w/o much of a life if none of this stuff existed, and it's due to the hard work you've all put into it that makes my career possible. Thanks so much!

Note: There will be a chapter inserted between chapters nine and ten. Chapters have been renumbered in the manuscript.

Animals
        Destiny was already awake and dressed when I got up the next morning. I'm glad she was there or I might have overslept.
        "Are you going to sleep all day? Your breakfast is going to get cold. I'm eating."
        I groaned, rolled out of bed, put on a robe and followed her to the dining room. She'd made coffee and had the robots make French toast, bacon, and tater tots. I didn't feel like tater tots. "What time is it?" I asked.
        She laughed. "You need a clock right there on the wall! Computer, what time is it?"
        The computer said "The time is seven twenty eight." Good, plenty of time. I finished eating and took a quick shower and started my morning chores about five minutes early. This time two of the computers disagreed with the other two. Two said "systems were nominal", one said that engine sixty four was getting three volts too much and the other said number sixty four was two volts short. Oh, well, I was going to have to walk the stairs anyway, so I decided I'd get engine and generator inspections out of the way first. Even though two or three volts was almost nothing when you're talking terrawatts.
        As I passed the commons Lek walked up, the one that talked English kind of okay.
        "Captain Knolls?" she said, which confused me because the whores usually called me "Joe" even though my name is John.
        "Lek?" I said, "how can I help?" I read Tammy's book, I didn't want to piss these dropheads off.
        "Look, Captain, you surely know what not having drops does to us by now."
        I almost said "I ain't got no drops, bitch" but I didn't. Instead I said "You're short of drops? Look, talk to..." Damn, I almost screwed up and gave Tammy away. Damn it, John!
        "Uh," I continued. "You need drops? Look, Lek, I finally get it. I do inspections and can confiscate..."
        "No," she said, "It's Sparkle. She going to..." she hung her head. "Buddha, but I really hate myself. I not human without drops! What has happened to me? But Sparkle need drops or she be dangerous wild animal."
        I really felt sorry for these women. I didn't think of them as whores any more, life had really kicked their asses. Tammy's book had really opened my eyes. Poor women. I called her on my fone, but she was already on it.
        "Tammy, could you get some..."
        "Drops to Sparkle?" she interrupted.
        "Yeah. Is she..."
        "She's okay. Now, anyway. But John, even though I knew, thanks. Please, if it comes up again call me, don't hesitate!"
        "Jesus, Tammy," I said, "Of course I will, after I read your book I know how dangerous a dropless drophead is."
        I finished walking down the hall to the stairs, then down that five damned flights. Most of this boat is engines. Second is generators, the generators take up more space than quarters and storage, and storage is as big as quarters.
        I checked number sixty four first, of course. It read normal. I almost logged that, but it suddenly dropped two volts, then immediately to a two and a half volt overvoltage. Bill told me once that that usually meant a bad connection, he's kind of a nerd.
        It's good to know nerds.
        I shut sixty four down like the book says, then inspected the rest of them. I don't know why I have to check the port generator, since it's broke, but I do so I did.
        The starboard generator was fine.
        The damned alarm went off. Fire in cargo seven. I didn't know whether to cuss the damned whores or the damned stupid engineers who design shit that catches fire and have emergency drills when there's a real emergency.
        I fucking hate it when there's an emergency upstairs when I'm downstairs. I have to run up five flights of stairs. Yeah, we're at half gravity now but it goes down slow, after the first day you don't really notice it dropping. The droppers hadn't complained, except when it had sudden changes like when we sped up to beat the rocks. I'm just glad I didn't have to run up the stairs that day I was climbing around outside. Oh, wait, I did, didn't I?
        I wished we were at zero G, I could have made it to the top in seconds. But then, of course, the women would kill me.
        The red light was flashing on cargo seven. "Computer, is there anybody in there?"
        "Parse error, please rephrase question."
        God damned computer. "Is cargo seven, uh, occupied?"
        "Negative." That was a relief; not only does the company get pissed off when cargo was damaged, these weren't just cargo, they were people. Human beings.
        At least, they were human when they had their drops. What Lek said was spooky, like one of those old horror movies Destiny likes, the old two dimensional ones with werewolves and vampires and no colors. I kind of shivered a little.
        The flashing light went out and I went in. There was a burned up maid in the room. Hell, was it noon already?
        Another burned up... wait, what was the number on that thing? R2? That's the same maid that burned up before. Whoever programs the robots that repair the other robots needs an ass kicking, or at least an ass chewing.
        I pulled out my fone. "Computer, take R2 out of service until the Martian maintenance."
        "Acknowledged." Another robot dragged it off to storage, and a third started noisily cleaning up the mess.
        I went to the commons, which right now was a restaurant with robot waiters and robot cooks and about a hundred naked women. I thought "I'm going to start inspecting cargo at meal time!" Not that these girls eat much, except the fat blonde with the German accent. They slept more than anything.
        "Attention," I yelled. They ignored me, the din continued. I pulled out my fone and addressed the PA, they can't ignore that.
        "Attention, ladies, who lives in number seven?"
        "That's Crystal," one of them said.
        "Where is she?"
        "I don't know. Oh, there she is," she said as another woman walked in.
        "Where have you been?" I demanded. "You're supposed to go to the commons when your quarters catch fire."
        "What?" she said, startled. "My quarters caught fire? I was in Leslie's cabin and got hungry. Is my stuff okay?"
        What stuff? "Yeah, the only thing that burned was the maid."
        "Good, I hate that noisy damned thing! Robot, I want a ham and cheese sandwich and a chocolate shake."
        I finished inspection by one thirty and was starved by then. Destiny called. "Where are you? I'm starved," she said.
        "Walking back to our apartment," I said. Oh, shut up you two, that's what I said. I told you I don't want that "professional" shit, I ain't no God damned professional.
        We had pizza and beer and watched an ancient comedy called Blazing Saddles and I didn't understand a lot of it, but some parts were funny. Destiny thought it was hilarious, and told me to read some history.

First, I want to thank you folks for your suggestions, although I didn't see them until I logged in this morning. The answer came to me last night when I was sitting on my porch with a beer in my hand and several in my gut.

The answer was simple and I don't know why I hadn't already thought of it, maybe I should drink more. I hacked out maybe 500 words, about half a chapter that will go between the present chapters 9 and 10. I'll post it when there's more than a skeleton, tomorrow is chapter 24.

And the answer was something you guys have probably seen way too many times at work -- corporate bureaucracy and lack of communications. What I wrote last night had the CEO chewing out the head of scheduling, a women with a BS in math who had only taken one physics class, and the head of finance, who held an MBA.

Stopping the boat a couple of times (like to help Captain Kelly) and detours around meteors didn't hurt.

As to the CEO, I have to apologize to you folks for something that may be a bit confusing; I'm changing the CEO's name.

The first germ of an idea for this book came last spring when I was sitting in the beer garden at Felber's talking to a couple of guys about Nobots. I hadn't realized that the patrons there were more literate than the general population, probably half of them read Nobots when I published it.

A few crack whores were walking down the street (it's a pretty bad neighborhood with plenty of characters who make fodder for fiction), and Dewey laughed and said "you ought to write a book about whores in space." I'd never seen a book with space whores, so it might be a unique idea, and writing a book about whores without it being pornography was a challenge.

A few days ago, Dewey said he wanted to be in the book, so I named the CEO after him, even though the Dewey Green in the story is nothing like the real Dewey.

A journal by NCommander the other day got me thinking (I know, dangerous but I was bored) and what we need here is a Gamer's Corner for fellow Soybeans users to post what games they are playing, build teams, trade in game items, etc. I think this would help build unity and community while at the same time helping the users hook up and do better in their games.

Anyway until one of the admins gives us a true gamer's corner section I figured we could use this post as a starting point so feel free to post what games you are playing you'd like to have others join, in game gear you'd be happy to give away/swap, basically anything to do with games and gaming feel free to post it here.

Allow me to get the ball rolling with a little gift for the fellow Soybeaners...if you recently picked up Borderlands II GOTY off the Steam sale and haven't maxed your character yet? I have plenty of orange items from the great loot hunt last year, lvl 50-70 and I'll be happy to work out times to hook up in game and dole out the loot. Drops will be limited depending on how many folks respond and will go on until the loot is gone, I don't have enough of each weapon to take requests for specific guns but feel free to ask and if I have it its yours, also have some sweet blue and purple weapons like the Morningstar sniper rifle I'll be happy to drop and if you prefer a particular type of weapon, like say shotgun or rifle I'll be happy to look and see what I have.

I'm having a math and physics problem: math and physics is getting in the way of the plot in Mars, Ho!

I originally thought it would be a six month trip, but math got in the way since they were getting gravity from propulsion. So I shortened it to a two month trip, and to do that I had to have Earth and Mars on opposite sides of the sun -- but orbital mechanics makes waiting shorten the time.

The best bad way around it I can see is a little hand-waving, with the captain wondering why the company didn't wait a week to launch. But I'm not satisfied with this. Does anybody have any ideas?

Junk
        I felt pretty good the next day when I woke up. Destiny was still asleep, so I started coffee, told the robot to make breakfast and no robot coffee, damn it! And took a shower.
        Huh? Bacon, eggs, and hash browns for two. Destiny would be awake by the time I got out of the shower. Huh? Why? Over easy. Christ, guys! What difference does it make how the God damned eggs are cooked?
        She was just waking up as I got dressed. "Hungry?" I asked. "I made coffee and the robots are making breakfast."
        "I'll probably be hungry when my stomach wakes up. What time is it?"
        "About seven thirty, we have a half hour before I have to go to work."
        "Is the coffee done?"
        "It should be by now, I started it before I got in the shower."
        "Well, I guess I'll get up, then," she said grinning, and got up.
        She put the news on the video... or is that "olds" since it's the same old shit? There was something on it about pirates, they had arrested thirty after a firefight on Earth, and fifty pirates and twenty policemen died. Hell, I killed hundreds of the bastards just throwing rocks at 'em. And only the bad guys died.
        Stupid news.
        Destiny I weren't paying attention to it anyway. Five 'til eight I went to the pilot room to make sure we weren't going too fast or too slow or the wrong way and started my inspections.
        There was arguing coming from the commons, damn it. I stopped and called Destiny. "Hon, could you call Tammy and have her handle these crazy women?"
        "Sure, what are they doing?"
        "They act like they need drops."
        "Okay, I'll call her."
        I decided to inspect the commons last. I didn't need a dropless whore.
        For once the cargo didn't give me any trouble in inspection; they were all asleep and the doorbells didn't wake them up.
        Odd, what with the commotion in the commons.
        When I went into the passenger section there was a funny smell in number eighteen. Burning insulation, it smelled like. I got out fast and pulled out my fone; systems should have seen that and fixed it already.
        "Computer, fire in number eighteen."
        "There is no fire in cargo eighteen."
        "PASSENGER eighteen you stupid computer!"
        "There is no fire in..." There was an explosion in eighteen! Shit!
        "Computer," I said as alarms went off. "Report."
        "Fire in passenger eighteen" it said as the door light flashed red. "Fire suppression technologies in play."
        Damned computer. "Cause of fire?" It had smelled like an electrical short circuit to me, ozone and burned plastic. They don't make these boats like they used to. This was the third damned fire on this ship! It wasn't a brand new boat, thank God, or the damned robots would talk. But the ones with three generators, the old ones that got retrofitted with fusion generators, almost never had electrical problems.
        "Unknown at this time," the stupid computer said. Stupid computer, something shorted out and a fuse should have blown but didn't. Same as the port generator, it should have shut itself down before it caught fire and melted lots of the parts.
        I decided to investigate later. "Computer, do not repair until ordered by me. Continue fire suppression and keep the door locked.
        "Acknowledged," it said. Why do them damned things talk like that? I'm glad my robots are old, I hate talking robots.
        Well, except that the old ones catch fire. That's never any fun.
        I inspected the good generator, the ion engines, and the messed up generator. One robot was working on engine One Thirty Two and I noted it in the log.
        Back at P18 the light was no longer flashing, so I went in. Yep, a burned up panel. I opened it, it was fried; something had shorted. I logged it.
        This shit didn't use to happen on old boats.
        I went to the commons and finally inspected it. The commotion was over.
        I went home and had lunch with Destiny. "What was going on in the commons?" I asked.
        "Thieves. You read Tammy's book, most of these girls had criminal parents and stealing is normal for them. Well, there were about fifty of them that had all their drops stolen and were in the commons accusing each other of stealing, when the thieves were all asleep. Tammy took care of it."
        "I'm sure glad we have her," I said.
        "Me too," she agreed. "Do you have to work this afternoon?"
        "I hope not. Not unless something breaks or the whores act up or pirates attack or..."
        "Okay," she said laughing. "I get it. Want to watch something?"
        "Sure. Pick something."
        "How about..." she started before an alarm went off.
        "You jinxed me," I said, grinning. "Damned dropheads!"
        It was another fire, this time in P19. Why in the hell are unoccupied quarters powered? It don't make no sense. It's a fire hazard, especially the shitty way they build boats these days, glad I didn't get a brand new one. I'll bet they're even worse than this one, and it's only ten years old.
        But it wasn't a real fire, just a drill, there only to waste my free time and annoy me. I have enough real emergencies that I don't need no drills. The company's programmers are idiots.

Golf
        "You've been practicing, boss."
        "Putting," the CEO replied. "Been practicing putting, that's where I'm weak at this game. First time I ever beat you, Bob."
        "Well, Charlie, I was a little off today. And you only beat me by one stroke," Bob said. "That was a great hole three, you eagled that one."
        "I got lucky on the initial drive. Bartender, two beers. Guinness draft, please. Bob, you're paying for a change! Oh, bartender, a couple shots of your best scotch, too."
        Bob laughed. "Well, that was the deal. Maybe we should try some zero G golf sometime."
        "Zero G? Damn, Bob, I'm not twenty any more. That's a young man's sport. Besides, I hate space."
        "Really? You run a shipping company and hate space?"
        "No, I just hate traveling in it. You did pretty good on number two or I'd have done even better against you. How are we doing on the sabotage front?"
        "Come on, we're just starting. You can't just solve a complex problem like that in a few days. Did you finish that report Knolls wrote?"
        "No, I got sidetracked by the book Doctor Winters' wrote that Knolls mentioned in his report. Damn, we need to check cargo closer, that book was horrible. I'm sure glad the charity sent her, it might have been catastrophic otherwise.
          "Then I read the report she made to her charity. I'll finish Knolls' report when we get back from 'lunch'."
        "How did you get Doctor Winters' report? She works for the charity, not for us."
        The CEO smiled. "Don't be stupid, Bob."
        "So, how much of Knolls' report have you read?"
        "Past where he saved her life. You know, Bob, you have a terrible taste in literature. Knolls couldn't write his way out of a paper bag and you enjoyed it? Damn, man."
        Bob shrugged. "We were sure lucky the charity sent Doctor Winters."
        "Yes, we were. Like I said. And Knolls was even luckier, and is probably glad he had her and the whores, he'd have been a dead man, and probably Kelly as well. Nobody expected what happened."
        He continued. "Have you talked to Human Resources to see about training a replacement for Knolls?"
        "Of course. I hate to replace him, especially with a greenie. Some of the maneuvers and weapon use he displayed in his second encounter with the pirates should go into our training manuals. "
        "Yes, he was a damned good captain. The company will miss him."
        "Well, I intent to try and talk him out of retirement."
        "Good luck with that! If you succeed you're the world's greatest salesman. I'm taking the afternoon off today, Charlie, I want to be refreshed and rested for the board meeting Monday. Do you want to shoot another nine?"
        "Sorry, Bob, I can't. I should have gotten back earlier, I want to finish reading Knolls' report, and I have a meeting with Richardson from engineering. I'm that close to firing that dumb son of a bitch. That was a hell of a boner he pulled, and I'm sure glad you brought the matter to my attention."
        "Hell, if I hadn't we should have both been fired!" the underling said, smiling, as if that was ever likely; between the two of them they owned 63% of all company stock.
        The CEO laughed. "Yeah," he agreed, "we should have! Look, Bob, enjoy the afternoon and I'll see you Monday morning. Like I said, I have to get going."
        "See you, Boss. Bartender, can I get another beer?"