SoylentNews

"Because that illusion keeps you on our side."

THE RULES OF THE NEW ARISTOCRACY

It doesn't matter how much food costs increase, doesn't matter if you can only afford fast food, we will always be able to buy steak. And we will invest heavily in fast food stocks to ensure we make money off this. Doesn't matter how much gas costs, we will always be able to afford it.

In addition to poor food choices and health coverage, your kids will grow up without proper nutrition which will cause them problems on every level, from physical to educational difficulties. Our kids will grow up straight and true and healthy.

It doesn't matter how much an education costs, doesn't matter if your kids can't afford to go to college or come out with massive debt, we will always be able to send our kids to university. And because a lot of our income is derived from tax incentives and taxpayer-financed bailouts your taxes are sending our kids to school. But you do not have the right to any of our money to send your kid to school.

If you or your kids want to start a business, you will find that because we've sucked all the money out of the economy, there is simply no available cash around to help you finance your startup. (Unless you want to go to your friends online at sites like Indiegogo, and isn't that just cute?) We just cut our kids a check and tell them to go have fun.

Your kids are born with a glass ceiling above which they will almost certainly never have the opportunity to rise. Our kids are born with a marble floor beneath which they will never be allowed to fall.

If you accidentally provide incorrect information on your tax return, you could lose your house, your possessions, and your livelihood. We lie all the time on our tax information and none of us ever have to deal with this. We squirrel away trillions of dollars in overseas accounts and do all we can to ensure that your money never leaves our control because we'll doubtless need to scoop out more of it soon.

You live in a Company Town; we pay you to work for us, while making sure that we own all the stores in town that sell our goods, the doctors offices where you go in town, the restaurants where you eat, and that we charge you just enough to make sure that at the end of the week you don't have any leftover money to squirrel away, so you can never leave the company town, can never get ahead, and can never risk criticizing the company town. You work for us. We own the town where you live. We own you.

If one of you takes a hundred dollar bill from the cash register, you will go to jail. If we take billions out of the savings of ordinary people then crash the economy, costing thousands of jobs, not one of us will ever be prosecuted. Because the New Aristocracy is above such things. So we'll just keep on doing it. Enjoy the ride.

Your local police belong to us now. We have militarized them into soldiers who treat you like terrorists. If you speak against us, we will ensure that you are tear gassed and beaten and handcuffed and caged into "free speech zones" designed to make you forget that the whole country was supposed to be a free speech zone. But now you have free speech only when and where we say you can have it. Meanwhile, we can say and do pretty much anything we want, to you or anyone else, and get away with it.

If you happen to figure out our game and talk about it, we will accuse you of Class Warfare, in order to distract anyone from realizing that yes, there was a class war, that it was against you, that the war is over, and we won.

Yes, you get a chance to vote for congresspeople and senators and presidents. But only after we've decided, long before the first ballot is ever cast, which candidate we will finance. Those we like, those who will give us what we want first and foremost, we will finance and you will get to vote on one of the two pre-screened candidates we have given you. If we don't like them, if we think they will challenge us, we will not finance them and you will never have the chance to vote on them. Because you don't get a real vote in the New Aristocracy.

We own the White House. We own Congress. They pass the bills we write for them. They make the laws we want them to make, and make sure that they only limit you, never us. We own the courts. We own the lawyers. They are the club we use to beat you into submission.

There are no Democratic or Republican Senators, or Congresspeople or Presidents. Those parties have not existed for decades. There is only the Party of the New Aristocracy. The rest is Kabuki theater. It is Mexican Wrestling. It is the illusion of choice, of difference, of democracy. This is not a democracy. It is a monarchy of money. In that monarchy, we are the Aristocracy, the royalty, and what we say, goes.

If you dump trash illegally, you will be fined and potentially arrested. If we dump hundreds of tons of toxic waste into rivers and streams, none of us will ever be arrested and if we are fined, we will simply raise our prices so that you are the one to actually pay for what we did.

We are the New Aristocracy, and we do not pay fines.

We are the New Aristocracy, and we are immune from prosecution.

We are the New Aristocracy, and we find your poverty and your powerlessness and your struggles disgusting. You are beneath us.

Understand something: we don't want you to succeed. We don't want someone coming along to slice the pie into smaller pieces. We want to own all of it. If we really wanted more of you where we are, do you think we would have spent the last thirty years consolidating every major company into smaller and smaller groups owned by fewer and fewer people?

We are the New Aristocracy because we were born into it. We got our money the old fashioned, Medieval way: our parents gave it to us. We were born into the wealth that we stole from you and your family over the last fifty years. You were not born into anything other than poverty and struggle. You will never be us. You will never have our advantages. And we like it that way.

We like that you peer through the bars of your cage to all that we have. We like that you think you can have it yourself one day. Because that illusion keeps you on our side. But you will never have those things. We've made sure of that. Because what you're looking at is ours, and we do not share.

The world we have carefully constructed for you is like one of those boardwalk games of chance where if you knock down the big pins with a baseball, you win a huge prize. But the pins are weighted and positioned so that you will never, ever knock them down. Yet you'll keep paying anyway, and keep throwing, until you exhaust yourself and your wallet. And we like it that way.

We don't want you to have opportunities, we don't want you to have an education, we don't want you to have a voice in what happens to you, we don't want you healthy, we don't want you to do anything but be frightened, helpless, docile consumers who will eat and watch and buy what we tell you to eat and watch and buy while we keep all the good stuff to ourselves.

Because you're not in our club.

Because we are the New Aristocracy.

And you are the New Peasants.

And we very, very, very much like it that way.

I've been working harder since I retired than I did working. Maybe it's because it's something I want. I've spent the last week proofreading. I found that typos and other errors are far easier for me to find in a printed book than on a screen.

I finished yesterday, updated and uploaded the file and ordered a new copy. Still having writer's block with Mars, Ho! (which is only 20% done) I checked Amazon and Barnes to see if they had Nobots available. Not yet.

Fifteen years ago when I had the Springfield Fragfest I had a terrible plagiarism problem. Folks weren't just infringing my copyright, they were posting my own work under their name. Not a week would go by that I didn't have to issue a DMCA takedown notice to someone, usually a university (a different one each time) where a student was plagiarizing my work. So I googled for pages using Nobots in an infringing way.

I publish under the noncommercial GPL license. All I demand is that it's non-commercial and I get credit.

I ran across this German site. I was taken aback at first... DMCA doesn't apply to Germans. Then I realized they were displaying mcgrewbooks.com in a frame!

I don't see how it could harm me and do see how it might actually sell a book or two so I'm not going to hassle them.

I wish I'd learned German rather than Spanish.

How to find the most useless page of SoylentNews:

From the dropdown selection button below the story (the one offering "Threaded", "Nested", etc. for comments) select "No Comments", then click "Change".

The option delivers what it promises: No comments. Also no story. Just the settings bar.

Note that this is not a critique (it's clearly just an artefact of how Slashcode works, and not harmful in any way). I just considered it amusing.

UPDATE: 2014-04-28T09:08Z - The info below is now out of date. The relevant voting round is over.

--------------------------------

I have noticed that voting for the site name is under way. On the left of my screen I can see a "Name Voting News" box, with important information.

Anyway, I thought it might be useful to have notes about each site name suggestion, all gathered in one place.

In my opinion, the thinking behind the name doesn't have to be immediately apparent. It's okay for it to need some explanation. (When I first heard of Slashdot, I didn't realize what it was a reference to.)

I've seeded this with my own thoughts. Feel free to add comments, and I will aim to edit this to incorporate them. Can you think of any good reasons for or against any of these?

• (1) absorbingnews.com - Just to be taken literally?
• (2) achetee.com - a phonetic writing of HT? Why?
• (3) alphadot.com - Has "dot" at the end, like Slashdot.
• (4) altdiscuss.com - "alt" is a usenet prefix, and implies alternative discussions to those you'd get in the mainstream
• (5) apt-get-news.com - A reference to Advanced_Packaging_Tool Possibly suggests a favouring of Debian-based Linux OSs, as opposed to non-Debian Linux OSs, or non-Linux OSs?
• (6) baconnews.com - Love of bacon seems to be a bit of a common theme in the USA, and has also hit Soylent - especially the IRC channel. Might put off over-sensitive adherents of certain religions.
• (7) bangdot.org - Punctuation character (written as a word), followed by "dot", like Slashdot. "Bang" means "exclamation mark"
• (8) bayesianews.com - Refers to Bayesian machine learning? Evokes the way news is handled here? And the way the best comments filter to the top?
• (9) beardrhetoric.com - Nerds are more likely than average to have beards? (Not these days)
• (10) boardkey.com - "keyboard" with the words switched around
• (11) chattrnews.com - chattr is a command line tool, "change attributes". It is also the word "chatter" with the final vowel dropped like Tumblr and Flickr
• (12) crosslog.com - Two words that roll off the tongue nicely?
• (13) dailybacon.net - Love of bacon seems to be a bit of a common theme in the USA, and has also hit Soylent - especially the IRC channel. Might put off over-sensitive adherents of certain religions. Daily bread is a common phrase (example). Also a lot of newspapers are called Daily [something].
• (14) deltachroma.com - Two words that roll off the tongue nicely?
• (15) devnull.com - A reference to the null device
• (16) dotbang.org - 2 punctuation characters (written as words), one of which is "dot", like Slashdot. "Bang" means "exclamation mark"
• (17) dotsalt.org - Reference to this kind of salt? Includes "dot", like Slashdot.
• (18) dupenews.com - A common theme on Slasdot was whinging about duplicated stories. Also, news-for-nerds sites rarely provide original news. We "dupe" other sites' stories, and discuss them.
• (19) eigentime.com - Two words that roll off the tongue nicely?
• (20) epsilonnexus.com - Two words that roll off the tongue nicely?
• (21) fetanews.com - "Feta" is an abbreviation of "fuck beta"? "Beta" refers to the new Slashdot UI. Feta is also a cheese.
• (22) firingsquid.com - A play on "firing squad". Why? Do we use Squid?
• (23) forkbeta.com - A play on "fuck beta"? You can "fork" software, but perhaps we've forked the Slashdot community? "Beta" refers to the new Slashdot UI.
• (24) forkdot.org - You can "fork" software, but perhaps we've forked the Slashdot community? Ends with "dot", like Slashdot.
• (25) freedefy.com
• (26) freedivide.com
• (27) fuckbeta.com - "Beta" refers to the new Slashdot UI.
• (28) futurians.com
• (29) gammavortex.com - Two words that roll off the tongue nicely?
• (30) geekcard.com - A common theme among geeks. Example
• (31) gitgot.com - Two words that roll off the tongue nicely?
• (32) grepcutnews.com
• (33) grepnews.com - A reference to Grep#Usage_as_a_verb
• (34) hashsalt.org - Reference to this kind of salt, and hashing?
• (35) hecknews.com
• (36) ionews.com Reference to I/O
• (37) iorevolution.net Reference to I/O
• (38) iotanexus.com - Two words that roll off the tongue nicely?
• (39) itarium.com
• (40) legitworksite.com - "Legit" is an abbrevation of legitimate. This is tongue-in-cheek humour.
• (41) li694-22.com - Comes from the internal name of the Linode server we were running on (li694-22.members.linode.com).
• (42) linevertex.com - A slash is a line. A point (dot) is a vertex. So this is probably a reference to Slashdot.
• (43) lostdash.com - Anagram of Slashdot
• (44) lowlevelnews.com
• (45) ls-lnews.com
• (46) makemesmart.com - "Make me smart". Smart = clever. This is tongue-in-cheek humour.
• (47) minddivide.com - Two words that roll off the tongue nicely?
• (48) nerdcard.net - A play on "geek card", which is common theme among geeks (Example).
• (49) nerdcraft.com - a reference to the game Mine Craft? Or to the "Netcraft confirms" meme (mentioned here)? Or simply the craft of being a nerd, similar to other words suffixed with "craft" like witchcraft.
• (50) nerddiscourse.com - Just to be taken literally?
• (51) nerdgloss.com - Two words that roll off the tongue nicely?
• (52) nerdnewsnet.com - "Nerd news", just to be taken literally. "Net" can be used as a suffix.
• (53) nerdpost.com
• (54) newschattr.com - chattr is a command line tool, "change attributes". It is also the word "chatter" with the final vowel dropped like Tumblr and Flickr
• (55) newsconfig.com
• (56) newsdotorg.org
• (57) newsgrep.com
• (58) newsignal.com
• (59) newsisyou.com - possibly inspired by the Soviet Russia meme?
• (60) newslash.org - A play on "new Slash" and "news lash"?
• (61) newsping.com
• (62) newstat.com
• (63) newuucp.com
• (64) nntpping.com
• (65) noncorpnews.com
• (66) noncorporate.com
• (67) nunexus.com
• (68) omnidiscuss.com
• (69) pipebeard.com
• (70) port119.net - 119 is the TCP/IP port reserved for NNTP (Usenet)
• (71) primedelta.com - Two words that roll off the tongue nicely?
• (72) pulsedot.net - Has "dot" at the end, like Slashdot.
• (73) reslashed.com
• (74) salientnews.net - Sounds similar to "Soylent News", but removes the "Soylent" implications. "Salient" means "Most noticeable or important"
• (75) salientnoise.com - Sounds similar to "Soylent News", but removes the "Soylent" implications. "Salient" means "Most noticeable or important"
• (76) saltdot.org - Reference to this kind of salt. Has "dot" at the end, like Slashdot.
• (77) salthash.com - Reference to this kind of salt, and hashing?
• (78) shpxurnq.com - ?
• (79) sigmanexus.com - Two words that roll off the tongue nicely?
• (80) sigmavortex.com - Two words that roll off the tongue nicely?
• (81) silentmews.com - Two words that roll off the tongue nicely?
• (82) soylentnews.com - The current name. Coincidentally, a genuine nutritional product called "Soylent" has just been released. In theory, trademarks shouldn't be a problem.
• (83) squintfeed.com - Two words that roll off the tongue nicely?
• (84) stealthnews.com
• (85) sudonews.com - "sudo is a program for Unix-like computer operating systems that allows users to run programs with the security privileges of another user (normally the superuser, or root)"
• (86) techmatter.com
• (87) thegarlic.com - Reference to theonion.com
• (88) uuengeek.com - "Uuencoding is a form of binary-to-text encoding"
• (89) yottatalk.com - "yotta" is the SI prefix for 10^24
• (90) yottatech.com - "yotta" is the SI prefix for 10^24

So ... I've recently gotten back into minecraft, and figured that perhaps there are other MC players here at SN, so I wanted to know if there was enough interest to setup a MC server in general. I'd probably use CraftBukkit, and I'm open to running mods if others are interesting. Leave a message below if you'd be interested.

Mods I'd like to run:
  * Traincraft
  * Railcraft
  * Mystcraft (useful for getting new ores without having to reset maps; age creation would be restricted to admins though; mystcraft is a server hog).

Leave your thoughts below.

Since we've got a fair number of complaints about us running too many site news articles, I'm going to condemn this to my journal, then link it next time we *do* post something about the site. For a large portion of today (4/16), SoylentNews users had issues with commenting, and moderation was completely hosed. This was due to a backend change; we shifted the site behind a loadbalancer in preparation of bringing up a new frontend and give us considerably more redundancy and latitude with working with the backend.

This change had been setup on dev for the last week with us testing it to see what (if anything) broken, and it was discussed and signed off by all of the staff. Last night, I flipped the nodebalancer to connect to production instead of dev, then changed the DNS A record for the site to point at the loadbalancer.

I stayed up for several hours at this point to ensure nothing odd was going on, and satisfied that the world would keep spinning, I went to bed. What I found though was I broke the formkeys system. Slash knows about the X-Forwarded-By header, a mechanism for when a site is behind a proxy on how to relay client IP information (this mechanism was already used by both varnish and nginx), however, for security reasons, we strip out the XFF header from inbound connections unless its on a specific whitelist. On both dev and production, we had whitelisted the nodebalancer to pass this header in properly.

Or so we thought. Linode's documentation doesn't mention, but the IP address listed in the admin interface is *not* the IP used to connect to the site; instead it uses a special internal IP address which isn't listed or documented anywhere. Our security precautions stripped out the X-Forwarded-By header, and made it appear that all inbound users were coming from the same IP. This wasn't noticed on dev as slash ignores the formkeys system for admins, and the few of us beating on it with non-admin accounts weren't able to do enough abuse to trigger the formkey limiters.

Our peak hours are generally evenings EDT, which means the low traffic at night wasn't enough to trip it either (or at least no one on IRC poked me about it, nor were there any bugs on it on our github page. However, once traffic started picking up, users began to clobber each other, commenting broke, and the site went to straight to hell. When I got up, debugging efforts were underway, but it took considerable time to understand the cause of the breakage; simply reverting LBing wasn't an easy fix since we'd still have to wait for DNS to propagate and we needed the load balancer anyway. After a eureka moment, we were able to locate the correct internal IPs, and whitelist them, which got the site partially functional again. (we have informed Linode about this, and they said our comments are on its way to the appropriate teams; hopefully no other site will ever have this same problem).

The last remaining item was SSL; we had originally opted out of terminating SSL on the loadbalancer, prefering to do it on the nginx instance, so Port 443 was set to TCP loadbalancing. This had the same effect as there is no way for us to see the inbound IP (I had assumed it would do something like NAT to make connections appear like they were coming from the same place). The fix was utlimately installing the SSL certificate on the load balancer, then modifying varnish to look for the X-Forwarded-Proto header to know if a connection was SSL or not. I'm not hugely happy about this as it means wiretapping would be possible between the load balancer and the node, but until we have a better system for handling SSL, there isn't a lot we can do about it.

As always, leave comments below, and I'll leave my two cents.

[ I've been kinda obsessed with this idea for a while. Have posted something similar under the same title a few other places, although I decided to completely rewrite it here given the more technical audience and the amount of time I have to kill tonight at work ;) ]

So, holograms have long been a staple of sci-fi techologies. And there's a lot of projects that have been working on making these a reality in some way. We've got 3D TVs on the lower-end, and crazy laser and water mist projection systems in labs. But there doesn't seem to be any true, free-floating holograms coming any time soon. That stuff is HARD.

On the other hand...perhaps we can do better. We have Google Glass. We have the Oculus Rift. We have augmented reality apps. How long before we can start to merge these product lines? How long before you can run an augmented reality app projecting 3D images on your smart contact lenses? Given that there are ALREADY prototype technologies to project onto a pair of contacts, I don't think it will be that long. A couple decades, surely, but I'm 23 years old now, so I expect to see that in my lifetime. After all, this isn't revolutionary new tech anymore, just incremental improvements to products you can already purchase.

Now, I said this would be *better* than true holograms. But there's an obvious disadvantage -- you have to wear something. So what's the upside? No hologram projector for one. Not limited to a specific space. Instead of merely controlling what my hologram projector creates in my own apartment, I can control what holograms are projected to me everywhere in the world. It can work around corners and such where any kind of projection may be difficult or impossible. And different people can see different images.

So what happens should this techology become ubiquitous? What's this got to do with the title of "Euthenasia of Consumerism"?

With this tech, you sure as hell don't need a TV. You don't really need a computer. You don't need anything decorative. Anything you don't directly interact with can be projected. But you can go even further than that -- all aesthetic aspects could eventually be virtualized. Everyone can buy the same plain white everything, and project whatever designs they want onto it. No stains either!

So you end up with that ultimate sci-fi apartment, where you press a button and your bedroom becomes the office which becomes the living room. Blast this signal through your wifi router, and everyone who enters your apartment sees the same. Or have some security settings -- your mom sees one decor while your friends see another. Even if they're in the same room together.

And then you open-source this stuff. Or pirate it. Whatever. Screw the 3D printers, half your apartment is now just code. And the only skill you need to DIY all of that is the ability to program. Or not even that -- just the ability to write themes for someone else's program. Or for the lazy, walk into someone else's home and *control-C* the TV.

Yeah, you can't virtualize everything, but looking around my apartment I could certainly virtualize all the most expensive things. The computers, the projector, even the stereo system. And most of the things I haven't gotten to yet because I don't feel like spending the money fall into that category as well. And hey, my nightstand may already be a cardboard box, but at least it could not look like one ;)

So, am I just nuts, or are we inching towards a global economic collapse in the best possible way?

I received and article rejection from the SoylentNews Editorial Staff with the following letter:

***********************
Hi,

Just wanted to let you know that we did reject your submission:

http://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=1081

The reason is that this is pseudoscience in the vein of bigfoot, lochness monster, etc. It's the scientific community's consensus that the chubacabras are simply a K9 (usually coyotee) with some sort of parasite (like severe mange).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chupacabra "Sightings in northern Mexico and the southern United States have been verified ascanids afflicted bymange .^[2] Biologists and wildlife management officials view the chupacabra as acontemporary legend "

http://www.livescience.com/24036-chupacabra-facts.html

Have a good one.

****************************
The Editor's name was withheld to protect the editorial failings [unlike some people I don't do public "Name and Shame" like some of the other SoyGoys around here].

Note that I had been expecting the rejection [when something stays in the queue for 10 days its pretty evident that someone does not like the content].

There is only two problems with this rejection- The item I submitted was a "News" item not as a "Science" item. The fact is that someone found something that does not look like a dog nor act like one... The above editorial note above FAILS as a legitimate rejection because all of the sources listed are either:

A) Non-peer-reviewed -- Wikipedia is widely known to be not a vetted source of science or scientific research. -- Wikipedia is not Encyclopedia Britannica... and citing Wikipedia as a source of verified "science" should make any real scientist or News editor squirm.

B) LiveScience posts non-science / pseudo-science / religion as "factual science" for example see: Easter Science, Jesus Christ the Man, and Who is the Antichrist? All of these LiveScience articles are presented as "science" but when examined as Science they all fail as Science. They are feel good Christianity passed off as science. Science is not Christianity...

So why do I have a problem with the rejection? Simple if you are going to reject on the basis of "Pseudo-Science" then the links used to reject the article should in no way be attached to information sources which are not either peer reviewed or carry other pseudo-science as science stories.

One more thing Live Science did carry as story about Texas 'Chupacabra' Turns Out to Be Imposter with a byline by Benjamin Radford. Please note that Mr Radford has a Bachelor's in Psychology and a Master's in Education. Somehow his expert opinion seems to be missing a qualifying degree in biology or related biological science.

He is obviously not talking Science but Skeptical Pseudo-Science especially when he says "So, is this animal the elusive chupacabra? It's clear that it's not, because video of the creature broadcast on KAVU clearly shows the Ratcliffe chupacabra doesn't have the anatomical mouth features that would allow it to suck blood, from goats or anything else. Like several other "chupacabras" found in Texas and elsewhere in recent years, a simple look at the mouth demonstrates that it is physically impossible for the animals to suck blood. The mouth and jaw structures of raccoons, dogs and coyotes prevent them from creating a seal around their victims, and, therefore, physically prevents them from sucking the blood out of goats or anything else." So it isn't a chupacabras because it isn't a vampire???? This piece of crap opinion is presented as SCIENCE???? Some one might want to let Mr. Radford know that real Science does not need to do Satire [and do it so poorly as he does] to accomplish its purpose. In fact it is people like Mr. Radford that spout trash science who stand in the way of Real Science.

The Skeptical Mr. Radford goes on "The most likely answer is that it's a raccoon. Animals that have lost most or all of their hair can be very difficult to identify correctly, for the simple reason that people are not used to seeing the animals without hair."

Um... "most likely answer"??? What? He does not know what it is? First you say it can't be a Cupacabra because it does not suck blood and then cannot identify the animal? THAT is science?????? If Mr. Radford was actually going to do "science" one would think that DNA evidence would be the best way to prove what the animal's species is. Or is DNA too scientific? Apparently "denial is science."

I'm sorry but Dear editorial staff you suck at Science and your sources of "plausible denial" suck even more. It appears you have fallen for the Pseudo-Religion called "Skepticism". Skepticism is not Science and should not be used. One can only wonder what the SoylentNews Editors would make of any kind of articles related to climate change.

NT

I've hardly logged on to the internet at all this past week, too busy correcting a mistake software houses frequently do: Trying to rush a project out the door. The fact is, I'm tired of The Paxil Diaries, but I don't want to ship a flawed piece of crap.

The first copy had a messed up cover; my printer's "cover generation wizard" has an interface almost as bad as GIMP. I fixed it and ordered a corrected copy, and a day later as I was converting the .odt to .html I discovered that some of the chapter numbers were wrong and there were no page numbers. I fixed it, resubmitted it and thought "This time it'll be right."

Number three showed up bright and early Thursday morning. I started going over it with a fine toothed comb. Almost halfway through and I started to think I'd be able to release it. The weather got really nice so I decided to read it in Felber's beer garden.

I discovered I was far better at proofreading when I've had a few beers than sober. When I'm sober what the words are saying distracts me from the words themselves, and I read too fast and miss errors.

It was full of errors, many of them whoppers. I marked them drinking, and finished correcting this morning while sober and sent for copy #4. It may be available in a couple of weeks depending on if I find more errors when it comes. I'll upload the book's HTML and PDF versions as soon as I decide I can release it.

Meanwhile, I can get back to Mars, Ho! this week.