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I'm referring to the fans who bought copies of Nobots. It's finally listed at Barnes & Noble here, and somehow it's cheaper there by three or four dollars. Again, my apologies. If you're thinking of getting a copy of The Paxil Diaries you may want to wait a couple of months until it's at Barnes as well.

Barnes is far superior to Amazon. Why? The bitches at Amazon still haven't listed it. However, Google's spiders haven't found it at B&N yet, either; I found it through B&N's search facility.

I was amused that B&N suggested that you nag me to make a nook version out of it, when you can read it or download it (actually, both books) free on my web site on your nook. I'm making e-pub versions, but haven't quite figured out all the nuances of the conversion software. It will be free as well.

Wooo, that nearly killed me to finish it. It's going living at 20:00 UTC (4PM EST), which is the start of our peak hours. We'll be revising it based on community feedback and if other important points come up as time goes on.

Of course, words means only as much as the actions taken behind them, but I think we've been relatively consistent in meeting the goals I outlined. Here's a small sneak preview for those who read my journal til the whole thing goes live

Statement of Purpose

Our aim is to stand in stalwart opposition to these trends. We will be the best site for independent, not-for-profit journalism on the internet, where ideas and free discussion can take place without external needs overshadowing the community.

The Paxil Diaries is finally available. I hesitated releasing it, because it's still not perfect. There is at least one grammar error ("whom" should be "who") and at least two formatting errors. But to tell the truth, I'm really tired of working on this thing and it seems no matter how many times I proofread, fixing one mistake seems to cause another.

You can read it, download it for free, or buy a hardcover copy here. I hope you enjoy it, some of you have been waiting ten years for it.

The PR company I'm currently contracting for hosted a conference this morning for folk in the group on the subject of content pollution. The area the presentations were made in was right next to the IT office - my boss is obviously considered far too disruptive to be allowed to be on the same floor as anyone other than the receptionist - and I caught a few of the points as I nipped in and out picking up equipment inductees.

All the presenters were PR people in good standing and the main topic revolved around dealing with the deluge of inconsumable content that swamps communication platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube every second of every day with "trod on dog turdz lolfail!" and videos of the aforementioned hound depositing the future foot warmer on the pavement while the cameraphone holding braindead idiot laughs hysterically. Then they got down to hints on how to actually do something about this. Hints like choosing a suitable medium for your particular message. Ensuring your writing style accurately conveys the motivation behind the piece. Make sure that content posted for clients will make some traction with the audience.

Effectively, a lot of people who think themselves very smart and creative have just realised the following, which when boiled down like this would have been far quicker to present, rather less self-serving and much more honest:

1) Idiots are Idiots
2) Diarrhoea is Diarrhoea
3) Writing, Photography and Film-making are professions

That's right you overpaid dickheads! People have been considering these problems online for decades; I was considering all this at university 15 years ago and it wasn't a new subject then. Considering that everyone at this conference was a PR professional working in an Internet-based arena, anyone who actually learned anything from any of the presentations should have been fired for incompetence the moment they nodded sagely as a bullet point appeared on the screen.

I did not see a thing in any of the presentations that wouldn't have been sneered at by any sixth form* teacher of the subjects under discussion. I never realised teachers got paid so much - they should do considering how much it seems you have to know to work in PR. It used to be said you had to sell your soul to work in PR, but the evidence now suggests the deal is actually for a large portion of your brain.

*high school

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.

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.