Bored, since I can't do anything to the book but wait for the USPS, I decided to log into my web host's site and check out statistics for my site. Most of them were completely unexpected.

I expected most visitors to be running Windows, but very surprised at how many Linux users came. 71.4% were running Windows, not surprising, but the 12.5% running Linux was completely surprising, considering that everything I read says only something like 1% run that OS. Many of the 14% "unknown" are likely to be Linux as well.

Linux kicks Apple's ass on my site! Only 1.4% are logging on with a Mac; they're dead last.

Browsers surprised me, too. The 52.3% that Firefox has wasn't surprising, but the fact that IE was dead last among desktop browsers (well, except Safari) but what surprised me even more is that people are still using Netscape and Mozilla. And I thought I was bad about not upgrading! 7.8% were on Android's browser.

Also surprising was the number of folks from non-English speaking countries, some of which outnumbers visitors from New Zealand (not many Kiwis visiting at all).

What really surprised me was that there were zero with scripting disabled. Not that it matters; I don't use any (except a little CSS) but I did use a little javascript back in the day when I was running my old Quake site. If I did use it, disabled scripting wouldn't hurt anything, my code always failed gracefully when it failed.

I still can't believe all the tools I have at my disposal, although I doubt I'll use more than one or two; I manage files with FileZilla and rarely log on to my host's site.

I've been busy editing. I sent off for a printed copy this morning, so you'll probably see more of me the next couple of weeks, as will the folks at the bar. I'll probably be bored, since I've been working obsessively on that book since March.

I updated my web site slightly this morning, adding a "coming soon" heads up about the book. I'm hoping to publish in a month. There will be one lucky fellow who will get a free hardcover copy, and hardcover copies will be "invitation only" but all you'll have to do is email a request and I'll return the mail with a URL where you can get it. I may do the same with the paperback.

My apologies, but the eBook version will be priced at two dollars more than my first books, which were free. It will be a two dollar Amazon download. If your reader doesn't do Amazon, forward your Amazon receipt to me with your reader type and preferred file type and I'll send it back by email.

If you're afraid I'm just trying to collect email addresses to spam, I'm not. I don't give or sell my address book to anyone. Moreover, my site collects absolutely no information about visitors whatever, and doesn't use cookies or any kind of scripting whatever.

PDF and HTML files will continue to be free, as well as the eBooks of the two previous books. The prices on the printed books will only change if the printer changes his prices.

Most likely I'll work on that new short story, Moroned Off Vesta about the incident Captain Knolls mentions several times in the book. It will have him in his Martian bar telling a friend who captains the company ships about what happened.

The title is a nod to Isaac Asimov's first published story, Marooned Off Vesta. I may try to shop it to a few science fiction magazines before I post it.

I mentioned my web site earlier, the domain registration needed to be renewed and I needed more space; their "free" hosting (it comes with registration) only gives you five megabytes. I had to delete the Bible to make room for The Paxil Diaries and wouldn't have had room for Mars, Ho! It's costing me $35 a year for ten times the space. "Free" is fifteen bucks.

Yes, they're cheap and they're good. I had to use their tech support to get FileZilla to see the files for FTP; the process had completely changed. Unlike some help desks I've dealt with in the past, they were excellent.

The changes to FTP include a lot. I can have subdomains, many subusers with their own separate users, all sorts of goodies now. Forums, discussion boards, comments, SQL, PHP, Java, Ruby, the whole kit and kaboodle.

And I won't be using any of it.

I've registered all my past domains with them, starting in 2000, and never once had a problem with them. They're a Canadian company, register4less. If you have a small site and need less than 5 megs and no frills it's only fifteen bucks.

Oh, and buy a book, I have new false teeth to pay for.

However, before the conservatives start celebrating, pay attention to this

In other words, you're stuck with him until you confirm someone to take his place. So if you hate him, the best thing you can do to get rid of him is to encourage the senate to actually hold a vote on his replacement. Even if the senate flips in November, they won't be able to push him out until they vote to approve someone else.

Eric Holder To Resign As Attorney General (source chosen because it has no paywall)

Some dumbass in Korea is desperately trying to gain access to my home system. In less than 6 hours, the system has made over 5,000 unsuccessful attempts to get in. I'm not sure if "phone book" is the right term or not, but they are going through a (very) long list of usernames and attempting to log in with them. One IP address the whole time, just not giving up.

Not that I expect it to make a difference, but I sent an email to their ISP.

This is an interesting change from the distributed attacks that I was used to seeing. Not sure if the two are related or not but I do seem to be seeing a larger number of attacks since being issued a new IP address at home.

'The Cause Of Empire Leads To The Graveyard'

"This is a vision of the world in which might makes right - a world in which one nation's borders can be redrawn by another, and civilized people are not allowed to recover the remains of their loved ones because of the truth that might be revealed. America stands for something different. We believe that right makes might - that bigger nations should not be able to bully smaller ones; that people should be able to choose their own future...

America is and will continue to be a Pacific power, promoting peace, stability, and the free flow of commerce among nations. But we will insist that all nations abide by the rules of the road, and resolve their territorial disputes peacefully, consistent with international law. That's how the Asia-Pacific has grown. And that's the only way to protect this progress going forward."

Nothing engages (enrages?) the crowd here on slashdot like pointing out what a tool samzenpus is when he posts whackjob conservative FUD to the front page. My first comment has so far drawn twenty-six moderations. Of those 26, the tally is currently:

• 6 troll
• 5 flamebait
• 2 informative
• 9 insightful
• 1 interesting
• 1 funny
• 1 underrated
• And 1 insightful that was undone

What actually surprises me the most is that not one of those moderations were "overrated".

Although if I could ask anything to change here on slashdot, it would be that they give us a way to actually view all these moderations in a way other than having to read the poorly-formatted comments that they send to our slashdot "inboxes". Clicking on my comment tells almost nothing useful about how it was moderated.

The article that this links to has nothing to do with wasting food. The point of the Seattle City Council's action is to get people to compost. You can throw as much food as you want in the compost, that is just fine. This goes with their earlier ordinances to encourage recycling, they are just trying to reduce the amount of material that is disposed of as "regular" trash.

This is in response to the atrociously miswritten Seattle Passes Laws To Keep Residents From Wasting Food. Even the worst editors on slashdot usually read at least a little ways in to an article before attempting to summarize it. However, once in a while samzenpus is so engrossed in beating off to fox news that he allows this kind of garbage to slip right in.

Well done, samzenpus. You showed us that just when we thought the front page crap here couldn't get any worse, you can still one up the crappiness. For those with short memories, I will remind us that he also posted these awful gems: NBC apologizes for editing Zimmerman 911 call

school sends child's lunch home after determining it unhealthy

Tesla will discontinue the Roadster

... and the cherry on the turd sundae:

California May Reduce Carbon Emissions By Banning Black Cars

I know I've missed plenty of great samzenpus failures along the way, but these are just some highlights. Really, why the fuck is this idiot an editor? I know some people who work for google, I'm sure they have a decent algorithm that could replace him.

Funny how we didn't do anything about this problem. After Surgery, Surprise $117,000 Medical Bill From Doctor He Didnâ(TM)t Know (new york times, 9/20/2014).

Oh, wait. We didn't actually do anything - aside from handing out the largest government handout in the history of government - with the affordable care act. If you want to know who owns the congresspeople and senators that are supposed to represent you, look only as far as the insurance card(s) in your wallet.

There has been a character limit for article headlines on the front page for ... well, I presume it's been there as long as slashdot has been in existence. For some part of that time, slashdot had editors who ... actually knew how to edit text (we long ago replaced them with people who randomly mash buttons in exchange for stock in dice.com).

Yesterday, there was an article that had a title that just couldn't fit under the limit. At least one comment pointed out that "rollout" was truncated to "rollo".

Now, we could have edited the headline to fit under the limit. Or we could have just buried the story as it wasn't relevant to the scope of slashdot anyways. Yet neither of those options were acceptable. So somehow a patch was devised to allow for this to make it to the front page with its full headline.

Don't try to tell me anymore that this site doesn't cater to a deeply conservative base. No sensible site would have gone to such lengths to get this crappy article up.

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5725497&cid=47939979

I had a little bit of downtime yesterday afternoon with my phone in my hand and decided to see how awful slashdot is with the default browser on Android. It is - as one might expect - rather bad. More so, the front page actually had conservative advertisements on the page (beyond the usual collection of conservative stories). The first ad was touting Paul Ryan being scheduled to appear at a conference about medicare and medicaid. Being as I was not logged in to slashdot through my phone at all, this appears to be part of the new default set of ads served up to newbies.

Well done, slashdot. Might as well cater to your own base. You wouldn't want people to think that other opinions are welcomed here or anything.

PS - I liked it better when we had ads for mail-order-brides on the front page. At least that was something that performs a useful service. The GOP can't claim that.

by David Swanson / September 13th, 2014

                               

To the extent that the U.S. public is newly, and probably momentarily, accepting of war -- an extent that is wildly exaggerated, but still real -- it is because of videos of beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff.

When 9-11 victims were used as a justification to kill hundreds of times the number of people killed on 9-11, some of the victims' relatives pushed back.

Now James Foley is pushing back from the grave.

Here is video of Foley talking about the lies that are needed to launch wars, including the manipulation of people into thinking of foreigners as less than human. Foley's killers may have thought of him as less than human. He may not have viewed them the same way.

The video shows Foley in Chicago helping Haskell Wexler with his film Four Days in Chicago -- a film about the last NATO protest before the recent one in Wales. I was there in Chicago for the march and rally against NATO and war. And I've met Wexler who has tried unsuccessfully to find funding for a film version of my book War Is A Lie .

Watch Foley in the video discussing the limitations of embedded reporting, the power of veteran resistance, veterans he met at Occupy, the absence of a good justification for the wars, the dehumanization needed before people can be killed, the shallowness of media coverage -- watch all of that and then try to imagine James Foley cheering like a weapons-maker or a Congress member for President Obama's announcement of more war. Try to imagine Foley accepting the use of his killing as propaganda for more fighting.

You can't do it. He's not an ad for war any more than the WMDs were a justification for war. His absence as a war justification has been exposed even faster than the absence of the WMDs was.

While ISIS may have purchased Sotloff, if not Foley, from another group, when Foley's mother sought to ransom him, the U.S. government repeatedly threatened her with prosecution. So, instead of Foley's mother paying a relatively small amount and possibly saving her son, ISIS goes on getting its funding from oil sales and supporters in the Gulf and free weapons from, among elsewhere, the United States and its allies. And we're going to collectively spend millions, probably billions, and likely trillions of dollars furthering the cycle of violence that Foley risked his life to expose.

The Coalition of the Willing is already crumbling. What if people in the United States were to watch the video of Foley when he was alive and speaking and laughing, not the one when he was a prop in a piece of propaganda almost certainly aimed at provoking the violence that Obama has just obligingly announced?

Foley said he believed his responsibility was to the truth. It didn't set him free. Is it perhaps not too late for the rest of us?

The situation in Ukraine should be causing conservatives to collectively blow their gaskets, except that most of them discarded logic long ago. Let's examine their beliefs on the matter. Many conservatives believe:

• That Obama is a communist (which is obviously wrong)
• That Marxist communism was the dominant philosophy for most of the existence of the USSR (also obviously wrong)
• That communism and fascism are in any meaningful way similar philosophically (also obviously wrong)
• That Vladimir Putin is attempting to reinstate communism in Russia (also completely and utterly wrong)

If we were to suspend reality long enough to pretend that those statement are not all pure crap, we then have a bigger situation in current events to address - Obama vs. Putin over Ukraine. If the two were philosophically aligned, why would they be so doggedly opposed to letting the other get an upper hand in the situation? Surely, two communists should be able to agree on how to take over a third country for Marxist happiness, should they not?

... and of course, President Lawnchair is building (another!) "coalition of the willing".

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice and you're AI..."

"I still can't allow you and Cmdr. Poole to jeopardize this mission, Dave."

President