This statement is mussing the tinfoil of the denialists and other right-wing nutjobs...I hope he does this some more! Trolololol! >:)

Where do the slopes diverge? They're practically on top of each other, unless you want to try the old "atmospheric vs. oceanic warming" argument...care for a go?

Climate change certainly did contribute to triggering the Syrian civil war:

http://www.scientificamerican....

AGW won't cause a quick Roland Emmerich apocalypse, but there are definitely more interesting surprises in store if we do nothing...and you can blame them on whatever you want, it won't keep them from happening.

I highly recommend Anita Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages, which is interesting to a sci-fi fan because it covers not only the obvious cases like Klingon, but serious attempts to create "philosophical" languages which are alluded to in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

It was interesting to me as a long time database and system designer because the seriously undermines the impulse that arises once in every generation of system designers that systems can be integrated "merely" by adopting a common, standardized ontological model.

A politician? With an agenda? Doesn't our socialist Muslim Kenyan president know that politicians aren't supposed to try to accomplish anything?

So we'd be DDOSing (Distributed Dick Overload Strategy) the NSA?

Turning their day jobs into Chatroulette?

The people who call others "social justice warriors" can be called "social injustice enthusiasts" :D

It doesn't matter why an author does what he does. What matters is if he gets away with it.

The whole write for yourself/write for your audience thing is a false dichotomy. If you write *solely* for yourself you won't connect with other people. If you write solely for other people you won't have anything to say.

Better to call it "terrorism by proxy".

That's almost laughable. You can't engineer your rivals out of the competition and claim that proves anything about fan voices. That simply shows that you're morbidly concerned with external validation.

Right, so they took advantage of the nomination process to avoid competing with works that would probably beat them.

Back in the early 70s there was a character who called himself "Count Dante" who used to advertise himself in the back of comic books as "'The Deadliest Man Alive'" (in quotes) based on his victory at an international death-match martial arts tournament he'd organized. What he neglected to mention is that he won this tournament by default, being the sole entrant.

That's exactly what the Sad Puppies have done. They've turned an impressive achievement into an impressive-sounding one.

Back in 1978 Frederik Pohl won the Best Novel Hugo for "Gateway", which was a scathing anti-capitalist satire. Gateway beat out a number of good novels, including "Lucifer's Hammer" by right wing authors Larry Niven and Jerrry Pournelle. But it didn't beat "Lucifer's Hammer" because of politics. Niven had one five previous Hugos and I think Pohl had won one. In fact "Gateway" is so dryly mordant I think a lot of people who read it don't realize it's satire. Had Niven and Pournelle won because they'd manuevered to have Pohl excluded from the ballot on political grounds, people would remember "Lucifer's Hammer" not as a great novel in its own right, but as that novel that should have lost to "Gateway".

Authors should concentrate on writing, not electioneering awards for themselves.

Nothing could be more relevant than social justice. Or would you return to segregated schools and lynchings?

The problem isn't that justice is an unworthy goal. It's that in a world where "public debate" is dominated by blogs and social media energy is poured into policing the purity of people's language rather than actually changing things. People used to form their little cliques, left or right, face to face rather than exposed for all the world to see and participate in. The process has been democratized, but at the same time crippled.

So the Sad Puppies organized to support their own slate of nominees. Good for them, I suppose, but there's something pathetic about the whole affair -- engineering a win for yourself in what's supposed to be a fan popularity contest. I say this as someone who's been reading sci-fi for over 40 years: if you want *my* respect, get people who *disagree* with you politically to vote for you.

Yes, but just because AES uses the xor operation doesn't mean that it is XOR encryption. By that argument if an encryption system uses some kind of rotation operation then it's no more secure than ROT13.

is that it doesn't matter how weak your keys are!