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!

But does the cyclodextrin plus paper packet weigh less than a nalgene bottle? I doubt it.

I really don't understand why "powdered alcohol" is a better solution than carrying grain alcohol. "Powdered alcohol" isn't alcohol somehow transformed into a powder, but ordinary liquid alcohol absorbed/encapsulated in a carrier powder. So you don't save weight over the equivalent amount of Everclear, you add it.

If the programmer in question was at least as good as average at meeting his targets, and the Easter Egg was suitably hidden, I probably wouldn't say anything. And I speak as someone who's actually managed programmers successfully.

Play and humor are essential feature of learning and advanced human cognition. We're more creative and effective when we give a our brains a little stimulation. When you treat programers as code generating machines you get less out of them than if you treat them as code generating animals.

I agree with you. From what I can see the normal prison term for aggravated identity theft is five years and for extortion of $30,000 is about 2 years or a bit more depending on prior criminal record, so a five to seven year sentence would be normal and actually feels reasonable to me. There's no question that this guy's behavior was abominable and deserving of punishment, but the novelty of the offense is not an aggravating factor. It just triggers revulsion more powerfully than heinous acts we're more habituated to. It's natural when confronted with a novel offense to want to stamp it out, but it can't be done this way.

We'll probably never get past the notion that outrageous punishments deter crime, even though we see that proposition disproven every time we see people speeding through a section of highway posted for $500 construction zone fines. The fact that the sight of a car that looks like it might be a police cruiser makes people tap their brakes even in an ordinary speeding fine zone should tell us something. It's the likelihood of punishment that modifies people's behavior, not the magnitude. A $50 fine you think you'll probably get is more powerful than a $500 fine you believe you probably won't get.

What keeps this kind of futile draconian sentencing going is accepting the "well at least we're doing something" standard as good enough. If you think about it, that's a very low standard of performance. In fact it's not a standard of performance at all. Nothing could be simpler than passing a law mandating extremely harsh sentences or inflating sentences by gaming the sentencing guidelines in unusual ways but those actions aren't going to work and are arguably unconstitutional.

I don't think you quite understand what that word means. A stereotype is a simplistic model that is held as if it were true of *all* members of some group. So if I say, "blacks are poorer than whites in the US," that's not a stereotype, it's a statistical assertion about differences in economic attainment between groups in aggregate. But if I say "Blacks are poorer because blacks are lazy," that's using a stereotype because it attributes something inherent to blackness. Likewise if I say "Bob can't own that Mercedes because he's black," I'm implicitly stating that all blacks are too poor to own a Mercedes so that's a stereotype. If I were to say "the rate of Mercedes ownership is lower among blacks than whites" that is not a stereotype but a (made-up) statistical assertion.

So now I'm ready to tackle your question. Hitherto, men have not requires as much protection from sexual harassment as a group, because they have as a group dominated positions of authority and indeed all jobs except in a few professions like teaching and nursing. There have been cultural attitudes that give preference to men in hiring and salary, all other things being equal.

However that's a far cry from saying no man hitherto has ever needed legal protection for sexual discrimination or harassment. For example, it is legally possible to be harass or discriminate against people of the same sex. If your boss pressures you for homosexual sex, that's still sexual harassment.