I think you answered your own question right there.

Everyone loves the benefits of government-funded infrastructure if someone else is paying for them.

That's not entirely true. If you are in the top %0.001 of the population for income, you could feasibly pay for your own private infrastructure. You buy a plot of land, put a wall around it and hire a bunch of people to protect you, take care of you and cater to your needs. But your standard of living wouldn't actually be any objectively better than it is in contemporary America. In fact it would probably be somewhat worse. Historically societies that organized themselves along these feudal lines were not by modern standards innovative. You mustn't imagine living your untaxed castle enjoying Internet access and the other benefits of a modern science. In the rule by and for the wealthy, guys like Jon Postel or Vint Cerf would most likely have been serfs.

Humanity's greatest resource is the creativity of people -- a resource that tends to be squandered either by totalitarian control on one hand or anarchistic neglect on the other. People who can see no middle ground aren't just blind as futurists, they're historically blind.

And by a thousand years ago they were going to war in his name. People will seize on anything to rationalize what they want to do, aided by the bottomless human capacity for inconsistency. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if someday to learn there were "Gandhian" terrorists.

Don't get me wrong, I think ideals are important. But we shouldn't expect too much from them. An ideal is only as good as the people who espouse it.

No, you have to get up before that so you can shlep 22 10 TB hard drives to the backup site.

The truth is that there is no simple solution for backup -- not if you consider preparing for future contingencies. Backup to hard drives? Your backup data is an asset that needs constant maintenance less bit-rot set in.

That's only if you don't count the unused solar energy as waste.

I don't see how anyone could be "awesome at CS" without being strong at math. Being skilled at *programming* and bad at math? Sure, although that would be a significant handicap.

Programming isn't CS, just like machining isn't mechanical engineering. Sure, machinists and mechanical engineers tend to have a basic seat-of-the-pants understanding of each others' disciplines, but that doesn't mean they can do each others' jobs.

Of course CS is different, in that many if not most people with CS degrees make their livings as programmers. And probably quite a few of them are mediocre at math in a way no mechanical engineer would be, but I wouldn't call those people "awesome at CS"; I'd call them over-credentialed programmers. On the flip side there are programmers without degrees in CS who are awesome at CS, but that's because they've self-taught, and are pretty much by definition good at math. They may have deficits in specific areas like geometry or calculus, but they're going to be good at stuff like abstract algebra and graph theory. If someone is "awesome at CS" they should be able to follow Euler's solution to the Konigsberg bridge problem. If they can't follow it they may be quite useful as programmers but they're not going to be designing any novel networking algorithms.

As far as making CS a core subject? That seems a bit extreme to me, and I actually have a CS degree. I think most people who are destined for STEM careers would benefit from some programming experience in something like MATLAB, but they'd benefit *more* from additional probability and statistics. There is certainly little call to teach them actual CS. It's questionable to me whether people heading into non-STEM careers benefit at all from CS or programming, and they'd certainly benefit more from additional courses in writing.

If you've ever been on a jury hearing a trial for a violent felony, you'd understand. Despite the feeling you have that the world is full of irresponsible morons, when you put people in that jury room most of them understand that they have a man's life in their hands on one hand, and the safety and order of society in the other.

It's very likely the most serious and important thing you'll do ever do in your entire life. You do not want to f*ck it up, even if the answer seems obvious when you walk into deliberations.

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?

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.