I always thought it was bizarrely tautological. If you wish something to be different and you personally can make a choice for it under your control to be different, then you make the correct choice. For example, I don't throw a soda can out the window of my car while complaining about pollution on the highway. Other people obviously don't care but I control the drop in the bucket I'm responsible for and I make the ethical choice.

But as I got older, I actually found and still find people that think they should be forced to do it the right way even while complaining about the abuse. Case in point, a friend in the medical profession was actually complaining about tax dodges while setting up his own backdoor Roth IRA. When I asked him about abusing the very rules he was decrying, he simply shrugged and said he doesn't make the rules he just follows them. He acknowledged it's shady as hell but pretty much felt like his hands were tied.

It was deeply troubling ... I get a similar feeling about this article. I understand it is sometimes harder to play by ethical rules than legal rules when everyone around you is benefiting from misconduct but ... it seems this is yet another example of the caste system thriving in India. It's simply stupefying on the "My dad is Li Gang" level.

That only works if you're not going to later need the smart quotes. It also doesn't work on a cut and paste from a newspaper.

I tried Lo, its lack of full justification was a show stopper. Have they fixed that yet?

It's their problem, I'll just link to S/N when I have an entry that might be in a book until they fix it. I'm not going to take extra effort because of someone else's lack of competence.

The problem you or I can't fix is quoting a newspaper in a comment, seeing it's fine in preview, and having /.'s garbage generator shit on it; you can't edit a comment.

Yes, if I enjoyed murder mysteries. It was well written, far better than that best-selling hack James Patterson. Stephen King is a great writer, but I've read few of his books because I'm no fan of dark fiction. I did enjoy The Green Mile, though.

Since you're looking to turn writing into a career, you did in fact choose the best genre. I don't care for them, but murder mysteries sell like crazy.

I compose in Open Office. Since what I write will probably wind up in a book, unicode is necessary and removing it is a hassle we should not have to put up with.

What's most maddening is that when previewing a journal or comment, slashdot's garbage generator doesn't shit all over it until you hit "submit". There's simply no excuse for it. Soylent News uses slashdot's code, and they had it fixed within a month or two of opening.

This should be especially embarrassing for what's supposed to be a tech site.

It looked like they had fixed it when I previewed. Why in the hell do smart characters work in preview but not posted? What's the point of previewing when slashdot's retarded code will fuck it up anyway?

For a version that hasn't had slashdot's garbage generator shit all over it, go here.

Slashdot's lack of smart quotes are one of my banes. Why does the infant Soylent News that uses slashcode not mangle smart quotes like Slashdot does?

Damned Dice...

What I meant is that even though movies can indeed be thought-provoking, they demand no imagination on the audience's part.

Agreed completely. I do need a cheaper printer, though.

But books and movies are completely different. If "Mars, Ho!" were a screenplay, it would have to be written completely differently. If it were a movie, the opening scene would be the withdrawing addict killing the bouncer. In the book, this shows up halfway through.

Movies are completely passive, you're spoon-fed everything in a movie. With literature, it's almost as much the reader's imagination as the writer's. It would be a boring book indeed that described every aspect of everything.

In a movie, everyone sees the same couch. In a book, everyone who reads it sees a different couch.

Likewise, these different mediums demand a different approach to getting the audience interested.

The inside of the book jacket used to be the place to hook people on the content - but with the move to digital, "What's a book jacket, gran'ma?", which is eventually going to become "What's a hardcover?" I for one welcome the demise of those pretentious not-to-be-touched hipster coffee-table books.

I used to think so, and thought the only reason I prefer physical books is because I read thousands of them before ever seeing a computer, but have changed my mind since publishing "Nobots" and "The Paxil Diaries". First was my 28 year old daughter's reaction when she saw a hardcover of "Nobots". "My dad wrote a book! And it's a REAL book!" Even though she grew up with computers in the house, she's not impressed with text on a screen. Perhaps because she grew up with them.

What cemented this for me was site stats. More people have paid for physical copies than have downloaded the free e-books. The vast majority simply read the HTML on the web pages.

If physical books die, it will be the publishing industry that kills them with stupid moves and policies, much like the music publishers have trashed sales of their physical wares.

Agreed. With "Nobots" you had to get a few chapters read before it starts to make sense, but a woman who read it told me "it usually takes a chapter or two to get me sucked into a book, I was hooked on that one in the first paragraph."

OTOH "Mars, Ho!" has a Mise en scene (which slashdot's lack of unicode prevents us from easily spelling correctly), its first chapter. Different stories take different approaches.