I'd certainly want to identify serial killers as soon as I saw them.

"There's a sucker born every minute."

It would be nice, but it's far, far more likely that the web will become - literally - nothing but ads cleverly (not) disguised as "content."

You are in conflict with the intent of impact statements. Good luck with that.

Do not feet sympathy for a bot. It has no feelings, and is not sentient. And remember, bots do not "think," they are basically advanced autocomplete, and they hallucinate a lot.

This is, in fact, another AI hallucination, so far as I can tell.

I think it's simpler than that. If he can convince people that AI can be their friend, then perhaps he can finally be someone's friend.

Manipulating the process is the entire purpose of victim impact statements. They're supposed to manipulate the process.

Unless, of course, it's not.

Know your audience.

All very true, but you've missed the point of the victim impact statement. In a murder case, it's not about the impact on the murder case, it's about the impact on those close to the victim. This was what his family wanted to say about how it impacted them. They just said it in an odd and indirect way.

Maybe you should read what you're replying to. As I said, and you didn't read or are lying about, Chernobyl was a unique design, and that caused a catastrophic failure that can't happen anywhere else. The reactors as Chernobyl were the only ones of that design.

We've seen the results of the worst case scenario at the design used for any other commercial reactor, at Three Mile Island (which had melted puddles of uranium in the core) and Fukushima (which suffered a tsunami and earthquake), and between the two, there's only one death attributable to radiation.

Which I already said, but you didn't read, or are lying about.

What happened at Chernobyl was unique to the reactors there, where a failure in the control system accelerated the reaction inside the core. It literally can't happen with the design used everywhere else, where the failure of the control system shuts down the reaction in the core. Three Mile Island was about as bad as it gets for most reactor designs, and there were . . . zero deaths that can be attributed to it. Even if you add in earthquakes and tsunamis, literally the worst nuclear power plant incident other than Chernobyl, there's only . . . one death attributable to radiation.

So wank away to your heart's content, you can't possibly look any more poorly informed.

How many of those small acts use Ticketmaster? Does Ticketmaster even both with shows that cheap?

Smaller venues I go to handle their own ticket sales, always at the door, and keep 100% of it (or, rather, split with the act in whatever way they agree).

Yes, it probably does believe that.

20 years ago, the internet was a refuge from the real world. Now, the real world is a refuge from the internet.

Not quite. It's fans who attend a specific convention - WorldCon - or buy an affiliate membership for the specific purpose of participating in the nomination and voting process for Hugos.