pericat @10: Voting is both a right and a responsibility. As I understand it, it takes more than being convicted of a crime for the state to be empowered to strip a convict of his or her rights as a human being or as a citizen. For the state to also strip a convict of his or her responsibilities as well is, practically speaking, seriously counterproductive.
That doesn't strike me as particularly convincing. Holding people for crimes for extended periods is also stripping someone of their rights to free conduct and free assembly. Prisoners are almost by definition stripped of their first, second, and fourth amendment rights.
We don't allow prisoners to carry guns, why would we allow them to vote?
Part of the penalty of the sentence is to have one's rights and privileges revoked because that person has shown his or herself unable to live as a member of our society.
I guess I understand where abi and pericat are arguing from, but I haven't yet been convinced of their position.
JMD @ 7: #5 Fuzzy -- I'm not going to answer that, because why should I give them the information they were looking for?
I think Fuzzy was wondering if they had actual information about you. Since it wasn't Reader's Digest, it could have been someone calling to confirm their information via deception as Clifton @ 4 suggested.
Bruce @ 120: This is what I call Geek Rule #1: Whatever can be done with a computer MUST be done with a computer.
That should be, Geek Rule #1: Whatever can be done faster, more efficiently and with fewer problems by a computer should be done by a computer. (And it's better for the environment, too!)
Bruce again: What compelling reason is there for them to change?
Money.
Right now a story from Scalzi might sell a few more magazines, especially since Scalzi himself controls a media outlet that can tout his works to hundreds of thousands of people that care about his work. Cory Doctorow, eBear and others have similar platforms. However, some of these writers won't submit to them due to their submission policy.
Perhaps by getting those boosts from the authors they'll even sell a few copies to the people that aren't 45+ or looking to get published. (Yes, it's a hyperbolic statement, but it's also mostly true.)
After that, maybe they'll be able to do a cost of living increase to their pay rates.
There's also the sad fact that pretty soon the "Big 3" won't be discovering many new talents. New talents are going to submit to cheaper, better paying places first. Sorry if that's upsetting to anyone.
I also find it hilarious that you think that "the Big Three have a working system in place, and they already receive far more submissions than they can use."
Great. They receive far more submissions than they can use. But if their real goal is to be a better magazine and provide better quality stories to their readers then they'll want to increase their number of submissions and thus be able to find more of the gems. If 99% of 1,000 stories "works", then increasing it to 99.9% of 10,000 or 99.99% of 100,000 would mean premium stories.
And don't forget, we all know that computers are better and faster at this stuff. It's a given, considering that this is what they're made to do.
And if you really want an absolutely compelling reason, then there should be an iron-clad one in #79: editors won't have to deal with human excrement smeared on submissions any more. Or even worry about it.
Once again we see that being a Doctor doesn't require the ability to coherently form and convey an idea.
I just dealt with a customer service issue with BoA. Everyone that I dealt with was very, very polite, although they twice tried to sell me on a credit card I already had and it took four different contacts (two phone calls, two trips into the local branch) to resolve my problem.
However, trying to convince people to pay for their dead relatives is screwed up.
@ #37 and #42:
My response to that is: "No, it just means that everyone is different. Similarities are never as interesting as differences."
Also: A subsection of that list defines what mainstream Christianity means to me. Just one single subsection.
I was on the mall. It was colder than it looked. :)
We need to switch the inaugurations back to April.
Caroline @ 16: I wasn't aware there were tickets to the parade for sale -- I thought it was just come and stake out a spot for free, if you could. I thought tickets were just for the actual ceremony, and could only be gotten through your elected representatives (for free).
If so, the national media has been suckered in too.
I think that the standing room is free, that the tickets are for reserved bleacher seating at specified locations.
And another friend of mine is going to be in the GLBT marching band, so I'm going to be there to cheer him on, w00t!
Joann @ 7: No doubt, but I think there were other things I wanted to be watching just then.
I'm glad I didn't have any fixed plans. I wasn't planning on going, but then my boyfriend bought tickets to the parade (don't ask me how! His internet-fu is strong like that) so we're going to be on the mall, at sitting at the parade later. It'll be a lot of fun, albeit totally insane packed-like-sardines-into-a-city-not-meant-to-accommodate-so-many fun.
I happen to really like the humorous conversational quality of some of Geico's advertising. I liked the artistic quality of the Absolut print advertising and a few of the Hagen Daas video ones. I like the salacious men's underwear advertising, especially when it's in a place that makes the odd juxtaposition of public with private so painfully clear (i.e. when it's on the NYC streets). I like Banksy's subversion of advertising when I see it (there was a billboard here in NYC that I never got a picture of that I suspected might be his).
I like movie trailers as well. Some trailers are works of art themselves. Pixar, for example, is quite good at them. Some of the other ones that I've seen that really impressed me are for Donnie Darko, the Watchmen, and Everything is Illuminated.
I hate it when the first chapter of an upcoming sequel is included in a book. It gives me a false sense of how much longer I have to read, and if I do read it, it forces me to suddenly drop out of a world that I've established a connection too. If I was going to buy the sequel, I will buy it. If not, then that chapter isn't going to be as convincing to me as the book that I just read.
In three years, I was called for jury duty three times by the state where I was a resident but had to defer because I was in college at the time. Then, when I got home and lived there for another five years almost, I never got called again.
Which is sad, because I wouldn't have minded jury duty so much.
Absolutely agreed. I'm always absolutely delighted when I find out that he's got a new post up.
Hooray Slactivist!
I don't know if I'm laughing. That kid is going to have some seriously high expectations that he's going to have to overcome in his life.
Here's hoping that the walking on water bit goes okay.
Another site that I belong to had similar problems, Fark, which serves hundreds of thousands of page views per day, and it was indeed being issued through their ads.
But, speaking of science fiction sites that are having issues, I haven't been able to reach Tor.com in the last two weeks, since traveling home to NM.
Normally I'd chalk that up to weird connection issues, but all my other sites work fine, and a few lines of each new post are appearing in my web based reader, but the links never work.
Good luck to Locus though . . . Fark is still having problems.
Nice . . . hahaha.
He just happened to have the costume handy, I guess?
For others not in the know, I'll spare you the difficulty of typing this into your Wiki search bar.
The Man Who Was Thursday.
I think that if we wait for Bush to do the right thing, we'll be waiting for a long time.
Jim @ 37:
Speaking of resolutely clean minded, I just read that Atlanta Nights quote as "Hot little juice box love."
And then, flipping back to dirty, that conjured all sorts of strange images in my head.
Lizzy L @ 12: Turn the above sentence around and what you get looks very much like what we've more or less had for the last 100 years or so.
We're likely to come out of this with a whole bunch of politically-important industries having a substantial ownership interest in the US government.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I think the government is primarily going to be buying not voting shares.
However, I think there's a certain truth and a certain misapprehension in that reversed statement. Yeah, the government is reversing the flow of money from the corporations giving money to the government to vice versa but as the government is (theoretically) public not private, there are huge differences between the first case and the latter case. I think that the people should be much more concerned about what is happening now because it's supposed to be our government.
But I'm too tired to figure out how to make that point more clearly.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 13 |
| 2008 | 77 |
| 2007 | 24 |
| 2006 | 1 |
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