There are increasingly richer fields of content that are not connected to the publishing conglomerates, so I'm with you. I can live without new music from them, and for older stuff and classics - well, I have a working cassette, 8-track, and record player on my stereo so legacy content is cheap and available (and it's fun to have different formats). I don't do illegal downloads, never have - call me crazy but I think people have a right under law to sell their stuff as they see fit. If that means selling their souls and 99% of their profits to some huge corporation... their business.
When I got my price-fixing lawsuit settlement check I went straight to CD Baby and spent it on an independent artist. Mmm, it's like screwing them twice.
It raises a couple of questions - I wonder how good of a job these sales figures are doing of tracking the independent artist who's selling directly or through a service like CD baby. A surprising amount of this year-to-date's new music purchases have been from extremely talented friends etc. at shows or direct from them. I also wonder about the used market. Between used stores and things like Half.com, does a boom in sales one year inevitably lead to dragging sales the next as people recycle more content? Could part of the "decline" in sales really be an untracked shift in the publishing paradigm (ok, yeah, I'm a stupid optimist).
The first thing I thought, looking at the set-up where your head is clamped into this air-tight bubble, is that it was very, very easy to imagine a variety of accident scenarios that would end up snapping your neck like a twig. A bonus scenario would be a giant shark snatching you from behind and ripping your body clean off so that your expiring head was bouncing around in the bubble while the gory contraption spun out of control. (Please don't lecture me about how sharks really behave, I'm just funnin')
That barrier to entry thing is going to continue to be the doom of e-books for a while to come. Let's see - I spend the price of about 500 used paperbacks or a good 20 top-shelf premium hardbacks before I can actually BUY a book. If I fall asleep with my fi'ty cent to two dollar used paperback at my feet on the beach, I'm out a buck or two when the tide rolls in. If it's my e-Ink book, well, there goes pushing four hundred dollars.
To add insult to injury, they still tried to jack you 1-5 bucks for an e-book in previous incarnations. I have the same problem as with online songs. When you eliminate the physical product (and this savings is, I would imagine, even more extreme with a book than a CD), I expect a greater component of the savings to end up in my pocket. A buck for an online song is ridiculous; a buck for an online book is pushing it: five bucks for an online book is robbery.
Add that to lousy selection, and you've got yourself a product I simply don't want.
Yeah, this shows a remarkable failure to understand what we in the debunkery biz like to call the "woo-woo" mentality. You start with the knowledge that stuff happens (big chunks of garbage strike the earth, things go boom, you know, the usual stuff) and ignore completely the fact that humans have been prediciting doom with great certainty continuously as can be plainly observed from the dawn of recorded history. Pick a favorite doomsday device (great floods are out of favor, more's the pity, planetary impacts and supervolcanos are in), go access a ton of information you don't understand and get crazy. If the "powers that be" say nothing, they're clearly covering it up - if there's a simple explanation, why don't they tell us? If they say, no, this isn't happening, here's why, well, clearly they're covering it up - if it's such a simple explanation, if our radical ideas are so crazy, why are they trying so hard to debunk it? It's a nice strategy, basically saying anything or nothing is proof of your theory.
Visions, signs, ancient writings, are all popular sources of "evidence." Those insisting on the same standards of scientific evidence we would demand for, oh, frozen-yogurt inspectors are pilloried for their blind adherence to the belief system of science. Remember, nobody can prove love exists, so either you don't believe in love or you accept that the science of geology is useless, as compared to messages in crop circles, for predicting major geological events.
People really dig on doomsday, I've never figured out why, exactly. Facts will never prevent them from clinging to their favorite theory of how everything is going to go to hell real soon now.
What really ticks me off is that if an unexpected, civilization-ending cataclysm does happen (and it certainly could - we don't have anything like a comprehensive program for tracking NEOs, for example), one of these damn woo-woo groups will get the credit for knowing about it all along. It's a given, because there is always, always someone "saying this is the year!"
I actually disagree. The spelling/grammar errors look canned to me - I would totally not put this past Microsoft, but this email smells bogus. The points raised are a bit too comprehensive and helpful to the anti-microsoft, anti-SCO case.
I could very well be wrong. It's mostly an instinctive reaction to the content of the memo. It seems very possible to me that a memo like this could be a cover - someone knows that the facts are more or like this, turns it into this bogus memo to obsfucate the actual source... Time may or may not tell.
It doesn't do anything for their legal case. The fact that some people decide to obey a licensing demand does not grant any true validity and authority to that demand. The benefit is solely for their financial disposition and the public perception of legitimacy.
Good distinctions. As I said, I haven't researched that side of the business well enough, though I plan to (it is an ongoing area of interest and thought for me). Thanks for the input.
It is in fact possible ASCAP or BMI could facilitate alternative distribution strategies for the artist who is not going to get that big recording contract. It's something I want to research but haven't yet, so perhaps I should keep my big mouth shut about that aspect. However, I do think that in playing a significant role in the development and administration of the the current system of royalties, including royalties for webcast, these organizations have been slanted towards the needs of the conventional music publishing business. That doesn't make them wrong or evil - and their slant is natural - but I believe that there is a growing place for something better designed for the many, many artists and bands who are never going to "make it" as recording contract artists but might very well make it if they had access to better systems where they could trade a certain amount of distribution control (i.e. legally allowing filesharing or webcasting with no or minimal fees) in exchange for exposure. Analogy: Penny Arcade would never make anybody a living in the world of conventional syndication, even with a relatively benign synidicate like Creator's Syndicate. Yet they've tapped into a market using the internet. I think there is a lot of potential in the internet, digital transfer, etc. to make a large number of musicians a decent living by expanding markets and just producing a product much less expensively. So I'd like to see people like the EFF stop talking about how we could make it legal to share people's copyrighted material against their will (it's impossible unless you change the law) and instead start talking about how we could facilitate sharing people's copyrighted materials who WANT them shared. It's a question that involves two basic but complex issues: keeping a system from being used to distribute material illegally, and making it worth the creator's while. Complex but worth talking about.
The article contains this line: "As intriguing as the EFF's proposal may be, it needs one group to participate. And that group, the RIAA, isn't biting."
This attitude IS the problem. Simply exclude RIAA members from whatever schemes you cook up and move forward. As I say, I don't know if BMI or ASCAP would be a help or hindrance. When you sign on as an affiliate, as far as I know, you grant them the right to negotiate your deals for public performance of any kind. I believe that if you are signed on with them, for example, anybody wanting to webcast your music MUST go by the standard royalty scheme, which is overly expensive and restrictive for many potential webcasters. Artists unlikely to get the kind of concentrated play that makes royalty deals worthwhile might find potential in these venues to carve out new kinds of sustainable niches for off the beaten track musicians.
We complain about how the media conglomerates restrict choice, produce fewer artists every year, cheat the artists they do sign, and then overcharge us to boot. We complain about the mainstream garbage and the same six songs on ther radio over and over again.
We complain about how file sharing gets restricted and the draconian and inconsistently applied copyright enforcement tactics.
So you're telling me that there's all these musicians out there that can't get a fair shot at public response, and if they did they'd get a rotten deal and lose their copyrights to their creative works.
So you're telling me there is this new technology revolution that can put scalable analogs of broadcasting into the hands of the people for, essentially, pocket change.
So you're telling me there are all these internet "radio" wannabes who can't do their thing because THEY're charging too much for access to content and saddling it with a bunch of foolish rules and restrictions.
And I'm supposed to get all tingly over some scheme to make it so we can insist that THEIR artists can be file-shared against their will? So I can go out and download that damn song I can hear a hundred times a day on the radio?
What is needed is not a new scheme for the existing body of media conglomerate-controlled, RIAA sanctioned, ASCAP administered content. What is needed is a whole new body of fresh, unrestricted, artist-owned content and an alternative to the RIAA and ASCAP for the artists to use to publish their work in a whole new way that takes advantage of technologies like file sharing instead of shunning them. The question is - how does it get started?
Hey Guys! Is she statisfied with the size of your P.E.N.S.?!
Is that a hard drive in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
The possibilities for jocularity seem endless. Oh, and I'm really looking forward to a computer I can lose 1/5th of through a moment of innatention. "No, waiter, I REALLY need MY pen back. It's got all the third quarter earnings numbers on it!"
It raises the interesting distinction between communism as a political philosophy and communism as it has generally been practiced. At it's most basic level, all communism means the direct and communal control of a society towards the common benefits of all members. So in fact democracy isn't mutually exclusive with this principle - a democratic decision-making process would seem to be the most sensible way for a society dedicated to direct and communal control to run things.
In the major examples of communist governments, the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx were abused to promote the imposition of communism by force - and to the surprise of nobody with a brain and a sense of history, absolute power was found to corrupt absolutely. The leaders, who claimed to be managing the developing the communistic societies for the good of the people and the revolutionary principle, became simple despots taking advantage of their power for material gain. This demonstrates some of the inherent pitfalls of communism. If you decide that communal ownership of all property is necessary for an ideal communist society, well then somebody has to "repossess" all that property and redistribute it. As many have discovered, things don't always work out so well in that transfer.
You may not know that the Communist Party USA has been active continuously since 1919 - not a bad trick when you consider how deep anti-communist sentiments have been at times in the intervening period. They've even gotten the occasional candidate elected.
You couldn't say that India has a communist government. In fact, better minds than mine would have to explain how India is governed, because it's complicated. It is unquestionably true that world's first elected Communist government was in the Indian state of Kerala in 1957, and communist parties in India still play a role in politics today. It is interesting, and will stretch your ideas about what communism is and isn't, if nothing else (I'm not a communist, by the way, but I find the varieties of ways we try to govern ourselves interesting...)
Fossil fuels do contribute in reality to the production of ethanol. If electricity is used, then you're using fossil fuels. Of course you put gas in the tractor and combine you use to produce the corn. In reality nothing can be done practically without fossil fuels in this day and age.
However you're right that the agricultural community does lean on the environmental issues (the Straight Dope guy's claim that burning ethanol may create more pollution is also dsiputed and, I believe, bogus).
The issue of whether ethanol has a positive energy balance is a issue of dispute, but at least pay attention to the dissenting opinion. http://www.usda.gov/oce/oepnu/aer-813.pdf My personal belief based on the data is that ethanol produced in a modern facility with cogeneration capacity does indeed produce net energy on the order of 30%. On the other hand there is also a good argument to be made that corn is not the ideal source for ethanol production for fuel http://www.ems.org/biomass/intro.html
I think the issue of ADM's dominance in the ethanol market is a more significant issue and worth looking hard at - ADM is a massive company and they should not be getting subsidies for producing ethanol the same way as farmers co-ops and the like.
I certainly believe ethanol is a better choice of fuel oxygenate than MTBE.
Saying ethanol is mainly just a porkbarrel subsidy is not accurate or fair. Background, I worked for the think tank the Institute for Local Self Reliance about a decade ago and observed firsthand the research that went into estimating the net energy yield of ethanol. It is a far from simple question.
Direct utilization of a biofuel for a hydrogen cell is still significant from an alternative fuels research perspective.
This article (too lazy to code in a link so you'll have to cut-n-paste) gives an interesting analysis from a Dean supporter who was caught by surprise by the faltering of his campaign in the aftermath of initial primaries. He gives a very credible analysis of why the Dean campaign succeeded beyond expectations in the non-traditional campaign and fundraising environment of the internet only to become seriously mired in the very meatspace reality of primary politics. Worth a read.
http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/02/03/ ex iting_deanspace.php
I think the bigger question is why Simson and Garfinkle are wasting their time on RFID issues when they should be planning the comeback tour... I love their stuff... Cecilia, you're breakin' my heart...
In my opinion it doesn't say much about Republicans or Democrats (or liberals or conservatives or big-endians or little-endians, etc. ad nauseum) as it does about how effectively our two-party nation has done the work of convincing people to identify the world as consisting of two "camps" and themselves as belonging to one of them.
Whatever "principles" you may see your preferred party as supporting, egregious examples can be cited of party actions violating those principles. A great example is drug war sentencing laws. Most people opposed to harsh drug law sentences would identify the Democratic party as closer to their ideology. Yet many of the most arbitrary and draconian mandatory minimum sentencing laws were rushed through by a Democratic congress - in a bid to prove themselves "tough on drugs."
Representing either party as being under the influence of corporate and private wealth, or swayed by the dictates of "special interests" or accusing them of swelling big government further is another good example. Both parties are entirely guilty. Anybody who acts like Democrats aren't catering to their corporate constituents, or like Republicans are doing anything about making Government smaller or less intrusive in the average person's life, is just deluding themselves on the basis of partisan rhetoric.
A quick review of how both these parties have worked to thwart minor parties from being able to participate significantly in the democratic process, and of how campaign finance reform is consistently blocked and emasculated in legislation (isn't great how we got that campaign finance legislation passed, and now money isn't a big deal in the upcoming presidential election? Representative democracy rocks!), will quickly reveal that Democrats and Republicans are truly bipartisan and at least one respect - their total commitment to preserving their manopoly on defining the issues in the national dialog.
I don't disagree with you in concept but as I read it the article was advocating a one-way trip as a method of making manned travel to Mars available in the shorter term and for less money. So it is not about colonization - I think you could indeed find people willing to give "settling" on Mars a shot. But the expense and complexity of that would be, I would guess (totally without justification I admit), at least equal to sending a ship with a return capability.
The thing about Mars is, given the launch window, if something goes wrong (hey these air filters are made of CHEESE!), you're screwed. You just get to expire on national television. Sorry, man - we'll rocket a wreath out in two years.
Well, if we're talking about the one-way-ticket scenario, the worst-case scenario I can think of would probably be successfully putting them down and then listening as the impact of the fact that they are going to spend the rest of their probably short lives in a bubble in the middle of a barren waste sets in. Whatever a person thinks they're up to, the human reaction to that situation could never be predicted until they got there... Given a year, two, three...
A person in that situation has nothing to lose and if they decide to go off the deep end they won't ever have to face anyone back home about the consequences. It could become a very ugly spectactle that turned people off to manned exploration. Suiciide, desperate pleadings (I don't care how much it costs, just come back and pick me up!), horrible fights between crew members (sure the space station crews manage to keep it together... but they know that if things go right they're eventually coming home) all seem like real possibilities.
The author's examples of risk-seekers like test pilots isn't valid. These people may be willing to dice recklessly with death but they are not seeking the guarantee of death. Show me the test pilot who would get into the plane after being told it's unquestionably going to blow up but he'll get a hell of a ride before it happens.
In summary, I don't think that Atwood's high reputation could have been based on such cartoonish work. I can only assume this is one of her lesser works.
That's how I took it. I don't really think Atwood is a science fiction writer at all - The Handmaid's Tale, for instance, is not particularly a science fiction tale. Speculative, yes. It is not even predominantly a feminist novel, in my opinion, though it is usually painted as such. It is mainly a political novel and its primary target is religious fundamentalism.
You might give some of her other books a try. I felt like her basically naive approach to what are in fact a very complex and subtle science issues really got in the way of her usually graceful prose. One of her short story collections like Wilderness Tips might be a good start to figure out whether you really like her stuff or not. The Handmaid's Tale or The Blind Assassin are better books in my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
When I got my price-fixing lawsuit settlement check I went straight to CD Baby and spent it on an independent artist. Mmm, it's like screwing them twice.
It raises a couple of questions - I wonder how good of a job these sales figures are doing of tracking the independent artist who's selling directly or through a service like CD baby. A surprising amount of this year-to-date's new music purchases have been from extremely talented friends etc. at shows or direct from them. I also wonder about the used market. Between used stores and things like Half.com, does a boom in sales one year inevitably lead to dragging sales the next as people recycle more content? Could part of the "decline" in sales really be an untracked shift in the publishing paradigm (ok, yeah, I'm a stupid optimist).
The first thing I thought, looking at the set-up where your head is clamped into this air-tight bubble, is that it was very, very easy to imagine a variety of accident scenarios that would end up snapping your neck like a twig. A bonus scenario would be a giant shark snatching you from behind and ripping your body clean off so that your expiring head was bouncing around in the bubble while the gory contraption spun out of control. (Please don't lecture me about how sharks really behave, I'm just funnin')
That barrier to entry thing is going to continue to be the doom of e-books for a while to come. Let's see - I spend the price of about 500 used paperbacks or a good 20 top-shelf premium hardbacks before I can actually BUY a book. If I fall asleep with my fi'ty cent to two dollar used paperback at my feet on the beach, I'm out a buck or two when the tide rolls in. If it's my e-Ink book, well, there goes pushing four hundred dollars.
To add insult to injury, they still tried to jack you 1-5 bucks for an e-book in previous incarnations. I have the same problem as with online songs. When you eliminate the physical product (and this savings is, I would imagine, even more extreme with a book than a CD), I expect a greater component of the savings to end up in my pocket. A buck for an online song is ridiculous; a buck for an online book is pushing it: five bucks for an online book is robbery.
Add that to lousy selection, and you've got yourself a product I simply don't want.
Plus, by changing it from the passive to the active voice, it's better writing (at least that's what MS Word for Windows grammar check tells me...)
Visions, signs, ancient writings, are all popular sources of "evidence." Those insisting on the same standards of scientific evidence we would demand for, oh, frozen-yogurt inspectors are pilloried for their blind adherence to the belief system of science. Remember, nobody can prove love exists, so either you don't believe in love or you accept that the science of geology is useless, as compared to messages in crop circles, for predicting major geological events.
People really dig on doomsday, I've never figured out why, exactly. Facts will never prevent them from clinging to their favorite theory of how everything is going to go to hell real soon now.
What really ticks me off is that if an unexpected, civilization-ending cataclysm does happen (and it certainly could - we don't have anything like a comprehensive program for tracking NEOs, for example), one of these damn woo-woo groups will get the credit for knowing about it all along. It's a given, because there is always, always someone "saying this is the year!"
I could very well be wrong. It's mostly an instinctive reaction to the content of the memo. It seems very possible to me that a memo like this could be a cover - someone knows that the facts are more or like this, turns it into this bogus memo to obsfucate the actual source... Time may or may not tell.
It doesn't do anything for their legal case. The fact that some people decide to obey a licensing demand does not grant any true validity and authority to that demand. The benefit is solely for their financial disposition and the public perception of legitimacy.
Good distinctions. As I said, I haven't researched that side of the business well enough, though I plan to (it is an ongoing area of interest and thought for me). Thanks for the input.
The article contains this line: "As intriguing as the EFF's proposal may be, it needs one group to participate. And that group, the RIAA, isn't biting."
This attitude IS the problem. Simply exclude RIAA members from whatever schemes you cook up and move forward. As I say, I don't know if BMI or ASCAP would be a help or hindrance. When you sign on as an affiliate, as far as I know, you grant them the right to negotiate your deals for public performance of any kind. I believe that if you are signed on with them, for example, anybody wanting to webcast your music MUST go by the standard royalty scheme, which is overly expensive and restrictive for many potential webcasters. Artists unlikely to get the kind of concentrated play that makes royalty deals worthwhile might find potential in these venues to carve out new kinds of sustainable niches for off the beaten track musicians.
We complain about how the media conglomerates restrict choice, produce fewer artists every year, cheat the artists they do sign, and then overcharge us to boot. We complain about the mainstream garbage and the same six songs on ther radio over and over again.
We complain about how file sharing gets restricted and the draconian and inconsistently applied copyright enforcement tactics.
So you're telling me that there's all these musicians out there that can't get a fair shot at public response, and if they did they'd get a rotten deal and lose their copyrights to their creative works.
So you're telling me there is this new technology revolution that can put scalable analogs of broadcasting into the hands of the people for, essentially, pocket change.
So you're telling me there are all these internet "radio" wannabes who can't do their thing because THEY're charging too much for access to content and saddling it with a bunch of foolish rules and restrictions.
And I'm supposed to get all tingly over some scheme to make it so we can insist that THEIR artists can be file-shared against their will? So I can go out and download that damn song I can hear a hundred times a day on the radio?
What is needed is not a new scheme for the existing body of media conglomerate-controlled, RIAA sanctioned, ASCAP administered content. What is needed is a whole new body of fresh, unrestricted, artist-owned content and an alternative to the RIAA and ASCAP for the artists to use to publish their work in a whole new way that takes advantage of technologies like file sharing instead of shunning them. The question is - how does it get started?
Hey Guys! Is she statisfied with the size of your P.E.N.S.?!
Is that a hard drive in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
The possibilities for jocularity seem endless. Oh, and I'm really looking forward to a computer I can lose 1/5th of through a moment of innatention. "No, waiter, I REALLY need MY pen back. It's got all the third quarter earnings numbers on it!"
In the major examples of communist governments, the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx were abused to promote the imposition of communism by force - and to the surprise of nobody with a brain and a sense of history, absolute power was found to corrupt absolutely. The leaders, who claimed to be managing the developing the communistic societies for the good of the people and the revolutionary principle, became simple despots taking advantage of their power for material gain. This demonstrates some of the inherent pitfalls of communism. If you decide that communal ownership of all property is necessary for an ideal communist society, well then somebody has to "repossess" all that property and redistribute it. As many have discovered, things don't always work out so well in that transfer.
You may not know that the Communist Party USA has been active continuously since 1919 - not a bad trick when you consider how deep anti-communist sentiments have been at times in the intervening period. They've even gotten the occasional candidate elected.
You couldn't say that India has a communist government. In fact, better minds than mine would have to explain how India is governed, because it's complicated. It is unquestionably true that world's first elected Communist government was in the Indian state of Kerala in 1957, and communist parties in India still play a role in politics today. It is interesting, and will stretch your ideas about what communism is and isn't, if nothing else (I'm not a communist, by the way, but I find the varieties of ways we try to govern ourselves interesting...)
How does a trip to Guantanamo Bay sound?
However you're right that the agricultural community does lean on the environmental issues (the Straight Dope guy's claim that burning ethanol may create more pollution is also dsiputed and, I believe, bogus).
The issue of whether ethanol has a positive energy balance is a issue of dispute, but at least pay attention to the dissenting opinion. http://www.usda.gov/oce/oepnu/aer-813.pdf My personal belief based on the data is that ethanol produced in a modern facility with cogeneration capacity does indeed produce net energy on the order of 30%. On the other hand there is also a good argument to be made that corn is not the ideal source for ethanol production for fuel http://www.ems.org/biomass/intro.html
I think the issue of ADM's dominance in the ethanol market is a more significant issue and worth looking hard at - ADM is a massive company and they should not be getting subsidies for producing ethanol the same way as farmers co-ops and the like.
I certainly believe ethanol is a better choice of fuel oxygenate than MTBE.
Saying ethanol is mainly just a porkbarrel subsidy is not accurate or fair. Background, I worked for the think tank the Institute for Local Self Reliance about a decade ago and observed firsthand the research that went into estimating the net energy yield of ethanol. It is a far from simple question.
Direct utilization of a biofuel for a hydrogen cell is still significant from an alternative fuels research perspective.
Thus missing your chance to be moderated offtopic... kids these days got no sense of humor grumble grumble grrr
because I'm lazy. (I thought I clarified that before). And yeah, at this point it would have been less work. Apparently I'm stupid too.
extra space between the x and i in that url. Sorry, some glitch from where the line broke.
http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/02/03
I think the bigger question is why Simson and Garfinkle are wasting their time on RFID issues when they should be planning the comeback tour... I love their stuff... Cecilia, you're breakin' my heart...
Whatever "principles" you may see your preferred party as supporting, egregious examples can be cited of party actions violating those principles. A great example is drug war sentencing laws. Most people opposed to harsh drug law sentences would identify the Democratic party as closer to their ideology. Yet many of the most arbitrary and draconian mandatory minimum sentencing laws were rushed through by a Democratic congress - in a bid to prove themselves "tough on drugs."
Representing either party as being under the influence of corporate and private wealth, or swayed by the dictates of "special interests" or accusing them of swelling big government further is another good example. Both parties are entirely guilty. Anybody who acts like Democrats aren't catering to their corporate constituents, or like Republicans are doing anything about making Government smaller or less intrusive in the average person's life, is just deluding themselves on the basis of partisan rhetoric.
A quick review of how both these parties have worked to thwart minor parties from being able to participate significantly in the democratic process, and of how campaign finance reform is consistently blocked and emasculated in legislation (isn't great how we got that campaign finance legislation passed, and now money isn't a big deal in the upcoming presidential election? Representative democracy rocks!), will quickly reveal that Democrats and Republicans are truly bipartisan and at least one respect - their total commitment to preserving their manopoly on defining the issues in the national dialog.
The thing about Mars is, given the launch window, if something goes wrong (hey these air filters are made of CHEESE!), you're screwed. You just get to expire on national television. Sorry, man - we'll rocket a wreath out in two years.
A person in that situation has nothing to lose and if they decide to go off the deep end they won't ever have to face anyone back home about the consequences. It could become a very ugly spectactle that turned people off to manned exploration. Suiciide, desperate pleadings (I don't care how much it costs, just come back and pick me up!), horrible fights between crew members (sure the space station crews manage to keep it together... but they know that if things go right they're eventually coming home) all seem like real possibilities.
The author's examples of risk-seekers like test pilots isn't valid. These people may be willing to dice recklessly with death but they are not seeking the guarantee of death. Show me the test pilot who would get into the plane after being told it's unquestionably going to blow up but he'll get a hell of a ride before it happens.
I think his response sounds sincere but it's notable that he is not necessarily backing off his opinion that the ultraviolent games are bad.
And his praise of Childs Play seems sincere and appropriate.
Now I must go shoot at traffic.
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Atwood
That's how I took it. I don't really think Atwood is a science fiction writer at all - The Handmaid's Tale, for instance, is not particularly a science fiction tale. Speculative, yes. It is not even predominantly a feminist novel, in my opinion, though it is usually painted as such. It is mainly a political novel and its primary target is religious fundamentalism.
You might give some of her other books a try. I felt like her basically naive approach to what are in fact a very complex and subtle science issues really got in the way of her usually graceful prose. One of her short story collections like Wilderness Tips might be a good start to figure out whether you really like her stuff or not. The Handmaid's Tale or The Blind Assassin are better books in my opinion.