Here's my submission to the defamation bill consultation:

I am writing to you as part of the consultation on the Draft Defamation Bill. I welcome the direction of the bill, but feel it doesn't go far enough to allow full freedom of speech. I would like to see the whole …

Like Wireless, Toast is another collection of Charles Stross short stories lent to me by Janos. For me, Toast maintains a higher average standard than Wireless, although Wireless does have some cracking stories.

I hugely enjoyed Toast, and of all the sci-fi I read, these stories come the closest to …

The first 3/4 of The Goldilocks Enigma is the best explanation of the current state of cosmology that I've ever read. The last 1/4 is speculation on the future of cosmology, trying to answer the 'why are we here?' question. That too is incredibly gripping reading. Davies leans …

I've taken the government's Red Tape Challenge on industrial emissions and carbon reduction. Here's my submission:

I accept that the world needs to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. The problem is that the UK has saddled itself with a huge bureaucratic burden in trying to deal with the issue, and …

In August 2008, I wrote in Home James, and don't spare the CPUs that by the time my eldest nephew is of driving age (2023), most cars will be driven by robots. I'm still sticking to my assertion! Ben at work agrees, but Laura doesn't. My friend Andy disagrees, but …

I was invited through SourceForge to take part in a study of Microfoundations and dynamics of online interactions and behavior. They repeated traditional experiments, but online. Eg. they grouped people into pairs and said that one of you gives an amount between \$0 and \$10, and the other one receives …

I've just released Imprimatur-021. The main change is that the <session> element has been removed. There's now just one session for the whole test script. The reason is that I felt that session information didn't fit with the hierarchy of XML. At the moment there isn't a way to start …

Whenever I read John Wyndham, I'm struck by how prescient his thoughts are. Here he is talking about what we'd now call disruptive technologies:

The discoverer and inventor are the bane of business. A little sand in the works is comparatively a mere nothing - you just replace the damaged parts …