Subsidies or not... My friend just spent a week travelling from country to country by train in Eastern Europe and the most he paid for a ticket was £12 - from Belgrade to Zagreb. Capital to capital within the UK would be almost ten times that!

And I didn't say we …

I don't know anything about a straw man but it was certainly a false syllogism 'Will people drive electric cars?'+'A C5 is an electric car'='People in the future will drive C5s'. Knob.

Well, UK trains are among the cheapest in Europe if you include subsidies.

But the main thing is that privatization only works if it's done well. I think UK rail was botched, so we're not really seeing all the benefit we could.

I think you're right on the 'bailing out' …

"drives standards up and prices down"! That hasn't worked very well, has it?

I like your idea about government leaving private enterprise to it, but what happens when it's just not up to the job? Do you bail it out with public money - like with Railtrack and Northern Rock?

Yes, that's true, nationalizing it would put an end to buck passing. The problem is that it would also put an end to competition, and competition drives standards up and prices down. It also puts the government in the nice position of being able to regulate the industry without having …

The Mosques of Istanbul, Handel's Messiah, illuminated manuscripts, Aretha Franklin and Sun Ra, the printing press, feasts, festivals, collosseums, cathedrals, pyramids and terracotta armies... it's astonishing what people can do when they have a God who's bigger than they are. Religion doesn't only bring out the worst in humans.

Dawkins …

....or un-privatise it?

The chocolate / crisp vending machine at Bath Spa train station took my pound coin. I've got a Pavlovian reaction to being on the platform, I buy a Bounty bar. This time it took my pound coin and without thinking I lost another £1.10 trying to dislodge the first pound …

When Janos lent me Player of Games, he also lent me 'A Fire Upon The Deep' by Vernor Vinge. Janos is like Amazon Recommends! Vernor's book is good, very imaginative. One problem with the book is that it hasn't been properly proofread. Really, all books should be written as wikis …

What's the difference between a nanobot and a virus? The answer from the Science Cafe talk at the Raven on Monday is that a virus is biological and a nanobot artificial. So I take this to mean there's no intrinsic difference, it's just how they come into being. This has …