Good answer! I think you've nailed it.

I think I'm still going to go ahead and write a sci-fi novel set in a democracy. I know it would be boring, but that's where I excel!

There's no current selection pressure to become 'grey goo'; a virus has no method of replicating itself other than hijacking other cells functions, and then having a mechanism to pass to another host. Viruses are also quite fragile in the environment, most need some sort of fluid transfer between hosts …

Long answer: When people write Sci-fi they tend to write about what ifs, often reflecting hopes or more commonly fears in their current society. Would you have 1985 without the fear of communism, the I robot series with out fear of automation removing jobs. The genre has now become more …

This is the second Vernor Vinge I've read, and it came up to the same high standard of the first. Again his imagination stands out as exceptional.

In this and many other sci-fi books, democracy is ignored. Why is that?

I've put up a gadget that lets you use your own domain name (e.g. id.tlocke.org.uk) as an OpenId identifier. The code is released as Free Software.

It says on the news that little information is coming out of Burma. Mobile phones cut off, internet cafes shut down etc. Regimes shut off the flow of information so that they can commit attrocities without anyone knowing. To get the information flowing again, why doesn't the UN fly over …

The bailing out of Northern Rock was a misuse of taxpayer's money. The FSA aleady guarantees the first £2,000 and then 90% up to £33,000 of any deposits. The further guarantees that the bank was making just makes it more likely that banks will be even more reckless …

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' …