or has smartphone technology reached something of a plateau? I mean, I had a iPhone 3GS for years and I held off from upgrading until the 5 was released, thinking that there'd be a step change or paradigm shift of some sort. When the time came I left Apple because looking around it seemed that all of the top of the line handsets are basically the same. I don't exactly push the envelope with my phone useage, and despite what people say I don't know many that do. In terms of the core functionality and interface experience, I couldn't find much to choose between Apple, HTC, Nokia or Samsung.

The iPhone was fantastic back in the day. The touchscreen and build quality were a real step forward and set a new standard. But these day smartphones are just another part of the scenery. Any it's not as if they're really moving forwards. The handsets have gotten as small as they can practically be, and then bigger again. Most handsets use the same style screens. Sure, we get more processing power and what not, but seriously how many cores do you need to check e-mail and post to facebook?

I'm using a Lumia 900 right now. And I'n going to stick with it until the next device comes along that changes the game on the same scale as the iPhone 3G did.

No. You have it backwards. Most recent literature is crap. Then again, most of the stuff that's ever been written is also crap. The difference between the works in the canon and the stuff that's getting published today is that over time it tends to be only the worthwhile material that endures. Mainly for this reason, if you pick up a book that's still in print after a long time then it's likely to be a lot better than a random contemporary book.

The idea that nobody listens to music over twenty years old is about a dumb as it's possible to get in a syntactically valid sentence.

What I'm getting at is that we don't sing songs glorifying the violent overthrow of the state. I'm not making a value judgement about revolutions - it all seems to have worked out quite well for you. But to take an example, the UK national anthem is a dirge about God saving the Queen (it's pure bullshit and pretty embarrassing on the rare occasion we win an international sporting event). Nobody takes it very seriously and you'll be hard pressed to find an Englishman who knows much more than the first verse.

Anyway, while we're all beseeching the almighty to take care of the monarchy, you guys are singing about bombs, rockets and the havoc of war. So whenever I see our government giving corrupt tax breaks to corporations I don't expect anyone to do anything about it because, you know, sure democracy is broken, but whatta ya gonna do? Whereas in the states its all 'hoist the red flag of revolution and let all men be free' one minute and choosing between scented and unscented lube at the airport the next.

This whole NSA thing is a good example. I can't go twenty minutes without being watched on CCTV in the UK, so I've always assumed that any privacy that I think I've got is an illusion. Freedom in the Uk is whatever the government allows you to do. But we're a bunch of serfs, obsessed with social class and mostly disinterested in civil liberties. What's your excuse?

Meh, that was some considerable time ago - and we just ended up with a kind of mini monarchy for a few years before reverting to the status quo (albeit with a few more constitutional restraints on the crown). Being a regicide has never been much of a badge of honour.

More recently, we kept the monarchy in the 18th century while the French were murdering their aristocracy, we had a general strike that didn't become a communist revolution and we flat out ignored the blackshirts who were agitating in the late 30s / early 40s.

As a Brit, I've always wondered about how you guys look back on the revolution. Since the US was created out of a revolutionary war you'd think that there could be no act that is more than in keeping with the spirit and founding principles of the republic than seeking to overthrow a government that has overstepped its bounds. But most of your 'patriotic' type pundits seem to view any form of anti-establishment sentiment as either communism or treason.

In the UK we've never really gone in for violent revolution, so I can understand why our national identity doesn't lend itself to direct action. But you guys are always going on about the glory of the republic and the benefits that you gained via armed struggle against the state. How do you keep those sort if ideas straight in your heads alongside the sort of 'my country, right or wrong' jingoism that has you reciting oaths of loyalty in school and so forth?

But the point is that whereas nuclear power might cause problems if something goes wrong, it seems that fossil fuels will certainly cause problems even if everything goes perfectly as planned.

The only renewable that I can see providing real power is wood - but people get upset by the idea of burning trees. Other than that we've just got to wait for someone to work out practical fusion energy generating - and fusion power is always only a few decades away!

The article that you link to in the Daily Mail panders to a peculiar kind of 'stupid american' stereotype that we Brits cling to when we want to feel better about the end of empire and the decline of our military and industrial might. You could replace the questions with ones of similar obscurity from British history and get a similar set of responses from a random selection of British folk. Try going out onto any street in the UK and asking the yokels about the 1689 Bill of Rights. Or get them to point to the location of the Battle of Trafalgar / Waterloo / Balaclava on a map.

The average guy on the street is just as ignorant everywhere in the world.

Not good enough. Look at the conveniently broken recording hardware that was watching while the Metropolitan Police executed Charles de Menezes on the London Underground. The evidence disappeared and was barely mentioned in subsequent press reports. Unfortunately it is the case that state owned surveillance technology is used almost exclusively to prosecute citizens and rarely as a check on the police.

People think I'm making stuff up when I repeat this immortal quote from the story...

"..they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it."

Yes, but surely the point is that the stuff that Cameron's been doing is in a whole different league to Galileo slapping together a couple of lenses and discovering that the moons of Jupiter go around in circles or just sitting down and thinking about a cage of insects buzzing about in a box on board a ship.

In physics it's pretty much the case that all the low hanging fruit has been picked. The experimental stuff takes large amounts of money. The purely theoretical stuff gets picked over by an army of professional thinkers every day. If there were any obvious flaws in relativity or quantum mechanics then it's almost certain that someone would have spotted them by now. I'm not saying that there's never going to be another paradigm shift - but it isn't going to happen by way of some amateur demonstrating that, say, GR is invalid by watching a pendulum swinging in the back yard.. In fact, any serious advance in physics will probably be driven by experimental results - and these are expensive to produce.

The moral panic that broken out in the news lately would be funny if it wasn't so fucking frightening. But mainly though it pisses me off that all of this 'think of the children' bullshit or vague allusions to stopping terrorists passes unchallenged most of the time.

Behold this master plan by the Andrea Leadsom and the Mothers Union to stop teenagers looking at porn http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17826515 Good luck with that! But while it's not going to work, it's a great excuse to get some extra control of the internet.

And yesterday, no less a person than the Deputy Childrens Commissioner for England was making the case for mobile interet censorship on the grounds that... and I'm not making this up... children in London routinely expect to be gang raped for hours in public parks by teenagers who've been watching porn on their phones. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18422204