On the other hand, science does, and this book is not science, but opinion, if you want to be polite about it. Racist opinion, to be precise, which have been around in some guise or other since who knows when? This kind of racism-disguised-as-science was common throughout 18th and 19th centuries and generally went along the lines of 'Us White (North-) Europeans Are Better Than The Rest' and was used to justify why we had a moral duty to go out and 'civilize' the inferior races.

Science is not made by taking a hand-picked assortment of data, twist it a few times and going 'Look, I can make the data match my opinon' - for anything to be science, you must have a hypothesis, which suggests a logically coherent explanation of all observed facts, makes testable predictions - and which survives experimental testing. It takes only 1 failed prediction to kill a theory.

Correct me if I am wrong, but that is hardly the main point of this book, is it? To quote from the article:

So, black people are violent (meaning 'primitive'?), Chinese are cunning ('good at business') and The White Man is the epitome of civilisation? And this is not racism - how? This is just a worthless rehash of junk from the days of the colonialism.

Groan. Something about this reminds of the scene in Monty Python's 'The Holy Grail', where a rather pestilential peasant is yelling 'I'm being oppressed'. Look, it's not always censorship when some company or government service refuses to be the medium for somebody's political propaganda; or if you insist on calling it censorship, then I have to say that not all censorship is bad.

But I don't think it applies in this situation - nobody has a right to have things printed for them, not even in a news paper. And just like a paper can refuse to print an article or an advert for any reason they like, the postoffice can do the same, of course. They have to make a business decision - why should they print a postage stamp, if they have reason to believe it may harm their business or their reputation? Freedom of speech doesn't mean that everybody has to help you spread your opinions, it only means that the state guarantees that they will not punish people for doing so.

Ah, the good old supply and demand, you say? Whatever, but the article argues that because nuclear power is 'more economic' right now, we should stay away from the alternatives, and I think that is a bogus argument. What we should do is use nuclear in the short term, while working hard to replace both fossil fuels and nuclear, as well as minimising our waste of energy and resources, because that is far more sustainable, long term.

That last point is far more important than finding alternative energy sources, because it can have an immediate and dramatic effect, and there are so many easy ways that every person on the planet could employ to cut back on wastage.

Mayne will be reading this as saying 'there's a way cure Alzheimer'; actually it isn't a cure, it just covers up some of the symptoms of the still progressing disease. This is comparable to painkillers - they take away some of the pain, which is good, but the underlying cause is still there; not a problem if you have a passing headache, but it can be much more serious if it is something that slowly gets worse, like an infected tooth, a slipped disc - or cancer.

You seem very upset that I dispute your claims - I wonder why? Or are you going to deny that as well?

You're just trying to sell the myth that being pedophile is really just innocent, nothing to worry about. But that trivialises the problem to the extent that in fact, most people are 'pedophiles' because they can see the attraction in innocent beauty - what we call pedophilism is a much more sinister and harmful condition: when an adult for whatever reason steps over the border between seeing and doing. It is in many ways parallel to the phenomenon that is called 'paranoid schizophrenia': most people have at least sometimes, a conversation going on in their head - like a voice that comments on what they do and see. They are not called schizophrenic, because they are able to distinguish between their inner voice and what happens outside their own mind.

And being pedophile is not like being gay; pedophiles are made, not born. One can argue that honmosexual behaviour is something that strengthens male bonding and therefore would have been an advantage in a small hunter-gatherer community, whereas it is clear that children who have been sexually molested do not survive that unscathed. Whether the acutal damage is primarily due to the sexual element or the physical and mental abuse that accompanies it, or something different, is not really relevant - the bottom line is that pedophiles harm children; and in fact, one of the outcomes of child abuse is that the child is more likely to become a child abuser as well, which makes the problem all the more serious.

Playing the 'Evil Govt' card is just your form of voodoo. It is astonishing, the amount of power people can imagine "The Government" has; apparently they are also able to cover up all thes UFO landings all over the place.

Yes, the good old myths that I used to read about in the 70s, 80s, 90s, ... - and which have been promoted ever since the days of the British Empire. It's a load of nonsense, basically; racism dressed up with cheap self-flattery: 'Us in the West are much better because of "freedom" or "democracy" or whatever'.

History shows us that China, like all other, great civilisations go through periods of progress and stagnation. Right now they are progressing at a staggering pace, while we are beginning to lag behind. And I can't see where you get the idea from that China is 'sealed off from outside ideas', when the truth is that China is investing hugely in education, science and technology, both in China and overseas. Also, I believe I have seen many times over the last couple of years, that people on this very forum keep complaining that new gadgets come out in China before you can get them in the US. In short, they are way ahead of us at the moment, and we should stop pissing in the wind and get ourselves moving, preferably in a forward direction.

Personally, I think we should be more confident in our own ability to take part in cooperation with China and other of the ascending nations. The future is likely to hold much more international cooperation and much less nationalism. Well, one can hope.

Can you ...

All to well, I'm afraid. What I can't imagine is what the hell I or anybody else would want that? I'm not much of a Luddite, but being constantly online is just not part of my lifestyle, and seeing the quality of the online natterdom, I feel no attraction at all, on the contrary. It's just like having a million TV channels, all of them showing Big Brother and Coronation Street and nothing else, 24/7.

Exactly - and it is amazing how good the basic vi functionality is. I always run vim in compatibility mode, not least because I work across many UNIXes, and basic vi is available everywhere.

Another good reason for not using fancy editors is that they support syntax highlighting and spell checking, which are often difficult to off. Yes, there are people to whom it is annoying to have every abbreviation and every word in a foreign language flagged as misspelled, and to whom proper indentation is sufficient to set off the structure of code.

And one final point: the fact that you can apply any standard UNIX command to a range of lines in vi is just amazing. Look it up if you don't already know it, but are interested.

I wasn't saying that an aircraft carrier couldn't sing a lullaby - it probably has a tannoy, and it might even sing quite softly; but it can only do so by not using most of its enormous power.

Not necessarily - the '...FLOPS' refers to FLOating Point Operations Per Second, and the hardware necessary to deal with this might conceivably not have the kind of processing capacity necessary for running DOS or Doom. It's like asking whether an aircraft carrier can sing you child to sleep; lots of power is not always relevant.

Is it not possible to be a Communist - even in America - without automatically being a spy or traitor? In most of the world 'communist' means 'somebody whose political views align with Communism'; well, more or less. If it is possible to be Christian, Jew, Muslim, ... and still be a patriotic American, is it not possible to be a Communist, patriotic American? Or course it is.

'Communism' is, put simply, the idea that means of production should not be owned by any individual, but should belong to the community. Not the state - the community, whatever that means. Equating the state with the community is a highly artificial idea. Please note that communism in this sense does not mean that people can't have property, it just means that the means of production are owned by everybody - like in a cooperative, really. Or a family - and if anything is being touted as American these days, it is 'family values'; so communism is at the core of what it means to be American.

I'm getting a little bit tired of the never ending fascination with QM 'weirdness', because it seems to me that it tries to see everything as 'weird' simply because it is 'quantum', with the danger that that it makes people blind to what might be explainable by more intuitive means.

In this case I think we see an illustration of the fact that the notion of a particle as a mathematical point in space - something with zero dimensions - is an abstraction; an approximation that works well enough because we can't in that much detail any way, and it makes the equations so much easier. We have always known, somewhere, that this is not true - things like the mysterious wavefunction that mysteriously collapses as soon as we measure it is a big hint, I would say. As explanations go, that one has always sounded a bit strained - hopefully we will be able to handle the maths of a better model in the not too remote future.

A more likely scenario, in my view, is that what we call particles is something more distributed in space, and that somewhere in that 'distributed particle' we can explain how a particle can travel through several paths at once. I mean, it isn't even an altogether new observation - the famous electron diffraction experiment shows something similar.

Now, why do I put such a subject header on my comment, when I know it will have me branded as 'anti-Semit' before I even start? Well, because it doesn't actually make much difference - as soon as anybody voices any concern over what Israel does to the Palestinians, they are stamped that way, no matter how carefully and well-intended their put their words. But maybe, just maybe, if I start out being provocative, I can get at least somebody in the automatically responding, pro-Israel faction to at least think and try to see the issue in a more nuanced way.

I am not against Israel's right to exist as a nation; I am pragmatic about it. The state that calls itself Israel is no doubt founded on a historically dubious justification, but it is a current reality and that is what we have to consider. But on the other hand, I don't think what Israel is doing is right, not by many miles. It is not right to annex palestinian territory - if it wasn't right of the European nations to establish colonies all over the world in the 18th and 19th centuries, then it isn't right for Israel to do this now.

And how can it be right for Israel to smash up Gaza's infrastructure, hospitals and schools, killing 10 - 100 Palestinians for every Israeli? The answer is of course, that it isn't. And the outcome in the long run is inevitably that Israel will erode the support it has in the rest of the world. The West has been far too permissive with Israel, because of a long, bad conscience for the Holocaust; but the power of Europe and America is on the wane, and the new powers don't have that historical background. At some point you guys will lose all your allies - what will you do then?

Most of us criticise Israel because we care, and because we expect that you can do so much better - if only you would try. But arguing with you is like arguing with Scientology or Jehovah's Witnesses; there is no honest dialogue taking place. All you do is look for ways to mishear or misinterpret any criticism, and find ways to twist it around as a weapon. Sometimes I don't think you guys want friends in the world; sometimes I think you are addicted to this never ending conflict, because if it ends, you have to look at yourselves and see what miserable creatures you have become; caricatures of the evil bullies that broke you during the Holocaust.

I think there is a third, and perhaps more likely explanation: Parts of the Russian military is not under the control of the government. Putin is not exactly stupid, and what is happening in that area is rapidly becoming stupid, so I think it is a reasonable guess that he hasn't got things under his control. Only very few countries are 'terrorist states' - there is something inherently incompatible between level-headed, routine administration of day to day business and hell-bent, wild-eyed terrorism; I can only think of Libya under Gaddafi.