I like when an author create a context to explore a hypothesis. Isaac Asimov did that on the foundation and robots series with the concepts of psychohistory and robopsychology. Frank Herbert with "Dosadi" shows what is happening when you put a full society into a high-stress condition. With his other books he explores concept like AI, Gods, religion, racism...

Hypothesis exploration is where Science fiction meet Fantasy and their predecessor fantastic. All this genre explore alternative reality where the rules of your world are changed. Uchronie is a sub-genre: "The Years of Rice and Salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson explorer a divergence reality where the Black Death annihilated European civilization in 1347.

That's why I would say that Sci-fi is still promising not maybe for gadget or tech but for the liberty it gives to the Author (and by extension the reader ^^)

I think we need both. Linus and Stallman are great developers and thinkers. I think Stallman is right about the free software movement. We see more and more restriction on information, DRM that are a very bad thing for consumer but also citizen. But the approach of Linus make Linux a good and viable OS.

We need more people fighting for more liberties and people that make stuffs happen.

I suppose you know Jamendo. I use it and i did find some very great stuff (for my taste) but it is quite difficult and time consuming. What I would find wonderfull is a podcast that would "advice" music. Not a mercantile advice but from somebody with a passion. Like radio did before.

Music is important to you, I would really enjoy to have somebody like you make me discover new music. Maybe it exist, i dont know. If you know any: please share; otherwise start something :-)

Are you still reading newpapers? On the Web? Do you prefer watching news?

Personally, I m only reading newspaper on the web (http://www.lemonde.fr http://www.liberation.fr/ http://www.lalibre.be/ http://www.lesoir.be/ and less http://www.lefigaro.fr/ http://www.letemps.ch./ Even if people describes me to be more on the right (for Belgium, translate as communist in the USA :) ), i prefer leftish newspaper. But I like to be able to read different point of view and then make an opinion about myself. Still i find the quality of the writing to be weaker than before. If you now a subject well, you see obvious errors.

Now, i still buy 2 papers every month : "le monde diplomatique" (in http://mondediplo.com/) and "foreign affairs" ( http://www.foreignaffairs.com/) both are very interessing and they are following high standard, I also read the Economist from time to time. I wouldnt want to read them on the web because each article is quite dense and asl myself to focus on it. I would like to have the same depth into classical newpaper but alas :(.

I think Democracy needs Journalism. In democracy, voters must vote for the best candidate. And how would you do without knowing? I think that both Education and Information need to be analyse in the light of how good they are to Democracy

To come back to the proposition, I think is not neccesaraly wrong, this could allow some smaller publication to exist and that will bring more diversity where before the News Conglomerate were tending to uniformity.

Do you know other tools?