You're right; he's a far better writer than Asimov. Not that I don't love Asimov, but Bradbury's mastery of language is light years ahead, and his imagination is far broader. I think his attitude towards the internet, if it really is as stated here, is pretty limited - but I'd also like to hear him talk about the reasons behind his view before dismissing it as the rantings of a lunatic.

The kid is five years old! You want to pack her off to school every morning with a rifle in her backpack? Sure, I agree that teaching your kids to stand up for themselves is imperative, but it's just not possible to make a child that young totally self-sufficient in unexpected situations.

You're lucky. It happened to me a few times, and I was just dropped off in the wrong place. Problem with being a kid is that, a lot of the time, adults don't listen to you because they assume you're lying/making trouble/confused, and that they know better than you do. They don't like to be told they're wrong by a kid, so they just tune it out.

We don't know how old the child is - if she's quite young, she doesn't need to be "abnormal" in order to need competent adults to get her where she's going. When I was a young schoolkid, getting on the bus was always hugely stressful - I lose count of the number of times I was put on the wrong bus, dropped off at the wrong stop, whatever. It can be quite traumatic for a young kid to feel lost, so some way for parents to be able to get to them quickly if they are lost is a good thing, in my view.

It's morally different, perhaps, but not in effect. The school accidentally places the child on the wrong bus; the child ends up who-knows-where without a parent at the other end to collect him/her. The child ends up unattended even though that was never the intention.

Doesn't the intro sequence to the Eric Bana Hulk movie have something very similar?

The British National Corpus and the Oxford English Dictionary disagree with you. "Wank off" is perfectly acceptable. (Linguistically, that is...)

Also, try Terry Riley "A Rainbow in Curved Air" and "In C". I can work for hours and hours with this kinda thing playing - it persuades my brain that time has stopped.

Any day!

Heh! Absolutely.

I may be risking all my claims to femininity here, but for me it's Dr. Pepper, Pizza, and Steve Reich coming out of the speakers. (N.B. "coming out of the speakers" refers only to Steve Reich, not to the soda or the pie.)

As a member of the female species, I would like to nominate my trifecta: A healthy and nutritious alfalfa salad; some Evian water (in the branded bottle, of course); and an episode of "Sex and the City" playing in the background.

I mean, get serious. Having a manicure? Whilst trying to type? I'm not gonna let anyone be in my vicinity while I'm coding, let alone some vapid manicurist. Sheesh.

Because it excites them sexually? Man, I'm gonna get onto this copyright-violation thing if it's as good as licking your own balls...

Yeah - there were loads of pirated editions of books in previous centuries, too. You'll often find a first edition published in London and then a couple of editions published very soon after usually in Dublin - seems to have been a centre for book piracy in the eighteenth century.

In an ideal world, yes. In our world, social control over who gets paid to write = very bad idea.

I'm with you. I recently started a policy of (mainly) only reading books that have won awards - don't get me wrong, I'm including things like the Eisner, the Hugo, and the Golden Dagger, so it's not just wanky fancy shit, but I've found it's made a huge difference. I'm enjoying my reading-time a lot, lot more. Okay, I'll miss some good stuff, but I'm also a lot less likely to have to wade through loads of trash, or to fall for the ubiquitous 3 for 2 offers that seem to suck cash out of my bank account if I so much as look at them.