The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.

So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?

Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?

Even the best of us have certain psychological mechanisms that can suddenly kick in and turn us into monsters. That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things. It's distressingly easy for those mechanisms to be triggered, either consciously by demagogues, or naively by people who think they're trying to do the right thing. Which is why I think it's more akin to tic-tac-toe.

The hour of noon has passed,' said Judge Fang. 'Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.

It is the fate of operating systems to become free.

The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rulers - It's the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments - Too bad we've forgotten how to do it