This either represents an apogee of convenience engineering, or says something deeply unsettling about paranoia and material possessions – you can now sign up to an online service that allows you to unlock, start, locate, disable or alarm your car. Without, you know, actually being there. All we need now is a way to drive the things without being in them … thanks to Bruce Schneier for the link, who quite rightly points out that it’s a system that just howls to be hacked.

If Bill Gibson could somehow conspire to sue reality itself for intellectual property theft, he’d never need to write again. He could certainly take DARPA to task for dreaming about replicators and blatantly ripping off the idea of Nanofaxes that he came up with in Idoru.

(Yeah, so loads of other sf books and shows have had replicators. I just happen to like Gibson best.)

Ah, conventions – that much misunderstood mainstay of genre fiction fan-dom. I’m off to my second con ever early next month, and I can’t wait. But I wish I’d had this list of sf con etiquette dos and don’ts with me last year, because then there’d be less people I need to avoid this year … [SFBC]

If you’re a fan of science fiction novels, the you can’t fail to have an opinion on this recent column in Asimov’s, wherein Norman Spinrad attempts to wrestle a perennial genre bugbear and define ‘hard’ science fiction. For my money, having read all the books he uses as examples, I think he’s done a pretty good job.

I’m gutted. AbeBooks, the nigh-ubiquitous second-hand book site, is offering the chance for you to win two tickets to the Nebula Awards ceremony this coming May; all you have to do is answer one easily-Googled question. Why am I gutted? It’s only open to US and Canadian residents. Meh. [SFBC]