Saved by hard sci-fi

The Mercury News is a little pessimistic about science fiction, but then says I believe the future lies with 'hard sci-fi', citing Gegory Benford as a good proponent of the art.
Whilst any article about science fiction in a newspaper is probably better than none, there's two things that occured to me:

• It sounds like they've just discovered hard sf, welcome to the 21st century.
• There's plenty of good non-hard science fiction about, which you can find with very little effort