Its decent... the center area pops and swings out to form a mouse area. That also leaves the center of the tray with a big hole to keep air circulating.
However, I suggest you keep what you have, get a nice but tiny OPTICAL mouse, and just use the mouse on the upholstery/pillow/jacket at your side.
From the Australian ambassador to China, of that period:
Why someone who had suffered cruelly at the hands of Cultural Revolution hardliners and who did so much to push China on the path of liberalization should himself become a hardliner is not explained. Even less does anyone seem to have felt any need to check out just what actually happened in Tiananmen in 1989. Eyewitness accounts that say there was no massacre have been conveniently ignored. Blatantly anti-Beijing propaganda accounts have been unquestioningly accepted. Fortunately we now have a source whose sober impartiality cannot possibly be doubted, namely the de-classified reports from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing at the time (see Google under Tiananmen, Document 30 especially).
They confirm that there was no massacre in the square, that almost all the students who had been demonstrating there for two weeks had left the square quietly in the early hours of June 4, and that the real incident was panicky fighting triggered by crowds attacking troops, initially unarmed, as they headed for the square on June 3.
In the process a still indefinite number of troops, students and civilians were killed and many military vehicles were torched. Call it a mini civil war if you like, with troops eventually getting the upper hand over unarmed insurgents. But that is not a deliberate massacre of innocent students.
Curiously, the photo that most media use to illustrate the alleged student massacre shows a row of blazing army vehicles, some with crews trapped inside, in a long avenue that clearly is not part of Tiananmen Square. Indeed, the U.S. Embassy material speaks of troops only finally entering the square after some students attacked and killed a soldier in a vehicle at the entrance. Most of the discussion you see here is doctrinaire (freedom, liberty, freedom, etc.) oligarch propaganda. The media-owning conglomerates/monopolists send their ready-made legislation and paid-for legislators to Washington, and what you see on TV is the party line that is to be toed.
"Oligarchy", now there is a label you basically never hear in the USA media even though it is the economic-political structure under which it operates. Journalists and activists who use it inside the borders get character-assassinated, whereas those who use it in foreign protectorates like Columbia and Philippines get murdered by US-supported "guerrillas" (terrorists). Meanwhile, the USA mouthpiece media wants you to see another of Bush's speeches linking Queda to 9-11, and another rehash about two murdered Russian journalists, and Tiananmen too; and you will still hear much about communism even though it supposedly doesn't exist anymore. But not oligarchy. Even "capitalism" is curiously infrequent, as self-examination of the system is discouraged.
What is the true difference between the USA and rivals like China and Russia? It boils down to USA enjoying the spoils of empire, creating political apathy officially labeled "peace and lawfulness" at home... while people on the frontiers burn and starve and those elements that not friendly to the military-industrial-legislative complex get drugs trafficked into their communities and a draconian "zero-tolerance" police state apparatus that sends more adult males to prison than any other country by far.
China is resource-strapped, hungry and crowded to the gills (though they can be thankful that US/UK forces have not fed their population drugs for many decades). And Russia has a waning civil war on its hands. Neither of them has had the luxury of sending their scoundrels abroad to rape and pillage, while playing potemkin village at home, for quite some time. And what makes either of them much different than India, for that matter, is beyond me... human rights violations abound with respect to all of the above.
What differs above all is the combination of selective blindness and hysteria generated in the pivotal Anglophone media. It will be interesting to see how their attitude changes as their influence abroad subsides... how much more cheerleading and demonizing will they be willing to do for the next conquest (er "liberation")?
...it is largely because cellphone mfgs are so tightly wedded to telecoms that they have little interest in offering a platform that attracts 3rd party development.
Open up the network, as Google is proposing, and mfgs have to compete more in terms of coherent feature sets and what 3rd party apps they can attract.
Don't know about Windows' implementation, but the PRNG's I'm familiar with do not use up all of the cached entropy in one gulp. The entropy is used as seed values for the psuedo-random algorithm, giving you more "random" bits then you started with.
Interestingly, the much-reviewed TrueCrypt engine seems to slow to a crawl if you create a bunch of files (and therefore keys) in a hurry - presumably it has an RNG that actually blocks waiting until it has enough new "really random" bits for each new key. This isn't how TC behaves on Linux at all, and I would doubt that description anyway. Generating new keys as files are written? I don't think so.
Read the PulseAudio docs on padsp, the PulseAudio/dev/dsp emulation layer. It's designed to transparently intercept all/dev/dsp calls and route them through PulseAudio itself. Really? Transparent??
Like artsdsp and esddsp?
Ha. Linux people really don't "get" user-friendly, do they? Why should I or anyone I'm showing Linux to have to add shell commands to their apps to get them working with audio???!! You idiot!
And it doesn't help with blocking caused by programs that use ALSA directly. The blocking isn't just an OSS thing, it a stupid kernel developer thing.
And anyway, if the presence of OSS-using programs blocks the newer architecture, then nothing's been fixed. You can't expect users to learn these details about apps and juggle them to keep their soundcard accessible.
I have a system right in front of me with NO/dev/dsp or other OSS apps on it, and the audio still blocks. You still need a soundcard with mutli-channel hardware in order for the audio to seem non-blocking.
Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server?
on
Fedora 8 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No, the problem is that ALSA also exhibits audio blocking by default, too. Many applications use ALSA directly, and some of those block audio even when nothing at all is trying to use OSS.
Adding another userspace soundserver will just compound the confusion that already exists, while leaving the largest architectural flaw in place.
Yet ANOTHER sound server?
on
Fedora 8 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is getting ridiculous.
And Linux audio STILL has a problem with blocking IO! So now I get to have networked audio in a few PulseAudio-aware apps, while my softphone won't ring and my calendar alarm is mute because some web page in the background uses Flash.
Comcast may be falsifying/ending recognizable bittorrent traffic... but my experience shows that they severely throttle any upstream traffic that's encrypted. Try a large-ish upload with scp sometime and you'll see what I mean... your throughput will be greatly reduced within 20-30 seconds.
...and I'd like to find out a summary of implementation details that answers that question.
If the scheme does not use a crypto-based trust mechanism, then there may be ways to decrypt and find out who is downloading what. OTOH if its really clever, then a snoop might be able to see what's being downloaded without seeing who.
This story has everything to do with open source and desktops. Go back to the top and re-read it.
You are paranoid. You're seeing so much red that you can't even realize there is no difference in terms of monitor support between an 80x25 character-mapped display, and a VGA bitmapped one. Yet you insist that deprecating character-mapping equals taking away text.
The real contrast here is between text-only mode vs. bitmapping where text + graphics are equally available. But you think in terms of a (false) choice between text-only and icon-only... which is classic CLI-jockey paranoia. And its so thick its robbed your ability to think straight.
The context of the discussion is desktop computing. Looks like you missed that too.
I'm curious - where is the industry standard base video mode on a Nintendo DS or a telephone? Those devices don't depend on separate displays-- they are built in so relying on an industry-standard config is moot in those cases. Can the questions get any more paranoid and inane?
I've seen over a dozen situations where the display could not be configured correctly without pointing and hoping on windows 95 alone due to the screen being out of range. Win95 is positively ancient and did not automatically fall back to safe video mode.
This bizzare idea where we have to always point at pictures instead of reading and writing limits things especially when you want to do a lot at once. Text has a place. I already pointed out that I never said the text config should be eliminated. This is typical anti-GUI kneejerking, assuming that a text feature will be taken away when a GUI feature is made standard.
GUIs are indeed chock full of not only icons and text, but keyboard commands and CLIs as well. Text may communicate more than icons in some situations, but text + icons together are so much more useful that they've become the standard; For the latter, you need a GUI. And it has to work.
But we have a particular GUI that is unmanageable for ordinary users
You might not need six video cards in the system but some people do things like that and how do you add that all into the GUI? Having a text file that can be appended to adds flexablility. I never argued against a text file. But Xorg itself needs to be the default method of managing it, for 'dogfood' reasons at least. Maybe someday they will even be able to code a graphical configuration tool, but I think a resizable 'X', a clock and calculator are the state of their art for this epoch.
... it is only advances in monitor hardware that have enabled people to get back from bad configuration choices instead of having to work out which of six mouse pointers is the real one. The only bad configuration choice that should ever leave someone without a GUI for display reconfiguration would be connecting a monitor that doesn't support the minimum requirements of the OS. As for pointers, I have never seen that problem, though I have booted ostensibly English-localized Linux distros that (mistakenly) required a different language keyboard when switching to console (rendering the system unmaintainable in that case -- if a GUI tool had been present, then it could have worked out).
Bottom line is: There is no excuse for throwing an end-user into text-only environment for any reason whatsoever. The GUI can do it all, even if temporarily falling back to an industry-standard base mode to correct a display problem.
It is largely due to the difference in pro vs. casual development methodologies. They both have their failing in terms of discipline, but the casual crowd lack something ELSE:
* They are coding to impress/please either A) themselves or B) their coder and sysadmin peers
* They rarely establish who their audience is (not consciously).
* The above determines what interface (in the broad sense) types will be honored. In the case of GNU system hackers, the interfaces are CLI and libwhatever APIs. ABIs are shunned party because of licensing, but also to a large extent because their audience is unconsciously assumed to be people familiar with linkers and compilers.
* Press Ctrl-Alt-Bksp in your Linux GUI and watch as all unsaved data is *instantly* oblitterated. GUIs are a nuisance to the Linux crowd because they represent an unwanted commitment (or the suggestion of a commitment they want to avoid). Likewise WRT a graphics subsystem that isn't properly configurable given any reasonable set of usability criteria... if Xfree and Xorg can't write a comprehensive configuration panel themselves, they should at least give others the tools to do so (and the semantically f--ked xorg.conf file is no such tool). Any fool writing for usability would have at least provided an API to have settings changed/validated in memory AND saved to disk by the graphics subsystem itself.
And just what is a computing 'interface'? It is defined as a commitment to a set of functionality for a particular class of actors (users). But FLOSS coders for the most part are NOT going to commit to end-users or other non-peers.
The ones that buck this attitude and inherited a lot of professionalism and user-focus from the proprietary world are: Mozilla, OpenOffice, MySQL among others. Ubuntu could qualify, though they aren't my ideal of 'coders'... they have internalized some specific user-focused methodologies.
Ones that are stereotypically slacking in the FLOSS manner: Gimp, Linux kernel (sorry, that is my honest assessment and I can cite Torvalds' own comments that would support it). KDE and to a bit lesser extent Gnome (although I hate to say so, because Gnome is so technologically awful).
Recommendations:
* Learn Rational Unified Process. Particularly the parts that cover documentation of requirements and use cases; continually reviewing/refreshing these is the best discipline for staying audience-focused.
* Dump the software repository mentality. Repositories/distros are inserting themselves between you and your end-users. You will have to code your stuff with LSB Desktop as a target and include all the rest that the spec doesn't supply, but you will finally be able to realistically distribute apps to end-users independently, on your own, without dependency issues.
* Re-connect with Personal Computing as a concept. Why were IBM PCs coveted in offices that were bursting with IBM mainframe terminals? Answer: Personal initiative and control for non-experts. Distro/repository culture comes from the computer science lab and server room. The concept of PC platform, a defined and easily navigable space upon which you place third-party products, came from the garage and the backoffice. Apple has a PC platform, and MS does. FLOSS has BSD and Linux distros where a novice programmer cutting her teeth has little chance of quickly and easily sharing her work with classmates and friends (even when they run Linux)... she'd have to devote weeks to fighting with and learning the package manager/dependency tarbaby first.
* For the OS people: Your graphics and sound subsystems must be refactored before they can meet basic user expectations. Linux *still* does audio-blocking on inexpensive hardware even with ALSA; the architecture of audio mixing must be reworked to never allow blocking unless an app jumps through hoops to do so. Not hearing a softphone ring, or a meeting alarm because of some Flash-laden web pages doesn't cut it... it's UNUSABLE!
The Ars Technica article about Leopard has lots of very cool details about Time Machine in it, including how it works. (It uses hard-links, including hard-links to directories, so in each and every time-stamped folder on the backup drive, you have a *FULL* copy of your HDD at that time (minus anything you excluded from the backups). Read that portion of the Ars Technica article if you want answers to questions about it. To elaborate, what is normally "kinda efficient" using rsync and rsnapshot, is made really quick and efficient in Time Machine because snapshots don't have to be compared and linked at the single-file level.
...or something that evokes the Internet Protocol.
People need to be reminded of what the ISP's role is: The offer Layer 3 service in the form of IP. Muck around with the protocols above that and you've not only stepped outside the bounds of an ISP, but are guilty of false advertising and data falsification.
Agreed, although I think peaceful revolt is possible and maybe even desirable.
Atheist vs theist dictatorships is an interesting comparison. Its my general impression that the atheist kind can't perpetuate their lies and suppression of information for many generations; their political discourse doesn't take place within the framework of instilled supernaturalist credulity. If Lysenkoism had emerged as a religious instead of atheist dogma, we would still be grappling with it today on school boards and in the courts... Russia is free of Lysenkoism, but we're far from being rid of creationism.
When a nation's language of business is steeped with overt appeals to magical thinking, then rational criticism becomes that much less effective. So I'll say that some institutionalized forms of corruption are more insulated or durable, if not more pernicious, than others.
Yet there are enough positive examples around to globe to support the idea that focusing on the character of government and society in earnest is infinitely better than cynicism that tries to replace govt with religion or a money-religion.
Its the conservative libertarian belief that government is inherently evil and society (our collective self) doesn't exist that underpins most of the selfish and self-immolating stupidity we see in this country today. People expected smaller govt from those who preached self interest and govt==evil, but instead we got BIG EVIL as a consequence of their unabashed self interest which we are supposed to sit back and admire!
On that note, I urge anyone who would have Dick Cheney removed from office to call their representative in Congress in support of HR 333 that was just introduced: 1-800-828-0498, 1-800-862-5530, 1-800-833-6354
And I ask that while doing so, everyone quietly reflect on what 'the ends justifying the means' has on our society and the world at large. It is something that every one of Cheney's henchmen, and mere taxpayers, is supposed to hold true in the unspeaking parts of their psyche; but I believe there is no room for civilzation in that.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.compusa.com/products/products.asp?No=100&N=200486
Its decent... the center area pops and swings out to form a mouse area. That also leaves the center of the tray with a big hole to keep air circulating.
However, I suggest you keep what you have, get a nice but tiny OPTICAL mouse, and just use the mouse on the upholstery/pillow/jacket at your side.
They confirm that there was no massacre in the square, that almost all the students who had been demonstrating there for two weeks had left the square quietly in the early hours of June 4, and that the real incident was panicky fighting triggered by crowds attacking troops, initially unarmed, as they headed for the square on June 3.
In the process a still indefinite number of troops, students and civilians were killed and many military vehicles were torched. Call it a mini civil war if you like, with troops eventually getting the upper hand over unarmed insurgents. But that is not a deliberate massacre of innocent students.
Curiously, the photo that most media use to illustrate the alleged student massacre shows a row of blazing army vehicles, some with crews trapped inside, in a long avenue that clearly is not part of Tiananmen Square. Indeed, the U.S. Embassy material speaks of troops only finally entering the square after some students attacked and killed a soldier in a vehicle at the entrance. Most of the discussion you see here is doctrinaire (freedom, liberty, freedom, etc.) oligarch propaganda. The media-owning conglomerates/monopolists send their ready-made legislation and paid-for legislators to Washington, and what you see on TV is the party line that is to be toed.
"Oligarchy", now there is a label you basically never hear in the USA media even though it is the economic-political structure under which it operates. Journalists and activists who use it inside the borders get character-assassinated, whereas those who use it in foreign protectorates like Columbia and Philippines get murdered by US-supported "guerrillas" (terrorists). Meanwhile, the USA mouthpiece media wants you to see another of Bush's speeches linking Queda to 9-11, and another rehash about two murdered Russian journalists, and Tiananmen too; and you will still hear much about communism even though it supposedly doesn't exist anymore. But not oligarchy. Even "capitalism" is curiously infrequent, as self-examination of the system is discouraged.
What is the true difference between the USA and rivals like China and Russia? It boils down to USA enjoying the spoils of empire, creating political apathy officially labeled "peace and lawfulness" at home... while people on the frontiers burn and starve and those elements that not friendly to the military-industrial-legislative complex get drugs trafficked into their communities and a draconian "zero-tolerance" police state apparatus that sends more adult males to prison than any other country by far.
China is resource-strapped, hungry and crowded to the gills (though they can be thankful that US/UK forces have not fed their population drugs for many decades). And Russia has a waning civil war on its hands. Neither of them has had the luxury of sending their scoundrels abroad to rape and pillage, while playing potemkin village at home, for quite some time. And what makes either of them much different than India, for that matter, is beyond me... human rights violations abound with respect to all of the above.
What differs above all is the combination of selective blindness and hysteria generated in the pivotal Anglophone media. It will be interesting to see how their attitude changes as their influence abroad subsides... how much more cheerleading and demonizing will they be willing to do for the next conquest (er "liberation")?
...it is largely because cellphone mfgs are so tightly wedded to telecoms that they have little interest in offering a platform that attracts 3rd party development.
Open up the network, as Google is proposing, and mfgs have to compete more in terms of coherent feature sets and what 3rd party apps they can attract.
Maybe they were hoping to get Microsoft's attention, and a nice fat donation to help spread their "message".
Huh?
Why would Comcast need to connect to torrents when MPAA/RIAA are already doing that?
It worked like sh-t for emulating OSS. Why would it work any better for emulating OSS + ALSA?
The problem is in the kernel. No userspace tool (like piles of junky sound servers) will fix it.
Why did you take what I said about ALSA and leave out of your answer?
Like artsdsp and esddsp?
Ha. Linux people really don't "get" user-friendly, do they? Why should I or anyone I'm showing Linux to have to add shell commands to their apps to get them working with audio???!! You idiot!
And it doesn't help with blocking caused by programs that use ALSA directly. The blocking isn't just an OSS thing, it a stupid kernel developer thing.
No I am talking about ALSA.
/dev/dsp or other OSS apps on it, and the audio still blocks. You still need a soundcard with mutli-channel hardware in order for the audio to seem non-blocking.
And anyway, if the presence of OSS-using programs blocks the newer architecture, then nothing's been fixed. You can't expect users to learn these details about apps and juggle them to keep their soundcard accessible.
I have a system right in front of me with NO
No, the problem is that ALSA also exhibits audio blocking by default, too. Many applications use ALSA directly, and some of those block audio even when nothing at all is trying to use OSS.
Adding another userspace soundserver will just compound the confusion that already exists, while leaving the largest architectural flaw in place.
This is getting ridiculous.
And Linux audio STILL has a problem with blocking IO! So now I get to have networked audio in a few PulseAudio-aware apps, while my softphone won't ring and my calendar alarm is mute because some web page in the background uses Flash.
Slashdotters do not understand encryption, that much has become clear.
Encryption won't give you anonymity. RIAA only has to connect to the encrypted torrent themselves to get the manifest with your IP address on it.
Comcast may be falsifying/ending recognizable bittorrent traffic... but my experience shows that they severely throttle any upstream traffic that's encrypted. Try a large-ish upload with scp sometime and you'll see what I mean... your throughput will be greatly reduced within 20-30 seconds.
...and I'd like to find out a summary of implementation details that answers that question.
If the scheme does not use a crypto-based trust mechanism, then there may be ways to decrypt and find out who is downloading what. OTOH if its really clever, then a snoop might be able to see what's being downloaded without seeing who.
LOL!
This story has everything to do with open source and desktops. Go back to the top and re-read it.
You are paranoid. You're seeing so much red that you can't even realize there is no difference in terms of monitor support between an 80x25 character-mapped display, and a VGA bitmapped one. Yet you insist that deprecating character-mapping equals taking away text.
The real contrast here is between text-only mode vs. bitmapping where text + graphics are equally available. But you think in terms of a (false) choice between text-only and icon-only... which is classic CLI-jockey paranoia. And its so thick its robbed your ability to think straight.
Text has a place... on a bitmapped display.
...for reading all of my long-winded messages and posting thoughtful responses. Its nice to have that level of reciprocation from time to time.
But we have a particular GUI that is unmanageable for ordinary users You might not need six video cards in the system but some people do things like that and how do you add that all into the GUI? Having a text file that can be appended to adds flexablility. I never argued against a text file. But Xorg itself needs to be the default method of managing it, for 'dogfood' reasons at least. Maybe someday they will even be able to code a graphical configuration tool, but I think a resizable 'X', a clock and calculator are the state of their art for this epoch.
... it is only advances in monitor hardware that have enabled people to get back from bad configuration choices instead of having to work out which of six mouse pointers is the real one. The only bad configuration choice that should ever leave someone without a GUI for display reconfiguration would be connecting a monitor that doesn't support the minimum requirements of the OS. As for pointers, I have never seen that problem, though I have booted ostensibly English-localized Linux distros that (mistakenly) required a different language keyboard when switching to console (rendering the system unmaintainable in that case -- if a GUI tool had been present, then it could have worked out).Bottom line is: There is no excuse for throwing an end-user into text-only environment for any reason whatsoever. The GUI can do it all, even if temporarily falling back to an industry-standard base mode to correct a display problem.
It is largely due to the difference in pro vs. casual development methodologies. They both have their failing in terms of discipline, but the casual crowd lack something ELSE:
* They are coding to impress/please either A) themselves or B) their coder and sysadmin peers
* They rarely establish who their audience is (not consciously).
* The above determines what interface (in the broad sense) types will be honored. In the case of GNU system hackers, the interfaces are CLI and libwhatever APIs. ABIs are shunned party because of licensing, but also to a large extent because their audience is unconsciously assumed to be people familiar with linkers and compilers.
* Press Ctrl-Alt-Bksp in your Linux GUI and watch as all unsaved data is *instantly* oblitterated. GUIs are a nuisance to the Linux crowd because they represent an unwanted commitment (or the suggestion of a commitment they want to avoid). Likewise WRT a graphics subsystem that isn't properly configurable given any reasonable set of usability criteria... if Xfree and Xorg can't write a comprehensive configuration panel themselves, they should at least give others the tools to do so (and the semantically f--ked xorg.conf file is no such tool). Any fool writing for usability would have at least provided an API to have settings changed/validated in memory AND saved to disk by the graphics subsystem itself.
And just what is a computing 'interface'? It is defined as a commitment to a set of functionality for a particular class of actors (users). But FLOSS coders for the most part are NOT going to commit to end-users or other non-peers.
The ones that buck this attitude and inherited a lot of professionalism and user-focus from the proprietary world are: Mozilla, OpenOffice, MySQL among others. Ubuntu could qualify, though they aren't my ideal of 'coders'... they have internalized some specific user-focused methodologies.
Ones that are stereotypically slacking in the FLOSS manner: Gimp, Linux kernel (sorry, that is my honest assessment and I can cite Torvalds' own comments that would support it). KDE and to a bit lesser extent Gnome (although I hate to say so, because Gnome is so technologically awful).
Recommendations:
* Learn Rational Unified Process. Particularly the parts that cover documentation of requirements and use cases; continually reviewing/refreshing these is the best discipline for staying audience-focused.
* Dump the software repository mentality. Repositories/distros are inserting themselves between you and your end-users. You will have to code your stuff with LSB Desktop as a target and include all the rest that the spec doesn't supply, but you will finally be able to realistically distribute apps to end-users independently, on your own, without dependency issues.
* Re-connect with Personal Computing as a concept. Why were IBM PCs coveted in offices that were bursting with IBM mainframe terminals? Answer: Personal initiative and control for non-experts. Distro/repository culture comes from the computer science lab and server room. The concept of PC platform, a defined and easily navigable space upon which you place third-party products, came from the garage and the backoffice. Apple has a PC platform, and MS does. FLOSS has BSD and Linux distros where a novice programmer cutting her teeth has little chance of quickly and easily sharing her work with classmates and friends (even when they run Linux)... she'd have to devote weeks to fighting with and learning the package manager/dependency tarbaby first.
* For the OS people: Your graphics and sound subsystems must be refactored before they can meet basic user expectations. Linux *still* does audio-blocking on inexpensive hardware even with ALSA; the architecture of audio mixing must be reworked to never allow blocking unless an app jumps through hoops to do so. Not hearing a softphone ring, or a meeting alarm because of some Flash-laden web pages doesn't cut it... it's UNUSABLE!
Fixing this w
...or something that evokes the Internet Protocol.
People need to be reminded of what the ISP's role is: The offer Layer 3 service in the form of IP. Muck around with the protocols above that and you've not only stepped outside the bounds of an ISP, but are guilty of false advertising and data falsification.
Agreed, although I think peaceful revolt is possible and maybe even desirable.
Atheist vs theist dictatorships is an interesting comparison. Its my general impression that the atheist kind can't perpetuate their lies and suppression of information for many generations; their political discourse doesn't take place within the framework of instilled supernaturalist credulity. If Lysenkoism had emerged as a religious instead of atheist dogma, we would still be grappling with it today on school boards and in the courts... Russia is free of Lysenkoism, but we're far from being rid of creationism.
When a nation's language of business is steeped with overt appeals to magical thinking, then rational criticism becomes that much less effective. So I'll say that some institutionalized forms of corruption are more insulated or durable, if not more pernicious, than others.
Yet there are enough positive examples around to globe to support the idea that focusing on the character of government and society in earnest is infinitely better than cynicism that tries to replace govt with religion or a money-religion.
Its the conservative libertarian belief that government is inherently evil and society (our collective self) doesn't exist that underpins most of the selfish and self-immolating stupidity we see in this country today. People expected smaller govt from those who preached self interest and govt==evil, but instead we got BIG EVIL as a consequence of their unabashed self interest which we are supposed to sit back and admire!
On that note, I urge anyone who would have Dick Cheney removed from office to call their representative in Congress in support of HR 333 that was just introduced: 1-800-828-0498, 1-800-862-5530, 1-800-833-6354
And I ask that while doing so, everyone quietly reflect on what 'the ends justifying the means' has on our society and the world at large. It is something that every one of Cheney's henchmen, and mere taxpayers, is supposed to hold true in the unspeaking parts of their psyche; but I believe there is no room for civilzation in that.