Whatever fault and atrocity US may have committed, anyone in the world is free to criticize and any US resident is free to discuss and lobby for change. The same cannot be said for China and that is fundamental difference between China and the rest of the free world.

I disagree strong with the Patriot Act, the use of torture and the Iraq War, but even I know that those actions pale in comparison to the tens of millions if not hundred of millions of Chinese that perished in the last 50 years due to the ineptness of an authoritarian regime.

While China certainly has achieve spectacular economic growth in the last 50 years, but I would argue that the US civil rights movement that continues today has far more importance than avoiding starvation.

I am kind of the IT person in a small company with about 20 users and I switched everyone over to OpenOffice 4 or 5 years ago and we have never looked back. OO has certainly came a long way since we started using it. There's a few access programs we use to run reports that I haven't been able to convert to postgresql, but I only need on copy of MS office running on the W2K server and that pretty much solved our report generation.

With the money we saved from using open office and the various linux email/web/sql servers, I managed to upgrade everyone to dual 20" screen desktops. The hylafax fax server I installed almost 10 years ago is still running today. Nothing MS made ever lasted that long, because like it or not you're forced to upgrade every few years.

BTW, I stay away from any external web based application because we simply do not have enough bandwidth to handle the traffic volume. As much as I like gmail, it's a lot faster to send a 3mb email attachment to an email server on the dmz. We're still limited by the T1 bandwidth, but at least I am free to do other tasks instead of waiting for the attachment to upload.

Reducing the role of Thomas Jefferson? Why? He's one of my favorite founding father. The person who writes so eloquently about freedom and dares to question the validity of God by cutting and pasting his own version of the bible. Yet, he still chooses to keep slave and may have even father children with slaves. To me, Thomas Jefferson personifies the constant struggle we all have between liberty and financial reality.

Our society is best served when we base our laws and actions on our collective logic and reason. What ever flaws DOE or any other government bureaucracy has is infinitely better than having our laws decided base on a illogical text supposedly written by God but in reality is written by men masquerading as God. The social conservative can't win their arguments base on science or logic so now they are trying to subvert our nation with politics staring with our children. I am ashamed to be a registered Republican. Damn, when they said small fiscally responsible government I didn't know the plan was to save money by moving city hall to the local christian churches and hand everyone a bible as an all purpose first aid kit, universal text book, and life's decision maker. . . . .

I lean toward the draft. Let the politicians justify their decision to the American people and we should all get a chance to shoulder the responsibility of our country going to war beside shopping at the local air conditioned malls. Put everyone on reserve status.

I don't care for the private contractors because I don't see why Blackwater should be paid a premium to do what normal American solders do everyday and I don't see why Haliburton should make a profit for doing what normal American solders used to do.

That depends on if you view postal service as a public service or private service. I view it as a public service and as a public service it should treat everyone roughly the same. Image if you are a farmer in rural American and has to pay "market" price every time you want send in your utility payment.

Or, imaging waiting in that long postal office line only to have people walk in and constantly cut in front of you because they are the "volume" shippers

I am fairly cheap so I think most government workers are overpaid, including the USPS. But I think USPS looses money because they are a public service and cannot discriminate against the rural population.

Sometimes the special FedEx/UPS surcharges cost more then USPS's parcel rate for rural areas.

The good thing is that they treat everyone roughly the same.

I was on the privatization wagon until GWB started to "privatize" our armed forces and now BHO wants to "privatize" our space exploration. I love the USPS/FedEx/UPS comparison. The good thing about USPS is that they usually don't care who you are or how much you ship, you pretty much get the same overall treatment depending on the mood of their staff. FedEx/UPS on the other hand discriminate base on your shipping volume and profitability.

There is a reason why USPS looses money year after year, beside the typical government bureaucracy. However, where else can you mail something for $0.44 to anywhere in the US with no additional charge for Saturday delivery.

In our pursuit of ever cheaper crap most of us forgot that freedom is not free. . . . C'mon people. . . wake up!

China is not Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, or even Singapore. It's not a free and democratic country and the last 10 years proved that we don't have a snowball chance in hell of either luring China toward democracy or contain China's brand of authoritarian capitalism. Combine our insatiable desire for imports and China's currency manipulation and we created our current financial meltdown. Sadly, the extraordinary efforts we made to save our economy ultimately benefited our biggest creditor, China. More bullet trains for China.

So here we are facing a downward financial and technological spiral and instead of looking to Germany or Japan for inspiration, our politicians want to frame every single political debate around religion or what they think the bible says. . . sad. . damn sad. .

I don't think the Vietnamese government was elected, either democratically or through vote rigging. You are confusing economic progress with democratic progress. In terms of advancing democratic ideas, given what we've seen in the last weeks, Iran is far ahead of the pacified Vietnamese population.

Since you are assigning blame on a percentage basis and I don't know your lifestyle, so it'll have to be a self assessment, how much blame do you deserve for buying and using products that originated from places ruled by tyrannical government?

Free trade with nations that are not free is call exploitation. It's collusion between an authoritarian government exploiting its silenced population and the merchants exploiting the ignorance of their consumers. Authoritarian governments rule by force and it's naive to think that there will not be a corresponding rise in military prowess with every net inflow of economic dollar, yet we continues to feed countries like China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia as if freedom is indeed free. One day, we are all going to wake up and find ourselves jobless and in debt to some of the nastiest government in the world. What are we doing to do then? They've already caught up to us economically and technologically. Their citizens had all been taught, with help of modern censorship, to believe that we're all a bunch of lazy arrogant bums that deserves whatever is coming to us as deem necessary by their governments. But, that's way way down the line in an uncertain future so who cares right?

At the end, the executives are the only ones who benefits from trading with authoritarian regimes. The executives are the only ones making continuous withdraw from the company coffer via salaries and bonuses while the shareholders play the musical chairs in the stock market. It amazes me to see nationally known companies using chapter 11 filing as if it's part of a normal business plan, never mind that the stockholder's equity are wiped out in such reorganization. The executives don't cares because they know their salaries are guaranteed and there's an endless pool of suckers being drawn into the stock market everyday, either willingly through direct investment or unwillingly through retirement plans.

Come to think of it, is capitalism compatible with democracy? . . . i wonder. I think so. It's what I've been taught it's ingrained in my psyche. But. . . how come it doesn't seem as true anymore.