This is how it works: in school or at work, day after day, they make you repeat what the newspapers say. Originality is bad for you, thinking is bad for you, reasoning is bad for you. Parroting it back with every show of enthusiasm is good for you.

I hate to break it to you, but this applies to us as much as it does them. The difference is that in the West, we've perfected it to such an extent that our population are almost completely unaware.

Got nothing better to do? Of all the threats to the world order, I think North Korea sits pretty close to the bottom. How about we uncover some of the hundreds of secret & illegal US & Israeli prisons, nuclear sites, etc? Sure, I know the answer already ... because these are 35,000 idiots we're talking about, and they all believe that North Korea is out to get them, and that the US and Israel are bastions of peace and democracy. Of course, in our secret prisons, no-one is tortured to death. And our secret nuclear bases would never actually launch an attack on another country ... in fact these are better thought of as peace bases, and are only secret because our enemies want to attack our peace!

Actually I would say:

a) Obama is a liar, sure ... but:
b) Bush is too stupid to be evil. He just had evil people pulling his strings

But more generally, I think you're on the right track. The similarity between Obama's and Bush's policies demonstrates that the US has yet to achieve anything even remotely democratic, and further, that it doesn't appear to matter who becomes president or which party wins government ... the same shit keeps happening.

Time to organise outside the political establishment.

Agreed. The original story makes it sound like a deviation from the current would be bad. I think pretty much anything would be better. In particular, more actual substance ... more discussion ... more grouping of people of similar interests. This isn't "subversion". It's just discussion. God forbid people actually have a fucking clue what they're voting on before the fact ...

There's quite a difference between a government organisation doing research and securing patents, and a private company doing the same thing. In the case of a government organisation, the benefits will actually trickle-down to everyone, whereas with a private company, they just hoard and profit.

Those bastards have been allowed to monopolise the food supply, polluting the Earth with their GM madness for far too long. They even want a monopoly over water! The Monsanto / GM appologists will tell me how much 'better' off we all are when eating roundup-riddled, petro-chemical-fertilised GM foods, but I allege they are full of shit.

Time to protect our food supply from both GM and patents. First step is a Monsanto boycott.

You're conveniently side-stepping the arguement. It's no good thumping your chest ( is it wrapping in an American flag, by any chance? ) and claiming that you're the 'top of the food chain' and so 'anything goes'.

We are omnivorous and don't really care what we eat, where it comes from and how it died. We just want it in order to survive.

Actually that's quite a disingenious arguement. We only very recently started eating meat, and are still horribly equipped for it. Have you tried eating raw meat? Go on ... and then tell me we're "supposed to eat meat" and it's natural. When you're done vomiting, consider that eating meat has been statistically proven to lower your life expectancy by at least 15% - it increases the risk of all sorts of cancers and heart disease - the list goes on. So the term 'omnivore' is used quite liberally when applied to humans. We're herbivores who have figured out how to burn animals to the point where eating them at least doesn't make us instantly sick.

I'm all praise for Miro. After discovering it, my TV viewing dropped considerably. Channels like 'The Real News' provide unbiased, in-depth coverage of world events. Channels like Submedia / It's the End of the World as we Know it provide some nice activist news with a health sprinkling of comedy. Then there are some pretty nice documentaries. Oh, and then there's that tech babe with gadget reviews ( can't remember the name of the channel for the moment ). But anyway, both the quality and the quantity of Miro channels runs rings around what's available via free-to-air stuff AND pay TV. And there are no ads!

That's the point exactly. One of the driving factors for us was that our legacy Access system was starting to become wildly unstable and very slow. I'm of course of the opinion that my solution is far better than Access.

Hi. Yes I'm Dan. I assume I know you. Real name?

And yes, up to this point I've done it all myself. I'm trying to recruit some friends - we'll see how it goes.

Macro support in Base? Hmmm.

I did some extensive testing of Base a little while back. It's OK for very limited use, but let's be brutally honest ... you don't create solid, complex systems on Base.

But people still want to create database front-ends on Linux, and have to use God-aweful web-based UIs.

Despair no longer - I have created a cross-platform, open-source framework to implement 'forms', 'dataasheets' and 'reports'. I'm even part-way ( 30% or so ) through creating a GUI builder to tie everything together. But the libraries are already complete and in production ( heavy use, I might add ). To download / view screenshots or just check out what's going on, it's all on my website: http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis/