To escalate the war to Iran and Syria is utter lunacy. I'm constantly amazed how Bush gets away with this. Sure, there's opposition within the US from some quarters but it's all talk. Why aren't Americans out there with pitchforks and cudgels trying to stop this?

It can only be because they don't actually care that much. If you assume that letters written to Salon, a liberal magazine, reflect issues that people care about, then, last I looked, 100 letters had been written about Apples's new toy, the iPhone, and 20 written about the outrage that is Guantanamo. What does that say about what Americans really care about?

Maybe one of the reasons most Americans aren't protesting more is that they aren't aware of the full horror of this war, courtesy of tight news management by the administration and a compliant mainstream media.

The news is managed by, for example:

1. Embedded reporters restricted to what they can report.

2. A refusal by the army to count Iraqis killed and the dismissal of independent casualty estimates (eg from the UN) higher than 'official' estimates..

3. A ban on showing American casualties returning to the US.

4. A demonisation of any off-message media organisations (eg al-Jazeera) and the management of bad news on the ground (eg the priority given to securing hospitals etc when Fallujah was attacked so that unwelcome news of the Iraqi body count be obscured).

The news that does escape is then massaged further and reported by the likes of Fox News, right-wing radio and a supine press.

So after all this filtering of the news, it's no surprise that many Americans don't seem to get the full enormity of what's happening.

This article attacks Bush through humour which is a powerful weapon. Making fun of somebody (standing on deck stern and resolute, but without his pants) can diminish him in the public mind as much as any reasoned criticism.

Keep up the good work Mr Keillor.

The Gitmo detainees are not prisoners of war so they don't have those rights. They do not have the right to be tried in a civil court either.

They have been deliberately placed outside US law and outside the reach of the Geneva Convention. Many of them appear not to be guilty of anything much apart from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we don't know for sure because we're not told and sometimes they aren't told either.

They have been incarcerated for up to 5 years and tortured. Some have been released with no explanation, apology or recompense.

These are not the actions of a civilized society and thank goodness for people like Anant Raut who help to mitigate the effects of these outrages.

I enjoy reading the letters as much as the articles, even some of the abusive ones (Locutus springs to mind - often abrasive but funny, intelligent and to the point). Salon should welcome these because they attract readers almost as much as the articles themselves.

It's a good point made by others that writers like Sidney Blumenthal get little feedback because of the magisterial authority of his writing, whereas some other writers can attract a lot of often well-deserved flak. But it's also true that some threads, even supposedly 'factual' ones, do just degenerate into chaos. For example, the response to any article making vaguely critical observations about Israel is guaranteed to end in a welter of ridiculously polarized views, unanswerable and selective pseudo-erudition, and wild accusations.

But this is a good thing as it shows not that there's anything necessarily wrong with the article, but that there's something wrong with people's understanding of the issues and Salon is right to highlight it.

Hang on a minute. We know there are things we don't know (thank you Rummy), and we guess there are things we'll never know or understand about what's 'out there'. And maybe the higher apes understand this as well. Some people call this 'spirituality'.

But it does not follow that this is 'religious'. Because there are things we don't know does not predicate the existence of a God; to say that we don't know what happens when we die does not imply there is an afterlife.

To wonder on the mysteries of life and the universe is not a 'religious' experience: anybody can do it, even atheists. Even Richard Dawkins does it. Scientists and atheists can have as much wonder in their lives as true believers.

Rosenberg and various letter writers have already nailed a lot of the issues with software development projects. I'd just like to add one more, and that is the question of when is the project 'finished'?

You've got to get that piece of software out there and earning money. Spend too long on it and you've missed the boat; rush it out and and you risk scaring away users with your insufficiently functional and inadequately tested software.

Judging what's possible in reasonable timescales can be very difficult. Microsoft's Vista will be full of holes that they could have plugged had they spent more time in development and testing, but it'll be good enough for enough people to keep the money coming in.

Smaller outfits don't have that luxury - they don't have the captive market of Microsoft and must either produce software much quicker or much better than the likes of Microsoft, or go for unexploited niche markets, or invent new markets (like Apple).

This is one of the reasons why 'software is hard'.