The idea of having readers rate the letters is great. In fact, it's been part of our plan from the start. We weren't able to build it into the initial rollout of this system, though. And we want to be careful to make it work in a fairly intuitive way; such systems can quickly grow too complex unless they're deftly designed.

Basically, from where I sit, the more tools we can provide for you to customize how you see these letters, the better!

I won't add to my previous comments on the name-vs.-anonymity matter, except to reiterate that we're aware of and want to be sensitive to the concerns many of you are raising about privacy, and we'll keep our ears open, and there are good reasons why we couched this discussion in terms of "encouraging" people to sign their names rather than "requiring."

I will "Editor's Choice" my own posts. Eminently reasonable, thanks for pointing it out, Traidep. Clarity should win out over modesty.

TomAnderson -- the survey works just fine for me in Opera, which is my everyday browser, and in Firefox, which is the other browser I regularly use. The developers who built it primarily use Firefox. So it's definitely not an IE-only survey. Of course it's clear some users have had problems with it, and we're working to resolve them -- we've followed up on each complaint we've received with the partners who built the survey for us.

As for whether Salon is listening to feedback: Well, obviously each of you will decide for yourself whether we're paying attention to what matters to you. But, you know, there's a difference between "listening to feedback" and "doing everything that every single user wants." The former is achievable, though we can always work harder and do better; the latter is impossible!

...are posted on every letter submission form: "Salon reserves the right to delete any letter at its discretion; for example, we may remove letters that are far off-topic or excessively rude, or that violate the law or common decency, or when we have reason to doubt the veracity of the signature."

We use a *very* light hand here. But we will step in as we did this morning if it's clear that, as in this case, a letter writer was baiting and insulting people, inspiring a back-and-forth that had little to do with the article.

Salon operates two other forums, Table Talk and The Well, both of which have a variety of options for conducting this sort of online conversation.

... is not cool, sorry. It's fair use to republish short excerpts but not to post an entire article, as a poster named "CW" did. (And without, as far as I could see, citing the source, even.) We've deleted the article. For those interested in reading it, it's by Matt Welch, it's from Reason magazine, and you can find it at this URL:

http://www.reason.com/0402/fe.mw.injustice.shtml

Salon has always reserved the right to delete letters, and we've done so in a number of cases here.

As you can tell by reading the many letters that remain posted in this thread, we have no problem with a full-throated debate on the many issues surrounding Cole's piece. Have at it. But if letters devolve into name-calling and flames we will continue to step in as needed.

And no, we're not going to debate which letters should or shouldn't be deleted. That's our prerogative. We've used it sparingly and hope and expect to keep it that way.

From a consumer's perspective I wonder whether part of the issue here is audio quality. From the research I've done, as I ponder whether to replace my now-antiquated first-generation ipod, the Nano and the current top-of-the-line ipods all use the Portal Player chip, but the shuffle uses some other company's chip, and, curiously, even though the shuffle is low-end, everyone reports that it has *better* audio quality than the Portal Player models. It seems like a big enough difference that I figured, gee, maybe I should wait till Apple upgrades the audio in the main ipod models before purchasing one...

We've deleted a small number of letters from this thread.

As always, we're happy to host a heated and vigorous debate, and we're not censoring for indecent language or the like. As you can see from the letters that remain here, we're not deleting letters that strongly disagree with the article's author or that take intense issue with the author's ideas, either. By all means, have at it.

But we have always reserved the right to delete posts that are insulting and off-topic, and we'll continue to do so as necessary.

Someone posted the entirety of Paul Krugman's column from today. I thought it was a fine column, too. But that's not an acceptable use of this Letters space, so we've removed it. Selective quotation is fair use and that's fine.

Responding to a request made below, the full text of a letter from law professors opposing the detainee legislation is now available at http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2006/09/letter.pdf

Rodeojones, thanks for catching that typo -- we've now fixed it...