>Yeah, the Dems know what they are doing. They are telling him to say whatever it takes to get elected even if it contradicts his positions from a day earlier. Even if he can't answer a straight question about the troop surge in Iraq.

He's far better than GW2B: knows his English, doesn't bungle reading the prompter, doesn't need to speak on autopilot and I'd bet he's capable of writing a book, if he didn't write one already. So he's a far more capable actor. Now whether there's any substance in this show biz, it's up to the parties, and any other entity which pulls the strings. I don't care - and if he gets elected and puts Holbrooke back, he's really an empty suit. And that's only because I heard the old fart speak - I wonder how many other pearls are on the menu.

Which still leaves McCain in the dust. I mean, I don't have a horse in this race; I just don't see it in either of these two guys. Among the two, however, B.O. leaves McC in the dust. He can speak (albeit too priestly for my taste), he doesn't court the rednecks, not that bad. But I'm not expecting much.

>You know who Obama reminds me of in style and substance? Mussolini in 1920. Yeah, that worked real well.

Godwin's law. You lose.

>And, frankly, to address your final point....I'd take corporate dominance over government dominance any time. At least companies have to earn my dollar for a good or service; the government just outright takes it in return for vague promises.

The government, by its inception, came from the people, and it still has that in its substance; it always has to at least pretend, and some of its lower ranks actually have to believe they are public servants. The corporation, OTOH, is under zero scrutiny, it can bungle anything it wants, it can buy any law it wants, and its only overseer is the retiree who's just lost all of his 401k to brokers' fees and a combined oops/snafu on the market, while the CEOs get third layer of gold plating on their parachutes. Have you been to a grocery lately? Items are vanishing, you're getting more and more different packages of fewer and fewer items, it's beginning to remind me of Ceauşescu's times in Romania, when the shelves were full... of about dozen items altogether. But here it's not a government, it's the unprofitability of keeping a large assortment of items - you have to have a few of each, if the deliveries are weekly, you need at least 120% of weekly sales on hand, that's a huge amount of money - but if you have only half the items, then you can make arrangements with fewer suppliers... and half the cost of stock. There's your profit, and there's your diversity on the shelves.

Or... take this. I contacted Skype, suggesting that when someone drops out of a conference call, the name shouldn't vanish from the list of participants right away. Change status to "dropped", have a "reinvite" button, keep that for a minute or two. That would help a lot. What response did I get from Skype? Two automated messages (one looked personal but not sufficiently - obviously, no human has read the message yet). Four more messages to invite me into this or that survey about how satisfied was I with the customer service, what would I suggest etc... and still no sign that anyone has read the three sentences I wrote. The last message was 10K in size (plus remote images):

"Bubble bottom

Thank you, Skype

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Note: Skype has commissioned UCN, Inc a respected research vendor to carry out this survey on our behalf. By participating, you are allowing us to collect and process the data contained in the survey for the purpose of improving Skype's Customer Support service. Your data will be processed by Skype in accordance with the terms of our Privacy Policy

Help: if you need help with the survey please notify us by sending an email to cssatisfaction@skype.net.

Unsubscribe: if you don't want to receive further emails from us, send a blank email to..."

Great. My response:

I don't care how many subcontractors you hire, and how many questionnaires you offer to me to fill... I just suggested, as a programmer to programmer, what could be a really handy feature. This is about the sixth automated response I got, and still no sign that anyone ever read, (can't hope for "understood") what I said.

So we're done, ladies and gentlemen, until I get a response from a human. You're on Turing test, starting now.

Skype is a corporation, isn't it? And this is exactly what you get from them. They will have fired anyone you could have talked to - and I wasn't even complaining, I just had a suggestion, a little usability feature which would save my team a few minutes every day - times who knows how many such teams on Earth.

You know, if I was a corporation, I'd wave the "government is bad for your health" banner for as far as I can... I'd hold the pole high in my right hand and shout as loud as I can, so nobody would pay much attention which pockets did my left hand visit.