"far more than books or movies or music, games force you to make _decisions_. Novels may activate your imagination, and music may conjure up powerf..

ul emotions, but games force you to decide. to choose, to prioratize. All the fundumental benefits of gaming derive from this fundumental virtue, because learning to make the right decisions: weighing evidence, analyzing situations, consulting your long-term goals, and then deciding. No other pop cultural form directly engages the brain's decision-making apparatus in the same way. From the outside, the primary activity of a gamer looks like a fury of clicking and shooting, which is why so much of the conventional wisdom about games focuses on hand-eye coordination. But if you peer inside the gamer's mind, the primary activity turns out to be another creature altogether: making decisions, some of them snap judgements, some long-term strategies.
--Steven Johnson, "Everything bad is good for you", p 41)

Reading is not an active, participatory process; it's a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to "follow the plot"..

instead of learning to lead. --Steven Johnson "Everything bad is good for you", p20.

There is a basic social devide between those for whom life is an accrual of fresh experience and knowledge, and those to whom maturity is a process ..

"People who read for pleasure are many times more likely than those who don't to visit museums and attend musical performances, almost three times as likely to perform volunteer and charity work, and almost twice as likely to attend sporting events. Readers, in other words, are active, while nonreaders - more than half the population - have settled into apathy. There is a basic social devide between those for whom life is an accrual of fresh experience and knowledge, and those to whom maturity is a process of mental atrophy. --Andrew Solomon

Transparency International: Россия занимает 143 место, набрав 2,3 балла по 10-балльной шкале, где 0 - пктль абсол. кор-ти. Рядом Тонго и Индоезией.

средняя продолжительность жзни в России на 12 лет меньше, чем в США.

Путин ликвидировал мелкие партии (<50 000 человек), установил барьер в 7% для прохождения в Думу, запрет на изб.блоки, отмнл порог явки и графу "Проти

в всех".
В 1999 правлм участвовать в предвыборной гонке обладали 139 общественных объединений, а в 2007- только 15 партий.

При Горбачеве один представитель корпуса гос власти приходился на 220 жителей страны, в 2006 - уже на 90 человек.

the bulk of the public has let a corrupt administration get away with murder - literally, in the case of hundreds of thousands civilians in Iraq.

The panicky public reaction to the attack of 9/11 was unable to upset the balance of relatively sane encryption policy that it had taken decades to set right. However, the abdication of responsibility that took hold of both the Congress and the bulk of the public has let a corrupt administration get away with murder - literally, in the case of hundreds of thousands civilians in Iraq. Civil rights and moral standards as basic as the prohibition on torture, the freedom to moe around in your own country, and the universal condemnation of unprovoked attacks on other countries have all fallen by the wayside.
(John Gilmore, Electronic Frontier Foundation, October 31, 2004 ---Foreword to "Brute Force: Cracking the data encryption standard" by Matt Curtin, p. vi)

When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilage to be free. (Charles Evans Hughes, chief justice of the United States 1930-1941)

In 1994, the FBI Digital Telephony wiretap proposal passed the Congress in 1994.