Afghan minerals may reach 3 trillion dollars: minister

Again - no idea whether this is true or just hype, but thought it was worth mentioning.

In some cases, your work is your social network. I work as a sysadmin for an insurance agency, and probably the most important day-to-day function for the insurance agents here is keeping in touch with clients. The ones that are "hip" enough to know about Facebook et al can see the value these things could have in doing business, but nobody has any delusions of being able to use one in any useful fashion because of regulatory compliance.

First, the only social networking site you're allowed to have a profile on is LinkedIn, which is fitting because it's designed from the ground up to do nothing but exchange business information in the most factual and boring way possible. Access to Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter is blocked in the office by our corporate-run firewall, and if you get caught discussing business with clients on a personal profile with one of these sites, you're subject to being written up.

Second, every change, even correcting a typo, requires submitting paperwork and waiting a matter of weeks to hear a "yea" or "nay" from corporate; given that timeliness is a key factor in most social networking sites, this fact alone renders them completely useless.

Most end up passing on making a profile at all, since it ends up being a huge hassle for little benefit compared to just calling people and meeting in person the old-fashioned way. I find it hard to believe there isn't some better middle-ground that corporate entities can find which would leverage communication technologies with adequate record-keeping.

Hardly.

The difference between public schools and home schooling in this case is that there is much more scrutiny in a public school. Though indoctrination most certainly happens in schools, it can at least be identified and handled, either through the media or in the courts - often both.

If you can identify a mechanism in homeschooling which prevents Mr. Smith from telling his child that evolution is a lie from the devil and that the world is 6000 years old, I'd be glad to entertain the idea in a more serious light. But until then, public school is the lesser of two evils.

I would not trust such a system like homeschooling to objectively and effectively educate most children. Relying on parents is an invitation for indoctrination and intellectual inbreeding. Forget teaching kids about skills that aren't already developed in adults, much less the ability to cope with different environments and alternative viewpoints.

No, I've absorbed the idea that people who have achieved a modicum of qualification are better suited to instruct our youth than parents who have a vested interest in protecting children from the scary world outside their home.

Schools do not just appear. They take a great deal of financing and legal paperwork. Your dream of grassroots school systems sprouting up is fantastically misguided.

Yes, vouchers help some parents place their students into better schools. Undoubtedly. But what you are breezing over is the effect this has on the other students who aren't quite so lucky. When considering educational models, you need to give attention to all students - not just the bright ones. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and all that. That is where vouchers fail.

Chiefly because exposing school systems to a competitive market implicitly accepts that some schools will fall into even worse decay that they currently are. Poor schools become poorer, with little funding to hire better teachers or acquire better books.

As schools are not objects which can house an infinite number of students, some students will be forced to attend those schools caught in that downward spiral - schools that are not only sub-par, but lacking funding and interaction with a diverse body of students, since all the brightest have made it into the "nice" schools.

When you consider that some students are going to be shafted big time by this arrangement, you may see why some (not just on the left) don't like the voucher system. Education after 18 is no longer compulsory, so good luck compensating for those all-important developmental years of education.

...I see this article which says Google is attempting a sort of compromise.

Google Inc. will shift its search engine for China off the mainland but won't shut it down altogether, and it will maintain other operations in the country. It's an attempt to balance its stance against censorship with its desire to profit from an explosively growing Internet market.

On Monday afternoon, visitors to Google.cn were being redirected to Google's Chinese-language service based in Hong Kong. The page said, according to a Google translation, "Welcome to Google Search in China's new home."

Google's attempt at a compromise could resolve a 2 1/2-month impasse pitting the world's most powerful Internet company against the government of the world's most populous country.

From an article in Time magazine, December 29 1995:

Gates is as fearful as he is feared, and these days he worries most about the Internet, Usenet and the World Wide Web, which threaten his software monopoly by shifting the nexus of control from stand-alone computers to the network that connects them. The Internet, by design, has no central operating system that Microsoft or anybody else can patent and license. And its libertarian culture is devoted to open--that is to say, nonproprietary--standards, none of which were set by Microsoft.

Gates moved quickly this year to embrace the Net, although it sometimes seemed he was trying to wrap Microsoft's long arms around it.

I remember reading Gates' book "The Road Ahead" something like seven years ago and being surprised at how wrong he was in his estimation of the impact that mainstream Internet connectivity would have. I wish I could get the exact quotes, but there were a few telling sentences where he comes off pretty clearly as dismissive that net connectivity would become anything more than a cute PC accessory. I'm still not sure if that was his genuine line of reasoning, or of it was just wishful thinking, but I think the point was clear that Microsoft was stacking their chips against net-based services, insisting that locally-run software was going to be the way of the future.

Now they are investing in what Google has already been doing and doing well for years, following their trend of copying other business' models instead of innovating on their own. I'm sure this will work out well for them.

It does; there should be a "minus" sign next to the title that you can click on to "demote" the story. You can then tag it appropriately (binspam, dupe, notthebest, stale, stupid, slownesday, offtopic).