Stories like this are kind of like saying, "Pencils - are they really good for writing? Look what those junior high school kids did with their pencils !!!!!! Can they possibly be any good for anything?"

Sheesh

This reminds me ever so much of the *great* grammar checker in the old Microsoft Word. So now not only do they want to homogenize English writing styles, they also want to extract all the humanity from social interaction. So glad I'm retired at this point.

Most shopping malls I know prohibit any picture-taking inside, let alone something to be broadcast to the webiverse.

On the other hand, the last time I was actually inside a mall was before telephones had cameras, so maybe they've given that up in the meantime.

For one thing, paying off the national debt would mean the end of Treasury bonds, a pillar of the global economy. Treasury securities are crucially important to the world financial system in a number of ways: banks buy them as low-risk assets, the Fed uses them for executing monetary policy, and mortgage interest rates vary based on Treasury rates. 'It was a huge issue ... for not just the U.S. economy, but the global economy,' says Diane Lim Rogers

So, isn't this basically saying that the US taxpayer is propping up the world's economy?

I know the answer to this must be no, at least in the short term, but I would think that the same engine might some day be used for that purpose, which I would use a lot, as I often save web pages, and I usually save them in that awful format with the text separated from the directory of resources, because that's what every browser, even old models, can read. It would be nice to save web pages or even web sites from the browser into pdf, like I used to do with Adobe Acrobat, back when I could afford to buy such things.

Speaking as someone who very casually uses an ipod touch, which I obtained on a special deal, and bought mainly because I just wanted to know what the device was like:

It's not easy to browse for apps or discover new ones. Sure, you can search, but search for what? I'm more likely to discover new apps when they're described on forums and bulletin boards than I am from cruising the Apple Store. Yeah, you can easily find the most popular ones in a list, but then, that's the point, isn't it? Once you're on that list, you're pretty much guaranteed to stay there, and remaining one of the small percent who gain the lion's percent of the income.

Well, I'm not wild about the device, anyway. Can't even simply transfer pictures to it without it reducing the resolution.

I've thought for a while that the ejection of Facebook, the probably ejection of Google, etc., is all part of a face-saving Kabuki to give Chinese companies room to grow, now that Facebook and Google have proved the utility of their respective functions to large groups of people.

For example, without Facebook as competition, such functional facebook clones like 51.com, xiaonei.com, and chinaren.com are growing quickly, keeping both the service and the economic benefits of the Facebook idea within China's borders in a classic case of economic protectionism. Yes, the government can exert more direct control over them than they could over facebook, but at this point, that's kind of the icing on the cake.

Without Google as competition, Baidu (www.baidu.com) has that much more room to grow and take more tech jobs from the Indian economy and give them to Chinese. Yes, the government can censor more, but again, that's icing on the cake, since there are many other ways to maintain censorship and manage the population. Simply keeping things in the Chinese language and managing the traditional media go a long ways towards maintaining such control anyway, automatically excluding foreign ideas while keeping the frames (and therefore the conclusions) of major debates under control. Such a condition is not "censorship" in the strict use of that word, but this is the system used by Western governments to control discourse, even though they lack the self-isolating features of the Chinese language, so there's no reason why it shouldn't work here in China.

Examples of Western "censorship" can be found at sites like www.projectcensored.org, by the way. My point, then, is that, while censorship is important to the government, there's more than one way to accomplish it. There is only one way to provide economic protectionism, which is to divert more economic activity to local businesses, whether that be through tariffs, governmental spending, or what have you. Therefore, economic protectionism seems to me a primary reason for this kerfluffle, even though censorship may, of course, remain as a secondary reason.

This Google exclusion is all of a piece with the general economic protectionism with which China has been irritating ideologically "free market" types for a long time.

The current arguments over principle, then, can be viewed as a dramatically-colored veneer allowing both sides to save ideological face when the inevitable market protectionism takes place.

I also think that private schools can do a great job of educating, but I think that in most cases their performance roughly parallels the public schools in their neighborhoods.

And I think many private schools have other means of cash in order to charge less in tuition than some public schools spend in tuition. For example, many are religious schools that use religious facilities. Also, teacher pay in private schools is usually about half that of public schools, at least in California, which mainly limits the available pool of teachers to those with spouses that have better-paying jobs. Head Royce, a well-known private school in Oakland, charges about $27,000 tuition per year in its high school, three times the figure you cite, probably almost four times the local rate, since California has among the poorest school funding in the nation. Every school is not Head Royce, but I mention it because such schools are often pointed out to illustrate the superiority of private solutions.

On the other hand, I don't discount your intuitions about government. The whole school board system is problematical, I feel. There should be some other way to provide local control without putting any old Tom Dick and Mary in charge of the schools. I also feel that one of the biggest barriers to progress in this country is a sort-of collusion between government and textbook publishers and test publishers, neither or whom has any interest in changing the system.

Witness what happened at the hands of politicians when real reform gained a toehold in California back during the eighties.

Most teachers I know and also the teacher's unions I've had contact with, are very heavily into reform based on research. It's the intractable resistance from the government, again, at the behest of entrenched publishers, that is the conservative force here.

Was this true only online, or also in the live broadcast?"

I don't care about the order of the athletes so much as the fact that they didn't broadcast it live at all. I had hoped to have watched it at the same time as my friends in Beijing, but was unable to do this. As far as I know, the USA is the only country who failed to broadcast the opening when it really happened. (some, like Canada, broadcast it twice - in real time and later a repeat in the evening.)

In the old days (don't call me geezer!) they did lots of live broadcasting, and, while it was a strain to get up in the middle of the night to see it, there's something about that experience that brings home a real sense of the world, and how big it is. In this case, there's a sense of wonder to the idea that you're watching something at the same time as people all around the world. NBC, unsurprisingly but no less disgustingly, prefers profit over human fellowship.

Of course, if you disagree with my point of view, that's no problem - you can just record it if it's broadcast live in the middle of the night.

What's even more frustrating is that I was unable to find an unblocked stream in another country so I could watch it on my computer. I found out later that some German stations hadn't blocked it. There was an article in the New York times today how NBC kept playing internet "whack a mole" with those who knew how to find a way around their blocking. Well, so much for the idea that the Internet is free. Kind of feels like the West must have felt when they fenced it all in.

actually I'm going to China soon, and I was going to start studying methods of circumventing China's great firewall. I wish I'd started already. Maybe I could (ironically) have used those methods to circumvent the great NBC firewall and watched the feeds from China or Canada.