If you are riding on (or rather under) a balloon, there is no wind. Try it!

How to utilize the documented power of placebo? What if we could get a ready-made placebo industry. The moral problem for a doctor to subscribe sugar pills and pretend to believe it will work would disappear if we could just all embrace homeopathy. As long as the weaker homeopathy medicine is forbidden (as it is not that diluted and could be poisonous), We would then have a set of people who believe that they are selling remedies that help (or at least are greedy enough to pretend convincingly). It would be costly, but not in comparision with the global medical industry. It's a win-win and will even add more jobs!

Interesting twist on the topic! Is it still free speech if one is drawling

I believe people advocating this is driven by two things (fine human values both!):

Greed: The desire to make money without adding value, not by more people registering domain names, but mainly by corporations having to protect their brands in more places
Stupidity: The lack of understanding DNS principles, as in limited to "domain names are what we see at the top of the browser window"

But in any case, now that all the adult stuff is moved successfully to the .XXX TLD, I think we are ready to introduce the new TLD .CON for all the scamming, phishing, spamming and jamming sites. All the idiots of the Interwebz will be happy to go to "microsoft.con" for their updates, and the rest of the world will be safe!

(Disclaimer: I have managed a small ccTLD since 1999)

Has anyone even been to China among the people commenting here?

Chinese people in my experience dislike (and criticize, at least to me) their government. Just one thing is more irritating to a Chinese than this oppressiveness, and that is the unbearable holier-than-thou attitude of US-Americans who has NO idea of the problems in the country where they live, but has ALL the answers to the problems in a country probably at 1.8 billion people (un-official number) with a history of thousands of years of corruption and feudal governments. I have used Internet in China, and noticed only that CNN was blocked (probably under some obnoxiousness clause) and that was easily bypassed using any proxy available. When I was there, there was an attempt to control the Internet cafe's, because they are making students stay away from school (the IC's are always packed with pimply kids who surf, and more often game the time away at 0.1 dollar per hour).

For those that are so concerned about the controls the Chinese government imposes, get a grip of the scale! The Internet usage is exploding, I was seeing people sitting transfixed at all kinds of offices, using the net. Not even the superior technology of the US succeed in this, although no dobt they're trying. (The US also has superior propaganda, which this thread so clearly shows.) How will you monitor that number of people?

All the recent news show that the China Gov. does NOT have control, latest 2 was accidents in a unlicences mine and a unlicenced dynamite factory - how long would you manage to run any business like that in the "free and open" US? Face it, the government in China do NOT have control, and it is for all of us to hope that somehow China does GET control. It is a long time since China was communist (economically speaking my native country Norway is more communist, probably because they can afford it).

Politically, I'd like to get some real change, and suggestions how to go democratic overnight in such a monster of a country.

Frankly, the US might do better NOT trying to help, since all political solutions from those quarters seem to involve bombs (preferably from high altitude).