I found myself in front of a recent Newsweek today and this is a bit about what I read...interesting...technology is all around...for better or worse...

Newsweek February 13, 2006
The Technologist by Steven Levy (p 14):

"Google and the China Syndrome"
-Rep. Tom Lantos, a California democrat and holocaust survivor, had a message to Yahoo, Microsoft and Google at a public briefing last week: "These massively successful high tech companies...should be ashamed". He was speaking of the way these Internet giants are cooperating with the Chinese government to stifle free speech. Google recently launched a China based search engine with built-in censorship of critical political content, news sites and information about democracy. At Chinese insistence, Microsoft (which also filters by Chinese rules) has also shut down the blog of a dissident urging democracy. And Yahoo...apparently provided information to China that helped it to identify a journalist writing anonymously about human-rights abuses; the man is now serving 10 years in jail for this "crime".-

Levy goes on to state that through discussions with people at these companies, he feels that they are ashamed...however given the fact that China, with 130 million internet users, is second only to the US... for many of these companies ignoring China would clearly be unthinkable.

Furthermore...many of these companies feel that they are in fact helping to bring "the tremendous benefits of universal access to all our users there"...

So...doing business under such terms...adding fuel to the fire or chipping away subversively at the "Great Fire-wall of China"?

As the Mad Hatter said (from what I remember): Verrrrrrrry Interesting...

-The Digit: 50.9% The percentage of computers that were laptops sold to consumers in 2005, outstripping desktop sales for the first time.