I am watching all those ultra-cheesy variety shows they still put on television on the holidays. I'm in Suzhou.

This was a cool...and off-the-wall...post. Don't think many people will be interested in it. I'm not very interested in it, but that is because I only know pinyin. I can't read much Chinese...speaking is most important to me. I'm just not a scholar like you.

I have never heard of anyone talking about replacing Chinese characters and the idea sounds pretty far-out. Sort of like Benjamin Franklin discussing scrapping English for Classical Greek...its just not going to fly. I don’t know why you say it stifles creativity and promotes illiteracy though. I failed Spanish in high-school – too much conjugation – and I find Chinese to be very easy. Again…I said I don’t really read much…I have difficulty reading every character in my son’s “Winnie the Pooh” book. But many peasants can read at least a little. Whereas if you are illiterate in a non-symbolic character language (English), then you really can’t read anything (I think…I’m not an expert or scholar as I have said). It may be difficult to teach Chinese to adults, but Chinese children pick up reading quickly. Chinese definitely read faster than Westerners too. As for creativity… I can’t see how someone can make the claim that Chinese writing influences that. There are so many other factors.

BTW, as you are talking about a place in Mainland China, you should have said he got that Red Umbrella from XIAMEN University.

I would not simplify Ben Bova and Jerry Pournelle as simply 1950s conservative republicans. Pournelle teamed up with Larry Niven for several really great works of Science Fiction.

Why would the VP be so ticked off about disclosing that they met with Kissenger? What does this mean?

I don’t know Andrew…I don’t believe that this IGRS standard will go anywhere. It is not “Who controls the standards controls the widgets”, as you have suggested, but rather “Who controls the brand-name, controls the profit. Who controls the profit controls the standards. Who controls the standards controls the widgets.” And Chinese companies really suck at controlling brand-names.

Sure, Chinese companies will be much more active in the standards-setting bodies. But those groups are always dominated by the big BRAND players. And the brand players (IBM, Intel, AMD, Sony, HP, you name it) have a lot more resources than Chinese companies. For example… ever notice that Intel makes motherboards? They probably 100% sub-contract this out nowadays I imagine. But as late as 1997, they maintained enough motherboard manufacturing capabilities in Puerto Rico and Malaysia to manufacture about 50% of the world’s motherboard market demand. Why did Intel have this spare manufacturing capability for a low-margin component? Because if they needed to, they could flood the market with Pentium CPU boards – complete with their chip-sets, their IP, their CPU – to ensure that Pentium would be the preferred standard instead of AMD.

According to the EE article, and your post, China may be getting somewhere in the standards war because this new standard has domestic popular support. That article in EE times is talking about a technology that has almost no useful installed support. Say it’s installed in PCs and TVs. But currently these two widgets don’t talk to each other and there is not a lot of consumer need for them to talk to each other. Cell phones and computers sometimes talk to each other, and there much consumer demand for that either. Furthermore, it seems that this “standard” is really just a software application that multiple companies have adopted. Not a complex network-layer solution. In short, it’s cheap. Which is good. But the functions are easy to reproduce. For pocket change costs, Sony or Samsung or even BenQ (companies which manufacture phones, TVs, PCs, and home audio equipment) could make the same thing and give it away to Nokia / Motorola / Apple for free. No royalties. End of story.

Well…almost end of story. There is the possibility that Samsung (for example) would adopt the Chinese standard as part of forming a deeper relationship with a supplier. There is the possibility (certainty) the Microsoft will support a standard it likes, and there will be a big War of the Standards. And in such a war, the Chinese standard may sneak on through to acceptance.. Or it may happen that a lot of tech geeks like using the Chinese software (it is an application, so I assume it can be directly used). They then think up some cool, easy things to do with the technology that inspires some companies to make products for this group of market innovators / early adopters. Anyway, it could become popular. But one thing is for sure, it will not become popular based on Chinese consumer adoption.

Schadenfreude. I saw it on the first page of this article. I have seen it other places recently. Is this word now in the English language? Its listed in several online dictionary, but I don't remember studying it in school years ago.