I'd assumed up to this point that the "Great Firewall" of China was primarily intended to censor and control China's own population. Now I'm thinking it's main purpose was as a strategic defense initiative. Now they can attack more freely without fearing for their own infrastructure.
Censorship is also a cloak for protectionism. Facebook, Ebay, Google, etc have all been banned or throttled to make way for censorship. It says something that censorship is more tolerated by the world than overt protectionism, and that trade protectionism must be done in the good name of censorship.
The sad fact in the U.S. is that it isn't the people with thoughtful consistent opinions on important issues that have real impact on the politicians that get sent to Washington to tackle current problems. It is instead the easily swayed fickle "undecideds" that determine the powers that be.
This state of affairs makes the tools in this article extremely disturbing in the context of government contractors.
Well that makes three of us that had similar ideas and didn't managed to fully implement them before Christmas :-p
Mine's more early alpha stage (and on hiatus) as attempting Facebook integration was biting off a little more than I can chew...
I still think there's a lot of mileage in the concept though as I think there are some pretty key features (other than vendor independence...) that Amazon's wishlist and Best Buy's Giftag are missing. Happy to talk
I was definitely thinking that facebook integration could really lower the barrier for people to use something like this. I've also been working on that piece of it.
I think an important aspect of this discussion is what your goal is. If you're measuring success by results achieved then some amount of talent is necessary though not sufficient. If you're measuring success by happiness then talent seems less important. If you enjoy spending time at something that you are terrible at and can sustain yourself, more power to you.
