What happens when a philosophy faces off against a really big army?

China now has the largest online population.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/28/1211232&from=rss

They also have one of the most active US espionage programs:
>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/washington/10spy.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=china%20spy&st=cse&oref=slogin

The domination of world history by the US-centric Western European economic machine rests squarely upon a philosophy of arbitrary monetary values assigned by a series of closed mathematical systems abstracted from hard currency, from military prowess, and from the educational level of the populace that is the primary beneficiary of the systems themselves. What's more, as is the norm with most American constructs, these systems are fueled by petroleum.

The mathematical systems to which I refer and the philosophies on which they are based are being put to their first real test.

More Than The Sum of Its Parts: Addendum

Quite a trend. Don't say you weren't warned:

Senate Approves Bill to Broaden Wiretap Powers

More Than The Sum of Its Parts

Google has a great app that will get us all (myself most emphatically included) to spend more of our lives online leaving behavioral profiles in our wake:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/070908-google-adds-third-dimension-to.html

Coincidentally, NebuAd has a killer app that they're shopping around to ISPs that will surreptitiously create implicit profiles:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/ad-targeting-companies-and-critics-prepare-for-senate-scrutiny/

Back at the Google ranch, Google is ordered to hand over their YouTube user data:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/07/03/ST2008070304015.html

Be forewarned: the whole is more than the sum of its parts.