Personally I just sort everything in memory like reddit, since I need to traverse all branches to calculate weighed scores, which is a balance of vote counts and age. I think reddit/HN do something similar? I wonder how Disqus handles this.
"One could argue that was more craftsmanship than innovation, but there's a strong connection between making things well and making better things, and China isn't famous for quality goods either."
That's because they weren't taught in our textbooks.
I'm trying to wrap my head around how the whole thing works. On one hand, mundane stuffs are monitored, on the other hand, you have stuffs like these freely discussed:
According to wikipedia, this is on the 12th most popular site in China.
I think the censors operate on very crude keyword filters. As long as you avoid the few obvious keywords, it's not that easy to get caught. The domestic web sites get around the censor by agreeing to open backdoors for the filters, yet at the same time turn a blind eye to the real disruptive stuffs that got around it.
Another thing is that scrolling is kinda sluggish in Chrome on my 2007 Mac Mini. Google docs PDF reader seems to scroll much more smoothly. It's still a big improvement over the flash version.
I wouldn't say they have no marketing. The Signal vs Noise blog, Ruby on Rails, and their books are very effective marketing tools. That being said, the quality of their products does seem to play a large role as well.
I think the personal computer will split into two branches, with power users keeping today's form factors, while average users who just want to surf the web or check their email will go for the appliances.
A bit off topic, but [Warring States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warring_states) happens to be the golden age of Chinese philosophy, akin to Europe's Age of Enlightenment. The intellectual output grew out of necessities of competition.
I was reading a popular Chinese forum (tianya.cn) thread on contaminated food, and I was surprised at how anti-government the tone was. (think reddit, but more extreme) There were jokes taking direct jabs at the party and state, and I was amazed that they didn't get taken down.
I think Chinese tend to avoid talking shit about their country in front of foreigners to "save face". It seems to be part of the culture.
Just curious, which family in the film are you referring to? I only have a vague recall of them.