But hey, the new bill at least gets Earth off the hook easily with Dr. Evil, no?

China has spent millions — perhaps billions — on personnel and infrastructure to accelerate growth in medal-rich sports in which it has had little success.

Americans (and probably other countries who fear that the Chinese will end up at, or near, the top of the medal count in August) will criticize the Chinese effort from various angles. Some will call the Chinese athletes automatons without spirit, slaves to the system, not “true” athletes for whatever reason, and so on. Some are already leveling charges that the Chinese are doping:

Mike Teti, the coach of the United States men’s rowing team, said, “We know they are cheating, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

That is a very bold statement. Wow. What does Teti know that the rest of the world doesn’t, and why doesn’t he come forward with details to back up that allegation? If he has some evidence of cheating by the Chinese, he should present it. Otherwise, he is only looks combatitive and defensive - like’s he’s preemptively building a case to explain U.S. losses to the Chinese teams in Beijing.  (For the record, I think the Chinese will do well in the sculling events, but not as well in sweep events.)

Whatever happens at this point, you can bet that the Chinese are not going to welcome Teti, nor the American rowing contingent, very warmly.

Consumers have already taken note, with U.S. gasoline demand down 0.6% this year compared with the same period in 2007, according to the Department of Energy.

The erosion in demand is likely to accelerate if gasoline prices shoot above $6, but a radical cutback in consumption will occur only if high prices weaken the U.S. economy further and contribute to increased unemployment.

So, what happens when gas hits $6/gallon? (IMO, we’re just a couple of years from that price.)  I think at that price, telecommuting and teleconferencing will hit hockeystick growth.  At a corporate level, businesses will probably be more selective when it comes to corporate travel, and will hopefully encourage virtual meetings and teleconferencing. I wonder if they’ll allow their employees more more latitude in telecommuting, too.

I don’t see why not - the technology is here today. For example, yesterday while up here in Tahoe, I took part in a three-way conference call between co-workers in San Francisco and a partner in Oregon. From my perspective, there was no drawback to being here in the mountains, nor for our partner to be in Oregon. All of us used Adobe Connect for screen sharing. It’s a no-brainer to use this technology, and in some ways, it’s faster to set up a screen sharing session between remote meeting participants than to gather a bunch of people in the same office into a meeting room and get a projector set up.

On a sidenote, I recently discovered how to fix something that has been bugging me for about a month in Outlook 2007: the prompt at the top of my inbox that asks me to install Instant Search. It got so irritating that I finally gave in and installed it, only to uninstall it about a day later. (Google Desktop search is so much better.) But then Outlook continued to prompt me to install Instant Search again.

Here’s how to remove that annoying prompt.

In Outlook 2007, go to Tools>Options, and click on the “Other” tab. Under “General”, click on the “Advanced Options” button. On the subsequent pop-up window, about halfway down, there’s a checkbox that says “Show prompts to enable instant search”. Uncheck it.

Whew, doesn’t that feel better?

We have a bunch of people already on the ground at the show, and they’ve set up some cams streaming live video. Some cams are fixed, but others you can pan, tilt and zoom yourself, from your browser - it’s almost like being there. (They’ll be pulled down on Thursday.)

Also looking forward to celebrating Marco’s 40th birthday with some friends (Farino, Kuhns, Noble) who are flying down on Thursday night.

Pretty cool. Fritz said he’s going to use it somehow in his video coverage of Web 2.0 Expo on Techweb.com.