Wondering what $895 million will get you in 2008? Well, if you're NBC, a whole lot of complaining, that's what. (Obviously, we are including ourselves here, though we are clearly not alone.) The latest outrage-ish is over the fact that part of the the opening ceremony fireworks display was actually computer generated. NBC says they informed viewers of this while it was happening and the Lauer/Costas transcript backs them up, so we're not going to split hairs over whether viewers should have understood that "cinematic device" actually meant computer generated. Anyway that was a Chinese decision not an NBC one. Along those same line, there comes word today that the little girl who sang during the show was actually lip-synching because the real singer wasn't attractive enough, which as we recall was also the reason Julie Andrews wasn't cast in the film version of My Fair Lady and we all saw how her career turned out! However, a few more stories like this and we're going to start wondering whether the entire Olympics is actually CGI and being broadcast from the basement of 30 Rock.

Another issue is NBC's habit of tagging things "live" when, in fact, they aren't — a big complaint among West Coast viewers. NBC says that "twice-per-hour" time stamps appear that "inform West Coast viewers that the event was only live on the East Coast." Ha! Under this rationale just about everything that has ever been recorded live could be stamped "twice-per-hour" to say, uh, hey, by the way, this was only live to people alive at the time.

What is clear is that NBC in all its planning apparently forgot to take into consideration the Internet. And while Google is doing a rather despicable job of complying with NBC's complaints regarding random clips that keep showing up wouldn't it have been easier, and so much more admirable and forward-thinking, if the company could have found some way to incorporate the Olympic pirates — elsewhere referred to as user-generated content, or alternately, the future of media — into its coverage.