>They can not just stop building them, because there are literally tens of millions of people getting their income from constructing those buildings.
Don't you see why this is obviously disastrous? There are so many analogies that can be drawn -- that I'm not even going to try. If you don't see why this is obviously ridiculous then read some stuff about the invisible hand of the market (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand). It is only a valid point from the narrow perspective of the workers involved and the employers of those workers selling their services.
Of course I "see" this. But I also see short to medium term considerations by the CN gov't of political stability in the country. Especially at a time of imminent power transition to the next political generation.
Its called "political reality".
But yeah, I read about the theory you linked to, about 10 years ago, when I studied it.
It is also seriously targeted at mobile devices like iPhone and Android. It also has quite different approaches to API and source code architecture (with Leaflet leaning towards OOP and Polymaps towards functional approach).
How many apartments are vacant in the US, just as a comparison, does anyone know? That would make the number much more meaningful.
Also, are these apartments dirt cheap and do they speak english in these areas at all? Maybe they could be a haven for startups, which are somewhat less bound by geography, if they were extremely cheap. I might just be dreaming though.
Try Phonm Penh (Cambodia). You can buy an apartment for $30k in a premium location. If you can't afford to buy, you can rent something decent for $60 a week or less. Food is about a third to half the price of what you're used to paying. Western standard places that are great to work in are springing up quickly now. Very friendly place. A lot of people speak English. Many of them have an entrepreneurial mindset (and run or dream of running some sort of small business). If you've got an interesting enough resume and want to check it out, feel free to ping me and I'll show you around (and depending on the state of the renovations you can stay one of my spare rooms).
What kind of work do you do? I'm in college (CS major) now and am planning to start freelancing on the internet soon and continue that as my permanent job after I graduate. If I relocate abroad to a developing country but pretend to be located in America (just use my parents' address or something), I could make a killing off of this sort of thing and have a relatively high standard of living in a country like Cambodia.
Is the internet there fast/reliable (censorship isn't important because I can just use a US VPN)? How's the weather?
Is it difficult to wire money from America to developing countries like Cambodia?
For those cases where the people don't speak English, is it particularly difficult to learn the language when you're actually immersed in it on a daily basis?
What is the local social scene like? Is there a large expat community? If not, are the natives welcoming?
Hopefully it'd be possible to get some action. I don't mean to be crude, but that's sort of a requirement for me (and a lot of guys) to live in any place. It's obviously not an issue anywhere in America, but it certainly can be abroad. I have quite a few high school friends in the military, and those stationed in Japan and Korea have no problem getting local women, but Afghanistan and Iraq are a completely different story.
For those cases where the people don't speak English, is it particularly difficult to learn the language when you're actually immersed in it on a daily basis?
Just hearing it all day every day won't make you suddenly magically start to understand it.
Of course, the difficulty level depends on the language. For example, many South-East Asian languages have tones and a highly bothersome writing system (especially compared to the 26 characters you're used to).
But no matter what foreign language you decide to learn, expect to make a huge effort.
> I've tried to learn Chinese and (a little bit of) Khmer. Khmer is much easier than Chinese, you'll pick up lots. But it's not essential.
Is Chinese used there as well, or was that just a hobby? According to Wikipedia, it looks like Khmer, unlike most SE Asian nations, is not tonal. That'd make things a lot easier for a tone deaf person like me.
> It is VERY social, unlike any other place I've lived. Don't worry, the local girls will love you.
What about the political climate? Is it less oppressive than China, or about the same or worse?
I'm a native-born American, with a degree from an American college. I don't see why my pay should be reduced because of my location when I'm doing the exact same work.
I develop software. I did this for 10 years in Australia before moving here and because of this have relationships with Australian companies that would allow me to do contracting work remotely for good money if that is what I wanted (however at the moment I'm working on personal projects, currently backrecord.com). You are right - GNI per person in Australia is ~$42k (assume it is similar for USA). GNI per person here is $650. So you live like a king.
Internet is reliable and fast enough (I use a 3G connection and this is very cheap). There are many telcos so lots of competition.
Weather is hot and at the moment wet. I love the weather.
btw: I don't think you'd ever get away with pretending to be located in America.
> GNI per person in Australia is ~$42k (assume it is similar for USA). GNI per person here is $650. So you live like a king.
Yeah, US is $46k according to Google. Can you afford a chef, maid, and chauffeur? That would be absolutely awesome! (Sorry if I sound a little too giddy; I come from a lower middle class, rural background, and the thought of doing software development while living like a king in a faraway tropical paradise sounds absolutely magical.)
> btw: I don't think you'd ever get away with pretending to be located in America.
Why is this (honest question, I really don't know much about freelancing yet)? The time difference? For phone calls, I'd use Skype to get an American number I could give clients, and my parents would have no problems scanning & emailing any documents that might arrive in the snail mail.
What would be the hurdles to get a startup running in China? The Great Firewall?
It's a big country so it's always possible to find a place that fits your personal taste. For example Sanya is a tropical island. Not much infrastructure there yet though.
1) Language, especially when getting stuff like visas, work permits, incorporation, etc. You can stay on non-work (or business) visas, but it's not terribly legal.
As for the English standard, imagine you have a country with 1 point something billion people, and speaking English was discouraged until about 20 years ago (except if you were in intelligence). How do you teach it? Only young people tend to be fluent. Most English teachers have never left the country, or had much one-on-one interaction with people who can speak good English. Students are great at certain elements of formal written grammar, if it's in an exam setting. Vocabulary can be OK. But fluency can be a problem.
2) Red tape. It's non-existant for the old woman selling wonton soup by the side of the street (as long as she can run faster than the local city management, or can afford to give them lots of free soup), but not likely to be fun for foreign businesses.
3) Talent. I'm sure it's there, but you won't know how to find it. You can't tell if people are bright, unless you can communicated easily. Also,expect programmers with great geometry, good algorithms, and no idea how to work in a team; kinda like most countries, really.
4) Honesty. Chinese believe that "actions speak louder than words". If you don't understand this, and you won't, you won't understand why everyone is telling white lies to you. People may explain this as "face" related, or "high context communication", but to some people it looks very dishonest.
As a foreigner you are not allowed to own a business in China. You must start a special "joint venture" company with a native Chinese partner, with something like $15-20k USD in a chinese bank. Expect to be screwed by your Chinese partner, the bank, the local government, your local vendors, your landlord, etc.
Depends on the city. In the city I live in, apartments cost the same as in Germany, but with worse quality. But prices go down drastically in the countryside (because nobody wants to live there).
I remember thinking of this one time as a teenager. Could we see a top down view of the rise of man? The huge caveat is that you have some capability of travelling faster than the light leaving earth, so that you can then look back and absorb the rays. It makes perfectly good sense that if you could travel faster than the speed of light you could use a massive telescope to peer back at the earth and see it's past geological events -- and I mean millions of years even, not just something trivial -- or given a strong enough telescope perhaps more detail could be seen. All of the information that left the earth as light is still out there, all over the universe.
>Could we see a top down view of the rise of man? The huge caveat is that you have some capability of travelling faster than the light leaving earth, so that you can then look back and absorb the rays.
Easier: look at the light as it was gravitationally refracted around a black hole; some paths will probably reverse the relevant light and send it back towards the Earth.
Unfortunately the size of the lens required to actually view this is impractically huge, possibly larger than the Solar System itself -- but it's fun to think about, I guess.
Also, because light is quantum and not continuous, eventually you get to the point where there isn't any light. You can't just keep cutting out X% of the light and still have some there.
Right, but the mirror would have to have been placed at least as far back as the half way point to where you want to see. If you want to see back two million years, you would have had to place the mirror one million years ago.
child_process.exec is different from n*x system exec. Node is still doing the fork()ing and exec()ing behind the scenes. Exposing those calls in node would give you direct access to the child process before executing your commands.
I think the implication is that the presence of women leads to higher performance among men, as well as any other traits that women contribute to the group. I think it's a give and take overall, and I bet women get better around men too. We are symbiotic after all. ;)
I was thinking the same. People see me as a jack of all trades, sometimes, and I really connected with some of the points the original poster made. But it's usually because the other person doesn't know a lot about whatever "trade" I'm doing at the moment, that they would call me a jack of all trades. Backend developers respect my backend work, designers respect my design work, etc, and that doesn't make me a master of none, nor you.
I'm sure there are plenty of kids that can circumvent this and access facebook from friends' computers, from school, cafes, etc. This is especially true if the kid knows they are being watched or if they have a laptop. Kids are smart. You suggest that a parent out-tech their child. I don't imagine thats so easy to do for some parents that aren't great with computers when they are up against a tech-savvy teenager.
Listen, what's the purpose of the law? To help parents control their children?
If you don't trust your children to understand your lessons about being careful online, do you install cameras on their way to school as well? Do you read their text messages and diaries? Is this seriously acceptable/normal over there or is this explicitly targeted at Facebook/social media sites?
For me this seems like an easy way out. If you are suspicious that your own kid does something you don't like (Yeah.. And you never did that in the good old times..), let's just snoop out their communication on Facebook.
And - as we all know - the things you say or write as a kid are like totally acceptable all the time. You'd never talk bad about things your parents like and you'd always like your parents to check out the people you've got a crush on..
Edit:
You suggest a kid can use a computer at another kids house (to do stuff on the 'net that has to be controlled) but trust your kid to not abuse the distance to your home in other ways? "Yeah, she's over at a friend's. Hope they're not on Facebook again."?
> Listen, what's the purpose of the law? To help parents control their children?
More likely, the purpose is to grandstand and give technophobic/worried parents the impression something is being done on their behalf, in the hope that they'll vote for the politicians responsible in future. Whether the law works is irrelevant.
There's always a way around this kind of thing, that's just part of life. If someone is adequately determined to circumvent your restriction, they can almost always do so. You're correct that many children could just use the computer at a friend's house, but there's nothing we can do about that short of imposing IP and/or MAC restrictions on Facebook logins (parents could extract Facebook passwords, however, and login to their childrens' accounts independently). A router with adequate reporting capabilities would be a huge upgrade for most families, and it's becoming increasingly important to place this kind of monitoring on the network side given the ever-growing preponderance of mobile devices.
The article seems to be linkbait anyways, but if it were true I would be entirely against it -- I am just pointing out where the argument for home network monitoring falls short when both parties are aware of the monitor being there. I suppose the key to having one, for a parent, or for someone building one, would be to leave a kid completely unsuspecting.
I suppose the key to having one, for a parent, or for someone building one, would be to leave a kid completely unsuspecting.
If I were a parent installing monitoring software, I think I'd tell my kids exactly what the software monitors, show them the logs, and teach them a way to get around it that logs access times but not content. I would say, "If you need to hide something from me, that's cool, but I'm going to know that you hid something and I'm going to ask about it, so keep that in mind." The purpose of the monitoring software would be to provide an opportunity to analyze the potential consequences of my kids' online activities.
Of course, imagining and doing are very different things, so ask me again in n years after I've actually started a family and see if I actually followed my own advice ;).
You ask the child for all their passwords and install a monitor on their computer for other activity. If the child is going to circumvent this by creating a fake account or lying to you about being on a social network then this law still won't help you. In order for a website to give you access to an account, you have to know that account exists.
Bottom line, monitoring your child is part of being a parent and there are already tools in place to help with this. As the saying goes Trust but verify.
Don't you see why this is obviously disastrous? There are so many analogies that can be drawn -- that I'm not even going to try. If you don't see why this is obviously ridiculous then read some stuff about the invisible hand of the market (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand). It is only a valid point from the narrow perspective of the workers involved and the employers of those workers selling their services.