While it's only 2% of the revenue of the i-Device, it pays over 1 MILLION people a living, middle class wage in China. Foxconn (i-Device maker) employs over 920k directly (wikipedia). They also get components which are also China made, not to mention how the wages stimulate local economies. Foxconn has supply chain requirements which effectively requires payment of living wages. Without i-Device, several million jobs would be lost.

This also doesn't factor in how China forces Foxconn to effectively bring prosperity to poorer parts of China. There are many parts of China where people are under-employed and Chinese govt effectively dictated to Foxconn to create factories to train worker, to bring wealth to stimulate local economy (building factories, employing people, etc) and every few years kicking them further inward while the local govt run factories take over the trained employees to make mature products and fulfill internal demand

China is all about the 8% growth, without i-Device, and foreign input, it simply would not be possible. The local corruption is too inefficient to maintain the growth.

300 char limit. Actual threaded conversation where you can see both the @ and the response. Twitter is simply NOT usable unless you subscribe to everyone in the world and decide to wade thru all the crap. G+ doesn't have the critical mass yet.

I admit that my mind is in the gutter today, but anyone else read it like that?

Anyone?

Now we're doing tech support for China users?

Wow! The subject of the article made it feel like 1999 again. Glad to see our swift, efficient justice system is on the ball.

It will kill all slashdot traffic!

Mostly it's kmplayer. linux and mac os just do not have the single app that have the breadth of protocol support and features that kmplayer does

I'm sick and tired of comments using the pop density excuse being an insightful.

Newsflash: fast broadband did not appear in the entire country overnight. Countries started with the largest cities, giving the maximum number of people access. South Korea has 80% urbanized population, same as US. If all urban areas has broadband on par with South Korea, the average speed would be similar to South Korea. But it's the people saying that we shouldn't do everything unless we can get 100% in one shot that's holding us back

In my experience, in the world of business, it is when someone in management finally snaps that you'd get the computer upgrade. If you write the business cases now, they'll just sit around getting outdated until the snap. Might as well wait for the snap, so you can write more updated business cases.

Does that make me an extreme TV watcher? Or just a couch potato?

erm... given that the typical 8.5x11 page has an 1 inch margin in each direction. The actual area covered by text is 6.5x9, which is 11.1" diagonal. Which is not too far off from iPad, which is 9.7" diagonal. So, an 12% shrinkage makes 12pt font unreadable? so 10pt font is unreadable?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomworger/509169005/

If you have not done so already, I would recommend using http://www.codechef.com/ as a source of practice tests for your students, it has tests in various degrees of difficulty and CPU limit. As many may have mentioned, programming competitions tend to have different CPU seconds for compiled lang like C/C++ and interpreted lang (Python, Java). Codechef does something similar, though you may want to check if the difference is reasonable for the competition you're preparing for.

Also, the site has a lot of foreign participants and daily ranking for benchmark tests, this way your students can see where they rank and you can help them improve.

As for language choice, I'd choose Java if you wish to orient your students to a more collaborative projects, or Python for more solo projects. Most other languages on your list have various problems listed above by others and won't get the students as far as these two would.

For violating the law? Or to the scientist for reporting the violation?

BTChina and its mirrors are already down. Many of the forums have closed their sharing forums,etc
The crackdown is on any site without an Audio/Visual distribution license. Which you probably cannot get without paying some unknown bureaucrat somewhere