There was a medieval cholera epidemic spread by multiple groups of religious pilgrims. It began with Hindu pilgrims bathing in the sacred Ganges at Varanasi & then going home; that spread it over most of northern India. Moslem pilgrims going West for the Hajj then spread it to Persia, Baghdad, Jerusalem, ... Finally, crusaders brought it to Europe. It killed tens or hundreds of thousands in all those places.

In the 80s, I met a PhD biochemist who had worked on making synthetic rubber from petroleum products. He said going the other way -- from the latex in rubber tree sap to something that could substitute for gasoline -- looked feasible. All the science was known and in principle the process would be straightforward, but neither the engineering nor the economic/political problems involved had been solved. Is anyone looking at this sort of thing today? What about oil-producing plants, such as oil palms?

I'd say the obvious way to go: https://silentcircle.com/

This article is on retiring abroad, but it contains some material relevant to the remote-work-overseas scheme: http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Retiring_abroad

I woked as a texg writer at a large company that I won't name. The group I was in developed test tools for internal use company use, nothing that got shipped to clients. They had 600,000-odd lines of C code in the tool set. One day I did some grepping through it. I cannot recall everything I checked, but all my results were awful. Things I do recall: A couple of thousand uses of functions that could fail like fopen() or malloc() without the idiom (fp = fopen(...)) != NULL or the same with ==. I checked a few manually, and none had any other error checks. Only about 5% of switch() statements had a default case. There were under 10 uses of the assert() macro in the whole set, all in one guy's code.

Yes. In particular, you mentioned doing various things related to databases. Consider learning more SQL and looking at DBA jobs. Those require most of the skills that progammers need, some of them pay quite well, and all the skills you already have would be useful fo a DBA.

An anonymous user writes: " It's time to switch from mass-email to a web page with RSS. If people really want your newsletter, they'll come to you." That would be fine in many cases, but it does not work for the purpose in question here. For example, consider a user in some country where many web sites are censored, blocked by government filters. He or she can use a proxy, but the gov't routinely blocks proxy sites too. Even VPN hosts may be blocked. Benhett's group's role is to continuously create new proxies, let people know about them, and hope they can get some mileage from them before they are blocked. The notifications cannot be done via the web, for two reasons. One is that the web site involved would of course be blocked, so it would do users little good. The other is that it would give censors a list of proxy sites to block.

I'm a bit of a conservative technically. No C++, just C, and if I need scripting I'll use the shell, sed(1), awk(1), etc. rather than learn Perl or PHP. I see the benefits of some of the more modern stuff; I just don't feel I need them. There are only two things added to Unix since Seventh Edition that I'm absolutely certain were improvements. One is TCP/IP networking. The other is the immutable files from 4.4 BSD. They seem to me to be a very simple and powerful security mechanism, one that would let me fairly straightforwardly secure much of a system. Much easier than working with SE-Linux in particular. My question of course is why the Linux kernel does not (yet?) support immutable files. Yes, I know about chattr(1), but it does not give BSD-style immutable files that even root cannot change.

muhula writes: The scary part of this chip and pin vulnerability is that banks have a history of blaming the consumer and not issuing refunds ... banks systematically suppress information about known vulnerabilities, with the result that fraud victims continue to be denied refunds Ross Anderson heads the Cambridge group that found this attack and the earlier man-in-the-middle attack (a gadget between card & reader that makes all PIN verifications succeed no matter what number you enter). He's been writing about bank vulnerabilities for years. A famous older paper: "Why cryptosystems fail" http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/wcf.html Problems with PIN numbers: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/security-of-self-selected-pins-is-lacking/

As someone said earlier, forget China (unless you can get a Western company to send you there at a Westen salary). Visa policies are fairly tight; there is no simple way to get a visa longer than one year. Ten-year vias are possible, but you need five years married to a Chinese, four years in a senior job in China, or starting your own successful company in China before you can even apply.

It is not a perfect fit for what you want, but check the Wikitravel article on "retiring abroad" for info on various places that are cheap to live and that do encourage immigration: http://wikitravel.org/en/Retiring_abroad

I'm flying through 12 times zones with stops in four countries. Seems like fairly low-key travel to me as a long-term expatriate, but does that rate as "spectacular" on your scale? I carry a laptop and do some work during the the holiday, but it isn't particularly "drudgework".

I was a techncal writer at home. Here in China, I work in the Computer Science department of a university as an editor. Publishing papers in international journals is a degree requirement for graduate students here. Their English is generally good enough to write something mostly comprehensible, but usually below the standard a decent journal requires. Your best bet for similar work in Beijing would be the top technical university there, Tsinghua: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_University