Yet another great example of our congressmen throughly reading the very laws that they vote upon...
If only most Americans had somewhat decent interest in politics beyond the narrow confines of our own lives, we could catch things like this much sooner before they became a media worthy issue in the first place. Oh well, at least this is one win for sensibility in this case, unlike some of the recent SCOTUS cases. Cheers!
It's really no problem at all.
If you plan on teaching in one of the larger cities, then it would be very good to have a Bachelor's Degree in some English-related subject. Barring that, you can pick up a 100 hour TEFL/TESL certificate in about a month, which will open up the door to many schools.
If you head to one of the smaller cities where foreigners are a bit harder to come by, then you really don't need any qualifications at all. All you have to be is a native speaker who is willing to take the time and the energy to teach, and many schools will happily accept you.
Just be warned that although China is a reasonably modern place in many aspects, coming from the Western world is still a huge culture shock in terms of how things are done around here, so be prepared for a lot of adjustments. Since you're coming from Germany rather than the U.S. though, you will probably have an easier time than I did adjusting to the metric system and the public transportation systems here.
Since China's wages are still about 1/10th that of us in the Western world, you will definitely not be making any money to take back to Germany, but it's still a fun experience, especially if you enjoy working with kids. The younger Chinese kids are *NOT* shy at all, but the older they get, the more shy they seem to become. All in all, it's been a good experience.
When I was growing up, it was ST: TNG which got me interested in science along with Mr. Wizard and a whole lot of good teachers along the way who introduced me to model rocketry, optics, and home chemistry sets. We've advanced so much since then in terms of homebrew projects and access to information via the Internet, but have also lost a lot in terms of freedoms and regulations since 9/11. So many things that we used to do because we were kids and sorely for fun are now outlawed or frowned upon in this time and age. It's hard to say whether this generation will have an easier time growing up than we did.
The thing that I've found after switching careers from a programmer in the U.S. to an English teacher in China is that kids are amazing resilient and playful wherever they are. All you have to do is to give them the right tools, a little push along the way, and it's incredible what they can accomplish. Now, the U.S. educational system is still an order of magnitude better than the Chinese one in many ways, but the rest of the world is catching up slowly, and it's quite possible that the playing field will be leveled in our lifetimes. I sorely wish that my current students will have a chance to get outside of the standardized testing mindset and be able to develop their own thoughts and ideas for themselves, but it's an uphill climb against society in both countries for different reasons. All we can do as teachers is to try.
Half the guys over here live on $2 a day, so even $1 would be a lot out of their pockets. 8-(
Now, if every adult male in the U.S. contributed $5, I could definitely go for that. It's about as good as the $3 campaign contributions on your taxes that you keep getting nagged about every year, and it would go to something that I could tell my kids about rather than how things used to be when the shuttle was still running and we could send our own astronauts to the ISS. [sighs]
I was in high school when one of our fellow lab assistants by the name of Lucas (although I cannot remember his last name to save my life at the moment) introduced me to Slashdot in 1997. It was one of the few sites that I went to everyday along with ESPN and the New York Times. I've lost my login three times since then, so I will definitely not be competing with the rest of you for lowest UID status, but I can definitely say that this is one of the sites which has really influenced me throughout the years, and has helped me view all of the marvels of life from perspectives foreign to my own. I know that we complain a lot here about broken JavaScript, CSS, and the horrors of Slashcode, but at the end, other than Arstechnica, this is the place that I come to for stories that interest me.
Thanks for all of your work here, Rob. I never knew you personally, but your contributions have shaped our generation more than you'll ever know. May God bless you in all of your future endeavors.
Get Johnny 5 to drive it.
That was about my sentiment as well, only my brain added:
But jeez... I don't have that old ISA SoundBlaster card with the game port on it anymore...
[dons long, white beard and fake glasses] These younger kids probably don't even know what a game port is anymore. Now get off my lawn!
You can't really gauge the efficiency of sandybridge (the current cycle of intel i3/i5/i7 cpus) by their "northbridge" heat. It's true that these chips don't draw so much power, but with sandybridge platform has memory controllers and integrated graphics right in the CPU; you can guess that these two components draw the most power. It's probably still a minor win for power efficiency, but it's not like there's been a huge efficiency breakthrough.
It's interesting that you should use the word "normal" in your post, because here in China, Internet filtering is indeed normal, the same way that you would considering post-9/11 groping to be normal and being constantly watched in the streets of London normal. Do I agree with it? Certainly not, but every place has its own culture and laws, and for the most part, the modern Chinese people are getting along just fine without trying to fit in with Western ideals.
It's actually quite amazing to me how much China has progressed from the days of the Cultural Revolution though. Between all of the new high-tech buildings, the girls in miniskirts out on the streets, the new high speed train which rivals the Japanese, and the huge influx of luxury items, it's hard to believe that this was a nation torn apart and hungry just half a century ago. Now, I believe that the Bill of Rights (not the Constitution itself, due to that nasty 3/5th compromise) is one of the greatest ideas in history, but China has placed economic freedom above political freedom in its efforts to pacify its people, and having a chance to be here and talk to various people, I've actually found that it's working decently well.
Not every place is like the U.S., but not every place is like the Middle East either. I really don't know how the "China model," as it's often called, is going to end up, but to be honest, propaganda is everywhere. How many times have you watched a commercial where everything was true? How many people do you know who watch Fox news or listen to Rush Limbaugh? Even NPR and the BBC have their own biases. How many actual, purely objective articles can you find in the mainstream media? Certainly, we don't have the state mandated media in the U.S. like China does, but the important thing to accept is that everyone has their own propaganda, no matter where they are. It's just a matter of which ones you agree with and which ones you don't.
Do the things that work for the U.S. automatically work in China? It's going to be very interesting to find out in the next ten to twenty years as China continues developing and opening up to the world. I'm curious to see how this huge housing bubble and the enormous debts of the local governments are going to turn out, but there's no denying China's growth and advancement in the last 30 years. With Russia's fade from glory, I'm hoping that some competition can get the U.S. out of its current funk and start being the country that we're capable of being. If not, China will be glad to sell us everything that we need, and once they get past the copying stage and start innovating for themselves, it's going to be scary.
Just tried it here from Kunming with the results:
Wikileaks Cables Say No Bloodshed Inside Tiananmen Square 235
2011
2009
Bing Censoring All Simplified Chinese Language Queries 214
Chinese Social Websites Go Under "Maintenance" 84
Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Others Blocked In China 151
20 Years After Tiananmen, China Stifles Online Dissent 235
China Blocks YouTube, Again 127
China Makes Arrests To Stop Internet Porn 204
2009
2008
China Does U-Turn, Lifts Ban On Websites 133
China Allows Access to English Wikipedia 219
2008
2007
Users Rage Against China's 'Great Firewall' 277
Yahoo Confirms Beijing Blocking Flickr 163
2007
2006
Helping Other Big Brothers Go High Tech 97
Yahoo China has the Worst Filtering Policy 184
Poor Spelling Beats Google's China Filter 248
2006
2005
Business At The Price Of Freedom 254
2005
2001
China Prosecuting Webmaster Over Site 27
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Stupid Slashdot not respecting my pre element...
I've been a daily Slashdot reader since 1997, and I've been exploring China since March of this year. The only time that I've ever had Slashdot blocked was with the Falen Gong article a couple of months back. Apparently, there was a url keyword detection routine which filtered the page out. Every other page has loaded just fine. Fortunately, since I have a shell account on a U.S. server, ssh -D [port] got around it quite nicely.
I'm not sure how it is in the rest of the country, but here in Kunming, if you run a website, you have to have it registered with the police, which means that someone is probably periodically checking on your site to make sure that the content is considered appropriate and "harmonious." It is definitely a big brother approach, but considering the situation with the cameras in London, Homeland Security in the U.S., and the filtering in Australia, I really can't see an open web besides perhaps a couple of the European countries. To be honest, it reminds me an awful lot of the early gated communities like AOL, only this time, we're dealing with government rather than corporate interests.
Youtube, Dailymotion, Twitter, Facebook, and other such sites are blocked on a constant basis requiring a VPN or SOCKS proxy to get around. It's a bit of an annoyance, but most people around here simply use the native Chinese versions and don't notice anything of the outside world. It's only us foreigners that really know what's going on.
On the one plus side, China Telecom has a 3G mobile data plan with a 100 hour per month limit. I haven't found a data cap on it yet, and I used 17GiB last month watching Stargate: Universe. It's 500 yuan for the adapter and 400 yuan for six months, which works to ~67 yuan, or slightly over $10 per month use. Take that, AT&T!
Whenever I finish exploring here and get to Europe, I'll get a chance to see how all of you fancy Europeans have been haggling us Americans about our data plans and cell phones for years.
I'm giving up my mods on this thread to post this, but I simply couldn't resist jumping in with Buzz Lightyear's
To infinity... and beyond!
Personally, I think we should just start going to build numbers for every project. Having Firefox 76,326,358 would certainly take care of that annoying Chrome rivalry.
Ignoring politics is the wrong decision particularly in a discussion involving honeycomb. Check out the forums at tabletroms.com and you'll find that the notion ink adam is far and away the most popular tablet among enthusiasts - the group containing the largest amount of current and potential developers. There's no honeycomb for the adam or for that matter most of the other tegra2 tablets which are equally capable to the motorola xoom. Android has a great position in the market because up to now google hasn't resorted to the bullying and special treatment of other platforms. Google has failed to realize that this fair treatment and openness is a key to their success before honeycomb, and this failure is having a large impact on the success (or ultimate failure) of their current version.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
