642 karma · joined August 24, 2009
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=camz
> I didn't realise Forbes let you blog under their brand now
In fact that's been their exact business model for a while. Good March 2012 article on that:
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/173743/what-t...
http://www.techinasia.com/negotiation-miit-orders-chinese-br...
Indeed there seems to be one plugin which hotlinks a js file from Github: http://www.ce.cn/cysc/tech/07hlw/guonei/201301/21/t20130121_...
But of course, blocking Github didn't affect any of the other plugins. So Phoenix TV is reporting that most other plugins are still actually working:
http://tech.ifeng.com/internet/detail_2013_01/21/21406667_0....
To put this in perspective, that charge is almost the same as the charge for one of the programmers themselves. My guess is, Nosotek most likely have to pay for a third guy from the government to watch the browsing habits of the first two, and that third guy has to belong to both the set of political reliables and the set of internet-savvy people --- two sets which are already small in North Korea and whose intersection is even smaller. Not to mention the cost of the extra computer and internet connection itself
More links about Nosotek:
http://www.nkeconwatch.com/category/organizaitons/nosotek/
I'm only surprised it doesn't happen more often. I guess, given the intended audience, it's not so surprising that it doesn't get abused. But still, it would be incredibly easy to send out a fake email pretending to be the Federal Register. Imagine all the fun you could have issuing your own antidumping notices and arms control regulations.
No doubt, in any supply chain, the highest value-added steps are not occuring in Kaesong. As pointed out by others, labour costs can't explain the difference of hundreds of dollars on these monitors and so samstave's guess is likely wrong (though I don't think he deserves to be downvoted into oblivion). But companies don't decide to locate at Kaesong for cost reasons anyway; rather, they're there for nationalistic reasons about promoting reunification. The factories there apparently don't even break even in the absence of South Korean government subsidies, and the future of those subsidies is uncertain: http://koreajoongangdaily.joinsmsn.com/news/article/article....
(Another slightly more complex point is that companies manufacturing products at Kaesong likely have to accept lower margins on them --- exporting them runs into sanctions issues in many countries, meaning they have to be sold in the domestic market --- but I doubt that's what's going on here to make these monitors so cheap either).
For those who are interested in this kind of stuff, the blog http://www.nkeconwatch.com/ makes good reading
The issue is not the tax owed (which as you correctly note tends to come out near zero) but the reporting requirements, which go well beyond those imposed on people who live in the US and keep all their assets there. Turbotax and other consumer software packages do not (and likely never will) support the kinds of complex forms you have to file if you settle outside the US and start leading a normal financial life like any other resident of your adopted homeland: Form 8621 if you'd like to buy ETFs on your local stock exchange, Form 3520 if you're obligated to participate in a local retirement plan --- and most relevantly to Hacker News, Form 5471/8858 (and maybe a 926 and 8832 as well) if you'd like to start your own company where you live. Estimated time for completion for Form 5471 for example is 44 hours (plus a recordkeeping burden of 130 hours, primarily due to the part where you have to redo all your company's accounts in US GAAP), and it has a failure-to-file fine of tens of thousands of dollars per accounting period.
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i5471.pdf
All of these forms (except Form 8938 & FBAR) must be filed regardless of the tax owed or the value of the asset in question. These forms (and their associated failure-to-file penalties) were designed with extremely rich onshore people in mind --- because Congress didn't think anyone besides a multi-millionaire tax-evader would use a "Controlled Foreign Corporation", "Passive Foreign Investment Company", or "Foreign Non-Grantor Trust". But as it turns out, the way the rules are written, literally every American who lives abroad for more than a few years ends up in a similar boat as American homelanders with more than 100x their income/assets, and has to pay accordingly for tax advice --- not advice on how to reduce their taxes (since once taxes in the country of residence are taken into account, there is already no tax owed), but advice on how to properly report to the IRS.
Housing is expensive, yes, but you can live cheaply in HK if you're willing to adjust your standards downwards: you can get a tiny flat in a low-rent area without worrying about violent crime, you can eat at cheap diners or buy groceries at cheap wet markets without worrying about food-borne diseases, etc, owning a car is logistically & socially unnecessary, etc. Not everyone needs these guarantees but it helps if you're the kind of person who worries a lot =)
What is the visa situation like in Hong Kong? I've read elsewhere that getting a visa for China is very difficult (this might be an area where HH is different from CN). Are you able to get reasonably long visas so that you can stay there indefinitely, or will you have to relocate again in 6 months or a year?
HK Immigration Department is totally separate from mainland China. Different laws, different visa types, different procedures. It's not that hard to get a real visa here. ImmD is strict about their requirements but they are not mysterious, arbitrary, or painfully slow like USCIS. There is a self-sponsored employment visa (called "investment visa", but it doesn't require big capital investment, just a business plan). It does have to demonstrate some sort of benefit to locals, but that can be in terms of using local suppliers for goods and services, rather than hiring lots of local workers. There's also the QMAS visa, a sort of points-based skilled migration visa that gives you more flexibility.
http://www.emigra.com.hk/hongkong/page76.php http://www.immd.gov.hk/ehtml/QMAS.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_Migrant_Admission_Schem...
Trying to work for your own company while on a tourist visa is a gamble. For 90 days you'll be okay. Longer term, some people have josscrowcroft's experience and go on visa runs for years without trouble. If you're low profile and don't compete with local companies the Immigration Dept. may ignore you. But others end up like this Aussie who came to HK to give a risk management seminar and got two months in prison followed by deportation for working illegally: http://news.sina.com.hk/news/2/1/1/2352180/1.html
If you decide to stay really longer term, the system is generally quite fair (at least to skilled workers and students; if you're a maid or construction worker it's a whole other kettle of fish): permanent residence takes seven years, but your "clock" doesn't reset if you change employers (e.g. if you get acquired and become an employee sponsored by your acquirer), and there's no ridiculous quota on how many PRs are approved each year. And once you have PR it's actually permanent: you can vote, you cannot be deported and there's no bullshit about "losing status" for filing a tax return as a non-resident or going back to your home country for a couple of years.
1 Orto SDK is Free Software.
2 Copyright Kobayashi Yuu
3
4 Use and publication of applications produced by using Orto SDK
5 are free for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.
6 For other uses of Orto SDK, or for redistribution of the Orto SDK,
7 please contact support@orto.jp beforehand.
8
9 Due to lack of contract with Sun Microsystems,
10 Orto is Java-style but it is not Java. Orto is an independent language.
11 Java is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems
12
13 The author is not responsible for any damages which may occur through use of Orto SDK
14 Furthermore, reverse engineering of Ordo SDK is prohibited.Later on I'll have a read and translate any interesting parts of it. Right now it's 4 AM here, I'm coming off a long and not-very-fun debugging session, and I'm going to sleep.
There was a very similar report published about half a year ago by China Merchants Bank. HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660178
I blogged about that report and translated some portions of it at the time, see there for my thoughts on these things. my analysis in short: not many people taking concrete action, not many people leaving permanently. http://notlearningcantonese.posterous.com/rich-emigrants-as-...
I particularly liked this quote: "[I]t's reasonable to expect to find a large number of retained legal representatives under a legal system in which people feel that their property rights are constantly threatened by rent-seeking litigiousness or in which rampant rent-seeking opportunity gives them an incentive to behave litigiously themselves. The rarity of retained champions in medieval England therefore suggests that rent seeking under trial by battle wasn't rampant."
One warning: since it seems you plan to majority-own some local startups I hope you have an excellent accountant to help you with Uncle Sam. (yep, Americans living overseas still have to file with the IRS. whole mess of complicated forms. can even end up having to pay tax on undistributed corporate profits if you're not careful ...)
Engineering Statistics Handbook http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/index.htm
Digital Library of Mathematical Functions http://dlmf.nist.gov/
The Quantum Algorithm Zoo http://math.nist.gov/quantum/zoo/
Edushi (http://edushi.com/), as others have mentioned --- IIRC they were one of the first to market
Baidu rolled out their own offering in 2010 (go to http://maps.baidu.com/, pick a city from the menu on the right, and then click the "三维" button)
City8 (http://city8.com/) don't have 3D maps, but they have a Streetview equivalent which they've been working on since 2008 in Shanghai, Beijing, and other cities: http://en.city8.com/search/search.aspx
Couple of articles which may be interesting reading (in Chinese) --- touching on China-specific privacy, legal/data licensing issues, etc. surrounding these maps:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/internet/2008-03/14/content_778745...
Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Mainland all write in Standard Written Chinese. Hong Kongers do not expect to see Cantonese in materials translated from a foreign original, and largely do not want to. HK/TW/CN have a few vocabulary differences (e.g. "taxi" is HK's "dishi", TW's "jichengche", and CN's "chuzuche"). Orthogonal to the vocabulary differences, HK and TW use Traditional characters, SG and ZH use Simplified. But I can write "chuzuche" in Traditional, or "jichengche" in Simplified. They still mean the same thing and are still understandable to all.
While we hope to offer translations into Traditional Chinese by Cantonese speakers in the future, currently our translations are not ideal if you hope to sell your product in Hong Kong.
Traditional to Simplified mapping is perfectly surjective. That is to say, it can be done by computer with 100% accuracy. Having a Traditional Chinese and a Simplified Chinese version of a document does NOT require two separate translations from the source document, as you seem to be implying.
Let me draw an analogy, Britain says "boot" and "bonnet" and "bobby" where America says "trunk" and "hood" and "cop". That does not mean everyone needs to get separate British English and American English translations, nor separate Taiwan Chinese and Singapore Chinese translations. In one extreme, if I were a high volume group-buying website looking to expand globally, yes of course I want the whole interface and the terms and conditions done up separately for each English and for each Chinese. In the other extreme, if I ran a boutique hotel and just wanted to give my Chinese customers directions from the airport to my doorstep, I have no need for separate translations.
In between is a giant grey area where full-service Language Service Providers generally try to provide some guidance to their clients. As a low-cost LSP maybe you are not aiming at the kind of client who needs this kind of guidance --- in which case you shouldn't be purporting to offer it. You should define yourself clearly.
Even better, these tax rates on both services and on dividends may be further reduced by bilateral treaties. Chile has tax treaties with many OECD members and South American countries. See http://www.sii.cl/pagina/jurisprudencia/convenios.htm
US citizens/permanent residents should note a few things. Like trevalyan says, don't let it discourage you --- but be aware of the issues that could come up. If you participate in the program, you will become an owner of a "Controlled Foreign Company". You have to file a Form 5471 every year with the IRS and an FBAR declaration (TD F 90-22.1) with the US Treasury Department for any bank accounts owned by you or your Chilean company. 5471 in particular is a pain in the ass. Also if you go back to the US afterwards and continue running your Chilean company, it can get very complicated --- look up "Subpart F" (Internal Revenue Code sections 951-965), in particular "foreign base company services income" --- start at http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/26/usc_sup_01_26_10_A_20_1...
Another (less pressing) problem is that Chile has signed a tax treaty with the US, but it is not yet ratified by either side's legislature. Until the treaty has been ratified and the IRS determines that it meets their requirements, dividends that a US citizen receives from a Chilean company are NOT qualified dividends. They will be taxed at your ordinary US income tax rate and not the reduced rate of 15%. But I'd imagine by the time you are profitable enough to think of paying dividends, the treaty will be settled and this will no longer be a problem (though of course, the provisions for qualified dividends may have sunsetted by that time!)
Actually in the end, it was notable enough for Wikipedia. The article was not deleted again following the initial speedy deletions for copyright violation and the like. It was nominated for a full deletion discussion, but every single person other than the nominator voted "keep" [1]. Furthermore, the nominator (the guy who initiated the full debate) isn't exactly a model Wikipedian; he had been registered for less than half a year, and left in a huff just two months later after administrators told him to be more patient with some guy who had added unsourced names to a soccer roster article [2][3].
But it is doubtful whether Internet access alone will make people in developing countries contribute to Wikipedia ... As those from developing countries come online and try to edit the encyclopedia, a number of conflicts have arisen due to tensions between so-called ‘inclusionists’ and ‘deletionists’ in the encyclopaedia ... the homophily of the current network is coming up against its need to expand and diversify
Incidentally, one of the users who proposed the Makmende article for deletion (one of the other times, not the main debate above) is himself from a developing country [4]. And he's contributed to Wikipedia numerous articles about his home country (as well as others about Swedish, Taiwan, and Russian chemists) [5].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Woogee
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_not...
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Makmende&actio...
For those who are curious or suffering from insomnia, here's the actual laws that make Carnival mostly tax-exempt: Internal Revenue Code Sec. 883:
(a) The following items shall not be included in gross income of a foreign corporation, and shall be exempt from taxation under this subtitle: (1) Ships operated by certain foreign corporations: Gross income derived by a corporation organized in a foreign country from the international operation of a ship or ships if such foreign country grants an equivalent exemption to corporations organized in the United States. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode26/usc_sec_26_0...
"Foreign corporation" is defined in Sec. 7701:
(4) Domestic: The term “domestic” when applied to a corporation or partnership means created or organized in the United States or under the law of the United States or of any State unless, in the case of a partnership, the Secretary provides otherwise by regulations. (5) Foreign: The term “foreign” when applied to a corporation or partnership means a corporation or partnership which is not domestic. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/26/usc_sec_26_00007701----...
In some countries, the laws and treaties care about the "place of effective management" of a corporation in deciding where it is to be taxed. That would catch out Carnival. For example, the OECD model tax convention says: Profits from the operation of ships or aircraft in international traffic shall be taxable only in the Contracting State in which the place of effective management of the enterprise is located http://browse.oecdbookshop.org/oecd/pdfs/browseit/2310081E.P...
However, the US uses the following in most of its treaties instead: Profits of an enterprise of a Contracting State from the operation in international traffic of ships or aircraft shall be taxable only in that State. And, there is no double-taxation treaty between the US and Panama in the first place, only a tax information exchange agreement.
http://www.google.com/corporate/address.html
To be fair, I only thought to check that because I recognise the guy's name and know he's in CS (though I had no clue until today that he worked for Google) --- he co-developed LibSVM, which I've used heavily:
"Non-exclusive jurisdiction" clauses are put in because of problems with enforcement of foreign court judgments. If you sue someone in your country and win, but he has no assets in your country, you have to go to his country and convince a court there to enforce your country's judgment if you want to get your hands on any of his money.
Contract law differs a lot between countries, but any judge anywhere whom you ask to recognise a foreign court judgment wants to know at least three things: #1: the court which issued the original judgment actually has jurisdiction. #2: there's no more avenues of appeal above that court. #3: you informed the other guy before you sued him. If you can prove any one of those three is untrue, then you derail the enforcement of the foreign judgment. The "non-exclusive jurisdiction" clause makes it impossible to argue about #1.
Signing a contract for "non-exclusive jurisdiction" in HK doesn't restrict you or HKCorp trying to sue each other anywhere in the world you can convince a judge to listen. But it does mean that if HKCorp sues you in HK, wins, and then comes to your country to collect, you can't argue that the HK court was not a proper venue. While if you sue HKCorp in your country, win, and go to HK to try to get the judgment recognised, the HK judge will want to know why you didn't just sue in HK.
Newly-added bytes may be true or false. They may be useful or not useful even if true --- readers do not want every byte about a given topic, they want a few tens of thousands of the most useful ones. (This is entirely orthogonal to the inclusionist-deletionist debate about what topics should be included. Some bytes may be useless in the context of a main topical article about Alan Alda himself, but they would be very relevant to a subtopical article about Alan Alda's dental health).
For a popular topic, you'll have dozens of people adding bytes of varying quality. Insiders subtract the false or useless bytes (an action easily captured in statistics and then maligned on the internet by pundits), but also look at the true and useful bytes, fact-check them, and then leave them in place. This contribution --- curation --- is not captured in any statistics, but it is an important part of the mechanism by which you can have 1 expert and two enthusiastic amateurs stop by every few weeks on their lunch break to expand an article with no centralised notice or approval, without having have the place turned into a mess by the 97 vandals and well-meaning incompetents who came by in the meantime.
The real problem Wikipedia faces is in the long tail of topics, where there is only one person adding the bytes, and that person is either grinding an axe, self-promoting, or afflicted with incurable "nerdview". The well-meaning, harried, underinformed Wikipedia insiders inevitably screw up when they try to distinguish useless vs. useful bytes on these topics, but I wouldn't call the outsiders who added the bytes in the first place "experts". Unfortunately both sides' conduct may be scaring away the people who are actual experts on those long-tail topics ...
In the past the TWSE had a similar mechanism to the one you suggest: 30-second call auctions all day long (as compared to other exchanges who typically only had auctions at opening and closing time, and did continuous trading the rest of the day). Basically they'd give one best bid/ask update on a stock, gather new orders for a while (it was slightly random, sometimes as little as 22 seconds IIRC), match them at the volume-maximising price, and send out the new best bid/ask update. (Within this structure there was still time priority --- i.e. you only had to wake up once every 30 seconds, but when you did you had to send your new order ASAP. Also there was no atomic price amendment message ... you had to send an order delete and then an order create message, which caused all sorts of hilarity when they decided to take more than 30 seconds to send you a cancel acknowledgement.)
I read a study from 1998 basically supporting your position ... the authors concluded that "The call market method is more effective in reducing the volatility of high-volume stocks than low-volume stocks. This contradicts conventional wisdom which suggests that the call market method is superior for thinly traded stocks, while the continuous auction method is preferred for heavily traded stocks. The call market method does not impair liquidity and price discovery in the call market appears more efficient than in the continuous auction market." http://www2.hawaii.edu/~rheesg/Belgrade/Taiwan/TSEfinal.pdf
On the other hand, just a few months ago, the TWSE introduced continuous trading in response to pressure from exchange participants --- but only for warrants: http://www.twse.com.tw/en/about/press_room/tsec_news_detail.... http://www.twse.com.tw/en/products/trading_rules/mechanism01...
At this point I don't know yet of any detailed studies of the effects of that change. Also it's been years since I traded TW stocks, and I never traded TW warrants, so unfortunately off the top of my head I can't offer you an anecdotal account of the effects of the change either.
Somewhat off topic (bear with me, I do have a point at the end), but he already does pay taxes in the US: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2007/04/15/taxes-dont-have-to-be-pa...
In fact any person anywhere in the world whether American or not can volunteer to pay taxes to the US government even if he doesn't have a single US-based customer. All you have to do is incorporate in the US with an American nominee director+secretary and yourself as the sole shareholder. Then it's up to you whether you want to tell your local government about all the profits your American business is raking in.
Delaware in particular makes it hard for foreign governments to find out exactly who owns a particular corporation there. This is why you sometimes hear America referred to as the world's largest tax haven: http://www.lectlaw.com/filesh/bbg33.htm
However, for an American citizen living overseas and trying to run a small business, the main reason to incorporate in the US (rather than whatever country you're living in) is not to evade foreign taxes, but to avoid American paperwork. American owners of foreign corporations have to file form 5471 and spend all their time worrying whether any of their income can be classified under Subpart F (particularly Foreign Base Company Services Income --- look it up if you'd like your head to explode), in which case it DOES get taxed in the US as if it were a dividend to you personally. If you're Google and you want to pretend that your office in Bermuda with zero programmers and three lawyers is actually a major profit centre for software income, this is easy. If you're one guy selling bingo software, this is much harder, because you don't have the money to hire an international tax lawyer. Thanks President Kennedy!
Right now all the multinational corporations are deferring US taxes on their foreign subsidiaries by using Form 8832 declarations to create "hybrid entities" (ones which different governments disagree are corporations or pass-through entities). This all started back in 1997, when the IRS amended the entity classification rules in response to perceived abuses. Next year that law might get amended to make that impossible (Obama already tried last year, but failed), at which point all the high-priced accountants and lawyers will comb through the new regulation to find some other bright idea, while I hide under my pillow and cry.
Anyway, rant over, here comes the point I promised: US laws, whether in the field of immigration or taxation or whatever, may start out simple, but they inevitably get amended into increasing complexity until they make no sense at all, because unlike, say, the laws of Vanuatu, there's so many people looking for loopholes. Thus the laws manage to ensure that no one abuses process X, by making it damn near impossible for anyone, abusive or not, to get through process X in the first place. So I don't really have high hopes for this startup visa bill. It may pass, and in the first year hopefully some genuine foreign entrepreneurs will grab on to the chance to get a foothold in the US. But then there will be abuses, or maybe only perceived abuses blown out of all proportion by the media (or by disgruntled competitors who use PR agents to plant stories in the media), and then the law will get amended into oblivion starting from year two.
Malaysia is a lot more functional than Thailand on most measures (GDP per capita, number of coups per decade, corruption perception index, etc.)
In the foreign press they get quite a bad rap ... not only do they hang Aussie drug smugglers like Singapore, but they also have racial discrimination laws, religious police who raid bars and hotels, ex-PMs who spout off about "the Jews", etc. And on the ground, they definitely have worse public safety, more drugs, and more cops asking for "tea money" than Singapore (fewer than Thailand, though).
On the other hand there's less alcohol, bigger houses, and cheaper schools, which means a lot of expats perceive it as more family-friendly than Singapore despite the obvious drawbacks. And in reality, KL still has good nightlife despite the occasional tussle with the Islamic Affairs officers (who don't have any authority over non-Muslims anyway).
The Malaysian legal system isn't great, but it's common law, and it's good enough that all the fund managers are happy to use Labuan as a tax haven and a conduit for investing ... into South Korea, who haven't been very successful in pressuring the Malaysians to take Labuan out of the double-taxation agreement. (This is for example how Newbridge Capital managed to avoid paying capital gains tax on Korea First Bank back in 1998). I can't imagine any fund manager or rich tax evader being happy to park his money in a bank in Bangkok even if their taxes were lower.
On the bright side, and directly on topic for Hacker News: both Malaysia and Singapore beat the pants off of any other place in Asia (including Hong Kong) for the level of support they're giving to startups. The talent pool is better in Singapore (simply cuz so many Malaysian grads end up there and don't want to come back), but the real estate costs are a much bigger barrier. See e.g.
But even then, if you take the definition he suggests for a "city" (400 persons/km2), every single farming village in China would qualify. That's why China has a much higher population density threshold for defining urban counties.
[1] e.g. http://www.agecon.ucdavis.edu/extension/update/articles/v9n1... http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/agsaaea05/19565.htm
Local social network sites can get a toehold because Facebook or Friendster are not localised in their language, so they start as "clones". But that's just the start. It's stupid to look down on them just because they copied an interface or a few ideas. They grow (and their other local competitors die) because they execute well in their market. E.g. Renren may look a lot like Facebook, but the actual workings of the site are a lot different --- the two most obvious differences being that you can see who visited your profile, and game mechanics play a much larger role (e.g. you get "level up" by logging in for n consecutive days, giving you profile badges and the like). This annoys the living hell out of me, but I'm guessing most of their users like it, otherwise they'd be on another site instead.
Thanks to the Great Firewall, the Renren users don't have the option of going to Facebook, so there's no direct competition there, yet. But local sites can survive against international competitors as long as they execute well. Korean search engine/portal Naver is still going strong, because they continued to come up with strategies to stay ahead of their competition and keep their site as a destination (incentivising user-generated content, entering into tie-ups with local newspapers, putting printed dictionaries and encyclopedias online for free, etc.).
And on the other hand, Korean social networking site Cyworld executed extremely poorly, which is why they are struggling now. Ten years ago I knew plenty of people with Cyworld accounts --- Korean international students I studied with, and even Korean Americans (who couldn't even sign up on their own, but had to use their relatives' citizen ID numbers to sign up!). Then in 2006 Cyworld announced they were going to try to enter into the USA market. But they didn't leverage the existing userbase at all --- instead they created walled gardens for the USA and China which were completely separate from their Korean network. So of course I didn't bother signing up, and neither did hundreds of thousands of other people who all had friends with Cyworld Korea accounts and who certainly would have signed up if it would have connected them to their Korean friends. Oops. (The lack of support for anything but IE didn't help either). And now, all the Koreans who were studying abroad when Facebook started getting big have graduated and are going back to Korea for work (and getting all their domestic friends onto Facebook too).
Mongolia has the opposite story: the local search engines like Haih couldn't come up with any strategy to become profitable and are now defunct. The only feature they offered was Mongolian-language search. Google didn't --- and still doesn't --- handle Mongolian stemming. If you search just for "Ulaanbaatar", you won't find Ulaanbaatarad (in Ulaanbaatar), Ulaanbaatariin (Ulaanbaatar's), etc. But Mongolian stemming didn't make any money for Haih, and they had no strategy beyond "copy Google" (right down to the logo design). In contrast, at least for now, the local Mongolian social networks (Naizuud, Banjig 360, Ibox, etc.) are doing great --- plenty of Mongolians have accounts on Mixi or Facebook, but at least for now they're happy to keep using both the international sites and the local sites. Wonder how long that will last. Interesting times!
Nothing in there about the Intertubes, of course, and it's quite vague about exactly what constitutes pornography, but basically, you need a license from the Ministry of the Interior or the Ministry of Local Government, and if you violate it they can throw you in jail for three to six years and fine you.
E.g. http://www.nishinippon.co.jp/nnp/item/190712
(Google translated: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h... ... edit: I see that the machine translation managed to invert the sense of the last paragraph. The official quote there is actually "Even with this problem, we probably will NOT have to revise the average longevity".)
Unfortunately this factoid has been ignored in the Anglophone media, leaving it to a few nutcases on bulletin boards and blogs to try to get the word out (there is even a guy in the Economist comments section who mentions this).
Obviously someone out there thinks 1600 euros a month is a good deal for two guys who cannot IM you when they run into a mind-numbingly common blocker. Or that the internet connection (and the salary of a third politically-reliable guy to censor the internet traffic of the first two) is worth another 800 euros of productivity to two guys who have never heard of stackoverflow and don't go on Skype to do language exchange to improve their English skills.
But for me, if I want a cheap Korean-speaking programmer, I'd go to Yanbian or Shenyang in Northeast China. And if I wanted to do my part to liberalise North Korea, I'd lend some money to a Chinese cross-border trader so he can buy more South Korean DVDs and cellphones to sell in Sinuiju.
Like I said, there's no linguistic barrier against giving directions based on left or right in Balinese. It's merely cultural. Balinese people just don't do it when talking to each other. You might say, they demonstrate solidarity with each other against outsiders by using this geographic knowledge which sets them apart. (In Honolulu, which was originally populated by very distant linguistic relatives of the Balinese, the buses run "windward" and "leeward" even in English.) And besides, it's not very deep knowledge anyway --- the direction words are literally seaward-sunriseward-mountainward-sunsetward. What's more confusing is, there's Balinese villages both north and south of the big mountain, and they all use those directional words according to their local geography. Thus the ordering of the points is different. A counterclockwise turn for a southerner and a counterclockwise turn for a northerner take them through the above-mentioned points in opposite orders. I suspect the problem with the Balinese dancer boy to which the NYT is alluding comes from the following problem: his teacher wanted him to do something in a circle and he kept going the wrong way.
Which leads to the final rambling point: you'll probably notice that all the languages the NYT have mentioned are tiny ones you haven't heard of, unless you did a linguistics degree or came from the same province. I highly doubt all the big languages have always been purely egocentric-direction ones. Rather, they became that way when people who came from widely separate geographic areas had to use them with each other. It's easy to keep track of your North and South if you're in the middle of a giant desert or in a village where you've lived your whole life. It's hard if you're a merchant who sailed from the other end of the archipelago and walked down the streets of an unfamiliar port city, and so, you start asking for, and receiving, left/right directions instead.
To give an analogy: if a linguist from Mars gathered a corpus of business English conversation, he'd notice that men refer to something 36 inches off the ground as "desk height" rather than "penis height", and call a sphere an inch or so in diameter "ping pong ball size" rather than "testicle size". Similarly a small discus is "penny sized" (adjusting for your local currency) rather than "anus sized", a small stone is "fist-sized" rather than "ballsack-sized", etc. Is this because in English it's linguistically impossible to make comparisons to your genital or excretory organs? No, it's because it's socially unacceptable at work; someone may complain to HR and get you fired if you make that comparison.
Similarly, the reason the egocentric direction system is so dominant in Western (and Chinese, Japanese, etc.) culture is because of habit and custom --- urban civilians don't usually see sunrise or sunset from inside the office buildings and malls in which they're most likely to give these kinds of directions, so they never get instinctively oriented and the habit of giving directions by compass points never takes off. It has nothing to do with linguistics.
And in the right situation, giving east-west-north-south style directions actually can take hold (which is helpful when you've got two sets of elevators and telling someone to "turn left" after getting off will send them walking in a fairly random direction). At certain times in my life, all my colleagues knew their north from their south. Were we all members of a sensitive indigenous tribe with a deep connection to nature due to our special mother tongue? No, we were stock traders; we knew which way was east in the building because our asses were in our seats before dawn and we watched the sun rise through the same window every day and set through the opposite one. Put us in a different building (e.g. due to switching jobs) and we'd be confused for a few days, just like the Bali kid who tried to get dance lessons from a teacher in another village.