I for one, work in a corporation that outsources to many development centers in India and Mexico. My job is an IT manager. I have heated discussions with many of my friends on what the value of outsourcing to India is.
For short term, high turnover, and mission critical projects...it's tough to have the trust to give the work to someone that you can't see on a daily basis so you'd rather pay 10X the amount of $$ to hire someone in the US that is local to your team. That is a valid point, however from a sheer economics perspective, you can have so many more dedicated resources abroad on a significantly lower salary doing more work than that one genius programmer in the USA. The key is communication and quality standards. Run multiple projects with a slightly longer timeline and you will get the same volume of work done, just each project will have a slightly longer cycle time. And as an IT manager, I feel that even my job will be outsourced at some point. We have two Indian IT managers dedicated to our team too...one on shore and one off shore...they help to manage and maintain the quality of work and resources on our India team. I have to say..some of these guys are really smart...others...well, what do you expect for $500 USD/month?
I can honestly say that I would prefer a small, light cell phone with great reception, text messaging, vibrate, silent, and a few ring tones...games are optional...and REALLY LONG BATTERY LIFE...
That's all I ask. I don't ask for much. The buttons don't even have to light up:)
So does the mass itself flow or is it the wave propagation within the mass that flows?
If the former, than what happens to this mass under constant acceleration? I would surmise that without friction, there would be no heat buildup thus we could get this thing "flowing" pretty darn fast. If the latter, well, we can accelerate a wave through this matter maybe even faster than the speed of light. But then again, there was already an article on that kind of stuff.
The point is that there is no security to bypass... None, zip, zero, zilch.
What do you mean? They encrypted the data in binary and then broke it up into TCP/IP packets.
Just because the journalist could listen for the SSID of the network, connect to it, browse/download sensitive data, and then decode the binary data into a format that he could understand doesn't make it right. In fact, this should be protected under the DMCA or the DMCA should be reworded to include things like this.
On another note...what's the difference between the above scenario, with someone viewing data on an unencrypted wireless network from the one where someone finds a phone number of a modem, dials into a system, and downloads sensitive data? The former is considered OK because the data isn't officially encrypted and protected under the DMCA whereas the latter was illegal because of ignorance and fear. In my mind, they are the same thing...
He's probably a bad pilot...so this setup makes it much safer for him.
Also, what if this guy was handicapped in someway that made it impossible for him to fly in a real airplane? Or what if he was scared of heights? Those are all possibilities...
Though...I'm agreeing with everyone else and going with the virtual pr0n idea too.
Anyone think that Honda's robotics department is slowly adapting some of their technology to the auto division?
I remember writing a similar algorithm for my robot using sonar sensors...the robot would slow down just a little so that the rest of the systems could figure out how to avoid the obstacle ahead, or if it really is a obstacle....the "other systems" in this case would probably be the driver.
I think this could be a good thing as long as it's implemented correctly...though i can see how auto braking COULD have some bad implications... on a fast turn close to the threshold of the maximum tire/road friction point (much less if there is oil or ice), then if you hit the brakes...the car will skid or slide.
So I don't get it. Progress is progress...if the motiviation for inventions and creative thinking is only to block your enemy, so be it!
The first one to think of the idea should get control of it. The problem however, is the ideas being credited as novel. The main issue here is that even though there is no "prior art", there was lots of "prior thought", which is why people don't like the current patent system.
This sounds familiar...not RIAA stuff, but how did the web start? Look at yahoo for instance, some kid at a college decided to make a directory of links to facilitate a community with a information exchange. Is this any different? Just because his "search engine" was efficient and worked well (users could get whatever they wanted) doesn't mean he did anything wrong. RIAA is definately wrong in this case. If they are right, then any search engine is in violation of the RIAA's ideals. Can google prove that it doesn't facilitate downloading of illegal materials? Doubtful.
Also I remember that there were lots of muds in the xxxxx.fi address range that I used to frequent. Many of them used the standard mud releases and didnt really modify anything..so all of my BOTS would run perfectly. Telnet to mud, run bot, check back every few days or so...within a month you have a very good character.
I didn't have a life when I played them..made my girlfriend sit and watch me play...:)
Coded a DOS mud once...added the RIP song when you died... gave access to everyone in the computer labs and then held a beta test. The lab admin at the school banned my game beacuse it was too distracting from school work...blah! In that game I also coded a "mass_kill" function too...but I was the only God.
Dude...he's "the one". He got into the core, figure out how to change the world. Saved us all from the slavery and bondage of the Ubisoft programmers.
I find the following comments relevant and funny... -teleporting hostile guards into the safe-holds -teleporting everyone to a city at the bottom of the sea (from another post) Homer Simpson: There'll be no accusations, just friendly crustaceans [under the sea]
Doesn't this make the whole gaming experience more realistic (in a fantasy sense)?
Does anyone remember the days of mudding in ascii terminals? Gods, coders, wizards could be good, or bad. You just had to try not to piss them off or you would get your equipment stripped and you would be slain. I think it adds a nice dimension to the game. Especially when a "good" wizard/god comes and fights the bad one:)
I did a project in school that interfaced a computer to a piece of external hardware, namely LEDs.
To do this, I wrote a DOS assembly front end (control panel) that controlled the pins on the parallel port.
Secondly, I built the LED array with a spliced parallel port cable and connected the parallel wires to transistors so that when they are activated, the juice from the batteries supplied the current needed to drive my LED array. ( I think if you just hooked it up directly, via some small 220ohm resistors, the parallel signal could actually drive the LEDs.
Lastly...just hook up the two systems and viola!
I called my system..smart house demo or something, and used LEDs and piezo electric buzzers to represent things in the house that could be controlled via my control panel.
It was kinda a cop out from doing something cool with Xilinx gate arrays but this was still fun and visual too.:)
Hey, as someone with first hand experience in Dong Guan, Guan Dong, Shen Zhen, Hong Kong and other manufacturing centers of China, I can say that many posts so far are ignorant ramblings of naive posters.
I don't think that you can judge one area of China because a article on the internet says it's corrupt. You should all visit and see first hand. It's not THAT bad...
So the real scoop...
workers live in factory/housing complexes and can be forced to work 24 hrs/day.
food is cooked in 1.5 meter diameter cauldrons, stirred with shovels, and stored in barrels.
karoke parlors are great places to wind down and there are some really upscale places with shows, music, and lots of entertainment. (sauna's or discos may be more iffy)
business deals are sealed on handshakes during business meetings at nice karoke clubs.
the average salary of a Educated College graduate programmer is around 2000US annual (decent for the cost of living and government subsidized housing).
Anyway...you get the idea. It seems crappy to us, but we are all spoiled. In reality, most of non-industrialized China is worse off. The most horrible thing is the general air quality and water quality...I thought I was gonna die and I couldn't wait to get back to the US.
For general reference, the primary customers of these "sweat shops" are industrialized countries...I saw game boards, AOL CD tins, halloween decorations etc...Container after Container after Container was being shipped out from the port in ShenZhen and in HongKong. Ever wonder why the west coast port shutdown affected us so much? Most of our shit comes from over there. It's cheaper to produce there than probably in any other part of the world. You just need to "Guanxi" or network really well and get in the goverment loop and not piss off the gangs there and you'll do fine.
I hope everyone is a little more edumacated about this here area of the world. Now go visit, play dice games, drink, and be merry. After all, if you are going to buy all the shit (ram, computer cases, clothes, toys etc...) then you are the ones driving the economic disparity..so you might as well go and see and at least be concious of what really goes on. I did, and I don't think it's too terrible....does that make me a bad person?
As a former Mac Fanatic, and currently attending school in Boston, I would have loved to attend a Mac World Expo in Boston. In fact, when I was reading it in the newpaper, I was actually excited...but now I guess it's not gonna happen.
I only feel safe buying stuff online....if A, I have enough cash to cover the loss if it happens...and B, if I use a credit card.
If the seller never ships the item, just call up your bank and file the proper forms to stop payment and get your money back! If ebay or other online auctions won't do it..your bank will!
In the TOS aren't you agreeing to pay for a specific amount of something? Like broadband providers will try their best for perfect discrimination of their target market by having various bandwidth solutions available at varying costs....
well, as for your analogy...im not so sure it applies in this case. You don't have to pay for access to the canal so of course it's not stealing. But, what if the canal was divided into shipping lanes that you had to pay a per usage fee for? Okay, so let's say you pay for unlimited use of 1 shipping lane. You reverse engineer the lane markers and find out that it's possible to use two shipping lanes to increase your capacity. You didn't pay for the extra shipping lane, but you are using it. Is that stealing!? I think it is.
Well, all in all, this seems like such a petty crime. I'm sure the figures these companies used to calculate how much bandwidth was stolen was something like... (Total Expenses/Total Possible Bandwidth)*(Bandwidth Used by User) or something to that effect. It's not a very accurate formula because of the way a limited amount of bandwidth is allocated to bunch of users who actually pay for more bandwidth tht is actually available. (If 500 users on a 20Mbit segment all have max 1.5Mbit bandwidth, can they all get the 1.5Mbit they paid for? Hell no!). So it's just unfair for companies to blame people for causing their network problems when it's their own network setup that is the root of these problems!
Finally, FBI would not get called in for trivial crap like this. In my experience with law enforcement and the internet, if they suspect something they will audit your account by mirroring your downloads and then seeing if you are doing illegal stuff. Come on now, all you people know that there isn't that much HTML crap to download on the internet. There probably is enough pr0n out there to saturate cable networks many times over but you can only watch it soo much before you need a break. What else is left? I would bet that there was some illegal movie trades or illegal software distribution going on here. Pr0n trades, movie dump site, and warez/iso server would probably warrant the FBI to come in a take the computers. I know that they are really trying to crack down on the copyright infringements now.
As someone who recently travelled through China (Beijing, Shanghai, Xian, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong) in the past month, I can give you a first hand experience of what it is like to "obtain" internet access in China.
First off, it's not as "restrictive" as most people tend to think. As a US citizen who has never been to China before, I wasn't sure what to expect. When I first arrived in Beijing I was throughly surprised by the infrastructure that was already in place as well as the plans for future build up. (Chinese WTO Accession == Competition) + (Year 2008 Beijing Olympics == World Spotlight)
As long as you are surfing the net w/o any malicious anti-Chinese government intent, I don't think you have much to fear. In fact, the Chinese government makes internet access readily available to most of its citizens via government dial-up modem pools. A few of the numbers I remember, are 163, 169 and I think 2369 or something like that. These numbers have uname/password the same as the number itself and automatically bill the line you dial from. In terms of price, it's cheap for westerners. About 2 cents US per minute (don't quote me on that). I think that's pretty sweet. Anyway, if you don't feel safe using these government lines, there are "internet cards" you can buy. Basically you'll pay between 5 and 10 dollars US to get a username/password and a dial-up number for the area you are in. You purchase these on the street or directly from authorized vendors. These work off the same principle as the government dial-up lines, except that they are private and a little more expensive.
As far as speed goes, QoS in China blows. That may be the main advantage that internet Cafe's have over the widely available public internet. You cannot play games on the government internet connection because it's just too slow. I don't rememer any ping times but I do know that I couldn't get a decent connection to play Starcraft on Battle.Net (they have an Asia server).
Anyway, there are other ways to connect to the internet such as through your GPRS enabled phone. China Mobile as well as China Unicom provide the necessary conduit if you are on their subscription plan.
As for pr0n and the rest of the goodies. The connections on the internet are too slow for P2P applications to draw a critical mass in China. Instead, Chinese citizens have adapted by providing illegal copies of anything and everything you want. You just have to know where to look. In Beijing, my local friend took me around and within 1 minute of me asking him where he gets his stuff from, we were following a man back to his "house/shack" where we were able to browse through suitcases of CDs. Of course, I wouldn't try this by myself becuase my kidneys would be sold on the black market and I wouldn't be writing this now. But whatever, you get the point.
Everything in China revolves around MONEY. If you want to experience capitalism first hand, visit China. Of course there are people just mooching off the government hand-outs, but many people take it into their own hands to build their fortune. It's almost too hard to explain how Capitalist China is, but to put it in perspective, Capitalist China makes US policy look like a socialist/communist structure! It's not the Chinese government that drives this Capitalism, but rather the yearning of the Chinese people to "catch-up" to western ways and to obtain our luxurious standard of living.
If you are brave enough and know someone that speaks Cantonese well, you may try to venture into what I call the "ass" of China, Shenzhen. This city lies on the southern border of the Chinese mainland right above Hong Kong. It's where Western ideas and Chinese dreams clash. It's the drug center of China. It's the new manufacturing hub for Hong Kong businesses. It's a global hub for goods transfer. Dire misinterpretation of the West draws the younger generation to think it's alright to do drugs and have sex with multiple partners each week.
Many of us Westernized people look at the situation in developing countries and just scoff at how terrible the situation is. Oh sure, it's easy to blame everything on the foreign government but really it's our responsibility to help these underdeveloped countries build up their infrastructure and economies in ways that don't hurt its citizens.
Well, I better stop now before I get moderated down to "0 - OFFTOPIC". But just keep what I said in mind when you discuss China and the internet.
Hawaii, the Aloha state, the state with some of the most friendly and courteous drivers, initiated a pilot red-light and automatic speed detection program in 2000.
According to this article, public outcry about parts of the program led to the law being repealed. We should probably keep an eye on how this turns out because it will probably set a precedent for the rest of the country.
Slashdot Mirror
I love hawaii.. I made some spam musubi for my work buddies up here on the east coast... half loved it, the other half wouldn't even touch it.
:) ...but you're right... 1300 slices of spam is pretty darn big.
Try to keep an open mind and think of something happy when you eat it
Wow..good post.
/month?
I for one, work in a corporation that outsources to many development centers in India and Mexico. My job is an IT manager. I have heated discussions with many of my friends on what the value of outsourcing to India is.
For short term, high turnover, and mission critical projects...it's tough to have the trust to give the work to someone that you can't see on a daily basis so you'd rather pay 10X the amount of $$ to hire someone in the US that is local to your team. That is a valid point, however from a sheer economics perspective, you can have so many more dedicated resources abroad on a significantly lower salary doing more work than that one genius programmer in the USA. The key is communication and quality standards. Run multiple projects with a slightly longer timeline and you will get the same volume of work done, just each project will have a slightly longer cycle time. And as an IT manager, I feel that even my job will be outsourced at some point. We have two Indian IT managers dedicated to our team too...one on shore and one off shore...they help to manage and maintain the quality of work and resources on our India team. I have to say..some of these guys are really smart...others...well, what do you expect for $500 USD
I can honestly say that I would prefer a small, light cell phone with great reception, text messaging, vibrate, silent, and a few ring tones...games are optional...and REALLY LONG BATTERY LIFE...
:)
That's all I ask. I don't ask for much. The buttons don't even have to light up
I'm pretty sure you'd see it on ebay soon...
The plastic looks 'cheap' and has been imitated to death
That's only because the plastic IS cheap. We all know these are made with the primary objective being low cost.
So does the mass itself flow or is it the wave propagation within the mass that flows?
If the former, than what happens to this mass under constant acceleration? I would surmise that without friction, there would be no heat buildup thus we could get this thing "flowing" pretty darn fast. If the latter, well, we can accelerate a wave through this matter maybe even faster than the speed of light. But then again, there was already an article on that kind of stuff.
"The only thing they told me is not to put my head between the transmitter and the dish :-)"
:)
Who said that these things were only good for Internet?
The point is that there is no security to bypass... None, zip, zero, zilch.
What do you mean? They encrypted the data in binary and then broke it up into TCP/IP packets.
Just because the journalist could listen for the SSID of the network, connect to it, browse/download sensitive data, and then decode the binary data into a format that he could understand doesn't make it right. In fact, this should be protected under the DMCA or the DMCA should be reworded to include things like this.
On another note...what's the difference between the above scenario, with someone viewing data on an unencrypted wireless network from the one where someone finds a phone number of a modem, dials into a system, and downloads sensitive data? The former is considered OK because the data isn't officially encrypted and protected under the DMCA whereas the latter was illegal because of ignorance and fear. In my mind, they are the same thing...
He's probably a bad pilot...so this setup makes it much safer for him.
Also, what if this guy was handicapped in someway that made it impossible for him to fly in a real airplane? Or what if he was scared of heights? Those are all possibilities...
Though...I'm agreeing with everyone else and going with the virtual pr0n idea too.
You can buy them at eco-sphere.com. I saw these in person, they are really cool but too bad everything dies after a year or so.
Anyone think that Honda's robotics department is slowly adapting some of their technology to the auto division?
I remember writing a similar algorithm for my robot using sonar sensors...the robot would slow down just a little so that the rest of the systems could figure out how to avoid the obstacle ahead, or if it really is a obstacle....the "other systems" in this case would probably be the driver.
I think this could be a good thing as long as it's implemented correctly...though i can see how auto braking COULD have some bad implications... on a fast turn close to the threshold of the maximum tire/road friction point (much less if there is oil or ice), then if you hit the brakes...the car will skid or slide.
I think that would be called "voting" but IANAL so I'm not sure :)
If only this "utility" could be integrated in some nice GUI package or application...
It would make "security" that much more fun!
So I don't get it. Progress is progress... if the motiviation for inventions and creative thinking is only to block your enemy, so be it!
The first one to think of the idea should get control of it. The problem however, is the ideas being credited as novel. The main issue here is that even though there is no "prior art", there was lots of "prior thought", which is why people don't like the current patent system.
This sounds familiar...not RIAA stuff, but how did the web start? Look at yahoo for instance, some kid at a college decided to make a directory of links to facilitate a community with a information exchange. Is this any different? Just because his "search engine" was efficient and worked well (users could get whatever they wanted) doesn't mean he did anything wrong. RIAA is definately wrong in this case. If they are right, then any search engine is in violation of the RIAA's ideals. Can google prove that it doesn't facilitate downloading of illegal materials? Doubtful.
my $0.02
Hey, I remember batmud...
:)
Also I remember that there were lots of muds in the xxxxx.fi address range that I used to frequent. Many of them used the standard mud releases and didnt really modify anything..so all of my BOTS would run perfectly. Telnet to mud, run bot, check back every few days or so...within a month you have a very good character.
I didn't have a life when I played them..made my girlfriend sit and watch me play...
Coded a DOS mud once...added the RIP song when you died... gave access to everyone in the computer labs and then held a beta test. The lab admin at the school banned my game beacuse it was too distracting from school work...blah! In that game I also coded a "mass_kill" function too...but I was the only God.
Dude...he's "the one". He got into the core, figure out how to change the world. Saved us all from the slavery and bondage of the Ubisoft programmers.
I find the following comments relevant and funny...
-teleporting hostile guards into the safe-holds
-teleporting everyone to a city at the bottom of the sea
(from another post)
Homer Simpson: There'll be no accusations, just friendly crustaceans [under the sea]
Doesn't this make the whole gaming experience more realistic (in a fantasy sense)?
:)
Does anyone remember the days of mudding in ascii terminals? Gods, coders, wizards could be good, or bad. You just had to try not to piss them off or you would get your equipment stripped and you would be slain. I think it adds a nice dimension to the game. Especially when a "good" wizard/god comes and fights the bad one
I did a project in school that interfaced a computer to a piece of external hardware, namely LEDs.
:)
To do this, I wrote a DOS assembly front end (control panel) that controlled the pins on the parallel port.
Secondly, I built the LED array with a spliced parallel port cable and connected the parallel wires to transistors so that when they are activated, the juice from the batteries supplied the current needed to drive my LED array. ( I think if you just hooked it up directly, via some small 220ohm resistors, the parallel signal could actually drive the LEDs.
Lastly...just hook up the two systems and viola!
I called my system..smart house demo or something, and used LEDs and piezo electric buzzers to represent things in the house that could be controlled via my control panel.
It was kinda a cop out from doing something cool with Xilinx gate arrays but this was still fun and visual too.
Hope that helps.
Hey, as someone with first hand experience in Dong Guan, Guan Dong, Shen Zhen, Hong Kong and other manufacturing centers of China, I can say that many posts so far are ignorant ramblings of naive posters.
I don't think that you can judge one area of China because a article on the internet says it's corrupt. You should all visit and see first hand. It's not THAT bad...
So the real scoop...
workers live in factory/housing complexes and can be forced to work 24 hrs/day.
food is cooked in 1.5 meter diameter cauldrons, stirred with shovels, and stored in barrels.
karoke parlors are great places to wind down and there are some really upscale places with shows, music, and lots of entertainment. (sauna's or discos may be more iffy)
business deals are sealed on handshakes during business meetings at nice karoke clubs.
the average salary of a Educated College graduate programmer is around 2000US annual (decent for the cost of living and government subsidized housing).
Anyway...you get the idea. It seems crappy to us, but we are all spoiled. In reality, most of non-industrialized China is worse off. The most horrible thing is the general air quality and water quality...I thought I was gonna die and I couldn't wait to get back to the US.
For general reference, the primary customers of these "sweat shops" are industrialized countries...I saw game boards, AOL CD tins, halloween decorations etc...Container after Container after Container was being shipped out from the port in ShenZhen and in HongKong. Ever wonder why the west coast port shutdown affected us so much? Most of our shit comes from over there. It's cheaper to produce there than probably in any other part of the world. You just need to "Guanxi" or network really well and get in the goverment loop and not piss off the gangs there and you'll do fine.
I hope everyone is a little more edumacated about this here area of the world. Now go visit, play dice games, drink, and be merry. After all, if you are going to buy all the shit (ram, computer cases, clothes, toys etc...) then you are the ones driving the economic disparity..so you might as well go and see and at least be concious of what really goes on. I did, and I don't think it's too terrible....does that make me a bad person?
As a former Mac Fanatic, and currently attending school in Boston, I would have loved to attend a Mac World Expo in Boston. In fact, when I was reading it in the newpaper, I was actually excited...but now I guess it's not gonna happen.
I only feel safe buying stuff online....if A, I have enough cash to cover the loss if it happens...and B, if I use a credit card.
If the seller never ships the item, just call up your bank and file the proper forms to stop payment and get your money back! If ebay or other online auctions won't do it..your bank will!
In the TOS aren't you agreeing to pay for a specific amount of something? Like broadband providers will try their best for perfect discrimination of their target market by having various bandwidth solutions available at varying costs....
well, as for your analogy...im not so sure it applies in this case. You don't have to pay for access to the canal so of course it's not stealing. But, what if the canal was divided into shipping lanes that you had to pay a per usage fee for? Okay, so let's say you pay for unlimited use of 1 shipping lane. You reverse engineer the lane markers and find out that it's possible to use two shipping lanes to increase your capacity. You didn't pay for the extra shipping lane, but you are using it. Is that stealing!? I think it is.
Well, all in all, this seems like such a petty crime. I'm sure the figures these companies used to calculate how much bandwidth was stolen was something like... (Total Expenses/Total Possible Bandwidth)*(Bandwidth Used by User) or something to that effect. It's not a very accurate formula because of the way a limited amount of bandwidth is allocated to bunch of users who actually pay for more bandwidth tht is actually available. (If 500 users on a 20Mbit segment all have max 1.5Mbit bandwidth, can they all get the 1.5Mbit they paid for? Hell no!). So it's just unfair for companies to blame people for causing their network problems when it's their own network setup that is the root of these problems!
Finally, FBI would not get called in for trivial crap like this. In my experience with law enforcement and the internet, if they suspect something they will audit your account by mirroring your downloads and then seeing if you are doing illegal stuff. Come on now, all you people know that there isn't that much HTML crap to download on the internet. There probably is enough pr0n out there to saturate cable networks many times over but you can only watch it soo much before you need a break. What else is left? I would bet that there was some illegal movie trades or illegal software distribution going on here. Pr0n trades, movie dump site, and warez/iso server would probably warrant the FBI to come in a take the computers.
I know that they are really trying to crack down on the copyright infringements now.
As someone who recently travelled through China (Beijing, Shanghai, Xian, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong) in the past month, I can give you a first hand experience of what it is like to "obtain" internet access in China.
First off, it's not as "restrictive" as most people tend to think. As a US citizen who has never been to China before, I wasn't sure what to expect. When I first arrived in Beijing I was throughly surprised by the infrastructure that was already in place as well as the plans for future build up. (Chinese WTO Accession == Competition) + (Year 2008 Beijing Olympics == World Spotlight)
As long as you are surfing the net w/o any malicious anti-Chinese government intent, I don't think you have much to fear. In fact, the Chinese government makes internet access readily available to most of its citizens via government dial-up modem pools. A few of the numbers I remember, are 163, 169 and I think 2369 or something like that. These numbers have uname/password the same as the number itself and automatically bill the line you dial from. In terms of price, it's cheap for westerners. About 2 cents US per minute (don't quote me on that). I think that's pretty sweet. Anyway, if you don't feel safe using these government lines, there are "internet cards" you can buy. Basically you'll pay between 5 and 10 dollars US to get a username/password and a dial-up number for the area you are in. You purchase these on the street or directly from authorized vendors. These work off the same principle as the government dial-up lines, except that they are private and a little more expensive.
As far as speed goes, QoS in China blows. That may be the main advantage that internet Cafe's have over the widely available public internet. You cannot play games on the government internet connection because it's just too slow. I don't rememer any ping times but I do know that I couldn't get a decent connection to play Starcraft on Battle.Net (they have an Asia server).
Anyway, there are other ways to connect to the internet such as through your GPRS enabled phone. China Mobile as well as China Unicom provide the necessary conduit if you are on their subscription plan.
As for pr0n and the rest of the goodies. The connections on the internet are too slow for P2P applications to draw a critical mass in China. Instead, Chinese citizens have adapted by providing illegal copies of anything and everything you want. You just have to know where to look. In Beijing, my local friend took me around and within 1 minute of me asking him where he gets his stuff from, we were following a man back to his "house/shack" where we were able to browse through suitcases of CDs. Of course, I wouldn't try this by myself becuase my kidneys would be sold on the black market and I wouldn't be writing this now. But whatever, you get the point.
Everything in China revolves around MONEY. If you want to experience capitalism first hand, visit China. Of course there are people just mooching off the government hand-outs, but many people take it into their own hands to build their fortune. It's almost too hard to explain how Capitalist China is, but to put it in perspective, Capitalist China makes US policy look like a socialist/communist structure! It's not the Chinese government that drives this Capitalism, but rather the yearning of the Chinese people to "catch-up" to western ways and to obtain our luxurious standard of living.
If you are brave enough and know someone that speaks Cantonese well, you may try to venture into what I call the "ass" of China, Shenzhen. This city lies on the southern border of the Chinese mainland right above Hong Kong. It's where Western ideas and Chinese dreams clash. It's the drug center of China. It's the new manufacturing hub for Hong Kong businesses. It's a global hub for goods transfer. Dire misinterpretation of the West draws the younger generation to think it's alright to do drugs and have sex with multiple partners each week.
Many of us Westernized people look at the situation in developing countries and just scoff at how terrible the situation is. Oh sure, it's easy to blame everything on the foreign government but really it's our responsibility to help these underdeveloped countries build up their infrastructure and economies in ways that don't hurt its citizens.
Well, I better stop now before I get moderated down to "0 - OFFTOPIC". But just keep what I said in mind when you discuss China and the internet.
Hawaii, the Aloha state, the state with some of the most friendly and courteous drivers, initiated a pilot red-light and automatic speed detection program in 2000.
According to this article, public outcry about parts of the program led to the law being repealed. We should probably keep an eye on how this turns out because it will probably set a precedent for the rest of the country.