>It also only supports texts with simplified characters. I’ll eventually add support for traditional characters. The silver lining is that when you add a flashcard for a simplified character, you’ll also get a flashcard for the traditional character. It’ll be suspended by default so you’ll have to unsuspend if you want to study it.
This goal is difficult the way you put it. In Chinese, besides reduction in strokes, a number of traditional characters (of different or similar meanings but mostly pronounced the same) are converted into one simplified character. In other words, traditional character set has a n-to-1 relationship with simplified character set. For most characters this n=1, but you would also see n=2,3... quite often.
For this reason, you would often see articles awkwardly converted from simplified characters into traditional characters when it's done automatically. The other direction--traditional character to simplified character conversion--has no such problem.
> so China knowing things about me affects me much less.
Not if you have a few experiences when a recipient or sender verified with you that his/her/your email had disappeared. When that happened, we keep wondering did who say what which angered the email provider or hit the censor black list. Such things never happened with email provider from other countries. The same emails finally got through when we switched to gmail or alike.
It could go either direction. There was an startup Innopage in Hongkong news these two days claiming that the design of its iOS App "Worthy" was copied in merely 2 months by China's Alibaba after the latter sent a 10-member delegation team to visit Innopage in Hong Kong. Alibaba responded that "there is no factual and legal basis." What can a startup do?
>And the thing that China has, that the NSA most certainly does NOT have, is support of the public.
Public Support? First of all, Chinese government is known to hire internet commentators to show the public is on the government side.
Secondly, if you have read some comments from Sina Weibo (China's twitter), you would know the public don't support, but can't do anything about the censorship. China comes from a era when simply saying the wrong thing against the leader could get you killed. The latest news this month was five prominent Chinese figures has been detained for attending a private meeting discussing the 25th anniversary of 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Also a journalist in her 70s has been detained with her son "on suspicion of leaking state secrets to a foreign entity." Both incidents were reported in this news story:
Maybe I overlook? Are there turn-by-turn navigation api yet? Over the last year, every time I check it seems to be not available yet. I believe most or all streets in OSM only support up to street level rather than street NUMBER level. Well, please point me to some counter-examples if I am wrong.
Try out OSRM[1]. It is open source[2], so you can run it yourself, or you can use a public api for limited usage. The api has a JSON response with turn-by-turn[3], and it is remarkably fast.
Wow, speed is great. I'll definitely check it out. However, the second statement still seems to be valid: OSM is still at the street name level rather than street number level.
I read some MapQuest's document saying that Mapquest actually took points on a street and interpolate all the numbers. Maybe OSM can do the same. Eagerly waiting...
OSM does have addresses, but coverage is far from perfect. Nominatum (the geocoder used by OSRM) will interpolate addresses if it does not have the exact parcel info, which is surprisingly accurate in many cases. Work is also being done to create full address coverage as well[1], which you should check out if you are interested.
Routing is coming to osm.org real soon now, and as morganherlocker has pointed out, the software is already widely available (and used) elsewhere. But yes, house number data in OSM is partial at best.
I believe these 3 countries had a good and free education system (in the periods mentioned) which is still a burden for the majority of Chinese nowadays.
I understand Hugo's marketing effort. But most foreign companies cannot take a bite of their market because you need to accept the Chinese Communist Party's censorship first. Many foreign innovative apps are blocked and then cloned in-house with the censorship enforced. So their apps are not valued high outside of China and beyond Chinese as well.
Its not even that: China's laws are so unevenly enforced that western companies can't compete in China on content. You can find plenty of porn on Baidu, for example; Sina recently received a slap on the wrist for video content. Being "hen huang hen baoli" is how these companies make money, and the CCP mostly turns a blind eye. These are mostly protectionist moves by the government; censorship is also a big concern but not the primary one (freedom of speech is even enshrined in the Chinese constitution...).
Until China becomes a country that is really ruled by law, there isn't much foreign content companies can do.
Laws are weakly imposed for some companies because these companies recruited some prominent state leaders' relatives as their directors or cofounders. These relatives are greedy, but they are needed to negotiate cases of law enforcement.
This goal is difficult the way you put it. In Chinese, besides reduction in strokes, a number of traditional characters (of different or similar meanings but mostly pronounced the same) are converted into one simplified character. In other words, traditional character set has a n-to-1 relationship with simplified character set. For most characters this n=1, but you would also see n=2,3... quite often.
For this reason, you would often see articles awkwardly converted from simplified characters into traditional characters when it's done automatically. The other direction--traditional character to simplified character conversion--has no such problem.