> In this case, China shouldn't have had any trouble getting Hong Kong authorities to arrest and extradite this person, so it doesn't seem like the same thing.
Given the current political situation in Hong Kong, this may not be a valid assumption.
I'd be curious about Oil and Gas. I'm familiar with the other fields, but that one seems to require even less training for around the same amount of money. Or if you get into petroleum engineering - I remember in college that was known as the profession with the highest salary straight out of school.
Red Hat, by the way, deliberately obscured their kernel code in order to stop Oracle from simply providing support for Red Hat code. Probably the correct business move, but also probably against the spirit of FOSS.
Two thing come to mind as a starting point: Negotiation and focusing on building Hong Kong's economy.
Negotiation: The truth is, HK politics is very much like American politics. It consists of people blocking any progress on anything because the two sides are so deeply divided. Instead, I suggest making an honest effort to negotiate and take things step by step. For example, the central issue to the protests - the universal suffrage framework described in the Basic Law is strictly better than the current system. Accepting it while signaling that something even better is desired and will continue to be brought up would have been more productive. (Note that the whitepaper came out after the threat to occupy central).
Economy - One of the subtexts of the whole issue is Hong Kong's decreasing relevance in relation to China and indeed on the world stage. The stronger HK is, the more leverage HK has. Instead, real wages are barely increasing, rent continues to skyrocket, and there is basically no economy besides finance - and in that HK's competitive advantage shrinks every year. Instead of saying things like "we are willing to sacrifice the economy if it gives us true democracy", I think it should be accepted that destroying the economy is not likely going to get democrats what they want, and that a better economy would a) free up more people to be able to worry about politics rather than just putting food on the table, and b) make China think harder about killing the golden goose.
Occupy Wallstreet was a game of brinksmanship, but unfortunately that only works when both sides have something to lose. China has nothing to lose today.
In my opinion, that's a very good question and one that demonstrators rarely think about. Frankly, and until somebody convinces me otherwise, I think that Occupy Central was and is a strategic failure if the end goal is gain a better form of democracy in Hong Kong. China has shown time and again that it will not back down when things get physical, and in for example, the case of Tiananmen square, the government got more paranoid.
So rationally, I don't think it's a good move by the pan-democrats, as it essentially shuts down any possibilities of negotiation - the pan-democrats have very little leverage now that they've already "done their worst".
On the other hand, protests are not about strategy and rationality. People strongly believe in their ideals and they want to do something rather than sit around waiting for negotiations that may or may not happen. I can understand that which is why I'm not as quick to criticize the protesters as many in HK would.
I was very surprised when I found this out. It makes sense though - just like in any negotiation, you don't start with what you're willing to settle for, you start with what you want.
In general, there are always two sides to the coin. Where from an American perspective you see Chinese aggression outwards, if you flip the arrows on the map around, you might notice that from a Chinese perspective, the US is aggressively boxing China in.
Could you elaborate on the level for programs like these? I am familiar with a kid who was writing proofs regarding tensors (this is how it was described to me, my own math skills are extremely minimal in comparison) in the 5th grade. His father is worried about his social life going forward while wanting to nurture his talent. The kid was sent to the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth for a summer which he apparently found really boring. I think he is actually being tutored by a professor at a local university now, but I wonder if he'd find peers of his own age group and ability level at these programs?