I'm from there, I think the 'difficult' part is, that there might be tons of success stories on getting out of the country but none will give you a definite route on how, especially if you are already high profile. The things move around inside china are mostly per incident based, rules and regulation means almost nothing because every step of the way is dependent on the interpretation (and of course, mood) of the officer who can stamp on your paper.
I guess the most low profile thing for clowwindy to do is do as police have instructed and lay low for at least 1 year. If after that he is allowed to travel abroad then he can apply to big co like Google/Facebook and apply visa with work permit.
you are innocent, you have done nothing illegal, but the big brothers think differently.
So they first lock you up, if you are popular and the world is watching while they are locking you up, they will conjure up a charge like tax-evasions or conducting business scams [see AiWeiWei's charges] and make you suffer jail time chance fighting back. But in case you are not popular and the world didn't know you before incident happens, you will simply disappear. [see 'countless' dissidents' disappearing since 2013]
From a source close to some organizations that tune/develop the chinese firewall (spoiler alert: public universities), they are adopting methods to trigger reversed censorships. And in my eyes, these methods, despite less technical challenging, are working as intended. Also, see this: http://furbo.org/2015/01/28/grass-mud-horse/
Author here, I'm sure there are lot of errors in the article and I'm really humbled that this landed on Hacker News. Let's keep this discussion open :)
Generic -> robust. i... i dont know how to explain that. honestly i haven't thought about the necessity of explaining things like this. its... basic mathematics.
Simple: because std utils are programs that do what they supposed to do. if problems bound are well within the definition domain of a std util then its all good. Supportability and Extensibility is way too generic for you to draw a line saying std utils can handle them all. After all, they are programs, not programming languages.
Quite the opposite, and, quite simple: engineers over-engineer thing in order to make things generic. and generic make solutions robust. that's basic science. Unless the problem and solution are well understood, your investment won't guarantee a return at all.
I can imagine that those AKs are just the front. There might be someone or some organizations that sponsor the extremists. Money or otherwise. People who might benefit from instability, hatred towards the US etc.
If you know any of the back story of those names you would have known that none of them would need to affiliate with any company. They are basically the deity of our age. Without them we would not have modern computers and the only handhelds we have are rocks.