It's not really anything new, you can use the current Tier-1 visa for this purpose.

There's a Tier-1 entrepreneur visa which requires £200k investment, however most professional software developers will qualify for the Tier-1 general visa which doesn't require investment.

The general Tier-1 uses a points based system which takes into account education, english language fluency and past earnings. With the Tier-1 general visa you can stay in the UK for up-to 2 years (if you're not making money after 2 years and don't have investment, you might not be able to renew though)

I hope that happens, but I haven't noticed the US government being quick to imitate good ideas from other countries.

I wish, things here in the US are going very slow about visa. When humans have something important, and they lived with it since long time, they forget how bad is to live without it. You understand the importance of things only when you lose them. Silicon Valley might not be the Silicon Valley 50 years from now; the government has to do something clear and practical to avoid this kind of future. Now.

Current requirements for entrepreneur visa:

  • You have access to not less than £200,000 
  • The money is held in one or more regulated financial institutions 
  • The money is disposable in the United Kingdom
  • You personally have at least £3000 to support yourself
  • You can pass an english language fluency test

For more details: http://www.ukvisas.gov.uk/en/howtoapply/infs/inf24pbsentrepr...

If you're from the US, maybe. But if you're from Bangladesh and looking for a place to do a startup, you may decide to go to London for the visa.

I thought you were going to China: http://maxkle.in/giving-up-on-europe/

BTW, I don't mean this as a snarky retort. I'm seriously curious whether that plan has panned out for you.

There's this 500-year plan in place to resolve the weather situation. It's finally coming to fruition.

In essence, it involved developing new methodologies (the "Scientific Method"), which were able to lead to new technologies (loosely grouped under the label "industrialisation") which have produced large amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

This has been a particularly tricky plan, but it is basically in place and is now steadily warming up the planet, according to most reports. It should only take another couple of hundred years and England will be a good 5-10 degrees warmer.

SF is a pain in the ass to get around compared to NYC without a car or bike. I love both cities (and especially the weather in the former) but the MTA and London Underground have a much wider network of subway systems and buses.

Shoreditch is anything but cheap. It'll fall off pretty quick by the time you get to Stratford though.

I lived in Tower Hamlets (ie, the area in question) for 10 years and loved it. A lot of native Londoners look down on it as it has a reputation and is kinda rough around the edges. I understand a lot has changed in the last few years with the financial collapse and them dumping money in to the area in the build up to the Olympics.

The same visa also exists in the US. Have $500k-1 million? Then you can get in the short line to get a greencard.

I thought it might be software patents from the Reuters article but Techcrunch suggests its more about a DMCA-like system

I suspect given that google are one of the people pushing it that it's almost certainly a "common carrier" defence for copyright infringement which would protect websites from user uploaded copyright violations.

UK make the move, US make the "words"

No, this is symptomatic of a modern economy. Any advanced economy will have a similar focus.

If you think about it on a higher level, it makes a lot of sense. At first, the great bottleneck was having enough food, so all economies began with an almost-100% focus on agriculture. But then, as that became less and less of a problem, the next bottleneck was having enough stuff - whether machinery to make agriculture more efficient, or other items to make your life better.

As "stuff" gets less and less scarce, and cheaper and cheaper to acquire, what are we left with? The final bottleneck, which isn't going away any time soon, is that we all only have 24 hours in a day. "Services" is a euphemism for "ways to buy other people's time so you can have more than 24 hours of 'good time' (and higher 'good time' than you'd be able to achieve by yourself) per day". Whether that's bank services to speed up your money handling, or cleaning services, or web design services, or any other number of services which basically amount to helping someone, somewhere to make more efficient use of their time.

This is the final bottleneck until we figure out how to speed up our thoughts, and so all activity ends up piling into there.