Adam Carolla pitched this movie idea on his (former) morning show to McG. ("Famed director McG, the creative force behind Charlieâ(TM)s Angels, and most recently, We Are Marshalls.")
Adam's got a movie pitch for McG. It takes place in the year 2222, and the military has constructed a satellite weapon that can think for itself. Adam plays Col. Duke LaCrosse. He feels like he wants no part of this military anymore, because this satellite system has gone too far. And of course, it has become evil. Itâ(TM)s getting into the GPS systems of vehicles, because itâ(TM)s the year 2222, and every vehicle has GPS. It's starting to misdirect people, by having them drive out to the Grand Canyon, even though they are trying to pick up their kids from school. And this navigation satellite wants to destroy Adam, because it knows that he knows it's evil. On his side, Adam has a friendly robot â" a wise-cracking Roomba. The Roomba serves as Adam's navigation device, so he doesnâ(TM)t have to rely on the evil GPS.
With the help of the Roomba, Adam navigates the corridors of the ground base, but canâ(TM)t control the satellite from Earth. Itâ(TM)s too evil. They have to launch into space, and dismantle it from there. "Whoâ(TM)s the NASA insider," McG asks? "Michael Richards." He's a wild-haired nerd, whose wife was misdirected into the Grand Canyon by this satellite, so he's got a score to settle.
I don't think he has been sentenced yet. He wasn't found guilty but it signed a plea bargain, which likely to give him less than 5 years in jail, but probably a lot less or just a fine.
The rule is: If it's obscene, it's illegal and you are a criminal but there's no sentencing guideline. There is a *new* law, though, that says if it's obscene and depicts a child (this is quite vague), the sentencing guideline is 5 years for each obscene image. But these would be consecutive sentences.
What's obscene is really, really vague. Apparently, the definition of free speech can change based on where you're prosecuted, since obscenity is determined based on "community standards." Which is probably why Christopher Handley _in Iowa_ entered into a plea agreement.
If someone can install a security camera in your house, they likely have physical access to your machine. What do you think is more likely: Keyboard sniffer or security camera?
For me who works at home, it's nice idea to be able to see your password. And even if you're in an office, who's really going to try and steal your password? Do you worry when you leave your wallet or car keys at your desk that a coworker is going to steal your credit cards or vehicle?
It might just encourage users to chose a longer or more complicated password that's more difficult to hack. Security always has trade-offs.
If you want real security, you should use two or three factor authentication anyway. Too bad the web doesn't readily allow for it.
I remember in Japan for many years seeing toilets with spigots at the top of the tank, not to mention dual flush, heated seats, and no need for paper, thanks to a water spray and air dryer. So I'd hardly call it a breakthrough product.
It's the 21st century and we're still rubbing our ass cracks with dead trees.
I'm not sure why you got modded up... Managing people and getting paid more and getting promotions based on merit is orthogonal to "managing technical projects." Why would a promotion of a sales person create a technical manager out of them?
And if Google or whoever don't pay or promote according to merit, they're not going to retain very good sales or marketing people. They are only hurting themselves.
Many people (technical or not) "live in their own little magical world" and don't pay attention to what customers want, how to get the job done, or manage their time well. Technical people write software like Debian Linux. Having good relationships with customers (sales) and people to promote software (marketing) is what made Microsoft a lot more successful than we'd like to admit, although I wish they weren't so ruthless and avaricious.
Technical people often have a disdain for people who don't understand technical things, which is why this board is full of responses similar to yours. It's some sort of elitism I wish nerds would knock off.
ROKU also means "record" in Japanese works "rokuga" (recorded video), "rokuon" (recorded audio), "kiroku" (written record), etc.(Can't seem to get Slashdot to display the characters.)
My wife and I buy "soap base" in bulk and use it. It's intended to be mixed with fragrances and coloring (and I suppose resold) but we use it straight. It's very inexpensive, though you have to buy empty dispenser bottles to use it.
Here's the site we order from. There's no "anti-bacteria" chemicals in it, and for people like me who hate fragrances, it's hypo-allergenic without the boutique price. For a gallon, it's 25 cents an ounce. And it should last about two years per person. If you want something with an interesting label, go with Dr. Bronner's.
For those chemists (cooks) out there, soap is easy to make yourself.
Hoax device? Meaning, he was intentionally misrepresenting a lighted sign board a... sign? Perhaps, if they looked like actual bombs, they might have a point.
I'm curious what they could actually charge these people for, considering it's often intention to harm that's considered in these cases.
Vandalism, or posting bills or something else.
Once the smoke's clear, the trial will likely end up making the police and city government look stupid. That is, assuming the judge and jury acts reasonably on people that aren't evil criminals.
AOP solves the N times problem nicely. For instance, if you wanted to take an object with N methods and add a call x() to each of them, if you used ordinary OOP, you'd have to override every method, then call x() from each method. What's the elegance of that? I don't see how "proper" OOP can solve this sort of problem better than AOP.
AOP is largely mysterious and confusing because it's not something (yet) integrated with any standard languages. If it were integrated, then there would be proper tool support, recommend methodologies, references, implementaiton refinements to make AOP easier.
And in a sense, AOP isn't new to Java. Have you ever used the Java "Proxy" class? AOP really just provides a java.lang.reflect.Proxy "version 2.0".
Maybe AOP won't be used except by container providers, i.e. people writing EJB3 implementations.
the JCP is too slow and crufty, comes up with homegrown technologies nobody wants to use, etc. and that tools such as Hibernate and Spring not borne from the community process are superior or, in the case of EJB 3.0, adopted.
I guess I don't know why "Ajax" was brought up, I haven't used it and it's not something I'm familiar with. Maybe Ajax doesn't belong in the same class of technologies. Arguing about the specifics means missing the point, though.
It often takes "rebel" technologies to move things forward. It also takes some experimentation to develop a technology; i.e. coming up with a rigorous, solid standard might prevent its spread. Sometimes sloppiness is good. RSS, HTML, etc. have done okay despite the sloppiness. Requiring every web page be HTML compliant would have stifled the web.
Recently, I've started working on Weblogic. I used to develop with JBoss. In terms of service deployment, JBoss is superior to Weblogic. I guess with Weblogic, you're still stuck writing a lot of code to deploy JMX services. I noticed at my new company that programmers ended up launching network servers from a Servlet, which was not its intended use. The ease of deploying MBeans and dependency control with JBoss is superior. It can be done easily with a bit of XML, and no code is required. JBoss also handles ordered deployments better. With Weblogic, deployment ordering is done by assigning a deployment order number (1-4000 or something) to your deployment. It reminds me of writing programs with line numbers back in the good old days of BASIC.
It's my guess that functionality from Spring will be eventually refined into a series of JCPs. Sometimes it's better that standards develop in this way.
Perhaps it would have been a wiser investment to simply spend more on insurance than theft deterrance. Weigh the cost of an installed security system and monthly monitoring against simply having better coverage.
Still, imagine if you did go to the effort to create tests (not necessarily "unit tests" but "integration") for your game. Imagine the test procedure in pieces as follows:
Set-up:
1. Load level geometry (perhaps as a simplication point, create a test level) 2. Place dummy players and computer players in the level; dummy players do not move 3. Run for 100 game "ticks"
Verification: 1. Check if computer players reach dummy player location 2. Check player lost life
It would be desirable if the tests ran quickly (at 100% CPU) and without rendering or sound, etc.
All these steps are easily programmed. Once you have tests like this, not only are you testing specific bug scenarios (path following), but you also cover ones that you might not have anticipated such as your physics engine failing.
If you're smart, you'll design tests to be intelligent as well so that making a small change doesn't require rewriting all your tests. And if things are unpredictable (random elements), you may need to make the acceptance conditions in tests a bit more flexible or remove these.
Another way to test: In a specific game itself, you might simply record the input of a player running through a level. Though various unrelated code changes, you might expect the input to produce the same results.
Game programmers I know don't bother with writing testing frameworks like this because this sort of thing does take a lot of time to write. It is an investment and a lot of game programming is so short-term and non-iterative that it's difficult to be convinced to spend the time.
From what I've seen, Groovy's a half-baked programming language and unfinished product. See this criticism for a start.
If you want to do embedded scripting in Java, I suggest Bean Shell instead. As a library, Bean Shell is about 280K, Groovy is about 1.7M. And Bean Shell has been around for a lot longer.
I'd like to see Sun add closures and better support for lists/maps in Java itself (e.g. a map function). I'm hoping that pressure from Ruby will make the language grow. C# already made them change their mind about Generics.
Usually one has a couple other options when breaking encryption. For example, some unscrupulous hardware company employee could release the keys to the Internet anonymously. Or, somebody posing as a manufacturer could release them as well.
Although "bricking" is a possibility with the platform, it's unlikely to occur because potentially millions of people (voters) would be quite upset.
What's more likely is somebody caught with the "stolen" keys gets sentenced prison or worse.
Internet pricing these days mostly comes down to bandwidth, usage, availability, and less importantly service. A few customers may also consider going with a particular provider for hosting, security, customer support reasons, etc., but it's really become commodity market.
Telcos want to be able to use price discrimination, service differentiation, control of content, etc., to create more profit for themselves. They expect more profit for themselves at both ends of the pipe. Of course, they justify a 2-tier scheme by suggesting investment into infrastructure costs money, but it has always been the case with any other utility company that people/communities demand more electricity, water, gas over time.
In a Telco-centric world, the Internet would look more like the cellphone networks of today, where carriers sell 15 second ringtones for $2.00 or $3.00 on web sites hosted by themselves.
The "3rd party" content providers (Google, Microsoft, etc.) won't let this happen.
I read the article but the author doesn't really understand basic economic theory very well.
The general thrust is 99 cents is not the right price for all music to maximize profit. This we can all agree upon. But the formula of "less popular" + "cheaper price" = "more profit" is not correct.
Yes, if you price things lower, you do get more buyers. But this does not mean that pricing unpopular music means you make more money. It's possible that music that fits a certain "niche" such as, say JPop tunes, the optimal profit point is $2.50 per song not $.99. (Plug: http://gomorning.com/scene/itunes )
In addition, companies need to consider strategicly in deciding optimal pricing -- meaning, if all pre-1990s Jazz music is priced low, it impacts the profits made in new Jazz release. People may not buy any new Jazz music, and instead collect only older Jazz music. In some respects, it affects all music purchased, regardless of genre.
What record companies want to do is price older music fairly high to encourage the purchase of newer music. Which is why old music then is priced similarly to new music, though the demand is apparently much lower. (This is also one reason why retaining effectively indefinite copyright is in the interests of record companies. A large public domain does remove incentive to buy new work.)
I bought a Sharp Zarus in 1997 for about $200 (in yen), which had fairly reliable handwriting recognition for kanji. Kanji I think are even easier to recognize than kana. Although they are more complicated, many can easily distinguished by stroke count and stroke direction alone. Some kana are fairly difficult to tell apart. I had an easier time with kanji than English letters, which have no standard stroke pattern.
I recently got the same dictionary you did for the DS and I had assumed it would have kanji recognition built in. I was a little disappointed it didn't. I would imagine it could be included in a version 2 of the program. It should have at least included a kanji lookup by radical and stroke count feature.
Can anybody point to any research (or, frankly pundit or blogger) that has concluded that CAN-SPAM has had any effect at all? So far, it sounds like CAN-SPAM has bene "toothless", made "zero impact", etc.
Am I the only one who remembered EA back in the C=64 days, when they truly were the maker/publisher of innovative video games? Classics such as Archon, Mail Order Monsters, Racing Destruction Set, Modem Wars, Wasteland, etc.
My wife's Japanese, and I like J-Pop. But, iTunes Japan won't be getting my money, since we live in the U.S. and you have to have a Japanese credit card to download from their site.
It's actually easier for us to buy a CD from Japan and get it shipped to us, than try and send money to her Japanese bank account, etc.
You can buy a money card from http://amazon.co.jp/ (it's on the front page) ONLY IF you are in Japan. They think of everything...
I suppose eventually some stores are going to set up so you can purchase iTunes money cards overseas, but until then, iTunes Japan can kiss my ass.
The only way Amazon would get me interested would be if they offered more foreign releases, such as region 2 and region 3 titles that Netflix doesn't offer. In my neighborhood is a rental company named Scarecrow Video that offers 70,000 unique titles (compare to 40k of Netflix). They have VHS tapes and laser disks dating back to the 80s, things that never made it to DVD, and DVDs that are out of print.
Anyway, for your Average Joe/Jane, selection isn't that important. But I really like a comprehensive store, especially with Asian titles that never make it to the States.
I've been to Japan like six times. I don't understand people complaining about Japan being expensive. I've been to nice resorts (outside of Tokyo) which are around 10,000 yen ($100) a night including dinner and breakfast. You can find places in Tokyo for 4,500 yen (including tax) a night. You can buy a cheap lunch for 500 ($5) inside Tokyo.
Sure, the train can be expensive, but you can get a JR East rail pass for $150 and ride all you want for four non-consecutive days. A plane ticket (from Seattle or LA) is about $400 off season peak.
You could spend a week in and around Tokyo for about $1500 including airfare easily.
Slashdot Mirror
Summarized on the old blog.
Also made the same pitch to JJ Abrams..
I don't think he has been sentenced yet. He wasn't found guilty but it signed a plea bargain, which likely to give him less than 5 years in jail, but probably a lot less or just a fine.
The rule is: If it's obscene, it's illegal and you are a criminal but there's no sentencing guideline. There is a *new* law, though, that says if it's obscene and depicts a child (this is quite vague), the sentencing guideline is 5 years for each obscene image. But these would be consecutive sentences.
What's obscene is really, really vague. Apparently, the definition of free speech can change based on where you're prosecuted, since obscenity is determined based on "community standards." Which is probably why Christopher Handley _in Iowa_ entered into a plea agreement.
If someone can install a security camera in your house, they likely have physical access to your machine. What do you think is more likely: Keyboard sniffer or security camera?
For me who works at home, it's nice idea to be able to see your password. And even if you're in an office, who's really going to try and steal your password? Do you worry when you leave your wallet or car keys at your desk that a coworker is going to steal your credit cards or vehicle?
It might just encourage users to chose a longer or more complicated password that's more difficult to hack. Security always has trade-offs.
If you want real security, you should use two or three factor authentication anyway. Too bad the web doesn't readily allow for it.
Need that April fool achievement myself, of course.
I remember in Japan for many years seeing toilets with spigots at the top of the tank, not to mention dual flush, heated seats, and no need for paper, thanks to a water spray and air dryer. So I'd hardly call it a breakthrough product.
It's the 21st century and we're still rubbing our ass cracks with dead trees.
I'm not sure why you got modded up... Managing people and getting paid more and getting promotions based on merit is orthogonal to "managing technical projects." Why would a promotion of a sales person create a technical manager out of them?
And if Google or whoever don't pay or promote according to merit, they're not going to retain very good sales or marketing people. They are only hurting themselves.
Many people (technical or not) "live in their own little magical world" and don't pay attention to what customers want, how to get the job done, or manage their time well. Technical people write software like Debian Linux. Having good relationships with customers (sales) and people to promote software (marketing) is what made Microsoft a lot more successful than we'd like to admit, although I wish they weren't so ruthless and avaricious.
Technical people often have a disdain for people who don't understand technical things, which is why this board is full of responses similar to yours. It's some sort of elitism I wish nerds would knock off.
ROKU also means "record" in Japanese works "rokuga" (recorded video), "rokuon" (recorded audio), "kiroku" (written record), etc.(Can't seem to get Slashdot to display the characters.)
My wife and I buy "soap base" in bulk and use it. It's intended to be mixed with fragrances and coloring (and I suppose resold) but we use it straight. It's very inexpensive, though you have to buy empty dispenser bottles to use it.
Here's the site we order from. There's no "anti-bacteria" chemicals in it, and for people like me who hate fragrances, it's hypo-allergenic without the boutique price. For a gallon, it's 25 cents an ounce. And it should last about two years per person. If you want something with an interesting label, go with Dr. Bronner's.
For those chemists (cooks) out there, soap is easy to make yourself.
Hoax device? Meaning, he was intentionally misrepresenting a lighted sign board a ... sign? Perhaps, if they looked like actual bombs, they might have a point.
I'm curious what they could actually charge these people for, considering it's often intention to harm that's considered in these cases.
Vandalism, or posting bills or something else.
Once the smoke's clear, the trial will likely end up making the police and city government look stupid. That is, assuming the judge and jury acts reasonably on people that aren't evil criminals.
AOP solves the N times problem nicely. For instance, if you wanted to take an object with N methods and add a call x() to each of them, if you used ordinary OOP, you'd have to override every method, then call x() from each method. What's the elegance of that? I don't see how "proper" OOP can solve this sort of problem better than AOP.
AOP is largely mysterious and confusing because it's not something (yet) integrated with any standard languages. If it were integrated, then there would be proper tool support, recommend methodologies, references, implementaiton refinements to make AOP easier.
And in a sense, AOP isn't new to Java. Have you ever used the Java "Proxy" class? AOP really just provides a java.lang.reflect.Proxy "version 2.0".
Maybe AOP won't be used except by container providers, i.e. people writing EJB3 implementations.
the JCP is too slow and crufty, comes up with homegrown technologies nobody wants to use, etc. and that tools such as Hibernate and Spring not borne from the community process are superior or, in the case of EJB 3.0, adopted.
I guess I don't know why "Ajax" was brought up, I haven't used it and it's not something I'm familiar with. Maybe Ajax doesn't belong in the same class of technologies. Arguing about the specifics means missing the point, though.
It often takes "rebel" technologies to move things forward. It also takes some experimentation to develop a technology; i.e. coming up with a rigorous, solid standard might prevent its spread. Sometimes sloppiness is good. RSS, HTML, etc. have done okay despite the sloppiness. Requiring every web page be HTML compliant would have stifled the web.
Recently, I've started working on Weblogic. I used to develop with JBoss. In terms of service deployment, JBoss is superior to Weblogic. I guess with Weblogic, you're still stuck writing a lot of code to deploy JMX services. I noticed at my new company that programmers ended up launching network servers from a Servlet, which was not its intended use. The ease of deploying MBeans and dependency control with JBoss is superior. It can be done easily with a bit of XML, and no code is required. JBoss also handles ordered deployments better. With Weblogic, deployment ordering is done by assigning a deployment order number (1-4000 or something) to your deployment. It reminds me of writing programs with line numbers back in the good old days of BASIC.
It's my guess that functionality from Spring will be eventually refined into a series of JCPs. Sometimes it's better that standards develop in this way.
15 on the dollar is a rip off.
They're happy to buy Mercedes and wear Levis. They go see more Hollywood movies than domestic ones.
Japanese just don't really care for the sort of games on the XBox.
Perhaps it would have been a wiser investment to simply spend more on insurance than theft deterrance. Weigh the cost of an installed security system and monthly monitoring against simply having better coverage.
Still, imagine if you did go to the effort to create tests (not necessarily "unit tests" but "integration") for your game. Imagine the test procedure in pieces as follows:
Set-up:
1. Load level geometry (perhaps as a simplication point, create a test level)
2. Place dummy players and computer players in the level; dummy players do not move
3. Run for 100 game "ticks"
Verification:
1. Check if computer players reach dummy player location
2. Check player lost life
It would be desirable if the tests ran quickly (at 100% CPU) and without rendering or sound, etc.
All these steps are easily programmed. Once you have tests like this, not only are you testing specific bug scenarios (path following), but you also cover ones that you might not have anticipated such as your physics engine failing.
If you're smart, you'll design tests to be intelligent as well so that making a small change doesn't require rewriting all your tests. And if things are unpredictable (random elements), you may need to make the acceptance conditions in tests a bit more flexible or remove these.
Another way to test: In a specific game itself, you might simply record the input of a player running through a level. Though various unrelated code changes, you might expect the input to produce the same results.
Game programmers I know don't bother with writing testing frameworks like this because this sort of thing does take a lot of time to write. It is an investment and a lot of game programming is so short-term and non-iterative that it's difficult to be convinced to spend the time.
From what I've seen, Groovy's a half-baked programming language and unfinished product. See this criticism for a start.
If you want to do embedded scripting in Java, I suggest Bean Shell instead. As a library, Bean Shell is about 280K, Groovy is about 1.7M. And Bean Shell has been around for a lot longer.
I'd like to see Sun add closures and better support for lists/maps in Java itself (e.g. a map function). I'm hoping that pressure from Ruby will make the language grow. C# already made them change their mind about Generics.
Usually one has a couple other options when breaking encryption. For example, some unscrupulous hardware company employee could release the keys to the Internet anonymously. Or, somebody posing as a manufacturer could release them as well.
Although "bricking" is a possibility with the platform, it's unlikely to occur because potentially millions of people (voters) would be quite upset.
What's more likely is somebody caught with the "stolen" keys gets sentenced prison or worse.
Internet pricing these days mostly comes down to bandwidth, usage, availability, and less importantly service. A few customers may also consider going with a particular provider for hosting, security, customer support reasons, etc., but it's really become commodity market.
Telcos want to be able to use price discrimination, service differentiation, control of content, etc., to create more profit for themselves. They expect more profit for themselves at both ends of the pipe. Of course, they justify a 2-tier scheme by suggesting investment into infrastructure costs money, but it has always been the case with any other utility company that people/communities demand more electricity, water, gas over time.
In a Telco-centric world, the Internet would look more like the cellphone networks of today, where carriers sell 15 second ringtones for $2.00 or $3.00 on web sites hosted by themselves.
The "3rd party" content providers (Google, Microsoft, etc.) won't let this happen.
I read the article but the author doesn't really understand basic economic theory very well.
The general thrust is 99 cents is not the right price for all music to maximize profit. This we can all agree upon. But the formula of "less popular" + "cheaper price" = "more profit" is not correct.
Yes, if you price things lower, you do get more buyers. But this does not mean that pricing unpopular music means you make more money. It's possible that music that fits a certain "niche" such as, say JPop tunes, the optimal profit point is $2.50 per song not $.99. (Plug: http://gomorning.com/scene/itunes )
In addition, companies need to consider strategicly in deciding optimal pricing -- meaning, if all pre-1990s Jazz music is priced low, it impacts the profits made in new Jazz release. People may not buy any new Jazz music, and instead collect only older Jazz music. In some respects, it affects all music purchased, regardless of genre.
What record companies want to do is price older music fairly high to encourage the purchase of newer music. Which is why old music then is priced similarly to new music, though the demand is apparently much lower. (This is also one reason why retaining effectively indefinite copyright is in the interests of record companies. A large public domain does remove incentive to buy new work.)
I bought a Sharp Zarus in 1997 for about $200 (in yen), which had fairly reliable handwriting recognition for kanji. Kanji I think are even easier to recognize than kana. Although they are more complicated, many can easily distinguished by stroke count and stroke direction alone. Some kana are fairly difficult to tell apart. I had an easier time with kanji than English letters, which have no standard stroke pattern.
I recently got the same dictionary you did for the DS and I had assumed it would have kanji recognition built in. I was a little disappointed it didn't. I would imagine it could be included in a version 2 of the program. It should have at least included a kanji lookup by radical and stroke count feature.
Can anybody point to any research (or, frankly pundit or blogger) that has concluded that CAN-SPAM has had any effect at all? So far, it sounds like CAN-SPAM has bene "toothless", made "zero impact", etc.
Am I the only one who remembered EA back in the C=64 days, when they truly were the maker/publisher of innovative video games? Classics such as Archon, Mail Order Monsters, Racing Destruction Set, Modem Wars, Wasteland, etc.
My wife's Japanese, and I like J-Pop. But, iTunes Japan won't be getting my money, since we live in the U.S. and you have to have a Japanese credit card to download from their site.
It's actually easier for us to buy a CD from Japan and get it shipped to us, than try and send money to her Japanese bank account, etc.
You can buy a money card from http://amazon.co.jp/ (it's on the front page) ONLY IF you are in Japan. They think of everything...
I suppose eventually some stores are going to set up so you can purchase iTunes money cards overseas, but until then, iTunes Japan can kiss my ass.
The only way Amazon would get me interested would be if they offered more foreign releases, such as region 2 and region 3 titles that Netflix doesn't offer. In my neighborhood is a rental company named Scarecrow Video that offers 70,000 unique titles (compare to 40k of Netflix). They have VHS tapes and laser disks dating back to the 80s, things that never made it to DVD, and DVDs that are out of print.
Anyway, for your Average Joe/Jane, selection isn't that important. But I really like a comprehensive store, especially with Asian titles that never make it to the States.
I've been to Japan like six times. I don't understand people complaining about Japan being expensive. I've been to nice resorts (outside of Tokyo) which are around 10,000 yen ($100) a night including dinner and breakfast. You can find places in Tokyo for 4,500 yen (including tax) a night. You can buy a cheap lunch for 500 ($5) inside Tokyo.
Sure, the train can be expensive, but you can get a JR East rail pass for $150 and ride all you want for four non-consecutive days. A plane ticket (from Seattle or LA) is about $400 off season peak.
You could spend a week in and around Tokyo for about $1500 including airfare easily.