Mod parent up: filter doesn't actually exist... it's just a proposal supported by a minority of polticians. And the more daft things that they try and block with it, the more ridiculous the whole thing sounds, and the less chance there is of this thing ever actually passing through Parliament and becoming law.
Like the parent, I'm pretty confident this proposal will go and quietly die in a corner eventually.
Can I just say this is a fantastic post and I bet you will be proved to be right. If you think about it, the Internet is truly a unique thing in today's world. The only communications medium that has essentially no controls over its use (unless you live in China etc).
I'm Australian and while we don't have any filtering at this time, this proposed filter does worry me. I'm fairly certain it's unpopular (and technicall unfeasible) enough to not pass through Parliament in its current form. But give it another few decades... and I think we all will be heading the way you describe. That includes America. In fact, America might end up censoring things MORE than we do in Australia (compare the levels of nudity and swearing that you can see on free-to-air US TV, and free-to-air Australian TV: Australia allows much more of both, and basically doesn't censor anything after 10pm, whereas the US tends to bleep out stuff far more often).
True, although 3Drealms put the patch online to disable the parental lock and made it available to Australians. Since it wasn't hosted in Australia there was nothing wrong with that.
So in reality, very few people actually played that 'parental lock' mode:P I certainly didn't.
China: Comprehensive, active and ongoing censorship of many non-Chinese websites. Filter able to be changed rapidly in response to current events.
Iran: As above, but not as comprehensive or as sophisticated as China.
Australia: No internet censorship at the moment.
What Slashdot always fails to mention in these fear-mongering articles is that this filter is simply something that is being PROPOSED by a minority of politicians, mostly to appease promises they made during the last election to various conservative and Christian groups. It does not actually exist (yet).
Then of course you have the Americans coming in with comments like "OMG Australia is falling apart, what a shithole of a country", without realising that this is all just a proposal in one or two senators' deranged heads and doesn't exist. And knowing how things to in Australian politics, it is very unlikely to ever get approved by the wider Parliament and become law. There are a few reasons for this:
1. Massive public unpopularity. Most Australians don't want this. They aren't anti-censorship per se, but they sure are anti "anything-that-is-gonna-make-my-internets-slow-down". Trials have shown that this filter will substantially slow down access.
2. Most people, even politicians, understand that trying to censor the internet is virtually impossible (VPNs, encryption, plus the simple fact that websites can be changed, started up, shut down and moved around far quicker than any static list of sites could keep up with). So this would simply be a waste of money, and wasteful spending is not something the government wants to be seen to be doing in the current economic climate.
3. Comparisons with China, Iran et al. Just mentioning this is a pretty good way of turning someone against the filter pretty quickly.
Anyway so executive summary: there is no internet filtering in Australia currently. There is a (rather unpopular) proposal to implement some which I would give a good chance of never coming to fruition.
Slashdot needs to keep reporting on these stories... I find the idea of this filter as abhorrent as any of you... but it needs to acknowledge or make clearer that this filter doesn't actually exist. It's just an idea at this stage.
Well ok, yes we don't allow the HOSTING of certain material on servers within Australia. But you are perfectly free to host it elsewhere, and we aren't restricted from accessing anything on the net. I wouldn't really call that censorship (unless you happen to be in the content-hosting business, I suppose).
As for censoring TV/movies etc, from what I've seen of US TV (which is a fair bit - I lived there for 3 years), they censor it far more than in Australia. Australian TV is quite happy to have heaps of swearing and full nudity after a certain time of night. But you rarely see that on US free-to-air stations.
Also, the US, Australia, EU etc. ALL have a rating system for TV, movies, books etc (G, PG, R etc) which are substantially similar to each other. This is a form of censorship and perhaps Australia is slightly more harsh in its rating system than other countries. But I still wouldn't call that 'serious active censorship' that is substantially more than in other countries. As stated above, things ~seem~ a LOT more censored in the US (when I started living there I couldn't believe that you bleeped out even mild obscenities on the radio and TV, and when my American wife moved to Australia with me, she was astonished at how much nudity we can show on our terrestrial TV stations).
Anyway, not trying to provoke an argument here since I agree with the gist of your original post. Just seems odd that you singled Australia out for having serious censorship when at most, it's only ~slightly~ more strict than the US IMO. Half of Europe and virtually all of Asia and the middle east are far worse than both countries, in that regard.
I was merely answering the OP's question by pointing out that the article had already answered it. I was not passing judgement on whether or not such a requirement was a good idea. So I'm not sure what the point of quoting me and asking "so what?" is.
Depends how you define 'better'. Japanese phones are certainly more feature-rich than the iPhone. However, they aren't always more elegant or usable (some of the interfaces on Japanese phones are pretty awful, to be honest).
Besides, even if I had a 'better' phone, I still wouldn't refuse another phone for free!
The article states that attendance at this university is a necessary requirement to graduate:
Truants in Japan often fake attendance by getting friends to answer roll-call or hand in signed attendance cards. That's verging on cheating since attendance is a key requirement for graduation.
Having said that, smart students would probably be able to figure out a way of disabling this 'feature' or spoofing it to show them as being in a different location pretty quickly. Also GPS often fails to get a usable signal in some buildings.
Hmmm some good points. Not entirely sure how being socially and geographically mobile precludes using ID cards for identification though (as opposed to fingerprints).
As a non-American, I see fingerprints as being much worse than ID cards because:
- They are permanently attached to you. Someone can confirm your identity even against your wishes, via a finger print. Whereas with a card, if you don't have the card or you choose not to produce it, you are anonymous.
- You leave evidence of your fingerprints on things you touch. This is obviously useful for investigating crimes, and I guess that's why it's a popular method of storing ID information in the US. But for pure identification purposes, an ID card does the same job and doesn't leave a trail on everything you touch.
Then again, fingerprints have some advantages:
- Much more difficult to forge.
- No risk of losing that form of ID or having it stolen.
Incidentally, Australia also started as a socially mobile, relatively classless nation. Same as the US in many respects (i.e. a bunch of separate ex-British colonies become independent and formed a union of self-governing States with an overarching Federal government structure). But yet fingerprinting is unheard of here. (We don't have ID cards either though, apart from drivers licences and stuff. ID here is generally just done with passports or birth certificates, when required).
Ah true... it's just that in my experience getting enough points to qualify if you don't happen to have a particularly in-demand occupation is virtually impossible. But you're right, I neglected to mention if you do have an in-demand occupation then things are a bit easier.
I was more speaking from the personal experience of trying to get my girlfriend (now wife) into Australia when she didn't have an in-demand occupation. In the end getting married was the only feasible way.
I also tried the US green card lottery twice. Obviously didn't win either time;)
There are also 100+ GB plans from several ISPS at the 'standard' ADSL1 speed of 1.5 Mbps, which is quite close to your 1 Mbps example.
If you wanted to get upwards of 200 GB though, you'd have to buy a 24 Mbps plan with 200+ GB and tell your modem to connect at 1 Mbps if you insist on it... why you'd do that is beyond me though. The 24 Mbps plans are not really any more expensive than the 1.5 Mbps plans usually, as it's a function of what equipment is in your area and the condition and length of your phone line. Since you pay for the data you use, the ISP doesn't really care what speed you get it at. So they are happy to sell you 24 Mbps plans for the same as 1.5 Mbps plans, if they have the hardware to supply it to you in the area.:)
Great Britain and Australia are both engaging in serious, active censorship. However, even then the level is tiny compared to that of China.
No. The Australian online censorship thing was only a proposal, supported by just a handful of senators. It never made it through Parliament and at this point, looks like it won't ever get through in anything like its current form. Really, it was never going to happen, being completely impractical and unworkable, not to mention despised by 90% of the voting public.
Slashdot hyped it up like crazy, but even a blind person could see that it was never going to happen. I'm sick of seeing people who vaguely remember some articles on Australia and internet censorship just flat out saying "Australia has serious active censorship". It simply isn't true. As of this moment, my internet connection here in Australia is exactly the same as yours in the US.
Not sure about the UK, but my guess is that the situation is similar. Some politicians have suggested some censorship measures, but any real world trial would show that it's just impossible (or highly impractical) to do. One VPN and it's entirely pointless.
Of course, in a perfect world, anyone could pick up their bags and move to a different country if they wanted to. In the real world of course, you need a visa.
The US is hard to get into unless there are valid family or employment connections. The Green Card Lottery is about your only chance if you have no pre-existing link with the US. Australia is even harder as they have similar visa options as the US, but no 'green card lottery' equivalent. So to move to Australia, you need to find a company willing to employ you and move you there, or have family there already. Another option if you're young is to study as a foreign student and then stay once you graduate. It's possible to do but hideously expensive.
Within the EU movement between different countries is a lot easier (assuming you already have citizenship of one or more EU countries). However as stated, the quality of life there is more variable than in US/AU/NZ (certainly some EU countries are excellent, but others are sorta average at best).
Yes I guess that's what my post was trying to get across though - it IS mostly only about authentication in the US.
But other countries perceive that as a bizarre thing. They SEE it as a gross violation of their rights. It's a difference in the perception of what fingerprinting means, rather than anything inherently more evil about the US system. Cultural insensitivity, if you will.
I wonder how fingerprinting became such an accepted way of IDing someone in the US but not in other countries? There must be some historical reason for that.
Actually now that I think about it, a lot of Americans seem to be paranoid about ID cards (aka the old 'papers please' meme). Yet in most countries, ID cards are the accepted method of ID. So there you go - Americans trust fingerprinting but don't like ID cards. Other people distrust fingerprinting but think ID cards are perfectly acceptable. Bit of an oversimplification but an interesting thing to think about...
Wtf? People knew about Al Qaeda way before 2001. The Cole bombings? Nairobi? Do any of these things ring a bell? They were a major terrorist organisation for a good decade before 9/11, and struck mostly at American targets overseas during this time. So the name Osama bin Laden was well known to me prior to 2001, both as the leader of this group, and just because the bin Laden family is quite a well known name anyway due to their massive wealth in the construction and other industries in the mid east.
The US seems to love fingerprinting as a method of ID for some reason. In most countries, the only people that ever have their fingerprints taken are criminals.
I have security clearances to several Australian Federal Government departments (as an IT contractor). No fingerprints required. They just simply aren't used here as a method of ID.
The only people in the world who have my fingerprints, in fact, are the Americans, because I have travelled to the US and they take ALL TEN FINGERPRINTS of all visitors (?!?!!! that's still a serious wtf from me every time I think about it, even though I've gone through it a dozen times now)
GP is mostly correct. Most countries require you to go through immigration both on arrival and departure.
I'm an Australian with an American wife and so travel very frequently between the two countries. Both countries require you to go through immigration and customs on arrival (as you would expect). Australia requires you go through immigration upon departure as well (NOT customs). The US doesn't require that you do anything at all upon leaving, however. Frankly I don't know how they keep track of who is in their country...must be via airline records or something.
Note that the immigration check upon exiting Australia is just so they know who's in and who's out of the country at any given time. Arrivals - departures = possible visa overstayers. For citizens, it's also so they know where you are in case of crisis (e.g. if they know you've gone to country X, and a war breaks out in country X, they will try to contact you and assist you to get back home). It's not a customs check, and they don't fingerprint you or anything. It's just a "my name is X, and I'm leaving".
Hell, Australia doesn't fingerprint you for arrival either. In fact, the only place my fingerprints are on record anywhere on Earth is the AMERICAN DHS. Sorta funny (and scary) that my own government doesn't have my fingerprints, but some random foreign one does...
Yep your suggestions would probably work really well. The kana syllabaries really aren't hard to learn. I picked them up in a few months without even really trying to. Context, as you say, would probably be sufficient to avoid the problems of homonymic kanji... although since Japanese has so many MORE homonyms than English maybe not?
Only problem is that some people think that kana-only Japanese, and romaji for that matter, are rather ugly. Romaji I don't mind but kana-only with no spaces is stupidly hard to read (at least for me). At least with Kanji the nouns and verb stems stick out at a glance, and the whole written language becomes smaller and more compressed. Huge strings of kana are harder (then again, I'm not a native speaker... and other languages like Latin were originally space-less and they didn't seem to have a problem).
I live in Australia. Most highways are asphalt but a few of the more major ones are concrete because it's tougher and lasts a lot longer. In summer they can be painfully bright to look at (keep in mind light intensity here is higher than most places in North America). Bought me some polarised sunglasses a year or two ago and they are just fantastic for driving. Eliminates road/water glare but doesn't dim the view of other objects.
Japanese wouldn't be a bad choice from a SPOKEN language perspective. It has far fewer unique sounds than most other languages and hence is prounouncable easily by most people (the only tricky one from an English speaker's perspective might be the 'r' equivalent consonant which is not a sound present in English and is sorta half way between our r and l. Americans might also have a problem with the openness of the vowels... but UK/Australian/NZ/other English speakers wouldn't have a problem as they have retained those open vowels in their accents (unlike Americans... compare 'hot' or 'pot' between a Brit and an American... the Japanese 'o' is how the Brit would say it, same with 'a').
Also, it's grammatically very simple, almost child-like in a way. No gender, only two tenses, and only one irregular verb. All other verbs conjugate according to the 'rules'. This is very different than say, French or Italian, where it's like "ok here's how you generally conjugate verbs... except for these eleventy million irregular verbs that you'll just have to rote learn"
OTOH, the WRITTEN Japanese language is far from the simplicity of the spoken one. It's probably the most difficult on earth, in fact (all the fun of ideogrammatic characters, like Chinese, but with less consistent readings, AND two other phoenetic characters sets mixed in as well!)
Yep, it's aeroplane in Australia/NZ too. Spoken just as it's spelt (like aerospace, as you say).
American 'airplane' always hits my 'language pedantry trigger' whenever I hear it for some reason. Some other US variations I don't mind, but 'airplane' just sounds lazy to me.
I get this all the time. Actually, everyone outside the US who does business with the US (or has US-based offices) gets this. Why?
US paper sizes: Legal, Letter etc.
Everywhere freaking else: A3, A4 etc.
Slightly less text fits on one or the other, but Word defaults your paper size to the type of paper that your printer can print. Over very long documents, or documents with a lot of images or tables, it can be several pages out by the time you get to page 100+.
Sorry but I don't know a single person that uses mouse gestures, and very few that use Adblock. Most just use a default out of the box install of Firefox.
I've shown a few people at work Chrome and they seem impressed. I've switched to Chrome fulltime at home now, although I still have Firefox on my work laptop (I work for Oracle and their default machine image includes only FF).
Techies might use Adblock but 'the masses' out there just want a plain old browser that displays their internets. That's why IE did so well - it was there when you installed Windows and it worked (sorta).
The 3L/day I can relate to. I have days like that too (although it's almost always diet). Not every day though obviously.
7L a day, every day, on the other hand - holy crap. The human body isn't supposed to have that much fluid intake in a day of ANY liquid (including water) is it? O.o I'm not even sure my stomach could cope with being filled constantly like that.
She must have needed to go to the bathroom every half hour...
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Mod parent up: filter doesn't actually exist ... it's just a proposal supported by a minority of polticians. And the more daft things that they try and block with it, the more ridiculous the whole thing sounds, and the less chance there is of this thing ever actually passing through Parliament and becoming law.
Like the parent, I'm pretty confident this proposal will go and quietly die in a corner eventually.
Can I just say this is a fantastic post and I bet you will be proved to be right. If you think about it, the Internet is truly a unique thing in today's world. The only communications medium that has essentially no controls over its use (unless you live in China etc).
I'm Australian and while we don't have any filtering at this time, this proposed filter does worry me. I'm fairly certain it's unpopular (and technicall unfeasible) enough to not pass through Parliament in its current form. But give it another few decades ... and I think we all will be heading the way you describe. That includes America. In fact, America might end up censoring things MORE than we do in Australia (compare the levels of nudity and swearing that you can see on free-to-air US TV, and free-to-air Australian TV: Australia allows much more of both, and basically doesn't censor anything after 10pm, whereas the US tends to bleep out stuff far more often).
Your post is sad, but realistic, I think.
True, although 3Drealms put the patch online to disable the parental lock and made it available to Australians. Since it wasn't hosted in Australia there was nothing wrong with that.
So in reality, very few people actually played that 'parental lock' mode :P I certainly didn't.
Sure:
China: Comprehensive, active and ongoing censorship of many non-Chinese websites. Filter able to be changed rapidly in response to current events.
Iran: As above, but not as comprehensive or as sophisticated as China.
Australia: No internet censorship at the moment.
What Slashdot always fails to mention in these fear-mongering articles is that this filter is simply something that is being PROPOSED by a minority of politicians, mostly to appease promises they made during the last election to various conservative and Christian groups. It does not actually exist (yet).
Then of course you have the Americans coming in with comments like "OMG Australia is falling apart, what a shithole of a country", without realising that this is all just a proposal in one or two senators' deranged heads and doesn't exist. And knowing how things to in Australian politics, it is very unlikely to ever get approved by the wider Parliament and become law. There are a few reasons for this:
1. Massive public unpopularity. Most Australians don't want this. They aren't anti-censorship per se, but they sure are anti "anything-that-is-gonna-make-my-internets-slow-down". Trials have shown that this filter will substantially slow down access.
2. Most people, even politicians, understand that trying to censor the internet is virtually impossible (VPNs, encryption, plus the simple fact that websites can be changed, started up, shut down and moved around far quicker than any static list of sites could keep up with). So this would simply be a waste of money, and wasteful spending is not something the government wants to be seen to be doing in the current economic climate.
3. Comparisons with China, Iran et al. Just mentioning this is a pretty good way of turning someone against the filter pretty quickly.
Anyway so executive summary: there is no internet filtering in Australia currently. There is a (rather unpopular) proposal to implement some which I would give a good chance of never coming to fruition.
Slashdot needs to keep reporting on these stories ... I find the idea of this filter as abhorrent as any of you ... but it needs to acknowledge or make clearer that this filter doesn't actually exist. It's just an idea at this stage.
Well ok, yes we don't allow the HOSTING of certain material on servers within Australia. But you are perfectly free to host it elsewhere, and we aren't restricted from accessing anything on the net. I wouldn't really call that censorship (unless you happen to be in the content-hosting business, I suppose).
As for censoring TV/movies etc, from what I've seen of US TV (which is a fair bit - I lived there for 3 years), they censor it far more than in Australia. Australian TV is quite happy to have heaps of swearing and full nudity after a certain time of night. But you rarely see that on US free-to-air stations.
Also, the US, Australia, EU etc. ALL have a rating system for TV, movies, books etc (G, PG, R etc) which are substantially similar to each other. This is a form of censorship and perhaps Australia is slightly more harsh in its rating system than other countries. But I still wouldn't call that 'serious active censorship' that is substantially more than in other countries. As stated above, things ~seem~ a LOT more censored in the US (when I started living there I couldn't believe that you bleeped out even mild obscenities on the radio and TV, and when my American wife moved to Australia with me, she was astonished at how much nudity we can show on our terrestrial TV stations).
Anyway, not trying to provoke an argument here since I agree with the gist of your original post. Just seems odd that you singled Australia out for having serious censorship when at most, it's only ~slightly~ more strict than the US IMO. Half of Europe and virtually all of Asia and the middle east are far worse than both countries, in that regard.
I was merely answering the OP's question by pointing out that the article had already answered it. I was not passing judgement on whether or not such a requirement was a good idea. So I'm not sure what the point of quoting me and asking "so what?" is.
Depends how you define 'better'. Japanese phones are certainly more feature-rich than the iPhone. However, they aren't always more elegant or usable (some of the interfaces on Japanese phones are pretty awful, to be honest).
Besides, even if I had a 'better' phone, I still wouldn't refuse another phone for free!
The article states that attendance at this university is a necessary requirement to graduate:
Truants in Japan often fake attendance by getting friends to answer roll-call or hand in signed attendance cards. That's verging on cheating since attendance is a key requirement for graduation.
Having said that, smart students would probably be able to figure out a way of disabling this 'feature' or spoofing it to show them as being in a different location pretty quickly. Also GPS often fails to get a usable signal in some buildings.
I can eat almost any food all year round by walking down the street and buying it from the same supermarket that I buy a mortgage from.
You can get a mortgage from a SUPERMARKET where you live? O.o (which I am assuming is the US)
No wonder the US had a subprime mortgage problem that plunged the world into a recession, if they are giving them away with boxes of cereal now ;)
Hmmm some good points. Not entirely sure how being socially and geographically mobile precludes using ID cards for identification though (as opposed to fingerprints).
As a non-American, I see fingerprints as being much worse than ID cards because:
- They are permanently attached to you. Someone can confirm your identity even against your wishes, via a finger print. Whereas with a card, if you don't have the card or you choose not to produce it, you are anonymous.
- You leave evidence of your fingerprints on things you touch. This is obviously useful for investigating crimes, and I guess that's why it's a popular method of storing ID information in the US. But for pure identification purposes, an ID card does the same job and doesn't leave a trail on everything you touch.
Then again, fingerprints have some advantages:
- Much more difficult to forge.
- No risk of losing that form of ID or having it stolen.
Incidentally, Australia also started as a socially mobile, relatively classless nation. Same as the US in many respects (i.e. a bunch of separate ex-British colonies become independent and formed a union of self-governing States with an overarching Federal government structure). But yet fingerprinting is unheard of here. (We don't have ID cards either though, apart from drivers licences and stuff. ID here is generally just done with passports or birth certificates, when required).
Ah true ... it's just that in my experience getting enough points to qualify if you don't happen to have a particularly in-demand occupation is virtually impossible. But you're right, I neglected to mention if you do have an in-demand occupation then things are a bit easier.
I was more speaking from the personal experience of trying to get my girlfriend (now wife) into Australia when she didn't have an in-demand occupation. In the end getting married was the only feasible way.
I also tried the US green card lottery twice. Obviously didn't win either time ;)
Funnily enough, you can get sorta close to both of those plans.
There are ADSL2+ plans (i.e. 24 Mbps) with 2 GB/month allowances: http://www.tpg.com.au/products_services/adsl2plus_pricing.php (first plan in the list).
There are also 100+ GB plans from several ISPS at the 'standard' ADSL1 speed of 1.5 Mbps, which is quite close to your 1 Mbps example.
If you wanted to get upwards of 200 GB though, you'd have to buy a 24 Mbps plan with 200+ GB and tell your modem to connect at 1 Mbps if you insist on it ... why you'd do that is beyond me though. The 24 Mbps plans are not really any more expensive than the 1.5 Mbps plans usually, as it's a function of what equipment is in your area and the condition and length of your phone line. Since you pay for the data you use, the ISP doesn't really care what speed you get it at. So they are happy to sell you 24 Mbps plans for the same as 1.5 Mbps plans, if they have the hardware to supply it to you in the area. :)
Great Britain and Australia are both engaging in serious, active censorship. However, even then the level is tiny compared to that of China.
No. The Australian online censorship thing was only a proposal, supported by just a handful of senators. It never made it through Parliament and at this point, looks like it won't ever get through in anything like its current form. Really, it was never going to happen, being completely impractical and unworkable, not to mention despised by 90% of the voting public.
Slashdot hyped it up like crazy, but even a blind person could see that it was never going to happen. I'm sick of seeing people who vaguely remember some articles on Australia and internet censorship just flat out saying "Australia has serious active censorship". It simply isn't true. As of this moment, my internet connection here in Australia is exactly the same as yours in the US.
Not sure about the UK, but my guess is that the situation is similar. Some politicians have suggested some censorship measures, but any real world trial would show that it's just impossible (or highly impractical) to do. One VPN and it's entirely pointless.
Of course, in a perfect world, anyone could pick up their bags and move to a different country if they wanted to. In the real world of course, you need a visa.
The US is hard to get into unless there are valid family or employment connections. The Green Card Lottery is about your only chance if you have no pre-existing link with the US. Australia is even harder as they have similar visa options as the US, but no 'green card lottery' equivalent. So to move to Australia, you need to find a company willing to employ you and move you there, or have family there already. Another option if you're young is to study as a foreign student and then stay once you graduate. It's possible to do but hideously expensive.
Within the EU movement between different countries is a lot easier (assuming you already have citizenship of one or more EU countries). However as stated, the quality of life there is more variable than in US/AU/NZ (certainly some EU countries are excellent, but others are sorta average at best).
Yes I guess that's what my post was trying to get across though - it IS mostly only about authentication in the US.
But other countries perceive that as a bizarre thing. They SEE it as a gross violation of their rights. It's a difference in the perception of what fingerprinting means, rather than anything inherently more evil about the US system. Cultural insensitivity, if you will.
I wonder how fingerprinting became such an accepted way of IDing someone in the US but not in other countries? There must be some historical reason for that.
Actually now that I think about it, a lot of Americans seem to be paranoid about ID cards (aka the old 'papers please' meme). Yet in most countries, ID cards are the accepted method of ID. So there you go - Americans trust fingerprinting but don't like ID cards. Other people distrust fingerprinting but think ID cards are perfectly acceptable. Bit of an oversimplification but an interesting thing to think about...
Wtf? People knew about Al Qaeda way before 2001. The Cole bombings? Nairobi? Do any of these things ring a bell? They were a major terrorist organisation for a good decade before 9/11, and struck mostly at American targets overseas during this time. So the name Osama bin Laden was well known to me prior to 2001, both as the leader of this group, and just because the bin Laden family is quite a well known name anyway due to their massive wealth in the construction and other industries in the mid east.
The US seems to love fingerprinting as a method of ID for some reason. In most countries, the only people that ever have their fingerprints taken are criminals.
I have security clearances to several Australian Federal Government departments (as an IT contractor). No fingerprints required. They just simply aren't used here as a method of ID.
The only people in the world who have my fingerprints, in fact, are the Americans, because I have travelled to the US and they take ALL TEN FINGERPRINTS of all visitors (?!?!!! that's still a serious wtf from me every time I think about it, even though I've gone through it a dozen times now)
GP is mostly correct. Most countries require you to go through immigration both on arrival and departure.
I'm an Australian with an American wife and so travel very frequently between the two countries. Both countries require you to go through immigration and customs on arrival (as you would expect). Australia requires you go through immigration upon departure as well (NOT customs). The US doesn't require that you do anything at all upon leaving, however. Frankly I don't know how they keep track of who is in their country...must be via airline records or something.
Note that the immigration check upon exiting Australia is just so they know who's in and who's out of the country at any given time. Arrivals - departures = possible visa overstayers. For citizens, it's also so they know where you are in case of crisis (e.g. if they know you've gone to country X, and a war breaks out in country X, they will try to contact you and assist you to get back home). It's not a customs check, and they don't fingerprint you or anything. It's just a "my name is X, and I'm leaving".
Hell, Australia doesn't fingerprint you for arrival either. In fact, the only place my fingerprints are on record anywhere on Earth is the AMERICAN DHS. Sorta funny (and scary) that my own government doesn't have my fingerprints, but some random foreign one does...
Yep your suggestions would probably work really well. The kana syllabaries really aren't hard to learn. I picked them up in a few months without even really trying to. Context, as you say, would probably be sufficient to avoid the problems of homonymic kanji ... although since Japanese has so many MORE homonyms than English maybe not?
Only problem is that some people think that kana-only Japanese, and romaji for that matter, are rather ugly. Romaji I don't mind but kana-only with no spaces is stupidly hard to read (at least for me). At least with Kanji the nouns and verb stems stick out at a glance, and the whole written language becomes smaller and more compressed. Huge strings of kana are harder (then again, I'm not a native speaker ... and other languages like Latin were originally space-less and they didn't seem to have a problem).
+1 to this.
I live in Australia. Most highways are asphalt but a few of the more major ones are concrete because it's tougher and lasts a lot longer. In summer they can be painfully bright to look at (keep in mind light intensity here is higher than most places in North America). Bought me some polarised sunglasses a year or two ago and they are just fantastic for driving. Eliminates road/water glare but doesn't dim the view of other objects.
Japanese wouldn't be a bad choice from a SPOKEN language perspective. It has far fewer unique sounds than most other languages and hence is prounouncable easily by most people (the only tricky one from an English speaker's perspective might be the 'r' equivalent consonant which is not a sound present in English and is sorta half way between our r and l. Americans might also have a problem with the openness of the vowels ... but UK/Australian/NZ/other English speakers wouldn't have a problem as they have retained those open vowels in their accents (unlike Americans ... compare 'hot' or 'pot' between a Brit and an American ... the Japanese 'o' is how the Brit would say it, same with 'a').
Also, it's grammatically very simple, almost child-like in a way. No gender, only two tenses, and only one irregular verb. All other verbs conjugate according to the 'rules'. This is very different than say, French or Italian, where it's like "ok here's how you generally conjugate verbs ... except for these eleventy million irregular verbs that you'll just have to rote learn"
OTOH, the WRITTEN Japanese language is far from the simplicity of the spoken one. It's probably the most difficult on earth, in fact (all the fun of ideogrammatic characters, like Chinese, but with less consistent readings, AND two other phoenetic characters sets mixed in as well!)
Yep, it's aeroplane in Australia/NZ too. Spoken just as it's spelt (like aerospace, as you say).
American 'airplane' always hits my 'language pedantry trigger' whenever I hear it for some reason. Some other US variations I don't mind, but 'airplane' just sounds lazy to me.
I get this all the time. Actually, everyone outside the US who does business with the US (or has US-based offices) gets this. Why?
US paper sizes: Legal, Letter etc.
Everywhere freaking else: A3, A4 etc.
Slightly less text fits on one or the other, but Word defaults your paper size to the type of paper that your printer can print. Over very long documents, or documents with a lot of images or tables, it can be several pages out by the time you get to page 100+.
Sorry but I don't know a single person that uses mouse gestures, and very few that use Adblock. Most just use a default out of the box install of Firefox.
I've shown a few people at work Chrome and they seem impressed. I've switched to Chrome fulltime at home now, although I still have Firefox on my work laptop (I work for Oracle and their default machine image includes only FF).
Techies might use Adblock but 'the masses' out there just want a plain old browser that displays their internets. That's why IE did so well - it was there when you installed Windows and it worked (sorta).
The 3L/day I can relate to. I have days like that too (although it's almost always diet). Not every day though obviously.
7L a day, every day, on the other hand - holy crap. The human body isn't supposed to have that much fluid intake in a day of ANY liquid (including water) is it? O.o I'm not even sure my stomach could cope with being filled constantly like that.
She must have needed to go to the bathroom every half hour...