Just to be clear, it's actually a little more than $100 USD right now, due to the current strength of the yen and weakness of the dollar. The yen -> USD conversion I got quoted for a personal transaction this morning was 91.63 yen per dollar, which would make your ten thousand yen worth $109.13, less transaction fees.
In conclusion, you seem to know nothing about these topics (food and agriculture and genetic engineering). If you're interested, educate yourself, I wish more people were engaged. Otherwise don't be surprised if no one takes you seriously.
I'm not the GP, but I'm just about smart enough to know that I know nothing on the topic, and I would, in fact, like to educate myself. You seem to be quite knowledgeable on the subject. Would you recommend any books or web sites in particular to get a start on this? If you have any advice other than the standard "wikipedia + google search", I, as well as many others, I'm sure, are all ears.
It just makes you wonder why they need to do that, or why the government even cares about which payment plan you use for your wireless phone. Generally speaking, the sale of a good or of a service goes like this: you give money, you receive good or service. To insert "government butts in and confirms your ID" between those two steps, there really should be a very good overriding reason explaining why this is absolutely necessary. Are there nations which have fallen apart and descended into anarchy because private citizens may be able to make anonymous telephone calls? That's about what it would take for this to have real merit.
A misconception has popped up in this thread because the GP and GGP didn't explain the whole register-at-city-hall thing.
If you live in Japan, you're going to be registered in a certain city. Citizens have their own system, which works a bit differently, but all foreigners on anything but a tourist visa have to register at city hall in the city they're living in. You do the paperwork, then in a few weeks receive an Alien Registration Card, which is government-issued ID that you are legally required to carry at all times (tourists and those waiting for their ARCs are required to carry their passports at all times). You can, and will, be stopped on the streets randomly by police to check your identity and make sure you're legal. Yes, Papers, please is alive and well in Japan.
In any case, this card is required to get a cell phone. You're not asking city hall's permission to get a cell phone, you're proving your legality, identity, and residence to the cell phone company. The same as all the other information, they're just taking it to fill every blank on the application.
That correction aside, getting a cell phone here is a nightmare. In fact, getting any utilities or services set up is a nightmare. The bureaucracy is far too entrenched. If you move here, expect to be without cell phone or home internet access for around a month. Also expect to be fingerprinted and have your picture taken upon entry. As a foreigner, there are a lot of things to deal with here.
Interesting points, but I think you downplay the role of role of playing time in the 'hardcore' mentality.
The challenge in raid content is getting the entire raid force to work cohesively together as a group. In a 'hardcore'-leaning game, this cohesion needs to be very tight for the group to succeed. In a casual-leaning game, a more rag-tag group of players is often able to succeed.
Hardcore groups of players rely on their members to consistently show up for raid times and to pay attention during raids. Both of these points correspond to play-time - hardcore players are both more likely to be playing on a given night and less likely to need to AFK at a critical time.
I've played on both sides of the fence, in race-to-the-top guilds and yeah-we'll-do-that-if-we-get-around-to-it-next-year guilds, and I'd say that play-time is given more attention than it deserves.
It's true that to be successful, you have to have a schedule. A lot of people balk at this, because they aren't accustomed to it with video games. But MMOs aren't like other games. Persistent teamwork is required to make anything happen. Is someone a hardcore thespian if they go to mandatory rehearsals for their community theatre troupe twice a week? Are they a hardcore musician if each week they play together a few hours a couple times? I wouldn't think so, it's just a hobby. The stereotypical hobbies here on/. are frequently solo-oriented hobbies like tinkering with tech and code, but plenty here also do things regularly that they don't think are particularly odd.
Next, someone will raise the claim that "hardcore" means you get together at least four or five times a week. That's not needed to see all the content in WOW, though. It's all about attitude and preparation.
If you read up on the new things you'll be trying beforehand (akin to practicing your music outside rehearsal, I suppose), you can get through all the content in the game getting together only twice a week. If you want to race to be first, you'll be gathering considerably more often than this, but typically only when new areas are released; otherwise, you can get through everything quite quickly, if you are focused. A lot of groups will make only three or four attempts an hour; if you're focused, you can bring that number up to six or more, and make less repetitive mistakes. The misconception comes from when more social-based guilds want to get "serious" about things by adding more time to their raids. Almost invariably, I've seen that this only leads to more screwing around, stretching the same amount of effort and attention (and hence, success) over a larger period of time.
By using "externalities" as FUD, you can justify anything just by pretending they're high on the competitive product.
Why are externalities necessarily FUD? The point of calling something FUD is because it isn't true, or at least creates artificial controversy: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt where there needs be none. Do you mean to say that all the effects of power generation are currently accounted for in the monetary cost of electricity?
This isn't just some bash on pollution, no power-generating method's hands are clean. We subsidized nuclear research, and continue to alternate incentive and sabotage for nuclear power plants. Hydro is often controversial in its changing the environment and habitat around it. We have the massive boondoggle of corn-based ethanol, thanks to the agricultural lobby. Around the world, political suasion is used all the time to keep the gas flowing. Now we're talking about ramping up incentives for solar and other green tech, and suddenly it's too much?
It's incredibly naive to argue that there is anything resembling a free market to promote the best option with respect to power generation. We've been kingmakers ever since there was an option. It's time to recognize this and act accordingly.
I agree with you on several things: one, that if your work isn't enough to make you sweat, you're not really doing anything; and two, that the obese often have a decent bit of muscle hiding on their frame to move around all that fat! It's really surprising to see the difference in weights used by beginners who are overweight and beginners who are underweight.
Can you explain a bit more what you mean when you say "human metabolisms are really bad at recovering once you push them too far past aerobic levels of activity"? If you're referring to the dangers of overtraining (peak-level exertion for multiple hours at a time) I completely agree, but I'm not sure that's what you're getting at here.
One last note, congrats on adding 15kg of muscle to your frame! That must've felt great.
Benching weights increases muscle mass which will actually raise your BMI. You need a cardiovascular workout. To burn energy you need something that increases your breathing and makes you sweat and burn calories quickly. Suggesting benching weights as a way to lose weight is insane.
The first half of this statement is true but irrelevant. You have a high BMI. You indicate that you're also, not to mince words, fat. Is your concern that you have a high BMI? Or that you're fat? I would assume the latter, as the former itself isn't particularly dangerous to your health. Hence, increasing your muscle mass shouldn't be an intrinsically bad thing.
Interestingly, rebuilding muscle is one of the best caloric expenditures you can choose. In other words, you burn a lot of calories due to lifting weights, not only during the physical movement but also in the 24-48 hours following. The increased muscle mass also helps increase your metabolism, which is absolutely the most important factor in your weight balance over time. Suggesting weight training as a way to lose weight is nowhere near insane.
The biggest thing is monitoring your appetite, no amount of exercise will help if you're over-eating and taking in more energy then you're burning off. The army did a study a long while back that showed just this: Taking in too much energy negates the weight loss benefits of exercise and you don't have to starve youself either, just limit yourself to 1500-1800 cals/day and keep track of it on a site like http://www.fitday.com/
Yes, and most of us want to join the freaking army, eat rabbit food and excercise 2-3 hours a day for the rest of our lives. Yeah, that's real sustainable.
Now that's not fair. He never said anything about joining the army, he made reference to a study by a professional organization for whom fitness is absolutely critical in order to bolster his point: if it's anyone's business to know how to get large populations in shape, it's their business. Also, he never said you have to eat rabbit food. You can get plenty full on 1800 calories a day if you cut out soda, fried food, and frequent huge carb fests (chiefly, pasta and pizza). I had scrambled eggs for breakfast, beef on a shallow bed of rice for lunch, and I'll be eating plenty of chicken (and, yes, some vegetables) for dinner, and I won't break 1600 calories today. If those things are your idea of rabbit food, good luck to you; I'd say there's a considerable range of foods you could eat. Also, I'll just mention GP said nothing about needing to exercise 2-3 hours every day forever - it has nothing to do with this conversation.
A doctor once was giving a talk about lecturing other doctors with regard to telling their patients they must lose weight to avoid the various complications that arise from being obese. He told them that they know about long hours and hard work, so they should strap an extra 20kg to themselves, and go about their 12-16 hour days, then when they get home try and put in 30-60 minutes of excercise and see how much they feel like excercise.
It's a viscious circle. The more weight you put on, the harder it is to start and continue a weight loss regime. And the older you get the more your body starts creaking (especially if you're unfit) responsibility you have and the less likely you are to keep it up.
This is exactly why hours and hours of aerobic training are so ineffective for the overweight. It forces you to force more stress on already-overworked joints and other body parts. No wonder people find losing weight so discouraging. Using a proper weight training routine doesn't nearly have the same problem. On the flip side, if you lose some weight, you may find your ankle to be in much better shape with less stress on it.
Most people I know when they hear about my wife's allergies say they "wouldn't give up food for anyone". Y
Working up a sweat is not a reliable measure of how effective an exercise is. I can hop into the sauna for a few minutes and get plenty sweaty, without much meaningful calorie burn.
Your plan for aerobic free weight exercise is interesting, but is also not very effective for weight loss. Both you and the GP seem to be tied to the idea that anaerobic exercise, which creates muscle, is somehow contraindicated for weight loss; this could not be farther from the truth. It takes a lot of energy to rebuild muscle, and on that point alone the anaerobic exercise pulls ahead in value. Beyond that, though, is the fundamental fact that muscle increases metabolism, and increasing your metabolism is absolutely a better way to lose weight than trying to torture an overweight body into two hours of cardio a day.
Products are not priced to bring in a "fair" level of profit. They are priced to bring in the absolute most profit possible, by finding the sweet intersection of supply and demand where profit is maximized. In practice, markets are divided up with import/export restrictions, region coding, etc to break up the market into submarkets with their own sweet spots, allowing even more profit. If these market barriers weren't there (I could buy movies, medicine, etc online from India, for example), the bottom line is that prices in the US and Europe would fall, and prices in India and elsewhere would rise, until they met a level more or less approximating equilibrium. It would still be set to overall earn companies the most profit.
This is not completely a black-and-white issue, as rising medicine prices would certainly decrease the quality of life in the third world. However, it's clearly untenable to move all production and work to India, where the market discrimination effects dirt-cheap living, and still expect to be able to milk full price from the thereby unemployed workers from the US and Europe - a future which we certainly appear to be heading to.
His will cannot be defied, they were merely doing his bidding. How can any action of man be artificial when god is everywhere, omnipresent and omnipotent.
Well, there's that whole Jonah thing. Kept ignoring what God told him to do, ended up in a whale's stomach.
Kinda makes it difficult to reconcile with omnipotence, exactly, but that's never been an easy one.
War, security, health care, clean water, etc., are all being privatised. Why not justice?
Call me a dirty liberal if you will, but I was under the impression that privatization is a big problem today:
health care investment (lack of govt oversight) the military industrial complex
Note how our lists overlap. You mention things that are being increasingly privatized, but certainly don't give any reason to believe that's a good thing.
On a final note, privatized justice is especially egregious: you get all the justice money can buy (and woe unto those who can't afford it).
I'm doing the exact same thing (JET Programme, in fact), so I'd like to weigh in on team teaching as well.
I've worked alongside over a dozen English teachers, all teaching (more or less) the same subject, and my experiences have run the gamut. It's given me a lot of insight as to what works and doesn't work to teach, although there's certainly more than one right way to go about it.
In my team teaching situation, all the classes I teach also have solo lessons with the other teacher; I'm involved as much as every other lesson, and as little as every third week, in various classes. Some of the classes are, to be honest, very difficult, because the team teaching doesn't work very effectively; others, the lessons are phenomenal. However, that's not a strict indicator of the students' improvement over the course of time. It seems to me that teachers can be weak at team teaching but still very good at solo teaching - there is a huge difference.
As I said, teaching with many different teachers has given me a lot of insight into the teaching process, but I'm not sure it's a panacea. I think more generally, it would be very helpful to institutionalize teacher observation throughout the teaching system: for teachers to watch other teachers work throughout their career, and in turn be watched, to gain different perspectives and continually improve. This would also help accountability, as you imply with your story.
More generally, while I'm sure we here at/. can come up with a hundred suggestions for improvement some way, I'm afraid things are a bit intractable. Teachers are well-insulated by their unions from any change, and I can't say it's entirely their fault. Teaching as a career provides such a low salary that it makes sense for teachers to feel threatened enough to unionize strongly. Until conditions are improved, almost any change toward accountability / improvement will be seen as scary.
You really seem to be studiously attempting to misunderstand the points everyone else is making.
Take any linux binary compiled 10 years ago and run it today on a shipping kernel. Oh wait... you can't. Do the same under Macintosh. Oh wait... can't.
If you have it for Linux, you've probably got the source code. If you're the IT guy, you'd better know the basics of compiling.
And nobody had enough sense to demand the source code...
Oh, they can demand. And any business is going to say "Yeah... Right. Give up the only leverage we have on your balls? ha ha." Only they'll be more tactful about it.
If it's bespoke software, it's only smart to ask for the source code. If it's niche proprietary, well, good luck getting it to run in any case ten years later. Windows really doesn't have that great a track record of maintaining proper legacy support, although you would make it seem to be the opposite.
You base your business on stuff you can't repair, realize the problem and don't make fixing it a goal. Then someday when it does go foom they will be shocked! shocked! and probably be lining up at the nearest public teat looking for a bailout like the banks.
I can't repair my car. Doesn't mean I don't drive one.
No, but if you're responsible for the purchasing and upkeep of a fleet of vehicles for your business, you'd better get a model someone can repair. Using binary blobs is like welding your car's hood shut: experts can't fix the engine, and amateurs can't even change the oil. You should think about your alternatives carefully before you bet the barn on them.
Linux/Unix on the other hand.... Do you realize how old UNIX is?
Somehow I don't think binaries compiled under Solaris will run under Linux. Binaries compiled for the Alpha architecture won't run under x86... and so on, and so on. I'm talking about binary compatibility, and that's what Microsoft delivers, version to version, year by year. Even Vista, the horrible failure that it was, bloated and crusty... still backwards compatible back to windows 3.1. It's disgusting, frankly... But that's what the customers ask for, that's what they get. You try running anything from thirty years ago on a recently-released "unix/linux" anything. Oh yeah: No source code. Binaries only. -_- You can rail on about technology improvements, and how this operating system does xyzzy so much better, and blah blah blah, but at the end of the day, the number one reason why Microsoft is in business is "Backwards compatibility". Your examples don't have it... Not out of the box, not without a helluva lot of work, and a lot of expertise that just doesn't exist in bulk anymore.
By ignoring all the POSIX-compliant software with viewable source code, you're trying to shift the argument to a binary-only battleground, which arguably should be Microsoft's forte. Unfortunately, you haven't even shown why or how Windows is better at carrying forth back-compatibility, only claimed that it is so.
If you're going to argue that Windows has better backwards-compatibility than POSIX systems, then let's have some proof. I'm all ears.
Okay, here's an "artificial barrier": You're an IT administrator for a bank. You support about 35 mission-critical applications that go to a mainframe. Why keep the mainframe? Because it's the only thing that's gone through the laborous process of being documented, audited, and certified for use. Those certifications could run into the tens of millions of dollars, plus another fifty million to retool your existing infrastructure, minimum. All those applications were written for Windows 95.
Now, Microsoft is a safe bet because you know those applications were written decades ago and will still work. They're horrible, out of date, and make your butt itch just thinking about them, but they work, and it's cheaper to keep them going than to invest in an all-new infrastructure.
Well, I'm no IT administrator for a bank. But I've kept plenty of programs I used to run in the old days of Windows, 3.11, 95, 98, etc, and every now and then I get a bit nostalgic and try to get them to work.
As Windows has gotten older, it's gained different tools to try to run legacy code. They're pretty confusing to me, and I'm lucky if I can get half my software from the 95 era to load without some trouble.
That doesn't sound to me like software that just works. In fact, I'd venture a guess that most people have experiences more similar than different to mine, as I know of few things that cause more headaches in tech departments like migrations to a new system; migration costs between versions of Windows can be very high when crucial systems break, and it's often common sentiment to wait until an SP1 release before even beginning your own migration.
Judging by your posts in this thread, either you're a troll, or you've got some kind of axe to grind. Regardless, you're also pretty much wrong.
If growing rice leads to some sort of cultural intelligence, why is it that West Africans, who have been growing rice over thousands of years, don't match the intelligence of rui Asians?
As others have said, Africa had a rich, strong culture for an incredibly long time, and its current state has a lot to do with the effects of European exploitation and colonialism. Others have also suggested that they may be just as intelligent, but that other factors (such as government and infrastructure) have so far kept them from reaching the same level of notoriety so far. FWIW, I've certainly known some very intelligent Africans working and studying abroad.
To get back on topic, though, I was wondering; does West Africa use similar methods of rice cultivation to Southeast Asia? The particularities of wet-paddy agriculture mean a world of difference.
Not to argue with your specific claims which, quite accurately, show the shortcomings in the GP's post, but Japanese houses, for the most part, really fail at insulation. I say this as someone who lives there. My apartment is bad at it, my friends' new apartments are bad at it, my other friends' houses are bad at it. In many ways, it's pretty frustrating.
Of course, as you say, things are largely due to Japanese cultural norms, and here is no exception. In Japan, the winter pastime is to sit around with you legs under a short table with a heavy blanket over it, with a heater built into the table. It keeps you nice and warm, but you get REALLY sedentary.
To get (briefly) on topic, Japan is, if anything, foreign-crazy. People mention ipods, etc, but that's not even the whole story. You know the anime-lovers back home who wear clothes with kanji they can't read on them? In Japan, it's the opposite. Most Japanese don't go to quite the unwashed extremes of their American brethren for their love of foreign culture, but it's a lot broader; everyone has clothing, bags, etc with English on them, and about 95% of them don't understand what their own clothes mean. They cram down their hamburgers and hotdogs like champions. They watch our TV shows and movies.
The iphone isn't popular here because it doesn't fit the lifestyle, and also because Softbank is a horrible, horrible service provider.
A close friend's mother is Swiss. I've been hanging out with him many times when we meet people, and most immediately compliment him on being fluent in Japanese. His immediate response is always, "But of course... I am Japanese." He grew up here. He lives here. He works here. But it's a permanent existence on the borders of society for him, as a hafu (half-Japanese).
This is a terrible crime against society, I agree, and the punishment should be banishment. The system we have for that is called prison, and they should be going there for a very long time.
I agree that prison is the right solution for this, but 87 months seems far too short.
Let's review these 5000 cases and total up all the unjust time these judges sentenced students to. Basic sentencing guidelines should make this easy to establish a rough figure, if the example from TFA is in any way representative.
It seems fairly accepted in our society (the RIAA's twisted logic notwithstanding) to impose punitive damages of 3x the offense.
Back-of-the-napkin math gives 2500 youth per judge, at a lenient 1 month unreasonable time sentenced per youth, times 3, divided by twelve, gives us a 625 year sentence for each judge.
Of course this is a false strawman. You are perpetrating the common caricature of the "gun nut".
People who fixate on "gun control" want nothing of the sort. They want to ban
guns outright buy are stymied by the current state of the law. They don't want
the moderate version of your little caricature.
The brutal irony here is that you, yourself, are guilty of the exact fallacy you're calling out the GP for. The fact that you can denounce the GP for focusing on the extreme fringe cases and then, with barely pause for breath, explain that everyone against you is an anti-gun extremist is really breathtaking
Regardless of where we, as a society, decide is proper to draw the line between what we legally permit in this debate, please understand that opinions on this (as in any subject) lie on a vast spectrum. There's a middle ground between banning BBs and allowing personal nukes.
We love to talk shit about Wikipedia here on/,; talk about how Knol is going to beat it or how Citizendium is better or how you wouldn't use it as a source (duh). But when push comes to shove, do we have any good competing models of how an online encyclopedia should be made?
Well, I don't recall seeing full support here on/. for Knol or Citizendium. There seemed to be people on both sides of the aisle getting their voices heard. Many people attacked Wikipedia for its shortcomings, which you yourself agree exist. So, too, did many people attack the upstarts, with the standard arguments that come out whenever we discuss project forks or restarts here. Finally, there were people who had reasonable criticism for the upstart projects themselves.
However, Wikipedia itself has been extensively criticized throughout its history; famously, its ability to accumulate knowledge and remove vandalism works "only in reality, not in theory." So on that note, how can we say that we know that those systems are inherently that much worse? Many would argue, as you yourself hint, that Wikipedia's supremacy is eminent in its dominance, and in its success. Yes, Wikipedia has orders of magnitude more content than its competitors. Please consider, though, the possibility that this is simply the result of first mover advantage and network effects.
Wikipedia came on to the scene to find a fresh niche to fill. Earlier sites existed with similar goals to describe and categorize life (see: everything2 and h2g2), but Wikipedia had a slightly different defined goal (be "the free encyclopedia") and software to ease the processes of collaboration and presentation. It took off like a shot and quickly established itself before it really had competition.
Today, Wikipedia has somewhere around 2.8 million articles and a dedicated community. It seems immediately obvious to me that it's impossible today to compete with Wikipedia from square one; any competitor would need to fork the project or have their own equally impressive database. A database that size needs a huge support structure, not only in infrastructure but also in terms of volunteers/workers to police content. It's not possible to get those things all at once. There might be enough people out there who would be interested in helping a different project, but there's no way to get in touch with all of them. New talent either joins up with Wikipedia, or becomes disinterested when they don't fit with that group.
Wikipedia got where it is because it was good enough at the right time. It does a lot right. It does some things wrong. It's not perfect. But then, I don't have to tell/. about technically inferior products dominating the marketplace due to familiarity...
A 2gb file size limit is one thing (I've never even heard of that rumor yet), but an app limit is quite another. If you have dual monitors running where you can look at a firefox window while playing a game and some music running on vlc, then obviously the starter edition isn't for you.
I also haven't heard of the 2gb file size limit. I believe the GP was using it as an example of deliberately crippling software to make a cheaper version, rather than an actual "feature" of Windows 7 Starter.
On the topic of the app limit, though, 3 apps is nothing. Your example of dual-monitor situations makes sense from the perspective of a tech worker used to such things, but I've known many people with one-monitor setups that use (abuse?) their setups more than that.
Imagine for a second the user's example were more like this:
My little brother, on his laptop, will have music playing on VLC while playing a game. Firefox will be open to GameFAQs in the background to alt+tab to whenever he needs to look something up. Meanwhile, he has Pidgin running, in case his girlfriend gets online.
Something like that could be run on a netbook or bottom-line PC as long as the game itself will run (and there are a lot of games out there to play, if you don't limit yourself to the latest releases). Maybe you'd argue he shouldn't be using Starter Edition either. However, there are certainly other situations out there that would run up against this problem in reasonable use, and that points at the really irritating thing about this limitation: for the sake of profit, Microsoft is trying to release a product that in a big way is less useful than their own products of 15 years earlier. That's ridiculous.
A lot of other people have torn to pieces the idea that we really call it "Darwinism" in meaningful discourse. They're pretty right. Our understanding of evolution has, err, evolved, over the years since he first propounded his theory.
That said, he laid the foundations for evolutionary biology, and deserves to leave his name in history a bit. If you've never read The Origin of Species, give it a shot. It's a solid work, and quite accessible. His application of the scientific method should be a case study for all scientists.
Democracy is a governmental system. Capitalism is an economic system. They have nothing to do with each other by nature.
Except insofar as that they are both places from which societal power is derived. The GP's point is that cultures which focus on their democratic principles give each person equal power, while cultures which focus on their capitalistic principles give each dollar equal power - and in many cases America tends towards the latter end of the spectrum.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to be clear, it's actually a little more than $100 USD right now, due to the current strength of the yen and weakness of the dollar. The yen -> USD conversion I got quoted for a personal transaction this morning was 91.63 yen per dollar, which would make your ten thousand yen worth $109.13, less transaction fees.
In conclusion, you seem to know nothing about these topics (food and agriculture and genetic engineering). If you're interested, educate yourself, I wish more people were engaged. Otherwise don't be surprised if no one takes you seriously.
I'm not the GP, but I'm just about smart enough to know that I know nothing on the topic, and I would, in fact, like to educate myself. You seem to be quite knowledgeable on the subject. Would you recommend any books or web sites in particular to get a start on this? If you have any advice other than the standard "wikipedia + google search", I, as well as many others, I'm sure, are all ears.
It just makes you wonder why they need to do that, or why the government even cares about which payment plan you use for your wireless phone. Generally speaking, the sale of a good or of a service goes like this: you give money, you receive good or service. To insert "government butts in and confirms your ID" between those two steps, there really should be a very good overriding reason explaining why this is absolutely necessary. Are there nations which have fallen apart and descended into anarchy because private citizens may be able to make anonymous telephone calls? That's about what it would take for this to have real merit.
A misconception has popped up in this thread because the GP and GGP didn't explain the whole register-at-city-hall thing.
If you live in Japan, you're going to be registered in a certain city. Citizens have their own system, which works a bit differently, but all foreigners on anything but a tourist visa have to register at city hall in the city they're living in. You do the paperwork, then in a few weeks receive an Alien Registration Card, which is government-issued ID that you are legally required to carry at all times (tourists and those waiting for their ARCs are required to carry their passports at all times). You can, and will, be stopped on the streets randomly by police to check your identity and make sure you're legal. Yes, Papers, please is alive and well in Japan.
In any case, this card is required to get a cell phone. You're not asking city hall's permission to get a cell phone, you're proving your legality, identity, and residence to the cell phone company. The same as all the other information, they're just taking it to fill every blank on the application.
That correction aside, getting a cell phone here is a nightmare. In fact, getting any utilities or services set up is a nightmare. The bureaucracy is far too entrenched. If you move here, expect to be without cell phone or home internet access for around a month. Also expect to be fingerprinted and have your picture taken upon entry. As a foreigner, there are a lot of things to deal with here.
Interesting points, but I think you downplay the role of role of playing time in the 'hardcore' mentality.
The challenge in raid content is getting the entire raid force to work cohesively together as a group. In a 'hardcore'-leaning game, this cohesion needs to be very tight for the group to succeed. In a casual-leaning game, a more rag-tag group of players is often able to succeed.
Hardcore groups of players rely on their members to consistently show up for raid times and to pay attention during raids. Both of these points correspond to play-time - hardcore players are both more likely to be playing on a given night and less likely to need to AFK at a critical time.
I've played on both sides of the fence, in race-to-the-top guilds and yeah-we'll-do-that-if-we-get-around-to-it-next-year guilds, and I'd say that play-time is given more attention than it deserves.
It's true that to be successful, you have to have a schedule. A lot of people balk at this, because they aren't accustomed to it with video games. But MMOs aren't like other games. Persistent teamwork is required to make anything happen. Is someone a hardcore thespian if they go to mandatory rehearsals for their community theatre troupe twice a week? Are they a hardcore musician if each week they play together a few hours a couple times? I wouldn't think so, it's just a hobby. The stereotypical hobbies here on /. are frequently solo-oriented hobbies like tinkering with tech and code, but plenty here also do things regularly that they don't think are particularly odd.
Next, someone will raise the claim that "hardcore" means you get together at least four or five times a week. That's not needed to see all the content in WOW, though. It's all about attitude and preparation.
If you read up on the new things you'll be trying beforehand (akin to practicing your music outside rehearsal, I suppose), you can get through all the content in the game getting together only twice a week. If you want to race to be first, you'll be gathering considerably more often than this, but typically only when new areas are released; otherwise, you can get through everything quite quickly, if you are focused. A lot of groups will make only three or four attempts an hour; if you're focused, you can bring that number up to six or more, and make less repetitive mistakes. The misconception comes from when more social-based guilds want to get "serious" about things by adding more time to their raids. Almost invariably, I've seen that this only leads to more screwing around, stretching the same amount of effort and attention (and hence, success) over a larger period of time.
By using "externalities" as FUD, you can justify anything just by pretending they're high on the competitive product.
Why are externalities necessarily FUD? The point of calling something FUD is because it isn't true, or at least creates artificial controversy: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt where there needs be none. Do you mean to say that all the effects of power generation are currently accounted for in the monetary cost of electricity?
This isn't just some bash on pollution, no power-generating method's hands are clean. We subsidized nuclear research, and continue to alternate incentive and sabotage for nuclear power plants. Hydro is often controversial in its changing the environment and habitat around it. We have the massive boondoggle of corn-based ethanol, thanks to the agricultural lobby. Around the world, political suasion is used all the time to keep the gas flowing. Now we're talking about ramping up incentives for solar and other green tech, and suddenly it's too much?
It's incredibly naive to argue that there is anything resembling a free market to promote the best option with respect to power generation. We've been kingmakers ever since there was an option. It's time to recognize this and act accordingly.
I agree with you on several things: one, that if your work isn't enough to make you sweat, you're not really doing anything; and two, that the obese often have a decent bit of muscle hiding on their frame to move around all that fat! It's really surprising to see the difference in weights used by beginners who are overweight and beginners who are underweight.
Can you explain a bit more what you mean when you say "human metabolisms are really bad at recovering once you push them too far past aerobic levels of activity"? If you're referring to the dangers of overtraining (peak-level exertion for multiple hours at a time) I completely agree, but I'm not sure that's what you're getting at here.
One last note, congrats on adding 15kg of muscle to your frame! That must've felt great.
Benching weights increases muscle mass which will actually raise your BMI. You need a cardiovascular workout. To burn energy you need something that increases your breathing and makes you sweat and burn calories quickly. Suggesting benching weights as a way to lose weight is insane.
The first half of this statement is true but irrelevant. You have a high BMI. You indicate that you're also, not to mince words, fat. Is your concern that you have a high BMI? Or that you're fat? I would assume the latter, as the former itself isn't particularly dangerous to your health. Hence, increasing your muscle mass shouldn't be an intrinsically bad thing.
Interestingly, rebuilding muscle is one of the best caloric expenditures you can choose. In other words, you burn a lot of calories due to lifting weights, not only during the physical movement but also in the 24-48 hours following. The increased muscle mass also helps increase your metabolism, which is absolutely the most important factor in your weight balance over time. Suggesting weight training as a way to lose weight is nowhere near insane.
The biggest thing is monitoring your appetite, no amount of exercise will help if you're over-eating and taking in more energy then you're burning off. The army did a study a long while back that showed just this: Taking in too much energy negates the weight loss benefits of exercise and you don't have to starve youself either, just limit yourself to 1500-1800 cals/day and keep track of it on a site like http://www.fitday.com/
Yes, and most of us want to join the freaking army, eat rabbit food and excercise 2-3 hours a day for the rest of our lives. Yeah, that's real sustainable.
Now that's not fair. He never said anything about joining the army, he made reference to a study by a professional organization for whom fitness is absolutely critical in order to bolster his point: if it's anyone's business to know how to get large populations in shape, it's their business. Also, he never said you have to eat rabbit food. You can get plenty full on 1800 calories a day if you cut out soda, fried food, and frequent huge carb fests (chiefly, pasta and pizza). I had scrambled eggs for breakfast, beef on a shallow bed of rice for lunch, and I'll be eating plenty of chicken (and, yes, some vegetables) for dinner, and I won't break 1600 calories today. If those things are your idea of rabbit food, good luck to you; I'd say there's a considerable range of foods you could eat. Also, I'll just mention GP said nothing about needing to exercise 2-3 hours every day forever - it has nothing to do with this conversation.
A doctor once was giving a talk about lecturing other doctors with regard to telling their patients they must lose weight to avoid the various complications that arise from being obese. He told them that they know about long hours and hard work, so they should strap an extra 20kg to themselves, and go about their 12-16 hour days, then when they get home try and put in 30-60 minutes of excercise and see how much they feel like excercise.
It's a viscious circle. The more weight you put on, the harder it is to start and continue a weight loss regime. And the older you get the more your body starts creaking (especially if you're unfit) responsibility you have and the less likely you are to keep it up.
This is exactly why hours and hours of aerobic training are so ineffective for the overweight. It forces you to force more stress on already-overworked joints and other body parts. No wonder people find losing weight so discouraging. Using a proper weight training routine doesn't nearly have the same problem. On the flip side, if you lose some weight, you may find your ankle to be in much better shape with less stress on it.
Most people I know when they hear about my wife's allergies say they "wouldn't give up food for anyone". Y
Working up a sweat is not a reliable measure of how effective an exercise is. I can hop into the sauna for a few minutes and get plenty sweaty, without much meaningful calorie burn.
Your plan for aerobic free weight exercise is interesting, but is also not very effective for weight loss. Both you and the GP seem to be tied to the idea that anaerobic exercise, which creates muscle, is somehow contraindicated for weight loss; this could not be farther from the truth. It takes a lot of energy to rebuild muscle, and on that point alone the anaerobic exercise pulls ahead in value. Beyond that, though, is the fundamental fact that muscle increases metabolism, and increasing your metabolism is absolutely a better way to lose weight than trying to torture an overweight body into two hours of cardio a day.
I'll have them run a copper wire alongside my fiber, just in case.
Congratulations, you've invented the droud. Larry Niven would be proud.
Products are not priced to bring in a "fair" level of profit. They are priced to bring in the absolute most profit possible, by finding the sweet intersection of supply and demand where profit is maximized. In practice, markets are divided up with import/export restrictions, region coding, etc to break up the market into submarkets with their own sweet spots, allowing even more profit. If these market barriers weren't there (I could buy movies, medicine, etc online from India, for example), the bottom line is that prices in the US and Europe would fall, and prices in India and elsewhere would rise, until they met a level more or less approximating equilibrium. It would still be set to overall earn companies the most profit.
This is not completely a black-and-white issue, as rising medicine prices would certainly decrease the quality of life in the third world. However, it's clearly untenable to move all production and work to India, where the market discrimination effects dirt-cheap living, and still expect to be able to milk full price from the thereby unemployed workers from the US and Europe - a future which we certainly appear to be heading to.
His will cannot be defied, they were merely doing his bidding. How can any action of man be artificial when god is everywhere, omnipresent and omnipotent.
Well, there's that whole Jonah thing. Kept ignoring what God told him to do, ended up in a whale's stomach.
Kinda makes it difficult to reconcile with omnipotence, exactly, but that's never been an easy one.
War, security, health care, clean water, etc., are all being privatised. Why not justice?
Call me a dirty liberal if you will, but I was under the impression that privatization is a big problem today:
health care
investment (lack of govt oversight)
the military industrial complex
Note how our lists overlap. You mention things that are being increasingly privatized, but certainly don't give any reason to believe that's a good thing.
On a final note, privatized justice is especially egregious: you get all the justice money can buy (and woe unto those who can't afford it).
I'm doing the exact same thing (JET Programme, in fact), so I'd like to weigh in on team teaching as well.
I've worked alongside over a dozen English teachers, all teaching (more or less) the same subject, and my experiences have run the gamut. It's given me a lot of insight as to what works and doesn't work to teach, although there's certainly more than one right way to go about it.
In my team teaching situation, all the classes I teach also have solo lessons with the other teacher; I'm involved as much as every other lesson, and as little as every third week, in various classes. Some of the classes are, to be honest, very difficult, because the team teaching doesn't work very effectively; others, the lessons are phenomenal. However, that's not a strict indicator of the students' improvement over the course of time. It seems to me that teachers can be weak at team teaching but still very good at solo teaching - there is a huge difference.
As I said, teaching with many different teachers has given me a lot of insight into the teaching process, but I'm not sure it's a panacea. I think more generally, it would be very helpful to institutionalize teacher observation throughout the teaching system: for teachers to watch other teachers work throughout their career, and in turn be watched, to gain different perspectives and continually improve. This would also help accountability, as you imply with your story.
More generally, while I'm sure we here at /. can come up with a hundred suggestions for improvement some way, I'm afraid things are a bit intractable. Teachers are well-insulated by their unions from any change, and I can't say it's entirely their fault. Teaching as a career provides such a low salary that it makes sense for teachers to feel threatened enough to unionize strongly. Until conditions are improved, almost any change toward accountability / improvement will be seen as scary.
You really seem to be studiously attempting to misunderstand the points everyone else is making.
Take any linux binary compiled 10 years ago and run it today on a shipping kernel. Oh wait... you can't. Do the same under Macintosh. Oh wait... can't.
If you have it for Linux, you've probably got the source code. If you're the IT guy, you'd better know the basics of compiling.
And nobody had enough sense to demand the source code...
Oh, they can demand. And any business is going to say "Yeah... Right. Give up the only leverage we have on your balls? ha ha." Only they'll be more tactful about it.
If it's bespoke software, it's only smart to ask for the source code. If it's niche proprietary, well, good luck getting it to run in any case ten years later. Windows really doesn't have that great a track record of maintaining proper legacy support, although you would make it seem to be the opposite.
You base your business on stuff you can't repair, realize the problem and don't make fixing it a goal. Then someday when it does go foom they will be shocked! shocked! and probably be lining up at the nearest public teat looking for a bailout like the banks.
I can't repair my car. Doesn't mean I don't drive one.
No, but if you're responsible for the purchasing and upkeep of a fleet of vehicles for your business, you'd better get a model someone can repair. Using binary blobs is like welding your car's hood shut: experts can't fix the engine, and amateurs can't even change the oil. You should think about your alternatives carefully before you bet the barn on them.
Linux/Unix on the other hand.... Do you realize how old UNIX is?
Somehow I don't think binaries compiled under Solaris will run under Linux. Binaries compiled for the Alpha architecture won't run under x86... and so on, and so on. I'm talking about binary compatibility, and that's what Microsoft delivers, version to version, year by year. Even Vista, the horrible failure that it was, bloated and crusty... still backwards compatible back to windows 3.1. It's disgusting, frankly... But that's what the customers ask for, that's what they get. You try running anything from thirty years ago on a recently-released "unix/linux" anything. Oh yeah: No source code. Binaries only. -_- You can rail on about technology improvements, and how this operating system does xyzzy so much better, and blah blah blah, but at the end of the day, the number one reason why Microsoft is in business is "Backwards compatibility". Your examples don't have it... Not out of the box, not without a helluva lot of work, and a lot of expertise that just doesn't exist in bulk anymore.
By ignoring all the POSIX-compliant software with viewable source code, you're trying to shift the argument to a binary-only battleground, which arguably should be Microsoft's forte. Unfortunately, you haven't even shown why or how Windows is better at carrying forth back-compatibility, only claimed that it is so.
If you're going to argue that Windows has better backwards-compatibility than POSIX systems, then let's have some proof. I'm all ears.
Okay, here's an "artificial barrier": You're an IT administrator for a bank. You support about 35 mission-critical applications that go to a mainframe. Why keep the mainframe? Because it's the only thing that's gone through the laborous process of being documented, audited, and certified for use. Those certifications could run into the tens of millions of dollars, plus another fifty million to retool your existing infrastructure, minimum. All those applications were written for Windows 95.
Now, Microsoft is a safe bet because you know those applications were written decades ago and will still work. They're horrible, out of date, and make your butt itch just thinking about them, but they work, and it's cheaper to keep them going than to invest in an all-new infrastructure.
Well, I'm no IT administrator for a bank. But I've kept plenty of programs I used to run in the old days of Windows, 3.11, 95, 98, etc, and every now and then I get a bit nostalgic and try to get them to work.
As Windows has gotten older, it's gained different tools to try to run legacy code. They're pretty confusing to me, and I'm lucky if I can get half my software from the 95 era to load without some trouble.
That doesn't sound to me like software that just works. In fact, I'd venture a guess that most people have experiences more similar than different to mine, as I know of few things that cause more headaches in tech departments like migrations to a new system; migration costs between versions of Windows can be very high when crucial systems break, and it's often common sentiment to wait until an SP1 release before even beginning your own migration.
Judging by your posts in this thread, either you're a troll, or you've got some kind of axe to grind. Regardless, you're also pretty much wrong.
Wait, what?
And he's not the only one.
If growing rice leads to some sort of cultural intelligence, why is it that West Africans, who have been growing rice over thousands of years, don't match the intelligence of rui Asians?
As others have said, Africa had a rich, strong culture for an incredibly long time, and its current state has a lot to do with the effects of European exploitation and colonialism. Others have also suggested that they may be just as intelligent, but that other factors (such as government and infrastructure) have so far kept them from reaching the same level of notoriety so far. FWIW, I've certainly known some very intelligent Africans working and studying abroad.
To get back on topic, though, I was wondering; does West Africa use similar methods of rice cultivation to Southeast Asia? The particularities of wet-paddy agriculture mean a world of difference.
Not to argue with your specific claims which, quite accurately, show the shortcomings in the GP's post, but Japanese houses, for the most part, really fail at insulation. I say this as someone who lives there. My apartment is bad at it, my friends' new apartments are bad at it, my other friends' houses are bad at it. In many ways, it's pretty frustrating.
Of course, as you say, things are largely due to Japanese cultural norms, and here is no exception. In Japan, the winter pastime is to sit around with you legs under a short table with a heavy blanket over it, with a heater built into the table. It keeps you nice and warm, but you get REALLY sedentary.
To get (briefly) on topic, Japan is, if anything, foreign-crazy. People mention ipods, etc, but that's not even the whole story. You know the anime-lovers back home who wear clothes with kanji they can't read on them? In Japan, it's the opposite. Most Japanese don't go to quite the unwashed extremes of their American brethren for their love of foreign culture, but it's a lot broader; everyone has clothing, bags, etc with English on them, and about 95% of them don't understand what their own clothes mean. They cram down their hamburgers and hotdogs like champions. They watch our TV shows and movies.
The iphone isn't popular here because it doesn't fit the lifestyle, and also because Softbank is a horrible, horrible service provider.
A close friend's mother is Swiss. I've been hanging out with him many times when we meet people, and most immediately compliment him on being fluent in Japanese. His immediate response is always, "But of course... I am Japanese." He grew up here. He lives here. He works here. But it's a permanent existence on the borders of society for him, as a hafu (half-Japanese).
So YMMV.
This is a terrible crime against society, I agree, and the punishment should be banishment. The system we have for that is called prison, and they should be going there for a very long time.
I agree that prison is the right solution for this, but 87 months seems far too short.
Let's review these 5000 cases and total up all the unjust time these judges sentenced students to. Basic sentencing guidelines should make this easy to establish a rough figure, if the example from TFA is in any way representative.
It seems fairly accepted in our society (the RIAA's twisted logic notwithstanding) to impose punitive damages of 3x the offense.
Back-of-the-napkin math gives 2500 youth per judge, at a lenient 1 month unreasonable time sentenced per youth, times 3, divided by twelve, gives us a 625 year sentence for each judge.
That sounds reasonable to me.
Of course this is a false strawman. You are perpetrating the common caricature of the "gun nut".
People who fixate on "gun control" want nothing of the sort. They want to ban guns outright buy are stymied by the current state of the law. They don't want the moderate version of your little caricature.
The brutal irony here is that you, yourself, are guilty of the exact fallacy you're calling out the GP for. The fact that you can denounce the GP for focusing on the extreme fringe cases and then, with barely pause for breath, explain that everyone against you is an anti-gun extremist is really breathtaking
Regardless of where we, as a society, decide is proper to draw the line between what we legally permit in this debate, please understand that opinions on this (as in any subject) lie on a vast spectrum. There's a middle ground between banning BBs and allowing personal nukes.
We love to talk shit about Wikipedia here on /,; talk about how Knol is going to beat it or how Citizendium is better or how you wouldn't use it as a source (duh). But when push comes to shove, do we have any good competing models of how an online encyclopedia should be made?
Well, I don't recall seeing full support here on /. for Knol or Citizendium. There seemed to be people on both sides of the aisle getting their voices heard. Many people attacked Wikipedia for its shortcomings, which you yourself agree exist. So, too, did many people attack the upstarts, with the standard arguments that come out whenever we discuss project forks or restarts here. Finally, there were people who had reasonable criticism for the upstart projects themselves.
However, Wikipedia itself has been extensively criticized throughout its history; famously, its ability to accumulate knowledge and remove vandalism works "only in reality, not in theory." So on that note, how can we say that we know that those systems are inherently that much worse? Many would argue, as you yourself hint, that Wikipedia's supremacy is eminent in its dominance, and in its success. Yes, Wikipedia has orders of magnitude more content than its competitors. Please consider, though, the possibility that this is simply the result of first mover advantage and network effects.
Wikipedia came on to the scene to find a fresh niche to fill. Earlier sites existed with similar goals to describe and categorize life (see: everything2 and h2g2), but Wikipedia had a slightly different defined goal (be "the free encyclopedia") and software to ease the processes of collaboration and presentation. It took off like a shot and quickly established itself before it really had competition.
Today, Wikipedia has somewhere around 2.8 million articles and a dedicated community. It seems immediately obvious to me that it's impossible today to compete with Wikipedia from square one; any competitor would need to fork the project or have their own equally impressive database. A database that size needs a huge support structure, not only in infrastructure but also in terms of volunteers/workers to police content. It's not possible to get those things all at once. There might be enough people out there who would be interested in helping a different project, but there's no way to get in touch with all of them. New talent either joins up with Wikipedia, or becomes disinterested when they don't fit with that group.
Wikipedia got where it is because it was good enough at the right time. It does a lot right. It does some things wrong. It's not perfect. But then, I don't have to tell /. about technically inferior products dominating the marketplace due to familiarity...
A 2gb file size limit is one thing (I've never even heard of that rumor yet), but an app limit is quite another. If you have dual monitors running where you can look at a firefox window while playing a game and some music running on vlc, then obviously the starter edition isn't for you.
I also haven't heard of the 2gb file size limit. I believe the GP was using it as an example of deliberately crippling software to make a cheaper version, rather than an actual "feature" of Windows 7 Starter.
On the topic of the app limit, though, 3 apps is nothing. Your example of dual-monitor situations makes sense from the perspective of a tech worker used to such things, but I've known many people with one-monitor setups that use (abuse?) their setups more than that.
Imagine for a second the user's example were more like this:
My little brother, on his laptop, will have music playing on VLC while playing a game. Firefox will be open to GameFAQs in the background to alt+tab to whenever he needs to look something up. Meanwhile, he has Pidgin running, in case his girlfriend gets online.
Something like that could be run on a netbook or bottom-line PC as long as the game itself will run (and there are a lot of games out there to play, if you don't limit yourself to the latest releases). Maybe you'd argue he shouldn't be using Starter Edition either. However, there are certainly other situations out there that would run up against this problem in reasonable use, and that points at the really irritating thing about this limitation: for the sake of profit, Microsoft is trying to release a product that in a big way is less useful than their own products of 15 years earlier. That's ridiculous.
A lot of other people have torn to pieces the idea that we really call it "Darwinism" in meaningful discourse. They're pretty right. Our understanding of evolution has, err, evolved, over the years since he first propounded his theory.
That said, he laid the foundations for evolutionary biology, and deserves to leave his name in history a bit. If you've never read The Origin of Species, give it a shot. It's a solid work, and quite accessible. His application of the scientific method should be a case study for all scientists.
For any interested, there's a pretty good article about him over at the International Herald Tribune at the moment.
Democracy is a governmental system. Capitalism is an economic system. They have nothing to do with each other by nature.
Except insofar as that they are both places from which societal power is derived. The GP's point is that cultures which focus on their democratic principles give each person equal power, while cultures which focus on their capitalistic principles give each dollar equal power - and in many cases America tends towards the latter end of the spectrum.