I'm feeling some bitterness here, but let me clarify and expound.
"a large part of the Okinawan economy, which has never been great, is supported by the existence of the bases"
When all is said and done, the presence of the American bases only account for 3% of the Prefectural GDP. I can't find my direct reference on this, so I'll support with argument. There are approximately 35,000 service members and dependants located on the island of which 15% are virtually absent due to vacations and deployments. Okinawa has a population of 1.2 million locals which holds the US at 3% of their population. The local bases employ two classes of local nationals. Contractors are employed directly by the companies doing the work, such as American Engineering, and are paid from US funds supporting the local contracts. These jobs are small in scale and the employees make up less than 10% of the locals employed on the bases. The remaining 90% fall under the catagory of MLC and are hired and paid by the Japanese government under the supervision of the DFAB (Defense Fascilities Administration Bureau). All utilities used on the American bases are paid for by Japanese tax money in an agreement that the Americans would not build their own facilities and take up more land. All off island artillery exercises have their entire transportation and logistics budgets covered by the DFAB in an agreement not to fire artillery on the island anymore. Due to cheaper prices in the AAFES shopping centers, most americans purchase their high dollar items there, so the money is not injected into the Japanese economy. Don't even get me started about the number of locals who find a way to get signed in the base as a guest so they can spend their Japanese income on American goods. The primary spending that goes on out in town, sadly sits squarely in night time entertainment and is centered in Naha(Kokusai), Okinawa, and Chatan. Limitted spending occurs in Ginowan and Machinato, but most Americans will find their lack of Japanese speaking ability precludes them from the predominant Japanese entertainments districts in Nago, Maehara, Gushikawa, West Naha and Itoman. Surprisingly enough, the chief resentment against Americans does not even lie in the populous near the bases. You have to travel north of Onna to start seeing the bold prejudice. So your argument about people wanting their own land back is moot. The areas surrounding the main bases are always affluent because the owners of the land are being paid a handsome sum of money in rent. I lived right down the street from the two primary owners of Futenma and all I have to say is I wish I owned a Porshe, a Ferrari, and a 4 story palace. I never talked to them personally, but I'm going to guess the reason why they were never present in meeting demanding the return of Futenma is because they honestly didn't care. You are under the false assumption that the establishment of the bases displaced thousands of families. It is simply not correct. Okinawa was an agrarian society only a few steps from feudalism before the wars and most of the land on the island is owned by a select few wealthy land owners. The change to individual wealth and freedom was a direct result of the American presence, not an existing institution we impinged on.
I realize you lived in Japan for 14 years, but you have to understand that someone living in Japan is just as capable of commenting on Okinawa as someone living in China is of commenting on Taiwan. There is a lot of misconception fueled by spin in the press and simple lack of education and caring. I sadly only lived in mainland Japan for 6 weeks, but after the 3 years in Okinawa, the differences in perception were amazingly stark (a similar situation exists between Honshu and Hokkaido).
I am just as patiotic as the next American, perhaps even more so being a fomer Marine Officer and graduate of the Naval Academy. I personnaly feel that our presence slows down their economy and provides a negative influence on their youth (MT
Common misconception. I lived there for 3 years, speak Japanese, and regularly return to see my Okinawan and Japanese friends there.
Most of the media bashing and organized protests are driven by a handful of large companies and political groups who are vying for power. The bases actually only occupy less than 20% of the land with nearly half of that being the Jungle Warfare Training Center, which is in a completely unoccupied portion of the island. The corporate concern lies in Kinser and Futenma. Kinser sits on prime development land for tourism interests which is badly needed for the islands economy since the city planners F'ed up the transportation grid. Futenma sits in a high dollar(Yen) residential area that could see enormous profits from home building as well as extending some of the business district off of 330.
The protests are mostly staffed from member companies of the large corporates. I'll never forget the day a girl I was dating called me and said she had to cancel dinner because she had to go protest the Americans. At first I thought she was going nuts, but she later explained that her office had been chosen and everyone had to go or they would be frowned upon. Most of the people standing outside the bases are only there because of social obligation, not from any real angst towards the US. (This of course changes when our service members decide to rape 12 yr old girls).
There is probably about 10% of the population who actually harbors resentment to the US. I would peg about 99% of that falls into: Old folks who are pissed that their agrarian lifestyle has disappeared (Okinawa has been world renowned for being friendly and open, so it's not the typical Gaijin syndrome of mainland Japan), girls and their friends and family who were jilted by some yound american playboy and left preganant as a single mother (bad juju in Japanese and Okinawan society), or just the typical uneducated, racist flock you can find anywhere in the world.
You should find some books on the recent history of the island. Pretty fascinating reading. One of the other huge myths is that Okianwa would fall appart if the Americans weren't injecting money through the bases....a little research and reading would tend to indicate our presence would only be missed by the younger crowd who are starved for anything American.
Actually, you are incorrect. I was on the island less than a week and was informed that calling a local "Japanese" was a social faux pas. The curious bastard in me spent a great deal of my next three years there studying the history and culture of the people. So, while I could give you a fairly good dissertation on WHY it pisses them off, you don't NEED to know. All you NEED to know if you are going to travel or do business there, is don't do it. You are now aware of an important issue in that region, and I haven't given you one ounce of clue as to the historical and political events that led to it being an issue.
Just curious, but did Sprint have the integrity to put a star next to the word 'first', and then have the words 'in America' printed in text so small most folks couldn't read it, or did they just flat out lie again?
TV and movies have been available in Japan on cell phones for nearly two years. When I left in February, no one really cared all that much unless something important was going on. I would bet that tons of commuters are watching the olympics while riding the JR to work and back. The picture quality is actually pretty darned good. I personally never bought a FOMA phone because the 3G coverage in my area was still in the works. And the way they switched email from being directly on the phone to being through a web portal was kind of annoying when you were already used to just pressing a button and being inside of your INBOX on their 50x series of phones.
With all the political BS going on in the media, I swear I'd donate money to the first 527 group who titled themselves "Disillusioned Cell Phone Users for a President Who Will Make The Cellular Companies Leave The Dark Ages and Stop F&^%ing Over The Public With Overpriced Used Technology".
Geographical knowledge is not just limited to knowing where the lines are on the map. Any idiot can look at a map and write Okinawa, Japan. Geography also involves knowing something about what lies inside the lines. Someone who spent any time reading about Okinawa would know never to add the ", Japan" on the end. Yes, it's part of Japan, everyone knows it, but the locals still are miffed about it, so it's more geographically appropriate to just refer to it as Okinawa.
You don't need to know the whole history of the area, or be deeply involved in its political issues, you just need to know the basic important issues for the area.
C'mon guys, someone go fetch the cluebat. If you want to see what the cell ohone market will look like in 3 years, book a flight to Tokyo. As far as cell phones replacing items like mp3 players, it just ain't gonna happen. DoCoMo released an mp3 phone about 4 years ago in Japan and it failed miserably for two reasons. #1 Cost - which has largely been mitigated since then, and #2 limitted battery life - which is still as much a reality here as anywhere else. Producing continuous sound draws juice. Hardware decoding draws juice. Even in Japan's advanced cellular tech industry the best phones still only get between 2.5 to 3 hours of talk time in realistic use. Unless the handset makers all agree on a standerd charging adapter that restaraunts and coffee shops would then agree to provide, people are just going to get pissed off way too fast when they are listening to their latest "Bittany Thpears (southpark lisp spelling intentional) Album" and they finally get an important phone call, but the battery is too low from playing music.
The only earth shattering news about our cell phone market is that we continue to put up with hand-me-down technology from Japan and Europe and we also continue to pay way too much for it. The latest Samsung phone released here in the US has finally met the same standards as the NTT phone I bought 3 years ago in Japan...except it's $300 here and my phone back then only ran me 12,000yen (~$100). But if I sign up for a one year binding contract with T-Mobile, they'll discount it down to $200...woohoo.
The only reason why a mojority of handheld features are going into cell phones is because 95% of people don't NEED the full features of a handheld, and the small subset of features they do need (calendar, todo, adress book) are easy to implement in a cell phone. I consider myself a technology freak and I would never pay extra money for a cell phone that will open word documents because I have never been so damned busy that I couldn't wait to open it on a regular computer.
No inside info or anything, but there has been no successful attempt on IBM or Novell's part for a summary judgement in their favor. This does bring to question..."What if SCO is right?"
Now, of course they were completely smoking crack to say the Linux community owes them ~$700 per copy of Linux used. But if they do indeed own the IP to some of Unix AND IBM did indeed slip a few bells and whistles into Linux without getting the propper blessing....then I would say the slashdot boards are going to be an interresting sight to see.
Don't get me wrong. I'm rooting for Big Blue, The Suse guys, and Joe Linux user. But the length this has drawn out does make one wonder.
"And how can a site for a software product not have screenshots showing off its functionality? That's the real question."
Duh!! Because it's a JAVA project management tool. Didn't you know that JAVA's cross platform compatibility has a "feature" that often makes it bahave slightly differently on different platforms. They could put screen shots up, but they'd ultimately look different than yours unless you happen to have the exact same system configuration as them.
This is not entirely correct. A good chunk of Japan is running 100V at 60Hz which is close enough to US standards of 110V. Basically, anything that is not high powered works just fine and most electronics are designed to work with either. However, I believe the Tokyo region runs at 50Hz, which could damage any system that was built to depend on the power frequency for its operation.
WTF?!? You know, that makes great sense. We should apply it to everything. The NRA is right. It's not the guns that are killing people, it's the idiots who were stupid enough to stand in front of the working end.
Seriously, you are driving a 1000Kg object at speeds around 40m/s (90mph) which translates to 800,000 Watts of kinetic energy and you think it's the responsibility of the pedestrians to avoid you.
The Japanese have an amazing concept about driving. That whole license thing that we joke about paying $20 for and taking a simple road test is actually taken serious there. It cost around $3000 to take the class to get your license over there and they then consider you to be a LICENSED professional when it comes to driving. Their law of the road isn't gross tonnage, it's the exact opposite. Smaller classes of objects using the road ALWAYS have the right of way and there is no such thing as a no fault accident. Everyone has the responsibility to pay attention to what they are doing and people driving larger vehicles have the responsibility to look out for the smaller vehicles that would be seriously damaged if there were an accident. Amazingly enough, they have lower speed limits, and , you're not going to beleive this one, less traffic related fatalities. As a matter of fact, for the 3 years I lived on Okinawa, the only bad accidents I ever saw were Yankee plates (Americans cars had the letter Y on the license plate) who were driving way above the speed limit.
Most of this was aimed at the root post that said you should be able to just drive as fast as you want to. It has nothing to do with drafting, and everything to do with the sheer number of people that get affected and tax dollars wasted when someone's hot-rodding @ss has to be scraped off the pavement because they lost control of their vehicle, or a deer jumped out into the road.
Perhaps if it cost Americans $3000 to get a license, not just the first time, but everytime you lose it for speeding, DUI, etc.., we might actually pay a little more attention to what the word license actually means.
You're right about the promises from AT&T...for the most part. I'll take the hard copy of a book any day over reading a screen, but when you need access to a book right a way, it would be an amazing thing to just pull it right up off your local library's page rather than having to brave traffic down to your local Barnes and Noble.
As far as the heart surgury goes. If I was going to die anyways, and the nearest surgeon was 2000 miles away, why not give him a crack at it?
I'm a software engineer and beleive me, I'd pay serious money to not have to keep multiple dev trees for 8 different platforms. I'd use JAVA for everything if it truely were platform independant (as well as a few other limitations in the language removed for high performance coding). But until they actually do work it out that way, My projects will continue to be C++ with a ton of compiler directives.
If I wer a moderator and it were a different subject, I probably would have modded you up without reading as well. But again, being from Japan, I knew right away the phone thing was not right. Now if only the SEC and FCC would allow NTT DoCoMo to compete directly in the US market....then we'd have some cool phones.
"Or did you expect AT&T to actually fulfill those promises themselves?"
At the time, yes, actually I did expect some form of corporate integrity. After all the scandals US businesses have been through in the past 4 years, I'm not suprised one bit.
And yes, all of those promises have been possible since the day AT&T made them, they just never followed through with the support. If they had taken the money they spent on those commercials and all the law suites they've levelled against the regional bells and put it into R&D and infrastructure, they might have even come through on a few of them, or at least gotten closer.
"check out and read entire books via the internet"
Searches for Anne McCafferey, R.A. Salvatore and Ray Bradbury all resulted in No results. This is not what AT&T promised, nor would it be classified as "soon".
"make video phone calls"
Nice site with a clearly written disclaimer at the top that as of June 4th, 2004, these phones were still months away. Further reading into the text shows that the site highlited these phones because they could "record more than a few seconds of video". That is not a video phone. I just moved from Japan where phone technology is where it should be and they STILL do not have the video phones AT&T promised in their commercials.
"perform remote heart surgery"
Thanks for the article about the kidney surgury. Also if you actually read it you will see that the surgury WAS NOT done remotely, there was just a doctor on the other end of the line talking someone else through the proceedure. AT&T's commercials showed a doctor wearing computerized gloves guiding the motions of robotic hands holding the scalpal.
The real kicker of it all is that I got modded Troll for making a legitimate comment on failed promises and you got modded Insightful for linking to three articles that did not actually demonstrate anything other than I was right.
File JAVA and its promise of platform independance away with all those AT&T commercials from the mid 90's that promised you would soon be able to check out and read entire books via the internet, make video phone calls, and perform remote heart surgery with their new technology.
I will give them this though, they did manage to corner the handheld/cell phone market with JAVA. But then again, A JAVA app written for i-Mode phones won't work on a Blackberry, so I guess they fscked that one up too.
"I'm a microsoft user...it's just that I don't need to leave."
No shares or options in the company huh? Set your eye's on your boss's position. Make sure you are dead good at your job, but also learn how to do his as well. Unless you are cursed with some form of anti-social psychotic behavior, promotion is inevitable. Continue on this track and you will eventually end up with a budget that is not large enough for what you need to do. Once you are there, look at how much money you are spending on Exchange, IIS, and MS SQL. Then look at IMAP, Apache, and Postgres. Unless your company actually USES the calendar features of Exchange, your users will notice very little difference. Your budget will see an enourmous chunk of money freed up from license fees and the sheer extra hardware required by exchange's poor scaling abilities. I can think of no redeeming qualities for IIS and CERT's recent recommendation to flat out STOP using IE should be profound enough. Postgres is actually the most SQL compliant RDBMS on the market and can easily migrate in all your existing SQL tables (triggers and stored proceedures will require some effort, but very few small to medium sized businesses ever use them). Notice I never made an arugument for switching your desktops to Linux. Good security policies and Antivirus practices can keep the main detractor from MS on the desktop at bay and the transition to Linux with OO is still not smooth enough to be called worry free, but eventually even that line item on your anual budget is going to grow into a "need"
Actually, the same reason why our cell phones suck here compared to Japan is why it makes no difference whether you use an American cell phone or a PDA. The designed in software is crippled. Why on earth are modern PDA's still using WML or XHTML browsers when there are perfectly capable industry standard browsers that will run inside of them. NTT DoCoMo's phones were my reason for not owning a PDA in Japan because they had a hoard of web sites out there that did everything I needed to do. I could actually even reserve concert or plane tickets right from my phone's i-Mode browser. Try going to a website on the Blackberry....just plain sucks and almost no-one develops for it. Pocket-PC...miles better, but scripting for dynamic page support is unstable and there is a bug with HTML POST requests that M$ refuses to fix. I'm not even going to get started about Palm.
I write public safety software and there will always be a market for a portable method to access information for policemen who primarily use bicycles, motorcycles or horses. But writing stuff for the current mess of devices out there just plain hurts. If the Hand held makers would just sit down and agree that their priority is to allow people access to information and all support at least HTML 3.0 standards with CSS and JScript, there would be an explosion of web services and web portals that would actually bring some value to these things. Hand helds right now are just a few steps above Linux for the desktop. Linux is doing much better for application support, but is still mostly a geek toy. At least the handhelds allow a total moron to play solitaire and keep his address book right out of the box.
Disclaimer: For the super busy, high powered business man, being able to sync your Hand held with email and calendar functions is a service worth it's weight in gold. However, until they offer some value to the other 90% of us, the parent poster is dead right about the cell phones.
"Three. Yes it's sad that anyone died in the line of duty, but three out of 2000+ officers is a pretty low fatality rate."
Not sure where you got your info from, but a quick search at Baltimore County's website shows on around 1800 sworn officers over the course of last year with 833 assaults on officers. Google and Baltimore Co. were uncooperative in letting me know how many of them ended up being fatal. One fatality is way too many and 833 assaults is outright insane. That's about three times a day that blatent disrespect is shown to them....I really don't think having them do constible style patrolling will produce enough results to justify the additional danger to them.
The issue of private vs public IS as black and white as I put it. When you are out in a public street, there is nothing against the law for a cop to look at you, nor is there anything wrong with them walking around and looking at you. Now they are just looking at the street via a camera instead of actually having to stand there. It's simple efficiency. No one is demanding your papers, or cataloging your porno rentals. They're just watching the streets via camera to make sure they will be able to quickly react to a criminal situation. It's been two years since I was last in Baltimore, but that city is way too big to put human eyes in all the problem areas all the time with only 1800 officers. If you can find a way to find the money to replace a $1000 last until it breaks camera, transmitter, and monitor with a $35,000 a year plus equipment and training costs policeman, I too would rather have the reassuring presence of a real officer. However, reality is probably going to lead to the camera being the everybody wins solution to keeping eyes on problem areas.
"whatever happened to the old "constible on patrol"? "
Uhh, they were all gunned down in the 1930's by Tommy Guns. What century and city do you live in? We're not talking about Smalltown, Indiana here. We're talking about a major metropolis only a 30 minute drive from the murder capitol of the country. Do you have even the slightest idea as to how many cops died in Baltimore alone last year trying to protect the public safety?
Then again, maybe you're right. We could do it like China did with Hong Kong and have an officer armed with a shotgun or uzi at every street corner. That will definitely make people feel safe and no one would ever think of the words "police state" as they walked by trying to use the farthest point on the sidewalk away from the guy with the sub-automatic weapon.
Seriously people, we as americans put up cameras at our homes and our stores and arm ourselves and call it our patriotic right to protect ourselves from evil. But the moment the good folks hired by your CITY to protect the PUBLIC from evil decide to do the same thing in PUBLIC areas, it's "1984" and "Police State" and "Where will this invasion of PRIVACY end?". Everyone on slashdot right now go to dictionary.com and look up the words PUBLIC and PRIVATE. Apparently most of you will be shocked to learn that that expecting PRIVACY in a PUBLIC place is about as retarded as Caffiene Free Mountain Dew.
Send me an email when the police demand to install cameras in your home or business, then the concept of a public entity invading a private one will actually be real. This is just the public officials trying to keep your public places safe for you to use at your own free will. Of course, if your intended use is for criminal purposes, then I guess YOUR safety was just decreased....too f*cking bad!
4tech as a network engineer, NTT Docomo as a consultant, JapanLaw as a translator, half a dozen GS-6 through GS-9's who work on the US bases, and I even know one guy banking 120K rewriting bank software from Cobol and Fortran to C++ and JAVA web front ends. Salary has very little to do with what you know, and almost everything to do with who you know and what you can get done for them. Promotion is not simply a matter of being good enough to replace your boss, it is almost always more tied to being more accepted by your bosses peers as a replacement....i.e. if you aren't out networking and getting to know people, they're never going to think of you when the higher paying jobs pop up on the radar. It may also be noted that some of my friends average 16 to 18 hour days and get some of their most valuable sleep on the Yokohama line.
Actually, we are waging a cultural battle that we are never going to win. Most of my friends in Tokyo who are in their 20's and still not married still live with their parents. And they average about 60K in income. Stop and think for a second how many toys you could buy for that kind of cash at the expense of still living with your parents. No place to make out with your girlfriend (I know this is slashdot, but work with me on this...), no problem, just go to a love hotel with the waterfall themed room and only pay $30 for 3 hours of sweet loving. Yes, eventually you'll get married and get a place of your own and be back in the poor house, but by then your tired of having the bleeding edge in fashion and tech and are just happy with something that works. No hurt to the economy as there is a generation of youngsters rolling almost their entire bank into having cell phones that double as credit cards/train tickets/PDAs/TVs/Digital Cameras/Radio telescopes. Just imagine if every young american was buying a new cell phone on an average of every 6 to 12 months....the companies would be forced to innovate to give us something better than we bought 6 months ago or lose us to a competitor who say, already is developing wotking 4G technology.
Yeah...based on the logic presented in that article, he is going to come to the conclusion that Linux was really the result of a gay marriage between Charles Babbage and Alan Turing.
This is almost as funny as that "5 year study" on the Total cost of ownership of Win2K vs Linux that was released in 2001.
I just moved back to the states from Japan and I leave my Docomo D505i on 24/7 and only use it as a PDA (alarm, calculator, calendar, contacts, memo). Despite constantly hammering the battery looking forsignal, I only have to recharge it once every 5 days.
While in Japan, I took an older N503i out on a military exercise in Hokkaido for 21 days. I spend an average of 45 minutes a day on the phone as the cell phones were more reliable than the military radios and I only had to recharge it once.
When I picked up a phone here, I finally just gave in and took the free Nokia for signing up with T-Mobile as the closest thing on the market was barely on par with the 2 year old N503i and cost $300.
The reason why cell technology sucks here is because we all spend too much time bitching on slashdot and not a single one of us has written our congressman expressing outrage that NTT Docomo has been barred from operating here. I could give a damn less if it's to protect the US companies from being driven out of business. "Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way!" Motorola and Nokia would like you to beleive they are competing...they're not. They're enjoying the fat lazy American consumer attitude that accepts their fast food class service because it is convenient.
Google's results are based on a democratically perceived relavence. In other words, the reason why GrokLaw is #5 doesn't mean they have the 5th largest source of SCO stuff, it means they are the 5th most linked to site from other sites that have the word SCO on them. In otherwords, if that many people felt Groklaw was reliable enough to put links to it from their page, then Google can be fairly sure that their site holds relavence to your search.
So yes, in theory, if a particular site could get every page on the internet to have a hyperlink to it, then it would appear #1 on every search that contained a word that was on that page, even if the page held no gramatical structure or information.
So, no, Groklaw is not the top Anti-Sco site on the net, nor is it the 5th ranked one. It just happens to contain the 5th most relavent source of info on SCO as perceived by other webmasters regardless of whether the content if pro, anti, or just a neutral view.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm feeling some bitterness here, but let me clarify and expound.
"a large part of the Okinawan economy, which has never been great, is supported by the existence of the bases"
When all is said and done, the presence of the American bases only account for 3% of the Prefectural GDP. I can't find my direct reference on this, so I'll support with argument. There are approximately 35,000 service members and dependants located on the island of which 15% are virtually absent due to vacations and deployments. Okinawa has a population of 1.2 million locals which holds the US at 3% of their population. The local bases employ two classes of local nationals. Contractors are employed directly by the companies doing the work, such as American Engineering, and are paid from US funds supporting the local contracts. These jobs are small in scale and the employees make up less than 10% of the locals employed on the bases. The remaining 90% fall under the catagory of MLC and are hired and paid by the Japanese government under the supervision of the DFAB (Defense Fascilities Administration Bureau). All utilities used on the American bases are paid for by Japanese tax money in an agreement that the Americans would not build their own facilities and take up more land. All off island artillery exercises have their entire transportation and logistics budgets covered by the DFAB in an agreement not to fire artillery on the island anymore. Due to cheaper prices in the AAFES shopping centers, most americans purchase their high dollar items there, so the money is not injected into the Japanese economy. Don't even get me started about the number of locals who find a way to get signed in the base as a guest so they can spend their Japanese income on American goods. The primary spending that goes on out in town, sadly sits squarely in night time entertainment and is centered in Naha(Kokusai), Okinawa, and Chatan. Limitted spending occurs in Ginowan and Machinato, but most Americans will find their lack of Japanese speaking ability precludes them from the predominant Japanese entertainments districts in Nago, Maehara, Gushikawa, West Naha and Itoman. Surprisingly enough, the chief resentment against Americans does not even lie in the populous near the bases. You have to travel north of Onna to start seeing the bold prejudice. So your argument about people wanting their own land back is moot. The areas surrounding the main bases are always affluent because the owners of the land are being paid a handsome sum of money in rent. I lived right down the street from the two primary owners of Futenma and all I have to say is I wish I owned a Porshe, a Ferrari, and a 4 story palace. I never talked to them personally, but I'm going to guess the reason why they were never present in meeting demanding the return of Futenma is because they honestly didn't care. You are under the false assumption that the establishment of the bases displaced thousands of families. It is simply not correct. Okinawa was an agrarian society only a few steps from feudalism before the wars and most of the land on the island is owned by a select few wealthy land owners. The change to individual wealth and freedom was a direct result of the American presence, not an existing institution we impinged on.
I realize you lived in Japan for 14 years, but you have to understand that someone living in Japan is just as capable of commenting on Okinawa as someone living in China is of commenting on Taiwan. There is a lot of misconception fueled by spin in the press and simple lack of education and caring. I sadly only lived in mainland Japan for 6 weeks, but after the 3 years in Okinawa, the differences in perception were amazingly stark (a similar situation exists between Honshu and Hokkaido).
I am just as patiotic as the next American, perhaps even more so being a fomer Marine Officer and graduate of the Naval Academy. I personnaly feel that our presence slows down their economy and provides a negative influence on their youth (MT
Common misconception. I lived there for 3 years, speak Japanese, and regularly return to see my Okinawan and Japanese friends there.
Most of the media bashing and organized protests are driven by a handful of large companies and political groups who are vying for power. The bases actually only occupy less than 20% of the land with nearly half of that being the Jungle Warfare Training Center, which is in a completely unoccupied portion of the island. The corporate concern lies in Kinser and Futenma. Kinser sits on prime development land for tourism interests which is badly needed for the islands economy since the city planners F'ed up the transportation grid. Futenma sits in a high dollar(Yen) residential area that could see enormous profits from home building as well as extending some of the business district off of 330.
The protests are mostly staffed from member companies of the large corporates. I'll never forget the day a girl I was dating called me and said she had to cancel dinner because she had to go protest the Americans. At first I thought she was going nuts, but she later explained that her office had been chosen and everyone had to go or they would be frowned upon. Most of the people standing outside the bases are only there because of social obligation, not from any real angst towards the US. (This of course changes when our service members decide to rape 12 yr old girls).
There is probably about 10% of the population who actually harbors resentment to the US. I would peg about 99% of that falls into: Old folks who are pissed that their agrarian lifestyle has disappeared (Okinawa has been world renowned for being friendly and open, so it's not the typical Gaijin syndrome of mainland Japan), girls and their friends and family who were jilted by some yound american playboy and left preganant as a single mother (bad juju in Japanese and Okinawan society), or just the typical uneducated, racist flock you can find anywhere in the world.
You should find some books on the recent history of the island. Pretty fascinating reading. One of the other huge myths is that Okianwa would fall appart if the Americans weren't injecting money through the bases....a little research and reading would tend to indicate our presence would only be missed by the younger crowd who are starved for anything American.
Actually, you are incorrect. I was on the island less than a week and was informed that calling a local "Japanese" was a social faux pas. The curious bastard in me spent a great deal of my next three years there studying the history and culture of the people. So, while I could give you a fairly good dissertation on WHY it pisses them off, you don't NEED to know. All you NEED to know if you are going to travel or do business there, is don't do it. You are now aware of an important issue in that region, and I haven't given you one ounce of clue as to the historical and political events that led to it being an issue.
Just curious, but did Sprint have the integrity to put a star next to the word 'first', and then have the words 'in America' printed in text so small most folks couldn't read it, or did they just flat out lie again?
TV and movies have been available in Japan on cell phones for nearly two years. When I left in February, no one really cared all that much unless something important was going on. I would bet that tons of commuters are watching the olympics while riding the JR to work and back. The picture quality is actually pretty darned good. I personally never bought a FOMA phone because the 3G coverage in my area was still in the works. And the way they switched email from being directly on the phone to being through a web portal was kind of annoying when you were already used to just pressing a button and being inside of your INBOX on their 50x series of phones.
With all the political BS going on in the media, I swear I'd donate money to the first 527 group who titled themselves "Disillusioned Cell Phone Users for a President Who Will Make The Cellular Companies Leave The Dark Ages and Stop F&^%ing Over The Public With Overpriced Used Technology".
Geographical knowledge is not just limited to knowing where the lines are on the map. Any idiot can look at a map and write Okinawa, Japan. Geography also involves knowing something about what lies inside the lines. Someone who spent any time reading about Okinawa would know never to add the ", Japan" on the end. Yes, it's part of Japan, everyone knows it, but the locals still are miffed about it, so it's more geographically appropriate to just refer to it as Okinawa.
You don't need to know the whole history of the area, or be deeply involved in its political issues, you just need to know the basic important issues for the area.
C'mon guys, someone go fetch the cluebat. If you want to see what the cell ohone market will look like in 3 years, book a flight to Tokyo. As far as cell phones replacing items like mp3 players, it just ain't gonna happen. DoCoMo released an mp3 phone about 4 years ago in Japan and it failed miserably for two reasons. #1 Cost - which has largely been mitigated since then, and #2 limitted battery life - which is still as much a reality here as anywhere else. Producing continuous sound draws juice. Hardware decoding draws juice. Even in Japan's advanced cellular tech industry the best phones still only get between 2.5 to 3 hours of talk time in realistic use. Unless the handset makers all agree on a standerd charging adapter that restaraunts and coffee shops would then agree to provide, people are just going to get pissed off way too fast when they are listening to their latest "Bittany Thpears (southpark lisp spelling intentional) Album" and they finally get an important phone call, but the battery is too low from playing music.
The only earth shattering news about our cell phone market is that we continue to put up with hand-me-down technology from Japan and Europe and we also continue to pay way too much for it. The latest Samsung phone released here in the US has finally met the same standards as the NTT phone I bought 3 years ago in Japan...except it's $300 here and my phone back then only ran me 12,000yen (~$100). But if I sign up for a one year binding contract with T-Mobile, they'll discount it down to $200...woohoo.
The only reason why a mojority of handheld features are going into cell phones is because 95% of people don't NEED the full features of a handheld, and the small subset of features they do need (calendar, todo, adress book) are easy to implement in a cell phone. I consider myself a technology freak and I would never pay extra money for a cell phone that will open word documents because I have never been so damned busy that I couldn't wait to open it on a regular computer.
No inside info or anything, but there has been no successful attempt on IBM or Novell's part for a summary judgement in their favor. This does bring to question..."What if SCO is right?"
Now, of course they were completely smoking crack to say the Linux community owes them ~$700 per copy of Linux used. But if they do indeed own the IP to some of Unix AND IBM did indeed slip a few bells and whistles into Linux without getting the propper blessing....then I would say the slashdot boards are going to be an interresting sight to see.
Don't get me wrong. I'm rooting for Big Blue, The Suse guys, and Joe Linux user. But the length this has drawn out does make one wonder.
"And how can a site for a software product not have screenshots showing off its functionality? That's the real question."
Duh!! Because it's a JAVA project management tool. Didn't you know that JAVA's cross platform compatibility has a "feature" that often makes it bahave slightly differently on different platforms. They could put screen shots up, but they'd ultimately look different than yours unless you happen to have the exact same system configuration as them.
This is not entirely correct. A good chunk of Japan is running 100V at 60Hz which is close enough to US standards of 110V. Basically, anything that is not high powered works just fine and most electronics are designed to work with either. However, I believe the Tokyo region runs at 50Hz, which could damage any system that was built to depend on the power frequency for its operation.
"Cyclists and children should look out"
WTF?!? You know, that makes great sense. We should apply it to everything. The NRA is right. It's not the guns that are killing people, it's the idiots who were stupid enough to stand in front of the working end.
Seriously, you are driving a 1000Kg object at speeds around 40m/s (90mph) which translates to 800,000 Watts of kinetic energy and you think it's the responsibility of the pedestrians to avoid you.
The Japanese have an amazing concept about driving. That whole license thing that we joke about paying $20 for and taking a simple road test is actually taken serious there. It cost around $3000 to take the class to get your license over there and they then consider you to be a LICENSED professional when it comes to driving. Their law of the road isn't gross tonnage, it's the exact opposite. Smaller classes of objects using the road ALWAYS have the right of way and there is no such thing as a no fault accident. Everyone has the responsibility to pay attention to what they are doing and people driving larger vehicles have the responsibility to look out for the smaller vehicles that would be seriously damaged if there were an accident. Amazingly enough, they have lower speed limits, and , you're not going to beleive this one, less traffic related fatalities. As a matter of fact, for the 3 years I lived on Okinawa, the only bad accidents I ever saw were Yankee plates (Americans cars had the letter Y on the license plate) who were driving way above the speed limit.
Most of this was aimed at the root post that said you should be able to just drive as fast as you want to. It has nothing to do with drafting, and everything to do with the sheer number of people that get affected and tax dollars wasted when someone's hot-rodding @ss has to be scraped off the pavement because they lost control of their vehicle, or a deer jumped out into the road.
Perhaps if it cost Americans $3000 to get a license, not just the first time, but everytime you lose it for speeding, DUI, etc.., we might actually pay a little more attention to what the word license actually means.
You're right about the promises from AT&T...for the most part. I'll take the hard copy of a book any day over reading a screen, but when you need access to a book right a way, it would be an amazing thing to just pull it right up off your local library's page rather than having to brave traffic down to your local Barnes and Noble.
As far as the heart surgury goes. If I was going to die anyways, and the nearest surgeon was 2000 miles away, why not give him a crack at it?
I'm a software engineer and beleive me, I'd pay serious money to not have to keep multiple dev trees for 8 different platforms. I'd use JAVA for everything if it truely were platform independant (as well as a few other limitations in the language removed for high performance coding). But until they actually do work it out that way, My projects will continue to be C++ with a ton of compiler directives.
If I wer a moderator and it were a different subject, I probably would have modded you up without reading as well. But again, being from Japan, I knew right away the phone thing was not right. Now if only the SEC and FCC would allow NTT DoCoMo to compete directly in the US market....then we'd have some cool phones.
"Or did you expect AT&T to actually fulfill those promises themselves?"
At the time, yes, actually I did expect some form of corporate integrity. After all the scandals US businesses have been through in the past 4 years, I'm not suprised one bit.
And yes, all of those promises have been possible since the day AT&T made them, they just never followed through with the support. If they had taken the money they spent on those commercials and all the law suites they've levelled against the regional bells and put it into R&D and infrastructure, they might have even come through on a few of them, or at least gotten closer.
"check out and read entire books via the internet"
Searches for Anne McCafferey, R.A. Salvatore and Ray Bradbury all resulted in No results. This is not what AT&T promised, nor would it be classified as "soon".
"make video phone calls"
Nice site with a clearly written disclaimer at the top that as of June 4th, 2004, these phones were still months away. Further reading into the text shows that the site highlited these phones because they could "record more than a few seconds of video". That is not a video phone. I just moved from Japan where phone technology is where it should be and they STILL do not have the video phones AT&T promised in their commercials.
"perform remote heart surgery"
Thanks for the article about the kidney surgury. Also if you actually read it you will see that the surgury WAS NOT done remotely, there was just a doctor on the other end of the line talking someone else through the proceedure. AT&T's commercials showed a doctor wearing computerized gloves guiding the motions of robotic hands holding the scalpal.
The real kicker of it all is that I got modded Troll for making a legitimate comment on failed promises and you got modded Insightful for linking to three articles that did not actually demonstrate anything other than I was right.
gotta love the slashdot mods
ray bradbury
File JAVA and its promise of platform independance away with all those AT&T commercials from the mid 90's that promised you would soon be able to check out and read entire books via the internet, make video phone calls, and perform remote heart surgery with their new technology.
I will give them this though, they did manage to corner the handheld/cell phone market with JAVA. But then again, A JAVA app written for i-Mode phones won't work on a Blackberry, so I guess they fscked that one up too.
"I'm a microsoft user...it's just that I don't need to leave."
No shares or options in the company huh? Set your eye's on your boss's position. Make sure you are dead good at your job, but also learn how to do his as well. Unless you are cursed with some form of anti-social psychotic behavior, promotion is inevitable. Continue on this track and you will eventually end up with a budget that is not large enough for what you need to do. Once you are there, look at how much money you are spending on Exchange, IIS, and MS SQL. Then look at IMAP, Apache, and Postgres. Unless your company actually USES the calendar features of Exchange, your users will notice very little difference. Your budget will see an enourmous chunk of money freed up from license fees and the sheer extra hardware required by exchange's poor scaling abilities. I can think of no redeeming qualities for IIS and CERT's recent recommendation to flat out STOP using IE should be profound enough. Postgres is actually the most SQL compliant RDBMS on the market and can easily migrate in all your existing SQL tables (triggers and stored proceedures will require some effort, but very few small to medium sized businesses ever use them). Notice I never made an arugument for switching your desktops to Linux. Good security policies and Antivirus practices can keep the main detractor from MS on the desktop at bay and the transition to Linux with OO is still not smooth enough to be called worry free, but eventually even that line item on your anual budget is going to grow into a "need"
"uncopyrighted software which has no license cost -- like Linux"
C'mon Slashdot crowd, let's all forward this article to sales@sco.com!!!
Actually, the same reason why our cell phones suck here compared to Japan is why it makes no difference whether you use an American cell phone or a PDA. The designed in software is crippled. Why on earth are modern PDA's still using WML or XHTML browsers when there are perfectly capable industry standard browsers that will run inside of them. NTT DoCoMo's phones were my reason for not owning a PDA in Japan because they had a hoard of web sites out there that did everything I needed to do. I could actually even reserve concert or plane tickets right from my phone's i-Mode browser. Try going to a website on the Blackberry....just plain sucks and almost no-one develops for it. Pocket-PC...miles better, but scripting for dynamic page support is unstable and there is a bug with HTML POST requests that M$ refuses to fix. I'm not even going to get started about Palm.
I write public safety software and there will always be a market for a portable method to access information for policemen who primarily use bicycles, motorcycles or horses. But writing stuff for the current mess of devices out there just plain hurts. If the Hand held makers would just sit down and agree that their priority is to allow people access to information and all support at least HTML 3.0 standards with CSS and JScript, there would be an explosion of web services and web portals that would actually bring some value to these things. Hand helds right now are just a few steps above Linux for the desktop. Linux is doing much better for application support, but is still mostly a geek toy. At least the handhelds allow a total moron to play solitaire and keep his address book right out of the box.
Disclaimer: For the super busy, high powered business man, being able to sync your Hand held with email and calendar functions is a service worth it's weight in gold. However, until they offer some value to the other 90% of us, the parent poster is dead right about the cell phones.
"Three. Yes it's sad that anyone died in the line of duty, but three out of 2000+ officers is a pretty low fatality rate."
Not sure where you got your info from, but a quick search at Baltimore County's website shows on around 1800 sworn officers over the course of last year with 833 assaults on officers. Google and Baltimore Co. were uncooperative in letting me know how many of them ended up being fatal. One fatality is way too many and 833 assaults is outright insane. That's about three times a day that blatent disrespect is shown to them....I really don't think having them do constible style patrolling will produce enough results to justify the additional danger to them.
The issue of private vs public IS as black and white as I put it. When you are out in a public street, there is nothing against the law for a cop to look at you, nor is there anything wrong with them walking around and looking at you. Now they are just looking at the street via a camera instead of actually having to stand there. It's simple efficiency. No one is demanding your papers, or cataloging your porno rentals. They're just watching the streets via camera to make sure they will be able to quickly react to a criminal situation. It's been two years since I was last in Baltimore, but that city is way too big to put human eyes in all the problem areas all the time with only 1800 officers. If you can find a way to find the money to replace a $1000 last until it breaks camera, transmitter, and monitor with a $35,000 a year plus equipment and training costs policeman, I too would rather have the reassuring presence of a real officer. However, reality is probably going to lead to the camera being the everybody wins solution to keeping eyes on problem areas.
"whatever happened to the old "constible on patrol"? "
Uhh, they were all gunned down in the 1930's by Tommy Guns. What century and city do you live in? We're not talking about Smalltown, Indiana here. We're talking about a major metropolis only a 30 minute drive from the murder capitol of the country. Do you have even the slightest idea as to how many cops died in Baltimore alone last year trying to protect the public safety?
Then again, maybe you're right. We could do it like China did with Hong Kong and have an officer armed with a shotgun or uzi at every street corner. That will definitely make people feel safe and no one would ever think of the words "police state" as they walked by trying to use the farthest point on the sidewalk away from the guy with the sub-automatic weapon.
Seriously people, we as americans put up cameras at our homes and our stores and arm ourselves and call it our patriotic right to protect ourselves from evil. But the moment the good folks hired by your CITY to protect the PUBLIC from evil decide to do the same thing in PUBLIC areas, it's "1984" and "Police State" and "Where will this invasion of PRIVACY end?". Everyone on slashdot right now go to dictionary.com and look up the words PUBLIC and PRIVATE. Apparently most of you will be shocked to learn that that expecting PRIVACY in a PUBLIC place is about as retarded as Caffiene Free Mountain Dew.
Send me an email when the police demand to install cameras in your home or business, then the concept of a public entity invading a private one will actually be real. This is just the public officials trying to keep your public places safe for you to use at your own free will. Of course, if your intended use is for criminal purposes, then I guess YOUR safety was just decreased....too f*cking bad!
4tech as a network engineer, NTT Docomo as a consultant, JapanLaw as a translator, half a dozen GS-6 through GS-9's who work on the US bases, and I even know one guy banking 120K rewriting bank software from Cobol and Fortran to C++ and JAVA web front ends. Salary has very little to do with what you know, and almost everything to do with who you know and what you can get done for them. Promotion is not simply a matter of being good enough to replace your boss, it is almost always more tied to being more accepted by your bosses peers as a replacement....i.e. if you aren't out networking and getting to know people, they're never going to think of you when the higher paying jobs pop up on the radar. It may also be noted that some of my friends average 16 to 18 hour days and get some of their most valuable sleep on the Yokohama line.
Actually, we are waging a cultural battle that we are never going to win. Most of my friends in Tokyo who are in their 20's and still not married still live with their parents. And they average about 60K in income. Stop and think for a second how many toys you could buy for that kind of cash at the expense of still living with your parents. No place to make out with your girlfriend (I know this is slashdot, but work with me on this...), no problem, just go to a love hotel with the waterfall themed room and only pay $30 for 3 hours of sweet loving. Yes, eventually you'll get married and get a place of your own and be back in the poor house, but by then your tired of having the bleeding edge in fashion and tech and are just happy with something that works. No hurt to the economy as there is a generation of youngsters rolling almost their entire bank into having cell phones that double as credit cards/train tickets/PDAs/TVs/Digital Cameras/Radio telescopes. Just imagine if every young american was buying a new cell phone on an average of every 6 to 12 months....the companies would be forced to innovate to give us something better than we bought 6 months ago or lose us to a competitor who say, already is developing wotking 4G technology.
Yeah...based on the logic presented in that article, he is going to come to the conclusion that Linux was really the result of a gay marriage between Charles Babbage and Alan Turing.
This is almost as funny as that "5 year study" on the Total cost of ownership of Win2K vs Linux that was released in 2001.
3 days?!?!?!?
I just moved back to the states from Japan and I leave my Docomo D505i on 24/7 and only use it as a PDA (alarm, calculator, calendar, contacts, memo). Despite constantly hammering the battery looking forsignal, I only have to recharge it once every 5 days.
While in Japan, I took an older N503i out on a military exercise in Hokkaido for 21 days. I spend an average of 45 minutes a day on the phone as the cell phones were more reliable than the military radios and I only had to recharge it once.
When I picked up a phone here, I finally just gave in and took the free Nokia for signing up with T-Mobile as the closest thing on the market was barely on par with the 2 year old N503i and cost $300.
The reason why cell technology sucks here is because we all spend too much time bitching on slashdot and not a single one of us has written our congressman expressing outrage that NTT Docomo has been barred from operating here. I could give a damn less if it's to protect the US companies from being driven out of business. "Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way!" Motorola and Nokia would like you to beleive they are competing...they're not. They're enjoying the fat lazy American consumer attitude that accepts their fast food class service because it is convenient.
"You can sell sh!t and get thanks...that's what I learned from the Yanks."
Google's results are based on a democratically perceived relavence. In other words, the reason why GrokLaw is #5 doesn't mean they have the 5th largest source of SCO stuff, it means they are the 5th most linked to site from other sites that have the word SCO on them. In otherwords, if that many people felt Groklaw was reliable enough to put links to it from their page, then Google can be fairly sure that their site holds relavence to your search.
So yes, in theory, if a particular site could get every page on the internet to have a hyperlink to it, then it would appear #1 on every search that contained a word that was on that page, even if the page held no gramatical structure or information.
So, no, Groklaw is not the top Anti-Sco site on the net, nor is it the 5th ranked one. It just happens to contain the 5th most relavent source of info on SCO as perceived by other webmasters regardless of whether the content if pro, anti, or just a neutral view.