When MSN China and Yahoo China followed Chinese laws and performed acts deemed unsavory by the American blogosphere (turning over information, censoring results, whatever), both companies were widely attacked. No one ever came to the corporation's defense by saying: oh, there is nothing the companies can do, Chinese journalists and others should have know better by using MSN/Yahoo US!
Which is what's so confusing--though I suspect it's more that the Slashbots simply found it a convenient opportunity to profess their dislike for MSN and Yahoo. Now if China had demanded that they (or Google) filter on their US servers as well, and they capitulated to that, then that would be worthy of condemnation. But you know the saying: "When in Rome . .." Objectively, the only effect of any of these companies refusing to do business in China is that it might to a small degree encourage intrepid users to find ways around the Great Firewall; and even if one postulated that the goodwill so obtained exceeded the loss of business in China, the question remains of whether these companies should get involved in political issues in the first place. (Just look to Washington for what happens when they do.)
Food for thought: Does "do no evil" extend to enforcing your own idea of "good" on everyone else?
As the other reply notes, the English pronunciation "Sulu" is closer to the Japanese suru; I've seen arigatou spelled "aligato" in news articles before as well.
In any case, STIV (the novel) lays out clearly that Sulu is Japanese, when he meets his great^N-grandfather Akira in the past; IIRC, there was supposed to be a similar scene in the movie as well but it got scrapped when they couldn't get the Japanese child they had picked for the role to cooperate. On the other hand, despite having lived in Japan for seven years I have yet to come across Suru/Sulu as a family name--and in the Japanese version he got renamed to Kato, says Wikipedia. Maybe Roddenberry didn't do his homework?
2. On/off toggle in the elevator. Have you had the kid hit 10 buttons? I have. Many times. Have you had some idiot hit a few buttons by accident? I get it every week. Not that I'm in a rush, but come on, think before you hit a button.
Here in Japan, we've already got that. Admittedly I haven't seen the technology used in public elevators--probably because someone would accidentally switch off somebody else's floor, and the next thing you know umbrellas are being drawn--but at my former employer's office in Makuhari, it was in fact possible to turn off a floor button by pressing it for 2-3 seconds. (It's the NTT Makuhari Building, in case anyone works there and wants to try it, and it only works on the central blue elevators that stop at all floors.) I've since changed jobs so I can't check the elevator maker or model, but vague recollection says it was Mitsubishi.
In fact, Windows does run Windows 3.1 apps in a VM type process these days, it's called a WoW (Windows on Windows) VM
So that's what the "wow" in wowexec means . . . and here I always thought it was some overworked coder saying "wow, we actually managed to get this ancient crapola working". You learn something new every day!
Computers are tools. Tools should do exactly what you tell them to do, no more, no less. How would you like it if your hammer suddenly decided your doctor needed more money and hit your head instead of the nail?
Did anyone else catch this little gem (granted, it's not a direct quote so the reporter might be playing fast and loose) down where they're talking about downloads vs. discs?
Studio executives argue that people want to own their content and that DVDs offer the same portability options as downloadable programs or video on demand services.
Okay, Mr. Studio Executive, perhaps now you'll explain to me just why you should be allowed to control how I use something that I own?
(The scary thing is that Joe Sixpack would probably eat up whatever bullshit the studio exec spouted in response . ..)
Instead they should just be holding back on patents, fighting for fair-term copyrights (e.g., 50 years maximum)
If someone is still living off the income from their copyrighted material 50 years (hell, even 5 years) later, they're just a parasite on the rest of our wallets. Copyright is supposed to provide an incentive to create, not a lifetime pension for anyone who happens to create something.
The difference is that when a US exec screws up at this magnitude, reguardless of how much apologizing happens, they will be canned in the very near future. They also will face a very likely suit in court for defrauding investors. In Japan, it seems businessmen apologize for everything, yet very little gets fixed.
You missed the part where the businessmen resign after apologizing. In Japan, it's rare for a company to actually fire an exec--or anyone, for that matter--as that would be impolite; what usually happens is that the person/people responsible, which usually means top execs for something of this magnitude, voluntarily (or sometimes semi-voluntarily, i.e. upon strong suggestion) resign from their job or position as a form of taking responsibility. It's my personal opinion that this concept of "resigning in shame" is a reason why so many problems don't actually get fixed: the person with the most incentive to do something (the person who got blamed for letting it happen) is already gone.
What I've yet to discover, is whether the privitization of Japan Post is a signal that the day of ruling families is over, or whether it's a signal that the government will no longer compete with them.
Actually, it's just a signal that Koizumi finally managed to push his pet project through the system; I doubt it'll have much more meaning than that.
When I first came across the lynxcgi: settings in lynx.cfg, I was amazed such a "feature" even existed. IMHO, if you get screwed over because you had lynxcgi enabled, you deserve what you get.
Okay, I've got it now. Or at least, I've got enough of it to realize that I need to go take some more physics classes to have a decent chance of getting it . . .
Neat, so there really is some weirdness going on. Thanks for the pointer! (I had to laugh at the Wikipedia observation that a theory that violated causality would be "deeply unsatisfactory".)
In the midst of serious sleep deprivation, the following weird analogy for quantum entanglement came to mind. Maybe some of the physics folks here can tell me why it's wrong:
Suppose you take a coin and spin it on a frictionless surface in a vacuum, so that it's perfectly balanced and doesn't wobble. In theory, it will keep on spinning at the same rate forever.
Now suppose you take a second coin, identical in all respects to the first, and start both coins spinning at the same time--but with one of them 90 degrees out of phase compared to the other, so when one is "horizontal" when viewed from above, the other is "vertical".
Finally, suppose you have a way to move the coins without affecting their rotation. Move one of the coins as far away as you like from the other.
Reach out a finger and stop one of the coins. Suppose that at the instant you stopped it, the coin was horizontal. You now know that, at that particular instant, the second coin was vertical--not because the coins somehow "communicated" with each other, but simply because they both followed the same laws of physics up until you interfered.
Granted, I'm oversimplifying tremendously, but is this a semi-reasonable explanation of why quantum entanglement has nothing to do with instantaneous communication, or do I just need to get to sleep?
Joe Haldeman wrote an interesting novel, Buying Time, on just this topic. The premise of the novel is that scientists have indeed found a way to extend life indefinitely, ten years at a time (albeit in the rather crude manner of ripping you apart and putting you back together again)--but the cost of the treatment is your entire net worth, minimum one million pounds, which you're not allowed to give back to yourself afterwards. While the manner of treatment in the novel results in different answers than what may be reached from genetic research, it does address a number of issues, both scientific and societal, about lengthening life and the effects thereof.
Because when I had fiber installed in my apartment a few months ago, the guy had no problem with taping it against the wall/floor junction (radius of curvature... (goes and measures) 3cm), and I still get close to 100Mbps. Perhaps not quite as good as copper, but not that much worse, either.
Yes, for a while Sofmap was pretty much out of the picture, but they were the only chain that couldn't sell used games (as they were the ones on the receiving end of the lawsuit). I can't recall any other stores that followed suit. Lately there's been a bit of a shift from games to anime/manga in Akihabara, but Trader and Liberty, at least, are still going as strong as ever, and there's a new used book+game store (Furuhon Ichiba) that popped up a few months ago with a decent selection as well.
One court case later, SoftMap loses against the publishers and "No Resale" becomes enforceable in Japan.
For about one year, in Osaka only (it's "Sofmap" BTW). Then the Osaka high court overturned the lower court's ruling. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, the lower court ruled against the publishers, and the high court upheld that ruling. Finally, in 2002, the Supreme Court upheld both high court rulings (Japanese link), reasoning that the doctrine of first sale overrules any distribution rights. So those "no resale" stickers are utterly meaningless now, and nobody pays any attention to them.
If you're paying me to specifically create/modify a piece of software for you, it makes sense that I need to charge you for updates and bug-fixes to that custom piece of software because somebody has to pay me for my time. (emphasis added)
Updates I can accept, but why should I give you more money for making errors? If you can't write it correctly the first time, you should pay the cost of fixing the bugs. If you build me a table and it falls over the first time I try putting something on it, are you going to charge me again to fix the table?
I've got a finance spreadsheet with about a dozen graphs, each with 30-60 points. Excel can recalculate them all almost instantly (< 1 second). OOo takes about 20 seconds. That's 20 seconds every time I hit Enter. Argh.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is what's so confusing--though I suspect it's more that the Slashbots simply found it a convenient opportunity to profess their dislike for MSN and Yahoo. Now if China had demanded that they (or Google) filter on their US servers as well, and they capitulated to that, then that would be worthy of condemnation. But you know the saying: "When in Rome . . ." Objectively, the only effect of any of these companies refusing to do business in China is that it might to a small degree encourage intrepid users to find ways around the Great Firewall; and even if one postulated that the goodwill so obtained exceeded the loss of business in China, the question remains of whether these companies should get involved in political issues in the first place. (Just look to Washington for what happens when they do.)
Food for thought: Does "do no evil" extend to enforcing your own idea of "good" on everyone else?
In any case, STIV (the novel) lays out clearly that Sulu is Japanese, when he meets his great^N-grandfather Akira in the past; IIRC, there was supposed to be a similar scene in the movie as well but it got scrapped when they couldn't get the Japanese child they had picked for the role to cooperate. On the other hand, despite having lived in Japan for seven years I have yet to come across Suru/Sulu as a family name--and in the Japanese version he got renamed to Kato, says Wikipedia. Maybe Roddenberry didn't do his homework?
Here in Japan, we've already got that. Admittedly I haven't seen the technology used in public elevators--probably because someone would accidentally switch off somebody else's floor, and the next thing you know umbrellas are being drawn--but at my former employer's office in Makuhari, it was in fact possible to turn off a floor button by pressing it for 2-3 seconds. (It's the NTT Makuhari Building, in case anyone works there and wants to try it, and it only works on the central blue elevators that stop at all floors.) I've since changed jobs so I can't check the elevator maker or model, but vague recollection says it was Mitsubishi.
So people can find them amid the flood of dupe reports.
So that's what the "wow" in wowexec means . . . and here I always thought it was some overworked coder saying "wow, we actually managed to get this ancient crapola working". You learn something new every day!
Computers are tools. Tools should do exactly what you tell them to do, no more, no less. How would you like it if your hammer suddenly decided your doctor needed more money and hit your head instead of the nail?
Studio executives argue that people want to own their content and that DVDs offer the same portability options as downloadable programs or video on demand services.
Okay, Mr. Studio Executive, perhaps now you'll explain to me just why you should be allowed to control how I use something that I own?
(The scary thing is that Joe Sixpack would probably eat up whatever bullshit the studio exec spouted in response . . .)
I knew space flight was dangerous, but . . . wow.
(Somebody's gotta take the karma hit for this, might as well be me.)
If someone is still living off the income from their copyrighted material 50 years (hell, even 5 years) later, they're just a parasite on the rest of our wallets. Copyright is supposed to provide an incentive to create, not a lifetime pension for anyone who happens to create something.
The funny thing, of course, is that at the moment this very /. article is at the top of the search results . . .
And I can think of 30,000 or so people who might agree with it, if they could. Your point?
You missed the part where the businessmen resign after apologizing. In Japan, it's rare for a company to actually fire an exec--or anyone, for that matter--as that would be impolite; what usually happens is that the person/people responsible, which usually means top execs for something of this magnitude, voluntarily (or sometimes semi-voluntarily, i.e. upon strong suggestion) resign from their job or position as a form of taking responsibility. It's my personal opinion that this concept of "resigning in shame" is a reason why so many problems don't actually get fixed: the person with the most incentive to do something (the person who got blamed for letting it happen) is already gone.
What I've yet to discover, is whether the privitization of Japan Post is a signal that the day of ruling families is over, or whether it's a signal that the government will no longer compete with them.
Actually, it's just a signal that Koizumi finally managed to push his pet project through the system; I doubt it'll have much more meaning than that.
That's nice, but what is it in Libraries of Congress per microfortnight?
When I first came across the lynxcgi: settings in lynx.cfg, I was amazed such a "feature" even existed. IMHO, if you get screwed over because you had lynxcgi enabled, you deserve what you get.
Okay, I've got it now. Or at least, I've got enough of it to realize that I need to go take some more physics classes to have a decent chance of getting it . . .
I guess I'll try and get to sleep now . . .
Suppose you take a coin and spin it on a frictionless surface in a vacuum, so that it's perfectly balanced and doesn't wobble. In theory, it will keep on spinning at the same rate forever.
Now suppose you take a second coin, identical in all respects to the first, and start both coins spinning at the same time--but with one of them 90 degrees out of phase compared to the other, so when one is "horizontal" when viewed from above, the other is "vertical".
Finally, suppose you have a way to move the coins without affecting their rotation. Move one of the coins as far away as you like from the other.
Reach out a finger and stop one of the coins. Suppose that at the instant you stopped it, the coin was horizontal. You now know that, at that particular instant, the second coin was vertical--not because the coins somehow "communicated" with each other, but simply because they both followed the same laws of physics up until you interfered.
Granted, I'm oversimplifying tremendously, but is this a semi-reasonable explanation of why quantum entanglement has nothing to do with instantaneous communication, or do I just need to get to sleep?
Joe Haldeman wrote an interesting novel, Buying Time , on just this topic. The premise of the novel is that scientists have indeed found a way to extend life indefinitely, ten years at a time (albeit in the rather crude manner of ripping you apart and putting you back together again)--but the cost of the treatment is your entire net worth, minimum one million pounds, which you're not allowed to give back to yourself afterwards. While the manner of treatment in the novel results in different answers than what may be reached from genetic research, it does address a number of issues, both scientific and societal, about lengthening life and the effects thereof.
Because when I had fiber installed in my apartment a few months ago, the guy had no problem with taping it against the wall/floor junction (radius of curvature... (goes and measures) 3cm), and I still get close to 100Mbps. Perhaps not quite as good as copper, but not that much worse, either.
Yes, for a while Sofmap was pretty much out of the picture, but they were the only chain that couldn't sell used games (as they were the ones on the receiving end of the lawsuit). I can't recall any other stores that followed suit. Lately there's been a bit of a shift from games to anime/manga in Akihabara, but Trader and Liberty, at least, are still going as strong as ever, and there's a new used book+game store (Furuhon Ichiba) that popped up a few months ago with a decent selection as well.
For about one year, in Osaka only (it's "Sofmap" BTW). Then the Osaka high court overturned the lower court's ruling. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, the lower court ruled against the publishers, and the high court upheld that ruling. Finally, in 2002, the Supreme Court upheld both high court rulings (Japanese link), reasoning that the doctrine of first sale overrules any distribution rights. So those "no resale" stickers are utterly meaningless now, and nobody pays any attention to them.
Try this patch. It's worked fine for me for the last few years.
Updates I can accept, but why should I give you more money for making errors? If you can't write it correctly the first time, you should pay the cost of fixing the bugs. If you build me a table and it falls over the first time I try putting something on it, are you going to charge me again to fix the table?
I've got a finance spreadsheet with about a dozen graphs, each with 30-60 points. Excel can recalculate them all almost instantly (< 1 second). OOo takes about 20 seconds. That's 20 seconds every time I hit Enter. Argh.
My God! Won't somebody think of the chairs?!