I thought it was meant to show that the Golgafrinchans (sp?) did, in fact, mess up the program when they crashed on prehistoric earth, and Arthur was a last generation product of that bug...
Seriously. I want some of the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot that the GPP is smoking.
On a slightly related note, does it drive anyone else crazy when someone says "theory" when they mean (at best) hypothesis (a falsifiable idea based on the data) or (at worst) conjecture (when they mean "some hair-brained idea without significant support but *maybe* fits my notion of life, the universe, and everything)?
What GPP was saying is NOT a theory. Relativity is a theory. Evolution (well, through mutation and natural selection) is a theory. E=IR is a theory. A theory is well supported by facts, either not yet disproved by facts (evolution, relativity), or, though disproved, accurate enough to work well enough in our frame of reference (Newton's laws of gravity).
I understand the colloquial meaning of "theory" perfectly well, and I reject it, especially in a place like Slashdot. This is "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." The language should reflect that. (NB: this rant is targeted at GPP, while voicing my agreement with the parent post)
Hrmm... Guess I did forget to put the word "average" in my OP. However, considering the density is variable, would the density at a distance of the Earth's current orbit then even be enough to be considered part of the "sun"? Based on the calculations, it would then be an (probably) insignificant fraction of the 0.25g/m^3 that I already calculated.
How do they determine the boundary between the sun's "surface" and the space around it?
It will also expand, driven by helium fusion so that its outer layers reach past the earth's current orbit.
Out of shear boredom, I decided to do some calculations, using the following (someone please fix my math, if it's wrong):
Avg. distance from Earth to the Sun (according to Wikipedia) = 1.496x10^11 meters
Current mass of the sun (according to Google) = 1.9889x10^33 grams
Current Diameter of the sun (according to Google) = 1.4x10^9 meters
Volume of a sphere = (4/3)(r^3)
Density = mass/volume
Based on that:
Volume of the sun = 6.465x10^27 cubic meters
Density of the sun = 3.076x10^5 g/m^3 or about 300 kilograms per cubic meter
However, in the future:
Volume of red giant sun = 7.889x10^33 cubic meters
Density of red giant sun = 0.25 g/m^3 or about 250 milligrams per cubic meter
Can that be right? Can fusion happen at such a low density? For comparison, the average density of the earth's Atmosphere at sea level (of course depending on many factors) is about 1.225 kg/m^3.
Or, more likely, are my numbers off? Can someone check my math?
Regardless, the sizes and such involved are difficult to imagine, aren't they? A sphere with a current radius of about 0.005 AU will expand to a sphere with a radius of 1 AU? Huge. Mind boggling. My head asplode.
Morocco tried to block YouTube about a year and a half ago, because there were videos either making fun of the King or criticizing him.
The block didn't last long because so many people were (figuratively) up in arms about it. Given the amount of "non-offensive" material (i.e. in this case, material not criticizing the king), the government realized their own stupidity and realized it would be better to have a placated populous than risk unrest over such a small thing.
Are there parallels here? Possibly not, because I guess the blocks are for different reasons. However, it's not like a large amount of YouTube is about the comic or other representations of Mohammed, so... It will be interesting to see if the people cry out and how the government responds...
And, particularly now, if we pull troops home, the only place we will be attacked is at home (which is exactly what happened, see above, and note other attempts in the 90's to attack structures in the USA). I prefer to keep the enemies fighting on their own turf, blowing up their stuff, and not on ours.
Interesting... The attackers themselves seemed to indicate that what they wanted was the US out of the Middle East. Removing all US forces from the Middle East would satisfy that.
So, why would they feel the need to attack? Because they hate us for our freedoms? In that case, it's a good thing the current US government is taking that away a bit at a time. Combine the removal of freedoms with the removal of US troops from the Middle East, and they don't seem to have any reason to come and fight us on our turf, do they?
*sigh*
My less facetious point is, if all American soldiers came home (or, to be fair, had the option to settle as immigrants under proper visas in the countries they have so far lived their lives and raised their families in, in some cases), why would anyone want to attack? The US is far away. It would be better defended. And, it wouldn't be mucking about as the aggressors in foreign wars...
I just thought you might like to know that, while they are all in Asia and are very close to each other, Japan, Korea, and China are actually different countries with different kinds of culture, laws, and government.
Based on this, I can't help but wonder what a Korean horror movie (The Host) and a Japanese horror movie (Godzilla) have to do with the Chinese government banning horror movies...
What makes this a coincidence?
It just seems like saying, "Oh? You are from the United States? Coincidentally, there's a special about Costa Rican rain forests on TV right now."
will America's potential demise into a police state goof up the rest of the world as well?
Almost certainly. But don't let that stop you if you want to leave. No place is perfect, so you might as well go somewhere where you can have fun and not be as angered by the hypocrisy of the politicians. For example, right now, I'm living in Thailand. Freedom of speech is pretty abridged here. The police are corrupt. I'm sure there are a lot of other stupid laws I don't know about. However, at least they are up front about it. At least they aren't claiming to be the beacons of freedom while stripping those freedoms away. Also, the food is good, the women are pretty, the cost of living is cheap, and the weather is warm. It is far from being a perfect place, but it's comfortable enough, and if I stop liking it, I'll just move on.
Don't let what might happen in the future stop you from doing what you want to be doing today. Carpe diem and all that.
It's easy to be deceived if you are ignorant, arrogant, complacent, and passive. Those of us who saw the US moving down this path right from the start (using 2007.09.11 as the start, because that seems to be when the massive powergrab started, though the symptoms where there long before) were derided as paranoid, "tin-foil hatters". We were told, "This is America. Stuff like that can never happen here." We were told to "Calm down. It will never get that bad."
You know what? The US Constitution IS just a goddamn piece of paper. You know why? Because it is a contract from the people to the Government telling the government exactly what it can and cannot do. It's up to the people to enforce that, and when they don't, then it stops having any value greater than the paper it is written on. Your actions, or lack there-of, speak for you, and what they are saying is you don't care that this is happening.
You know what the US reminds me of? In the old cartoons, when a character ran off the cliff, he didn't start falling until he looked down and noticed that it was too late. That's where America seems to be. I hope I'm wrong, but I honestly don't see enough people caring to actually set things right.
They really are everywhere in Japan. To the extent that, when I saw the summary say "shuttering between 50 and 60 arcades in Japan" my thought was, "Oh no, how will the other thousands and thousands of them survive?"
I wish I could come up with a real number of arcades open in Japan, but my google-fu is weak today. However, given my experiences there, 50-60 does not sound like a big number of closings...
So, by leaving and the wishing to re-enter the country, your constitutional rights are suspended? What if you go somewhere like a US Embassy (which is technically considered US soil and under US jurisdiction) in another country and get let in there? Does that re-instate your constitutional rights?
Under what jurisdiction are these detention centers? I assume that, since you can be held without trial, access to an attorney, etc. without even having been accused of a crime (because if you are accused then they can just let you in and arrest you on the spot), the detention center must be somewhere outside of US jurisdiction in order for them to be able to strip you of rights that the Constitution and various laws and court cases forbid them to strip from you...
Something doesn't smell right about all of that.
The way I see it, there should be 2 choices: 1.) you are accused of committing a crime, they let you in, you are arrested, and then you get your day in court, or 2.) you are not accused of a crime so they let you and in and you are free to go. There really shouldn't be any middle ground there, if you are US citizen returning to the country.
As far as I understand, they cannot arrest you, because you haven't committed a crime, but they can refuse you entry into the country.
Just out of curiosity, can they refuse you entry if you are US citizen? Considering it is your home country, there isn't exactly another home country to send you back to, is there?
If they CAN refuse you entry, what happens if the country they send you back to denies you re-entry? Do you just spend the rest of your life hopping back and forth on planes until someone gives in?
I honestly, don't see how they could deny entry to a US citizen, for any reason. Can someone please clarify?
Is that why there are Doctors out there in the world (I noticed this a lot in Japan, but have also seen it in Morocco, the UK, and the US) who will prescribe antibiotics for a cold?
You really don't need to study all of those years and get and MD behind your name to know that this is wrong.
The "publish or perish" mentality is what pushed me away from research science as I was getting my BS (Marine Biology), and I bet it's the same mentality that causes a lot of these problems (plagiarizing, especially from the work of grad students and undergrads, occasionally, using false data, rejecting data that doesn't fit, etc). Couple that with a desire to become famous, and there you have it.
The problem doesn't lie in the scientific method or in replication, and peer review wouldn't be a problem if people were motivated to do science for science's sake rather than greed. People are they problem. They are not using those processes, at least, not correctly. I try to teach these things in my science classes, but I worry that by trying to make good scientists (biologists in my case), I'm setting my students up to not be able to compete in the real scientific world.:(
Why does the summary say "bricking the machine"? Does the machine become a doorstop that cannot be fixed? Can you not (and this might even be more complicated than necessary, but as a rather inexperienced Windows user, this came to mind first) use a Linux Live CD to boot and edit the necessary files? I DNRTFA, but if it is just an errant backslash, it should be a piece of cake to fix.
Mod the parent up. This is exactly what I wanted to say. Archive.org's Netlabel section is a great place to find new music for free from artists just giving it away (or at least giving some away to try to convince you to buy their other stuff). Also, I'd like to throw in LegalTorrents.com, where you can download archives of Netlabel stuff and get a lot of it at once. I recommend Observatory Online, One, and Kikapu, if you are into more melodic electronica.
As I mentioned in my original post, many Mac greybeards are comfortable with just going to the windows in the background (and in the Classic Mac OS days using WindowShade to quickly get the contents of the front most window out of the way without "minimizing" it to a location like the Windows Taskbar or the OS X Dock). That is the traditional Mac OS UI paradigm.
I'm not saying it is better or worse than the Windows MDI "most users have the the applications maximized" kind of paradigm. In Windows and the way people use it, the taskbar makes a lot of sense. The Mac way is just different, and here it really comes down to what the user is used to, IMHO.
Keep in mind that in the early days of OS X, it seems like no one was quite sure what the Dock wanted to be. Was it meant to be like the task bar? Just a program launcher with goodies? Apple Menu replacement? The dock always seemed a bit incomplete and schizophrenic to me. However, since I was comfortable with the old Mac OS way of task switching, it didn't bother me much. When Exposé came out, however, I'd wondered how I'd ever lived without such an efficient way of switching tasks.
Anyway, I don't think the Dock ever was meant to really handle task switching, though this wasn't really apparent until Exposé. I think it was always just a launcher (with application status goodies), but it took getting a really excellent task switcher in there to make that clear. Of course, hindsight is 20-20, and I could be dead wrong.
The Dock is a crappy task switcher, and the Finder is still broken in most of the same ways it has been broken since, oh, 1984.
You are doing it wrong. The dock isn't meant to be a task switcher. It is a launcher/shortcut area. If you want an application switcher, you have a few options: exposé and cmd-tab to name two. If you want a task switcher, you really can't beat exposé, though most Mac greybeards are probably comfortable with having a portion of the window from their other task visible behind the current front window (which really only works if you are only doing 2 or 3 things at one time).
According to the article (with which I agree), the only real reasons the finder seems to be broken is because Apple is making it a crappy combination of a browser (or explorer, if you are more comfortable with that term) and a spatial system (like the old finder) instead of clearly separating these things and letting the user to decide what they want to do. The new global view options mung things up even more as far as an intuitive UI goes, IMHO. I guess I can understand the gripes about the Finder, but I really don't use it that much. I prefer using it as a browser in column view, and with that I rarely have to have more than two finder windows open to do any given task. However, my organizational style is probably quite different from others.
That said, I haven't used Leopard yet, but there are a few things that I'm really not looking forward to. The Dock doesn't seem like too much of a nightmare if it is pinned to the sides (stacks default to grid view, I'm told). I'm a "pin it to the left, keep it small, and keep it hidden" dock user. The new folder icons and their previews on the dock look like they will drive me crazy, but it shouldn't be hard to change that (hopefully).
Anyway, I don't think the dock is really meant to be a task switcher. Just a launcher that can also give some basic application status information.
Korveck: I would not be so certain about this news until multiple news agencies confirm this.
Fair enough. But I remain hopeful. As horrible as the situation is, the Burmese are doing it right. IMHO, it is up the citizens of a country to stand up to their oppressors and take their freedom back, by force if necessary. I would hope that most US Citizens would agree.:)
Burmese troops are starting to mutiny. In parts of Rangoon, some soldiers have turned against the others to protect the protesters. In Mandalay, some soldiers are refusing to fight. From my link:
The organisation Helfen ohne Grenzen (Help without Frontiers) is reporting that "Soldiers from the 66th LID (Light Infantry Divison) have turned their weapons against other government troops and possibly police in North Okkalappa township in Rangoon and are defending the protesters. At present unsure how many soldiers involved."
Soldiers in Mandalay, where unrest has spread to as we reported this morning, are also reported to have refused orders to act against protesters.
Some reports claim that many soldiers remained in their barracks. More recent reports now maintain that soldiers from the 99th LID now being sent there to confront them.
Good on those soldiers for doing the right thing. Also, the article mentions that most phone lines into and out of the country have been cut, the mobile network has been shut down, and so had the national ISP. The government is trying to control the flow of information. HAM radio operators to the rescue?
I doubt I am alone in hoping for a revolution that reinstates the proper, democratically elected government in Burma.
In my experience, it does not even cross the minds of a HUGE majority of Japanese people to rip someone off. They are a very trusting people in a safe, peaceful, low crime country.
In Japan you can see unattended store displays full of expensive products (even including flat screen TVs) out on the street, but it doesn't occur to anyone to take something. You can walk down the street in the middle of the night with the equivalent of thousands of dollars in your pocket in cash and not be worried about someone mugging you. (From personal experience) You can lose your passport in one of the busiest shopping areas of Tokyo (Shibuya), walk into the police station the next day or the day after, and get it back because someone would rather turn it in than steal your identity. Hell, you can lose your wallet with money in it, and the chances are you will get it back with all of the money (though you are expected to reward the finder something like 10%). You can accidentally leave your really nice, expensive camera on the train, and easily get it back later from one of the stations on that line.
So, people don't worry about someone wirelessly stealing their ID data and stuff from their phones because generally people aren't interested in taking advantage of each other. They are interested in living a fun, good life, not in ruining the lives of others.
Yes, there are exceptions. A big one in recent years was the "Ore Ore" scam where young men would call random old people saying "It's me! It's me" and their target would say, "What? Is that you Takeshi?". The scammer, now armed with a name, would reply, "Yeah, it's me, Takeshi. I'm in trouble, grandma. I need you to send me money." And then they would get money. This scam worked because people are naïve and (sadly) old people sometimes not well taken care of by their families.
But, generally speaking, this kind of crime is not a big concern in Japan. I hope it never becomes one, because the low crime rate is one of the things I truly loved while living there.
Is Apple trying to freeze-out Linux, or is Apple trying to fix a potential security hole, which hits Linux as a side-effect.
I would think the obvious answer is that Apple is perhaps trying to break all of the programs out there like Senuti for Mac and Floola for Windows, programs which allow users to copy music OFF their iPods. Given those programs, the iPod becomes a great sneakernet way of sharing lots of music very quickly with friends. I imagine they want this to stop.
Cutting off Linux users is just a side effect of this.
I use my judgment to filter my water. It works pretty good. And my immune system takes care of anything that gets through.
That's good and all, but have fun dying of thirst or disease while I pull safe water from a cesspool in an emergency situation. Judgement + lifesaving equipment can make you live a LOT longer in adverse conditions than on either one alone.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it was meant to show that the Golgafrinchans (sp?) did, in fact, mess up the program when they crashed on prehistoric earth, and Arthur was a last generation product of that bug...
On a slightly related note, does it drive anyone else crazy when someone says "theory" when they mean (at best) hypothesis (a falsifiable idea based on the data) or (at worst) conjecture (when they mean "some hair-brained idea without significant support but *maybe* fits my notion of life, the universe, and everything)?
What GPP was saying is NOT a theory. Relativity is a theory. Evolution (well, through mutation and natural selection) is a theory. E=IR is a theory. A theory is well supported by facts, either not yet disproved by facts (evolution, relativity), or, though disproved, accurate enough to work well enough in our frame of reference (Newton's laws of gravity).
I understand the colloquial meaning of "theory" perfectly well, and I reject it, especially in a place like Slashdot. This is "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." The language should reflect that. (NB: this rant is targeted at GPP, while voicing my agreement with the parent post)
How do they determine the boundary between the sun's "surface" and the space around it?
Oops... Throw a "pi" up there into the Volume equation.
Avg. distance from Earth to the Sun (according to Wikipedia) = 1.496x10^11 meters
Current mass of the sun (according to Google) = 1.9889x10^33 grams
Current Diameter of the sun (according to Google) = 1.4x10^9 meters
Volume of a sphere = (4/3)(r^3)
Density = mass/volume
Based on that:
Volume of the sun = 6.465x10^27 cubic meters
Density of the sun = 3.076x10^5 g/m^3 or about 300 kilograms per cubic meter
However, in the future:
Volume of red giant sun = 7.889x10^33 cubic meters
Density of red giant sun = 0.25 g/m^3 or about 250 milligrams per cubic meter
Can that be right? Can fusion happen at such a low density? For comparison, the average density of the earth's Atmosphere at sea level (of course depending on many factors) is about 1.225 kg/m^3.
Or, more likely, are my numbers off? Can someone check my math?
Regardless, the sizes and such involved are difficult to imagine, aren't they? A sphere with a current radius of about 0.005 AU will expand to a sphere with a radius of 1 AU? Huge. Mind boggling. My head asplode.
The block didn't last long because so many people were (figuratively) up in arms about it. Given the amount of "non-offensive" material (i.e. in this case, material not criticizing the king), the government realized their own stupidity and realized it would be better to have a placated populous than risk unrest over such a small thing.
Are there parallels here? Possibly not, because I guess the blocks are for different reasons. However, it's not like a large amount of YouTube is about the comic or other representations of Mohammed, so... It will be interesting to see if the people cry out and how the government responds...
So, why would they feel the need to attack? Because they hate us for our freedoms? In that case, it's a good thing the current US government is taking that away a bit at a time. Combine the removal of freedoms with the removal of US troops from the Middle East, and they don't seem to have any reason to come and fight us on our turf, do they?
*sigh*
My less facetious point is, if all American soldiers came home (or, to be fair, had the option to settle as immigrants under proper visas in the countries they have so far lived their lives and raised their families in, in some cases), why would anyone want to attack? The US is far away. It would be better defended. And, it wouldn't be mucking about as the aggressors in foreign wars...
Based on this, I can't help but wonder what a Korean horror movie (The Host) and a Japanese horror movie (Godzilla) have to do with the Chinese government banning horror movies...
What makes this a coincidence?
It just seems like saying, "Oh? You are from the United States? Coincidentally, there's a special about Costa Rican rain forests on TV right now."
It's easy to be deceived if you are ignorant, arrogant, complacent, and passive. Those of us who saw the US moving down this path right from the start (using 2007.09.11 as the start, because that seems to be when the massive powergrab started, though the symptoms where there long before) were derided as paranoid, "tin-foil hatters". We were told, "This is America. Stuff like that can never happen here." We were told to "Calm down. It will never get that bad."
You know what? The US Constitution IS just a goddamn piece of paper. You know why? Because it is a contract from the people to the Government telling the government exactly what it can and cannot do. It's up to the people to enforce that, and when they don't, then it stops having any value greater than the paper it is written on. Your actions, or lack there-of, speak for you, and what they are saying is you don't care that this is happening.
You know what the US reminds me of? In the old cartoons, when a character ran off the cliff, he didn't start falling until he looked down and noticed that it was too late. That's where America seems to be. I hope I'm wrong, but I honestly don't see enough people caring to actually set things right.
I'm glad I left.
/cue the "good riddance" comments
I wish I could come up with a real number of arcades open in Japan, but my google-fu is weak today. However, given my experiences there, 50-60 does not sound like a big number of closings...
Under what jurisdiction are these detention centers? I assume that, since you can be held without trial, access to an attorney, etc. without even having been accused of a crime (because if you are accused then they can just let you in and arrest you on the spot), the detention center must be somewhere outside of US jurisdiction in order for them to be able to strip you of rights that the Constitution and various laws and court cases forbid them to strip from you...
Something doesn't smell right about all of that.
The way I see it, there should be 2 choices: 1.) you are accused of committing a crime, they let you in, you are arrested, and then you get your day in court, or 2.) you are not accused of a crime so they let you and in and you are free to go. There really shouldn't be any middle ground there, if you are US citizen returning to the country.
If they CAN refuse you entry, what happens if the country they send you back to denies you re-entry? Do you just spend the rest of your life hopping back and forth on planes until someone gives in?
I honestly, don't see how they could deny entry to a US citizen, for any reason. Can someone please clarify?
You really don't need to study all of those years and get and MD behind your name to know that this is wrong.
The problem doesn't lie in the scientific method or in replication, and peer review wouldn't be a problem if people were motivated to do science for science's sake rather than greed. People are they problem. They are not using those processes, at least, not correctly. I try to teach these things in my science classes, but I worry that by trying to make good scientists (biologists in my case), I'm setting my students up to not be able to compete in the real scientific world. :(
Hardly "bricking" IMHO.
Mod the parent up. This is exactly what I wanted to say. Archive.org's Netlabel section is a great place to find new music for free from artists just giving it away (or at least giving some away to try to convince you to buy their other stuff). Also, I'd like to throw in LegalTorrents.com, where you can download archives of Netlabel stuff and get a lot of it at once. I recommend Observatory Online, One, and Kikapu, if you are into more melodic electronica.
I'm not saying it is better or worse than the Windows MDI "most users have the the applications maximized" kind of paradigm. In Windows and the way people use it, the taskbar makes a lot of sense. The Mac way is just different, and here it really comes down to what the user is used to, IMHO.
Keep in mind that in the early days of OS X, it seems like no one was quite sure what the Dock wanted to be. Was it meant to be like the task bar? Just a program launcher with goodies? Apple Menu replacement? The dock always seemed a bit incomplete and schizophrenic to me. However, since I was comfortable with the old Mac OS way of task switching, it didn't bother me much. When Exposé came out, however, I'd wondered how I'd ever lived without such an efficient way of switching tasks.
Anyway, I don't think the Dock ever was meant to really handle task switching, though this wasn't really apparent until Exposé. I think it was always just a launcher (with application status goodies), but it took getting a really excellent task switcher in there to make that clear. Of course, hindsight is 20-20, and I could be dead wrong.
According to the article (with which I agree), the only real reasons the finder seems to be broken is because Apple is making it a crappy combination of a browser (or explorer, if you are more comfortable with that term) and a spatial system (like the old finder) instead of clearly separating these things and letting the user to decide what they want to do. The new global view options mung things up even more as far as an intuitive UI goes, IMHO. I guess I can understand the gripes about the Finder, but I really don't use it that much. I prefer using it as a browser in column view, and with that I rarely have to have more than two finder windows open to do any given task. However, my organizational style is probably quite different from others.
That said, I haven't used Leopard yet, but there are a few things that I'm really not looking forward to. The Dock doesn't seem like too much of a nightmare if it is pinned to the sides (stacks default to grid view, I'm told). I'm a "pin it to the left, keep it small, and keep it hidden" dock user. The new folder icons and their previews on the dock look like they will drive me crazy, but it shouldn't be hard to change that (hopefully).
Anyway, I don't think the dock is really meant to be a task switcher. Just a launcher that can also give some basic application status information.
Fair enough. But I remain hopeful. As horrible as the situation is, the Burmese are doing it right. IMHO, it is up the citizens of a country to stand up to their oppressors and take their freedom back, by force if necessary. I would hope that most US Citizens would agree. :)
I doubt I am alone in hoping for a revolution that reinstates the proper, democratically elected government in Burma.
In Japan you can see unattended store displays full of expensive products (even including flat screen TVs) out on the street, but it doesn't occur to anyone to take something. You can walk down the street in the middle of the night with the equivalent of thousands of dollars in your pocket in cash and not be worried about someone mugging you. (From personal experience) You can lose your passport in one of the busiest shopping areas of Tokyo (Shibuya), walk into the police station the next day or the day after, and get it back because someone would rather turn it in than steal your identity. Hell, you can lose your wallet with money in it, and the chances are you will get it back with all of the money (though you are expected to reward the finder something like 10%). You can accidentally leave your really nice, expensive camera on the train, and easily get it back later from one of the stations on that line.
So, people don't worry about someone wirelessly stealing their ID data and stuff from their phones because generally people aren't interested in taking advantage of each other. They are interested in living a fun, good life, not in ruining the lives of others.
Yes, there are exceptions. A big one in recent years was the "Ore Ore" scam where young men would call random old people saying "It's me! It's me" and their target would say, "What? Is that you Takeshi?". The scammer, now armed with a name, would reply, "Yeah, it's me, Takeshi. I'm in trouble, grandma. I need you to send me money." And then they would get money. This scam worked because people are naïve and (sadly) old people sometimes not well taken care of by their families.
But, generally speaking, this kind of crime is not a big concern in Japan. I hope it never becomes one, because the low crime rate is one of the things I truly loved while living there.
Cutting off Linux users is just a side effect of this.