A lot of the posts here express worry about the government using this information. This is probably typical American distrust of the government, a point of view that is revindicated every few months. What Americans should really be worrying about is this information in the hands of the private sector, where corporate loopholes and further lobbying by the telecommunications industry will certainly allow this information to be distributed even farther.
In the US, the people are supposed to control the government. If we don't like someone, we can vote them out of office. A corporation, however, exists as long as it is profitable--sometimes even longer. Imagine the profit to be gained first from selling information about our telephone communcations, then from compiling, classifying, and organizing that information in ways that allow you to track individual customers' behavior.
Private corporations have no responsibility to the public apart from the regulations imposed on them by the government. This fact underscores the vacuousness of arguments stating that if you want change in how corporations work, you need to do that inside a corporation. All the talk about ``corporate citizenship'' and ``corporate responsiblity'' disguises the fact that a corporation is an amoral entity; it will do whatever is necessary to make a profit.
Telephone communications corporations stand to profit from the sale of personal and private information, other corporations such as telemarketers and perhaps new industries will profit from its compilation, classification, organization, and distribution. There is now little to stop a telephone company from creating an affiliate for exactly this purpose.
The government is supposed to protect us from corporate misconduct, but our federal government is being run by people who owe their political existence to corporate America. The people still have the ability to empower themselves, but it takes so much time to make your voice heard through all the layers of government between us and them that many people's outrage will just turn into passive dissatisfaction. This growing sense of weakness in the face of the overpowering force of special (corporate) interests is the root cause of voter apathy in the US. We know there are problems, but we feel powerless to change anything.
But it's true, many countries do have a separate dialing prefix/area code for the various cell phone providers. However, in countries where even local phone calls are charged by the minute and the caller pays the charges on calls to cell phones, many people would love to have the convenience of a local number to dial.
In the United States, however, the burden is placed on the cell phone owner. Your "local" number may allow others to call you free of charge, but you will bear the costs of both incoming and outgoing calls.
Plus, not everyone wants people to know they are using a cell phone. (Although they quickly find out on most networks.)
Having extra digits seems a bit silly to me, though. Uniform number lengths provide a means to standardize data entry and to check for errors. "Our number is zerooneninethreeseven-twotwotwotwotwotwotwotwo"
So how many twos was that? What if we had occasional 12-bit bytes?
The same would apply to Dell laptop such as the Inspiron series with a modular bay and a battery bay in the front. The modular bay can also hold a battery. With a 4-hour recharge cycle, you could maintain a single laptop with only two batteries. On long flights, I get about 10 hours up-time on my Inspiron 8000 with batteries in both slots. Mind you, this is with the energy-saving mode turned on and little DVD-R drive use. I don't know how the batteries would hold up using a wireless card.
Dell claims that the Inspiron 8200 has a battery life of 2-3 hours and a recharge time of one hour with the battery off. That has not been my experience with the 8000 model. Maybe it lives longer under Linux...
The whole proposal, on the other hand, seems to involve quite a bit of work and breakage risk. Plus, things get stolen in hospitals. It seems like a handheld wireless solution might be better (as suggested in other posts).
Hmm. I got a 3-year next-business-day warranty on my Inspiron 8000 and have so far replaced a DVD-ROM drive and aa touchpad with no flak apart from some monkey telling me to uninstall GNU/Linux and run their DOS-based diagnostics from factory installed Windows ME. I don't need a piece of software to tell me I'm having an intermittent problem with their touchpad. And I certainly don't need someone telling me to uninstall my OS to solve a hardware defect.
On a network I administrated, a colleague came up with a wine name scheme. It was a Romance Lingusitics section, so we used French wines for French specialists, Italian wines for Italianists, Spanish wines for Hispanists, and so on. It takes a really long time to run out of wine names---and it is very easy to expand into beers, or liqueurs, or whatever...
Names of cities in particular countries or states also work well---anything that seems limitless and already possesses some sort of hierarchy you can twist to your own ends.
I concur on the Inspiron 8000. I am running Red Hat 7.1 and have been very happy with everything except for the teeth I had to pull to get Dell to support problems on the system. The system is the older type, with the ATI graphics chip---the newer ones have GeForce2Go.
Since my laptop was shipped with Windows ME (the cheapest alternative---Linux, as now, was not available), technical support has twice insisted that I "need to reinstall the operating system that is shipped with the system and then run Dell Diagnostics for verifying the hardware". I left Windows ME on a very small partition, so it isn't that difficult to do this, but it is annoying to have to do this for every little problem. So if you decide to go with a Dell, set some HD space aside for emergencies---I think the diagnostics may run under FreeDOS.
Ditto for the mouse problem. It seems to be application/desktop-specific, though.
So, I had a bad DVD drive. It was replaced with little resistance. The track point wandered, but this was fixed by a BIOS upgrade. The last thing that happened (source of the caveat above) is that the lower-right touchpad button died intermittently---a technician replaced it this week.
Ditto the 3-year support contract suggestion. Good luck.
Precisely. I'm not exactly inclined toward an alarmist reaction at the news of this case's outcome, but it does set a precedent that will be used by the respondents in disability cases to support their non-payment. Not only that, but this will have a ``chilling effect'' on others sho have been cheated by their employers, insurance, or by a government; people who suffer from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome will be much less likely to stand up for what should be a right.
Now we need the employers to show some interest in preventing the conditions that are causing their employees to suffer a permanent disability.
This one should be modded up as well, for the simple reason that if people used search engines more often, they would be able to save themselves asking. But of course/. is more fun and you get people's opinions about their recommendations as well, so don't feel too bad.
I got my information from a search I did months ago for international free speech organizations, but I too used Google.
I would recommend the Chaos Computer Club as a potential recipient for a "Spendchen". They are at
http://www.ccc.de/. Since it is a registered membership organization (e.V.), you can write a donation off on your taxes. You can also subscribe to their magazine ``Datenschleuder''.
First of all, I was referring to the learning process, not the comparative conceptual superiority of one language over another. The point is that for language learners, English is easier to learn at the beginning, but becomes harder. This trend is somewhat contrary to the typical learning pattern of a language like Japanese, which is very hard at the beginning, but gets easier once one learns the system.
Secondly, we do think in words as well as concepts. Cognitive conceptualizations are culturally and linguistically conditioned. A common example used to illustrate this point is the concept of colour. When I refer to something as ``green'', the range of light frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum that this refers to may vary slightly from one individual to another, but the general category remains the same. Translate ``green'' into Japanese, usually ``midori'', and the conceptualization includes frequency ranges that go into what most English speakers would call ``blue''.
These thought patterns suggest the existence of an overall effect on the speakers of a particular language. I, for instance, see that when I write (any of the languages you mentioned), I tend to follow structures that the language facilitates. The German linguist Karl Vossler even suggested that certain grammatical words (partitive forms) in French owe their existence to the bourgeois nature of French society. That takes things a bit to one extreme, but his ideas have merit.
I should have also mentioned that about 10% of all Indians speak English with nativelike proficiency. That would be over 90 million people. There are probably more English speakers in India than the native population of the US.
English has recently become (in the past year or so) the first language in the world to have more second- and foreign-language speakers than actual natives. This will probably produce a lot of simplifications and foreign influences that may later be adopted by natives.
Actually English is more of a de facto standard, like Microsoft Windows. It isn't really all that good for the job, but it gets the job done. English, unlike some other languages, gets harder the closer you come to nativelike proficiency. German is an example of a language that is very hard at first, but gets easier.
But no one needs perfect English to program or to do many jobs (I know this is obvious), but it does limit the efficiency and (upward) mobility of people who work in companies where English is the language used for day-to-day affairs.
I don't think anyone else misinterpreted your original comment. It's pretty clear what you meant. Someone is feeling persecuted (look at his/her other comments in this discussion).
Did you know there are more speakers of English in India than there are in the UK?
Precisely. And even the ones who don't have many more possibilities to be exposed to English. See my comment for my take on this. The Chinese should really concentrate on developing their own market because of the linguistic barriers that hold them back. An really, if you had a potential 1.2 billion-customer (UK: hundred million) market, wouldn't you try to exploit it? The Japanese developed their own markets beofre expanding into the world, and China has much more potential to expand if the game is played fairly and the wealthy countries don't divide the world amongst themselves.
The point is not whether the Chinese speak a colonial language, but rather that they do not speak English, the world lingua franca. Even Spanish or French would give them more advantages than being monolingual Chinese, as far as mobility is concerned. Indians, because of their good English, can travel anywhere to work. The ones who work in Germany, for example, don't even have to learn German because the companies they work for have English as their internal language, or at the very least a large number of co-workers who speak English.
Attacking the person does not invalidate the point. English speakers call this an ``ad hominem'' attack (from Latin `at/toward the person'). For instance, if I wanted to counter-attack, I would say that the AC must be an idiot because he can't manage subject-verb agreement. (Chinese has no agreement of any sort.)
Voltaire couldn't possibly have been paraphrasing Tallentyre for the simple reason that Voltaire died in 1778 and Tallentyre became well-known for collecting and translating his letters from French into English (pub. 1919?). BTW, there seems to be no agreement as to the exact wording of the English or French quotes.
Open emigration, I mean. People leaving the country. An obvious mistake... I switched around the syntax of the sentence beofre posting and didn't catch that.
Like I said in my comment about Microsoft being snubbed by the Chinese government, I think the Chinese have a huge advantage in their largely captive workforce. Whereas Indians constantly emigrate to richer countries (US, Britain, and now Germany), the totalitarian nature of China's policies make it very difficult to leave the country, although many do manage it. India's huge advantage is that about 10% of Indians are native/near-native speakers of English--- not bad for a country with 23 official languages. Unfortunately for China, not only does it have few English speakers, but English (at least spoken English) is especially difficult for Chinese to master.
A problem both countries face is access to computers and the Internet. China and India would produce a lot more software if it were easier for their citizens to gain the programming skills they need to accomplish this goal. If China finally succeeds in absorbing Taiwan, it will have the hardware production it needs to accomplish this. Perhaps this is part of the ``national strategy''.
Since Autonomy's software is based on statistical relevance, the speech-recognition technology doesn't have to understand every single word -- just enough to conceptually grasp what a scene or segment is about. The software begins by comparing phonemes -- slices of sound, like the syllables of a word -- to a huge probability table that predicts the context in which those phonemes may appear, and then doing that again with complete words. This language model takes up a lot of computing space and power, and only recently has it become practical to run the software on anything but a powerful Sun server. "Now we can use a twin-processor Compaq with one gigabyte of memory," Karas says.
What I find interesting is the underlying technology they are supposed to use. Linguists (people who study language, not government translators) have been trying for years to find a way to automatically transcribe audio data for linguistic research, but they haven't had much success. Now they're telling us that a single company is able to do this with any accuracy?
But then again, the article says that they just have to have an idea about what the scene is about, so maybe they are leaving out a lot of information. Maybe they are being over-optimistic about just how searchable their ``index'' is going to be. Now what would motivate a company to exaggerate the abilities of their product?
This is pretty old news, or at least a variation on a fairly tired theme. This was a discussion topic even back before Windows 2000 came out (and probably earlier): China doesn't want to use Microsoft. The code is kept secret, so they don't know whether the US (via Microsoft) is spying on them. And with all of the news about the FBI's ability to log keystrokes, you really can't blame them for being paranoid.
Beijing selected only Chinese companies, including Red Flag (for its Linux OS) and Kingsoft (for its WPS Office OA product).
I think this here is the entire point. China is trying to support its industry. Microsoft seems to be doing fine without their help and the Chinese tech industry needs the boost.
China does see itself as the leader of the Developing World. With this in mind, the government there might also be thinking of trying to access IT markets in its region. India might be in a position to do that if it weren't for the massive brain-drain they are suffering due to open immigration. China, on the other hand, has a trapped workforce which it could potentially exploit to create the products it needs to gain a share in outside markets.
BTW, Noam Chomsky was just paraphrasing Voltaire:
Je ne suis pas d'accord avec ce que vous dites, mais je me battrai pour que vous ayez le droit de le dire.
`I do not agree with what you say, but I will fight for your right to say it.'
Japan is in Region 2 and all of Western Japan has 110-Volt power. Japan also uses NTSC, just like the US. Depending on the TV you use your DVD Player with, you might need one. TVs with SCART ports are expensive here.
My suggestion: Look for a Japanese DVD Player.
NB: BTW Americans do not sue for everything. Our legal system prefers to handle things in court that Europeans like to handle by making new laws. It has to do with a philosophical preference for not restricting everyone's rights because of the actions of a minority.
I believe the ``anti-terrorist'' (Patriot Act) legislation proposal that President Bush is currently supporting will allow more of this kind of activity. Here is an article on the bill from LA Weekly. It's about a month old, but I don't think much
has changed since then.
Eudora and Netscape conveniently let you choose your mail directory,
unlike the Microsoft clients. You can save your mail directory on a
PGP disk (PGPDisk). This worked very well for me for years. You can of
course do the same thing with any Linux client using
volume encryption
(preferably on a single partition -- not root -- as small as possible to avoid losing performance).
But what are you worrying about? They say Linux is invincible...
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of the posts here express worry about the government using this information. This is probably typical American distrust of the government, a point of view that is revindicated every few months. What Americans should really be worrying about is this information in the hands of the private sector, where corporate loopholes and further lobbying by the telecommunications industry will certainly allow this information to be distributed even farther.
In the US, the people are supposed to control the government. If we don't like someone, we can vote them out of office. A corporation, however, exists as long as it is profitable--sometimes even longer. Imagine the profit to be gained first from selling information about our telephone communcations, then from compiling, classifying, and organizing that information in ways that allow you to track individual customers' behavior.
Private corporations have no responsibility to the public apart from the regulations imposed on them by the government. This fact underscores the vacuousness of arguments stating that if you want change in how corporations work, you need to do that inside a corporation. All the talk about ``corporate citizenship'' and ``corporate responsiblity'' disguises the fact that a corporation is an amoral entity; it will do whatever is necessary to make a profit.
Telephone communications corporations stand to profit from the sale of personal and private information, other corporations such as telemarketers and perhaps new industries will profit from its compilation, classification, organization, and distribution. There is now little to stop a telephone company from creating an affiliate for exactly this purpose.
The government is supposed to protect us from corporate misconduct, but our federal government is being run by people who owe their political existence to corporate America. The people still have the ability to empower themselves, but it takes so much time to make your voice heard through all the layers of government between us and them that many people's outrage will just turn into passive dissatisfaction. This growing sense of weakness in the face of the overpowering force of special (corporate) interests is the root cause of voter apathy in the US. We know there are problems, but we feel powerless to change anything.
How many countries have you lived in? ;->
But it's true, many countries do have a separate dialing prefix/area code for the various cell phone providers. However, in countries where even local phone calls are charged by the minute and the caller pays the charges on calls to cell phones, many people would love to have the convenience of a local number to dial.
In the United States, however, the burden is placed on the cell phone owner. Your "local" number may allow others to call you free of charge, but you will bear the costs of both incoming and outgoing calls.
Plus, not everyone wants people to know they are using a cell phone. (Although they quickly find out on most networks.)
Having extra digits seems a bit silly to me, though. Uniform number lengths provide a means to standardize data entry and to check for errors. "Our number is zerooneninethreeseven-twotwotwotwotwotwotwotwo" So how many twos was that? What if we had occasional 12-bit bytes?
The same would apply to Dell laptop such as the Inspiron series with a modular bay
and a battery bay in the front. The modular bay can also hold a battery. With a 4-hour
recharge cycle, you could maintain a single laptop with only two batteries. On long flights,
I get about 10 hours up-time on my Inspiron 8000 with batteries in both slots. Mind you,
this is with the energy-saving mode turned on and little DVD-R drive use. I don't know
how the batteries would hold up using a wireless card.
Dell claims that the Inspiron 8200 has a battery life of 2-3 hours and a recharge time of
one hour with the battery off. That has not been my experience with the 8000 model.
Maybe it lives longer under Linux...
The whole proposal, on the other hand, seems to involve quite a bit of work and breakage
risk. Plus, things get stolen in hospitals. It seems like a handheld wireless solution might
be better (as suggested in other posts).
Hmm. I got a 3-year next-business-day warranty on my Inspiron 8000 and have so far replaced a DVD-ROM drive and aa touchpad with no flak apart from some monkey telling me to uninstall GNU/Linux and run their DOS-based diagnostics from factory installed Windows ME. I don't need a piece of software to tell me I'm having an intermittent problem with their touchpad. And I certainly don't need someone telling me to uninstall my OS to solve a hardware defect.
With Dell, call to get fast results.
Comparative Distro Reviews for the I-8000:
On a network I administrated, a colleague came up with a wine name scheme. It was a Romance Lingusitics section, so we used French wines for French specialists, Italian wines for Italianists, Spanish wines for Hispanists, and so on. It takes a really long time to run out of wine names---and it is very easy to expand into beers, or liqueurs, or whatever...
Yquem, Pinot Grigio, Rioja, Verde (Vinho verde)...
Names of cities in particular countries or states also work well---anything that seems limitless and already possesses some sort of hierarchy you can twist to your own ends.
I concur on the Inspiron 8000. I am running Red Hat 7.1 and have been very happy with everything except for the teeth I had to pull to get Dell to support problems on the system. The system is the older type, with the ATI graphics chip---the newer ones have GeForce2Go.
Since my laptop was shipped with Windows ME (the cheapest alternative---Linux, as now, was not available), technical support has twice insisted that I "need to reinstall the operating system that is shipped with the system and then run Dell Diagnostics for verifying the hardware". I left Windows ME on a very small partition, so it isn't that difficult to do this, but it is annoying to have to do this for every little problem. So if you decide to go with a Dell, set some HD space aside for emergencies---I think the diagnostics may run under FreeDOS.
Ditto for the mouse problem. It seems to be application/desktop-specific, though.
So, I had a bad DVD drive. It was replaced with little resistance. The track point wandered, but this was fixed by a BIOS upgrade. The last thing that happened (source of the caveat above) is that the lower-right touchpad button died intermittently---a technician replaced it this week.
Ditto the 3-year support contract suggestion. Good luck.
I have converted the PDF to plain text. You can see it here. Not pretty, but readable.
Precisely. I'm not exactly inclined toward an alarmist reaction at the news of this case's outcome, but it does set a precedent that will be used by the respondents in disability cases to support their non-payment. Not only that, but this will have a ``chilling effect'' on others sho have been cheated by their employers, insurance, or by a government; people who suffer from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome will be much less likely to stand up for what should be a right.
Now we need the employers to show some interest in preventing the conditions that are causing their employees to suffer a permanent disability.
This one should be modded up as well, for the simple reason that if people used search engines more often, they would be able to save themselves asking. But of course /. is more fun and you get people's opinions about their recommendations as well, so don't feel too bad.
I got my information from a search I did months ago for international free speech organizations, but I too used Google.
The word for today is ``sinecure''.
Of course there is: Electronic Frontier Canada / La Frontière Électronique du Canada (http://www.efc.ca/)! And following great Canadian traditions, the site is bilingual.
Australia has one, too: Electronic Frontiers Australia (http://www.efa.org.au/).
I don't know if either is tax-deductible, but they do have interesting info on legislation in both countries. Cheers.
Stephan,
I would recommend the Chaos Computer Club as a potential recipient for a "Spendchen". They are at http://www.ccc.de/. Since it is a registered membership organization (e.V.), you can write a donation off on your taxes. You can also subscribe to their magazine ``Datenschleuder''.
Mach's gut!
First of all, I was referring to the learning process, not the comparative conceptual superiority of one language over another. The point is that for language learners, English is easier to learn at the beginning, but becomes harder. This trend is somewhat contrary to the typical learning pattern of a language like Japanese, which is very hard at the beginning, but gets easier once one learns the system.
Secondly, we do think in words as well as concepts. Cognitive conceptualizations are culturally and linguistically conditioned. A common example used to illustrate this point is the concept of colour. When I refer to something as ``green'', the range of light frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum that this refers to may vary slightly from one individual to another, but the general category remains the same. Translate ``green'' into Japanese, usually ``midori'', and the conceptualization includes frequency ranges that go into what most English speakers would call ``blue''.
These thought patterns suggest the existence of an overall effect on the speakers of a particular language. I, for instance, see that when I write (any of the languages you mentioned), I tend to follow structures that the language facilitates. The German linguist Karl Vossler even suggested that certain grammatical words (partitive forms) in French owe their existence to the bourgeois nature of French society. That takes things a bit to one extreme, but his ideas have merit.
I should have also mentioned that about 10% of all Indians speak English with nativelike proficiency. That would be over 90 million people. There are probably more English speakers in India than the native population of the US.
English has recently become (in the past year or so) the first language in the world to have more second- and foreign-language speakers than actual natives. This will probably produce a lot of simplifications and foreign influences that may later be adopted by natives.
Actually English is more of a de facto standard, like Microsoft Windows. It isn't really all that good for the job, but it gets the job done. English, unlike some other languages, gets harder the closer you come to nativelike proficiency. German is an example of a language that is very hard at first, but gets easier.
But no one needs perfect English to program or to do many jobs (I know this is obvious), but it does limit the efficiency and (upward) mobility of people who work in companies where English is the language used for day-to-day affairs.
I don't think anyone else misinterpreted your original comment. It's pretty clear what you meant. Someone is feeling persecuted (look at his/her other comments in this discussion).
Did you know there are more speakers of English in India than there are in the UK?
Interesting statistics on language on the Internet
Precisely. And even the ones who don't have many more possibilities to be exposed to English. See my comment for my take on this. The Chinese should really concentrate on developing their own market because of the linguistic barriers that hold them back. An really, if you had a potential 1.2 billion-customer (UK: hundred million) market, wouldn't you try to exploit it? The Japanese developed their own markets beofre expanding into the world, and China has much more potential to expand if the game is played fairly and the wealthy countries don't divide the world amongst themselves.
The point is not whether the Chinese speak a colonial language, but rather that they do not speak English, the world lingua franca. Even Spanish or French would give them more advantages than being monolingual Chinese, as far as mobility is concerned. Indians, because of their good English, can travel anywhere to work. The ones who work in Germany, for example, don't even have to learn German because the companies they work for have English as their internal language, or at the very least a large number of co-workers who speak English.
Attacking the person does not invalidate the point. English speakers call this an ``ad hominem'' attack (from Latin `at/toward the person'). For instance, if I wanted to counter-attack, I would say that the AC must be an idiot because he can't manage subject-verb agreement. (Chinese has no agreement of any sort.)
Voltaire couldn't possibly have been paraphrasing Tallentyre for the simple reason that Voltaire died in 1778 and Tallentyre became well-known for collecting and translating his letters from French into English (pub. 1919?). BTW, there seems to be no agreement as to the exact wording of the English or French quotes.
Open emigration , I mean. People leaving the country. An obvious mistake... I switched around the syntax of the sentence beofre posting and didn't catch that.
Like I said in my comment about Microsoft being snubbed by the Chinese government, I think the Chinese have a huge advantage in their largely captive workforce. Whereas Indians constantly emigrate to richer countries (US, Britain, and now Germany), the totalitarian nature of China's policies make it very difficult to leave the country, although many do manage it. India's huge advantage is that about 10% of Indians are native/near-native speakers of English--- not bad for a country with 23 official languages. Unfortunately for China, not only does it have few English speakers, but English (at least spoken English) is especially difficult for Chinese to master.
A problem both countries face is access to computers and the Internet. China and India would produce a lot more software if it were easier for their citizens to gain the programming skills they need to accomplish this goal. If China finally succeeds in absorbing Taiwan, it will have the hardware production it needs to accomplish this. Perhaps this is part of the ``national strategy''.
What I find interesting is the underlying technology they are supposed to use. Linguists (people who study language, not government translators) have been trying for years to find a way to automatically transcribe audio data for linguistic research, but they haven't had much success. Now they're telling us that a single company is able to do this with any accuracy?
But then again, the article says that they just have to have an idea about what the scene is about, so maybe they are leaving out a lot of information. Maybe they are being over-optimistic about just how searchable their ``index'' is going to be. Now what would motivate a company to exaggerate the abilities of their product?
This is pretty old news, or at least a variation on a fairly tired theme. This was a discussion topic even back before Windows 2000 came out (and probably earlier): China doesn't want to use Microsoft. The code is kept secret, so they don't know whether the US (via Microsoft) is spying on them. And with all of the news about the FBI's ability to log keystrokes, you really can't blame them for being paranoid.
I think this here is the entire point. China is trying to support its industry. Microsoft seems to be doing fine without their help and the Chinese tech industry needs the boost.
China does see itself as the leader of the Developing World. With this in mind, the government there might also be thinking of trying to access IT markets in its region. India might be in a position to do that if it weren't for the massive brain-drain they are suffering due to open immigration. China, on the other hand, has a trapped workforce which it could potentially exploit to create the products it needs to gain a share in outside markets.
BTW, Noam Chomsky was just paraphrasing Voltaire:
Je ne suis pas d'accord avec ce que vous dites, mais je me battrai pour que vous ayez le droit de le dire.
`I do not agree with what you say, but I will fight for your right to say it.'
Japan is in Region 2 and all of Western Japan has 110-Volt power. Japan also uses NTSC, just like the US. Depending on the TV you use your DVD Player with, you might need one. TVs with SCART ports are expensive here.
My suggestion: Look for a Japanese DVD Player.
NB: BTW Americans do not sue for everything. Our legal system prefers to handle things in court that Europeans like to handle by making new laws. It has to do with a philosophical preference for not restricting everyone's rights because of the actions of a minority.
Try to make some friends while you're here.
I believe the ``anti-terrorist'' (Patriot Act) legislation proposal that President Bush
is currently supporting will allow more of this kind of activity. Here is
an article on the bill from LA Weekly. It's about a month old, but I don't think much
has changed since then.
Eudora and Netscape conveniently let you choose your mail directory,
unlike the Microsoft clients. You can save your mail directory on a
PGP disk (PGPDisk). This worked very well for me for years. You can of
course do the same thing with any Linux client using volume
encryption (preferably on a single partition -- not root
-- as small as possible to avoid losing performance).
But what are you worrying about? They say Linux is invincible...