Actually, in shakespearian times, "nothing" is a euphimism for the female's reproductive organ. Armed with this knowledge, the play "Much Ado about Nothing" makes a LOT more sense, or at least, a lot more than you have thought possible.
The irony of your phrase, "the dancer getting 'nothing,'" need no explanation I suppose
it's cool and nice to have sub-10 dollar ISPs, but unless I can use them *everywhere*, they are pretty useless to me.
case in point - ATT worldnet, despite being a fairly expensive option, allows me to dialup in most cities around the world. Which means that when I can get to a payphone in Japan with a data-port, I get internet. This is not so much a big deal now that I live here and have interent on my cellphone, but man does it save your life on business trips.
But - then we get back to it - when back in the US, the service comes in mighty handy.
so, i am all for cheaper service (I think ATT worldnet is more expensive than the 12Mbit fat-pipe advertised on/. a few hours before), but if it's not portable, what's the point of dialup?
I don't personally believe people treats rice as much of a commodity as you make it to be. i mean, people i know around here would go to tanbo-side rice-dispencers and buy rice for quite a bit *more* expensive than store rice, I think. Granted they are always like "yeah fresh rice tastes better" so maybe I just never had the luxury of trying them.
Even if you don't compare to the midwest (west of mississippi), even in virginia / florida / carolina(s) you will still find that japan has a higher population density than these fairly well-established regions. Granted japan has a few thousand extra years to get settled, but i can't find another good one to compare...
Your company must be the exception to current trends. the building where my company's headquarter is at (NS building shinjuku, actually), is emptying because nobody want's to stay there for the high rent anymore and consequentially the floors are becoming vacant one by one. kinda weird actually.
as for fruits, I am comparing to US (technically, china-town) standards, so maybe we are operating on a different scale.
thai rice is ok for eating your regular meals. saffran I don't eat, but I like to point out that mochi rice (sticky rice / sweat rice) is originally from china, and I would think you can find some quality mochi rice from there. btw i think thai rice (if cooked with more water than you think you need) is ok for onigiri.
I think in 93 japan was still in (i mean, actually these days also, but to a lesser extent) the "expensive means better" mood. I can remember a clear example where Jonny Walker black-label lowered its MSRP, the demand DROPPED. I think it's more like a mentality thing - price and demand does not fit the same inverse corrolation as other countries.
land is not only in short supply in cities, in my opinion. if you look at the population density of the "rural" (inaka) areas, it would be orders of magnatudes higher than, say, midwest US. besides, companies seem to have also been moving away from the whole "we MUST have a headquarter in tokyo" thing, so land in rural areas are gaining value.
i don't think price of fruits has anything to do with geographic location. In NY you can get fresh lychee air shipped from china for reasonable prices. I will grant you that shipping anything in japan is an arm and leg, but that cannot be the reason why you can't get cheap fruits because by your reasoning in the countryside the fruits would drop in price. - unfortunately I live in the countryside (north of the kanto plain - i can see nantai-san on a good day) and I still have to rely on those 100% vegetable juice for my fiber / etc supply because fresh fruits are not affordable by my living standards.
i didn't mention anything about the US / EU, how/why did you drag them into it?
fact is fact - Japan DO in fact not import rice due to various political and economical (mostly political) factors, regardless of the policies of US / EU. Besides, rice-farmers do get heavy subsidary from the JP government too last I checked.
I mean, economically speaking I think if japan did not have so much rice-farmers and imported more rice it would be beneficial on a lot of levels: * no more rediculous price on rice (yes price is high in general but rice is worse than most) * a lot more land freed up for whatever else - I'd think land is generally in short supply in Japan * theoretically the farmers can get other jobs that more productive for themselves (despite heavy subsidary they don't make a lot of money) as well as for the economy * less tax that would need to be used for subidizing farmers.
i mean, when land become this expensive, it just really becomes impractical (economically and otherwise) to have them still be used for farming. I understand the "connection with the land" thing and all, but i mean, come on... for crying out loud import some rice and actually grow some affordable fruits! watermelons prices are like completely insane - and i won't even mention honeydew etc.
but whatever. I am just pointing out what I observe and (think i) know.
i kid you not. nearly every square centimeter of arable land is used to grow rice. (and when not in rice season, usually wheat. Corn is very very hard to come by in large quantities - never will you see 10cents a cob sales such as ones in SafeWay)
Well, that and Japan is physically *bigger* than Great Britian. (granted, 80% are mountains, which leaves 20% for crops)
with so much land devoted to rice, livestock is hard to come by and they import a lot of beef from various places (australia, US, Canada) - in fact there are sometimes commercials advertizing US beef, with cowboys and all that shit - even though that's total bs. veggies are equally few in quantity and lots are imported. Fruits too (fruits and veggies are very expensive)
seafood are plenty, though.
(as to why they don't import rice - well, see if they did all the rice farmers would be out of a job, and we can't have that. besides japanese are very proud of their rice - not sure why, other than maybe japanese rice is about 10x more expensive than rice anywhere else in the world.)
maybe also because of price differences? - I don't speak for hungary, but the below situation is my understanding of some tricky thing that goes on between danmark and germany:
danmark has 25% VAT, and germany 13% (VAT = sales tax); to equalize final prices, car manufactures price the cars so that the final price (after the VAT) is about the same in both countries.
a lot of germans used to go over to danmark, buy a car, go back to germany (get a refund on that 25% on the way out of danmark) and pay the VAT for germany. pocket a good chunck of change.
manufactures were not happy about it, so that changed in a zippy (lobbied some legislation, IIRC).
so, for example apple products are 30% more expensive in japan than the US. I can't imagine them being happy about me shipping a powerbook over here.
on the other hand, amazon japan seem to be all for shipping things to the US, though - any maybe to other countries like hungary too; so maybe give them a try.
The thing with testing lifters and their operation is this problem, if i understand right:
the easiest way to verify if the lifter lifts via ionic wind is by using the lifter in a vaccum, but while the lifters work ok in normal atmospheric pressures, when you begin to decrease the pressure of where the lifter operate (putting the contraption in a pumped area, say) would eventually cause too much corona discharge to happen and do a lot of bad things (lower dielectric constant for vaccum compared to air?).
so, in any case - ion wind or not, this technology is still not quite suitable for space just yet. (i mean, besides the fact that you need a relatively heavy powersupply for this to get going)
this is the official word from an engineer at a leading processor company. the company's name starts with the a vowel that is not "A."
Seriously though, there are no new technology on the horizon that would make silicon run cooler, and the speed of core-voltage drop does not keep up with frequency bumps (heat is square of frequency for CMOS gates).
at the mean time, i like to point out that even without water cooling, they can make some thin-ass notebooks*. I don't see why water-cooling is such a big deal.
sorry site in japanese - panasonic does not sell their really good notebooks in the US. summary: ~2.7lb including DVD drive, up to 7.5hr operating time, Pentium-M 1.3GHz, max 512RAM, etc. They also make one that's 999grams (just under 2.2lb) that does not have the optical drive.
language base: knows (esp. reads) chinese +~300hr japanese lessons.
dictionary: any of the fancy japanese electronic dictionary would do. often slang is not found in the japanese-english book, and you would have to navigate through the japanese-japanese part, so skill in figuring out what the explanations are is important.
erm. they wanted it so bad they wrote their own instead...
Heck, there was a slashdot story about this earlier...
It would be greatly amusing if the government got the idea of writing a harry potter book or two for "inspiring young kids toward great things." (i mean, JR Rowling has no power of copyright in china if the government don't give a shit about it) - like "Harry Potter discovers communism" or "Harry Potter vs. capitalistic pigs" or "Harry Potter and the red dragon Mao" something.
well, besides those, I eagerly await the harry-potter themed pornography that will soon surface around the world. I mean, making good stories with elaborate word-play into adult film of purely "uhh" and "ahh" and "ooo" and maybe "ouch" is a kind of translation, right?
I am currently learning Japanese by playing Final Fantasy X-2. Maybe more "increasing the knowledge thereof" than "learning," but I do have the dictionary handy and would pause at instances where I don't understand and look up the word.
It works wonders because
1) it teaches you slang that's sometimes not in textbooks but people use often (must have good dictionary, however) 2) you brush up listening comprehension 3) you can pause the damn thing (try that with TV - well, one without TiVO and the likes) 4) subtitle 5) it provides a mental reference about the words, when I see "furikaeru" I would think to myself - ahh, Yuna says this in her final monologue and such and I can use the game scenario to remind me of the meaning; etc.
So, games can definitely be a learning tool. In fact this the most fun I have had learning yet.
Of course, as a friend puts it, an equally effective way may be to find a - ahem - sex toy who likes to talk during - ahem - activities. But looking up dictionary during such activities may be slightly inconvenient.
no, i think you are wrong
on
Space Blog
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· Score: 5, Insightful
did you actually read any of his entries? how do you know they don't provide value if you didn't?
Given that I will probably never have the chance for long-term spaceflight in my physically capable lifetime, I would darn well like to know what it feels like to sit in a capsule, and what it's like to have a few million pounds of highly explosive stuff behind you blast you up at incredible speeds - the moments when the boosters are jettisoned, etc.
I'd like to know what it's like to fly through a space-station, and what particular difficulties are encountered during what's run of the mill on earth (eat, sleep, brush your teech, go to the restroom).
I'd like to know the views, the feelings, the daily life - because even if I cannot make it up there physically, for at least a short while my imagination can.
So, you think tax dollars are better spent to make some astronomers giddy about this nebula or that galaxy they can see? well, those nebulas and galaxies arn't going anywhere for the next few billion years. But there are people who might be interested in what space is like but won't ever have a chance to go up there. They won't last nearly that long.
What's wrong with providing a taste of space for everyone like that? do we not deserve some piece of the rewards for all these achievements in space? human experience should be shared by all, not just a few scientists, methinks.
practical applications for monitor-man technology
on
Random Humor
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· Score: 3, Funny
I am thinking, if you had a monitor attached to your head, wouldn't it be possible to use it to display stuff, like say, thought-bubbles?
or for the mute/deaf amongst us. I mean, who want's to learn to sign anyway.
Then, if it really can seriously display *thoughts*, i.e. grab things out of your head unaware - then how many % of the time would the said monitors display sex-related material when guys are wearing them?
Obviously there are video-conferencing application here too, and possbily making neck-chiropractors the next fastest-growing job-market in the world, but i will skip those for now.
During that time, the U.S. Patent Office will search for like products and will decide whether Pocket Duct is different enough to merit a patent.
I thought they just eat some donuts, laugh with eachother how stupid it is (if they actually read it, anyway), stamp approval, and collect the application fee?
for fuck's sakes man, just bring some bandaids if you need tape - at least you can use them on yourself, aside from posting presentations on the wall.
as many has pointed out in various places, toritsugi and similar companies (construction comes to mind) is the precise reason why things are expensive in japan. but I guess if you want to keep everybody fed with the current living standards... doing away with the "useless" companies - distributors especially, will mean that a lot of people go unemployed.
well, my understanding, anyway.
no big deal though - it's just the difference between reading on a sofa vs reading while standing in a book store; a little inconvenient but you can't beat the price!
not me. friend very into RC airplanes. being that it's a "specialty hobby" or something, and hence he pays through the nose for them.
I am from the US (well, sort of - it's a very long story), so I know of many people who is shocked by the act of standing
Tsutayas around me (and some book-off, etc) and other bookstores (miyazaki?) don't wrap any adult stuff. including the quality-print book-of-bondage and such - I know this not because I look for them, but when I went to rent a video, my girlfriend (visiting) somehow found the section and was chasing after me with such a book and asking the usual "who would you rather have" questions. sigh.
Besides the point, you can find nude pictures in motorcycle and car (especiall low-rider) magazines anyway, so the "adult section" isn't quite limited area wise...
And then there are the used bookstores that specializes in adult magazines. those are interesting. all the owners I saw conjures up the image of a japanese-version simpson's comic-store guy. heh.
what comes to mind right off my head are (in no particular order)
books / magazines CDs / DVDs movie tickets gasoline fruits rice vitamins station ary postage (delivery fee, let's say) beer
i think the above list are worse than others... most other stuff, if you know where to look, can be bought for reasonable prices.
what's CHEAP are cigarettes low-quality sake (rice-wine) RC parts (that are made in japan)*
*it seems that either customs makes a fortune on these, or the overseas resellers does - but either way expect to pay double for the same stuff overseas, or at least in europe - so i hear.
what's equivalent to escort service in the US is usually between 85-100 dollars per incident; (maybe all such establishments do price fixing?) I have no idea how much is escort service in the US, so determining if it's cheap or expensive is left as an excercise to the reader.
1) magazines are insanely priced here in Japan. A general purpose one (say, equiv to cosmo) would be 700 yen (think 6 dollars). A specialty one, say an hobby related RC magazine is a whopping 1,800 yen (about 15 dollars)*
2) generally all stores you can go in and read, but you have to stand there and do it - that has never prevented hordes of people from standing by the magazine racks and browsing through everything; japanese people are usually very accustomed to be on their legs, many having to stand on the train for commute and walk between the trainstation and their destinations
3) Interestingly, the porn sections in japan are not shrinkwrapped - and I do wonder if this is where the digital shoplifting takes place more than anywhere else: while it's fine and good to look at naked ladies standing next to an obasan browsing through summer-cooking recipies, where you really want to be is the privacy of your home with such magazines (let's be realistic here). So I can imagine that being a good candidate for such "theft." Of course, the obasan next to you might be stealing recipies too, but frankly the phones don't have THAT good of resolution - text won't come out.
now - you can stand and browse magazines ANYWHERE, including convenience stores (which, coincidentally, have adult sections - so if you suddenly have an urge to see pictures of naked woman at 3am, 7-E is the place to go), but nowhere I know have sit-down drinking coffee type.
side note: the "adult section" should probably include PC games section, which, as far as I can tell, is by far occupied with hentai-themed games than anything else. But none of them is censored or in a separate area. stupid american "decency laws"
other side note: the real popular stuff, they usually shrink wrap - this include popular comics, and game-hintguides, etc...
* last note: there is no such thing as subscription, or subscription discounts in japan: you can get a subscription, but then the book seller where you get it from would just mail you the said magazines on an interval and charge you cover price plus postage (ok maybe 5% discount). silly, eh? no wonder people "steal" the content.
I think it should have gone a LONG time ago, NT4 was tricky as a desktop OS because DirectX was pretty much nonexistant. I think once Win2K (and the first two or three SPs)came about, NT was a goner. The sad thing really is what came to replace NT and the like for the future-> XP, longthorn, etc.
NT (4.0) wasn't that revolutionary, anyhow. kernel is about on par with 3.5, and the OS itself didn't become really stable until SP5 or so (SP4 caused crap (read: exchange) to crap out, IIRC), and by that time 2K was just right around the corner.
I will be sad when 2K goes. in my opinion that's so far the best OS microsoft made. (XP drops low on the list b/c the nasty theme and horrible amounts of crap-service that comes pre-enabled, which (especially sys-restore) slowed your computer to a crawl and more).
You might be surprised to hear this, but coffee has became probably THE national drink of Japan. It's really an jaw-dropping thing because people usually have a concept where they are sipping green tea all the time.
The thing is, though, that they actually seem to genuinely like the stupid beverage (and almost everybody drinks it black - and by almost i mean 99.9% of the people), because they don't really have any perceptable needs for the caffine.
Being that most everybody is extremely health-conscious here*, it is not surprising that they are making "natural" decaf coffee - or I should say, decaf coffee that has not gone through the decaf cycle (which to many, ruins the taste).
* there is a dichotomy here - because while many guys goes on diets and somesuch, they are almost always horrible workaholics and a large percentage smokes and drinks like it's going out of style. So, it's almost like hipocritical health consciousness - but hypocritical or not, the demand is still there for the low-caffine beverage.
Slashdot Mirror
In order to take full advantage of BuyMusic.com's offerings you must be on a Windows Operating System using Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher.
I mean, does it hurt to at least let me know what restrictions / term of use you have on your music? THAT does not take f'kn IE, does it?
You can count me out, buy.com. I will patiently wait for Apple.
Actually, in shakespearian times, "nothing" is a euphimism for the female's reproductive organ. Armed with this knowledge, the play "Much Ado about Nothing" makes a LOT more sense, or at least, a lot more than you have thought possible.
The irony of your phrase, "the dancer getting 'nothing,'" need no explanation I suppose
it's cool and nice to have sub-10 dollar ISPs, but unless I can use them *everywhere*, they are pretty useless to me.
/. a few hours before), but if it's not portable, what's the point of dialup?
case in point - ATT worldnet, despite being a fairly expensive option, allows me to dialup in most cities around the world. Which means that when I can get to a payphone in Japan with a data-port, I get internet. This is not so much a big deal now that I live here and have interent on my cellphone, but man does it save your life on business trips.
But - then we get back to it - when back in the US, the service comes in mighty handy.
so, i am all for cheaper service (I think ATT worldnet is more expensive than the 12Mbit fat-pipe advertised on
I don't personally believe people treats rice as much of a commodity as you make it to be. i mean, people i know around here would go to tanbo-side rice-dispencers and buy rice for quite a bit *more* expensive than store rice, I think. Granted they are always like "yeah fresh rice tastes better" so maybe I just never had the luxury of trying them.
Even if you don't compare to the midwest (west of mississippi), even in virginia / florida / carolina(s) you will still find that japan has a higher population density than these fairly well-established regions. Granted japan has a few thousand extra years to get settled, but i can't find another good one to compare...
Your company must be the exception to current trends. the building where my company's headquarter is at (NS building shinjuku, actually), is emptying because nobody want's to stay there for the high rent anymore and consequentially the floors are becoming vacant one by one. kinda weird actually.
as for fruits, I am comparing to US (technically, china-town) standards, so maybe we are operating on a different scale.
if i can rap DeCSS code to neo-trance tunes, it will be a form of expression and protected under the first admendment?
upon hearing this, my first thought was the chatter-box prostitute from Bruce-Willis's "Last Man Standing."
Somebody drag my mind out of the gutter please!
thai rice is ok for eating your regular meals. saffran I don't eat, but I like to point out that mochi rice (sticky rice / sweat rice) is originally from china, and I would think you can find some quality mochi rice from there. btw i think thai rice (if cooked with more water than you think you need) is ok for onigiri.
I think in 93 japan was still in (i mean, actually these days also, but to a lesser extent) the "expensive means better" mood. I can remember a clear example where Jonny Walker black-label lowered its MSRP, the demand DROPPED. I think it's more like a mentality thing - price and demand does not fit the same inverse corrolation as other countries.
land is not only in short supply in cities, in my opinion. if you look at the population density of the "rural" (inaka) areas, it would be orders of magnatudes higher than, say, midwest US. besides, companies seem to have also been moving away from the whole "we MUST have a headquarter in tokyo" thing, so land in rural areas are gaining value.
i don't think price of fruits has anything to do with geographic location. In NY you can get fresh lychee air shipped from china for reasonable prices. I will grant you that shipping anything in japan is an arm and leg, but that cannot be the reason why you can't get cheap fruits because by your reasoning in the countryside the fruits would drop in price. - unfortunately I live in the countryside (north of the kanto plain - i can see nantai-san on a good day) and I still have to rely on those 100% vegetable juice for my fiber / etc supply because fresh fruits are not affordable by my living standards.
i didn't mention anything about the US / EU, how /why did you drag them into it?
fact is fact - Japan DO in fact not import rice due to various political and economical (mostly political) factors, regardless of the policies of US / EU. Besides, rice-farmers do get heavy subsidary from the JP government too last I checked.
I mean, economically speaking I think if japan did not have so much rice-farmers and imported more rice it would be beneficial on a lot of levels:
* no more rediculous price on rice (yes price is high in general but rice is worse than most)
* a lot more land freed up for whatever else - I'd think land is generally in short supply in Japan
* theoretically the farmers can get other jobs that more productive for themselves (despite heavy subsidary they don't make a lot of money) as well as for the economy
* less tax that would need to be used for subidizing farmers.
i mean, when land become this expensive, it just really becomes impractical (economically and otherwise) to have them still be used for farming. I understand the "connection with the land" thing and all, but i mean, come on... for crying out loud import some rice and actually grow some affordable fruits! watermelons prices are like completely insane - and i won't even mention honeydew etc.
but whatever. I am just pointing out what I observe and (think i) know.
i kid you not. nearly every square centimeter of arable land is used to grow rice. (and when not in rice season, usually wheat. Corn is very very hard to come by in large quantities - never will you see 10cents a cob sales such as ones in SafeWay)
Well, that and Japan is physically *bigger* than Great Britian. (granted, 80% are mountains, which leaves 20% for crops)
with so much land devoted to rice, livestock is hard to come by and they import a lot of beef from various places (australia, US, Canada) - in fact there are sometimes commercials advertizing US beef, with cowboys and all that shit - even though that's total bs. veggies are equally few in quantity and lots are imported. Fruits too (fruits and veggies are very expensive)
seafood are plenty, though.
(as to why they don't import rice - well, see if they did all the rice farmers would be out of a job, and we can't have that. besides japanese are very proud of their rice - not sure why, other than maybe japanese rice is about 10x more expensive than rice anywhere else in the world.)
as much as /. is not a good place for medical advice:
howstuffworks is pretty good.
maybe also because of price differences? - I don't speak for hungary, but the below situation is my understanding of some tricky thing that goes on between danmark and germany:
danmark has 25% VAT, and germany 13% (VAT = sales tax); to equalize final prices, car manufactures price the cars so that the final price (after the VAT) is about the same in both countries.
a lot of germans used to go over to danmark, buy a car, go back to germany (get a refund on that 25% on the way out of danmark) and pay the VAT for germany. pocket a good chunck of change.
manufactures were not happy about it, so that changed in a zippy (lobbied some legislation, IIRC).
so, for example apple products are 30% more expensive in japan than the US. I can't imagine them being happy about me shipping a powerbook over here.
on the other hand, amazon japan seem to be all for shipping things to the US, though - any maybe to other countries like hungary too; so maybe give them a try.
The thing with testing lifters and their operation is this problem, if i understand right:
the easiest way to verify if the lifter lifts via ionic wind is by using the lifter in a vaccum, but while the lifters work ok in normal atmospheric pressures, when you begin to decrease the pressure of where the lifter operate (putting the contraption in a pumped area, say) would eventually cause too much corona discharge to happen and do a lot of bad things (lower dielectric constant for vaccum compared to air?).
so, in any case - ion wind or not, this technology is still not quite suitable for space just yet. (i mean, besides the fact that you need a relatively heavy powersupply for this to get going)
Seriously though, there are no new technology on the horizon that would make silicon run cooler, and the speed of core-voltage drop does not keep up with frequency bumps (heat is square of frequency for CMOS gates).
at the mean time, i like to point out that even without water cooling, they can make some thin-ass notebooks*. I don't see why water-cooling is such a big deal.
sorry site in japanese - panasonic does not sell their really good notebooks in the US. summary: ~2.7lb including DVD drive, up to 7.5hr operating time, Pentium-M 1.3GHz, max 512RAM, etc. They also make one that's 999grams (just under 2.2lb) that does not have the optical drive.
language base:
knows (esp. reads) chinese
+~300hr japanese lessons.
dictionary: any of the fancy japanese electronic dictionary would do. often slang is not found in the japanese-english book, and you would have to navigate through the japanese-japanese part, so skill in figuring out what the explanations are is important.
best of luck.
Heck, there was a slashdot story about this earlier...
It would be greatly amusing if the government got the idea of writing a harry potter book or two for "inspiring young kids toward great things." (i mean, JR Rowling has no power of copyright in china if the government don't give a shit about it) - like "Harry Potter discovers communism" or "Harry Potter vs. capitalistic pigs" or "Harry Potter and the red dragon Mao" something.
well, besides those, I eagerly await the harry-potter themed pornography that will soon surface around the world. I mean, making good stories with elaborate word-play into adult film of purely "uhh" and "ahh" and "ooo" and maybe "ouch" is a kind of translation, right?
I am currently learning Japanese by playing Final Fantasy X-2. Maybe more "increasing the knowledge thereof" than "learning," but I do have the dictionary handy and would pause at instances where I don't understand and look up the word.
It works wonders because
1) it teaches you slang that's sometimes not in textbooks but people use often (must have good dictionary, however)
2) you brush up listening comprehension
3) you can pause the damn thing (try that with TV - well, one without TiVO and the likes)
4) subtitle
5) it provides a mental reference about the words, when I see "furikaeru" I would think to myself - ahh, Yuna says this in her final monologue and such and I can use the game scenario to remind me of the meaning; etc.
So, games can definitely be a learning tool. In fact this the most fun I have had learning yet.
Of course, as a friend puts it, an equally effective way may be to find a - ahem - sex toy who likes to talk during - ahem - activities. But looking up dictionary during such activities may be slightly inconvenient.
did you actually read any of his entries? how do you know they don't provide value if you didn't?
Given that I will probably never have the chance for long-term spaceflight in my physically capable lifetime, I would darn well like to know what it feels like to sit in a capsule, and what it's like to have a few million pounds of highly explosive stuff behind you blast you up at incredible speeds - the moments when the boosters are jettisoned, etc.
I'd like to know what it's like to fly through a space-station, and what particular difficulties are encountered during what's run of the mill on earth (eat, sleep, brush your teech, go to the restroom).
I'd like to know the views, the feelings, the daily life - because even if I cannot make it up there physically, for at least a short while my imagination can.
So, you think tax dollars are better spent to make some astronomers giddy about this nebula or that galaxy they can see? well, those nebulas and galaxies arn't going anywhere for the next few billion years. But there are people who might be interested in what space is like but won't ever have a chance to go up there. They won't last nearly that long.
What's wrong with providing a taste of space for everyone like that? do we not deserve some piece of the rewards for all these achievements in space? human experience should be shared by all, not just a few scientists, methinks.
I am thinking, if you had a monitor attached to your head, wouldn't it be possible to use it to display stuff, like say, thought-bubbles?
or for the mute/deaf amongst us. I mean, who want's to learn to sign anyway.
Then, if it really can seriously display *thoughts*, i.e. grab things out of your head unaware - then how many % of the time would the said monitors display sex-related material when guys are wearing them?
Obviously there are video-conferencing application here too, and possbily making neck-chiropractors the next fastest-growing job-market in the world, but i will skip those for now.
I thought they just eat some donuts, laugh with eachother how stupid it is (if they actually read it, anyway), stamp approval, and collect the application fee?
for fuck's sakes man, just bring some bandaids if you need tape - at least you can use them on yourself, aside from posting presentations on the wall.
urgh. products designed by sales people. sigh...
yeah. very much agree.
as many has pointed out in various places, toritsugi and similar companies (construction comes to mind) is the precise reason why things are expensive in japan. but I guess if you want to keep everybody fed with the current living standards... doing away with the "useless" companies - distributors especially, will mean that a lot of people go unemployed.
well, my understanding, anyway.
no big deal though - it's just the difference between reading on a sofa vs reading while standing in a book store; a little inconvenient but you can't beat the price!
not me. friend very into RC airplanes. being that it's a "specialty hobby" or something, and hence he pays through the nose for them.
I am from the US (well, sort of - it's a very long story), so I know of many people who is shocked by the act of standing
Tsutayas around me (and some book-off, etc) and other bookstores (miyazaki?) don't wrap any adult stuff. including the quality-print book-of-bondage and such - I know this not because I look for them, but when I went to rent a video, my girlfriend (visiting) somehow found the section and was chasing after me with such a book and asking the usual "who would you rather have" questions. sigh.
Besides the point, you can find nude pictures in motorcycle and car (especiall low-rider) magazines anyway, so the "adult section" isn't quite limited area wise...
And then there are the used bookstores that specializes in adult magazines. those are interesting. all the owners I saw conjures up the image of a japanese-version simpson's comic-store guy. heh.
well, not EVERYTHING.
n ary
what comes to mind right off my head are (in no particular order)
books / magazines
CDs / DVDs
movie tickets
gasoline
fruits
rice
vitamins
statio
postage (delivery fee, let's say)
beer
i think the above list are worse than others... most other stuff, if you know where to look, can be bought for reasonable prices.
what's CHEAP are
cigarettes
low-quality sake (rice-wine)
RC parts (that are made in japan)*
*it seems that either customs makes a fortune on these, or the overseas resellers does - but either way expect to pay double for the same stuff overseas, or at least in europe - so i hear.
what's equivalent to escort service in the US is usually between 85-100 dollars per incident; (maybe all such establishments do price fixing?) I have no idea how much is escort service in the US, so determining if it's cheap or expensive is left as an excercise to the reader.
Okay, where to start:
1) magazines are insanely priced here in Japan. A general purpose one (say, equiv to cosmo) would be 700 yen (think 6 dollars). A specialty one, say an hobby related RC magazine is a whopping 1,800 yen (about 15 dollars)*
2) generally all stores you can go in and read, but you have to stand there and do it - that has never prevented hordes of people from standing by the magazine racks and browsing through everything; japanese people are usually very accustomed to be on their legs, many having to stand on the train for commute and walk between the trainstation and their destinations
3) Interestingly, the porn sections in japan are not shrinkwrapped - and I do wonder if this is where the digital shoplifting takes place more than anywhere else: while it's fine and good to look at naked ladies standing next to an obasan browsing through summer-cooking recipies, where you really want to be is the privacy of your home with such magazines (let's be realistic here). So I can imagine that being a good candidate for such "theft." Of course, the obasan next to you might be stealing recipies too, but frankly the phones don't have THAT good of resolution - text won't come out.
now - you can stand and browse magazines ANYWHERE, including convenience stores (which, coincidentally, have adult sections - so if you suddenly have an urge to see pictures of naked woman at 3am, 7-E is the place to go), but nowhere I know have sit-down drinking coffee type.
side note: the "adult section" should probably include PC games section, which, as far as I can tell, is by far occupied with hentai-themed games than anything else. But none of them is censored or in a separate area. stupid american "decency laws"
other side note: the real popular stuff, they usually shrink wrap - this include popular comics, and game-hintguides, etc...
* last note: there is no such thing as subscription, or subscription discounts in japan: you can get a subscription, but then the book seller where you get it from would just mail you the said magazines on an interval and charge you cover price plus postage (ok maybe 5% discount). silly, eh? no wonder people "steal" the content.
I think it should have gone a LONG time ago, NT4 was tricky as a desktop OS because DirectX was pretty much nonexistant. I think once Win2K (and the first two or three SPs)came about, NT was a goner. The sad thing really is what came to replace NT and the like for the future-> XP, longthorn, etc.
NT (4.0) wasn't that revolutionary, anyhow. kernel is about on par with 3.5, and the OS itself didn't become really stable until SP5 or so (SP4 caused crap (read: exchange) to crap out, IIRC), and by that time 2K was just right around the corner.
I will be sad when 2K goes. in my opinion that's so far the best OS microsoft made. (XP drops low on the list b/c the nasty theme and horrible amounts of crap-service that comes pre-enabled, which (especially sys-restore) slowed your computer to a crawl and more).
You might be surprised to hear this, but coffee has became probably THE national drink of Japan. It's really an jaw-dropping thing because people usually have a concept where they are sipping green tea all the time.
The thing is, though, that they actually seem to genuinely like the stupid beverage (and almost everybody drinks it black - and by almost i mean 99.9% of the people), because they don't really have any perceptable needs for the caffine.
Being that most everybody is extremely health-conscious here*, it is not surprising that they are making "natural" decaf coffee - or I should say, decaf coffee that has not gone through the decaf cycle (which to many, ruins the taste).
* there is a dichotomy here - because while many guys goes on diets and somesuch, they are almost always horrible workaholics and a large percentage smokes and drinks like it's going out of style. So, it's almost like hipocritical health consciousness - but hypocritical or not, the demand is still there for the low-caffine beverage.