Disclaimer: I was briefly involved in the management of 2ch.sc.
This summary is at least unfair if not quite inaccurate. Hiroyuki's claim back then was that he paid a substantial amount of money to cover the costs of the servers, but Jim demanded more. Also, there is no evidence that Hiroyuki sold user data. He was just selling the right to use publicly available data for data-mining.
It was rather sad to see that people are bashing Hiroyuki based mostly on FUD like this "summary." I lost much of my interest in anonymous discussion boards because they are full of paranoid thinking. I just wish Hiroyuki good luck.
Hmmm,... I guess Japan could try to invent intelligent robots to help their decrepit population, OR they could relax their racist immigration policies and allow immigrants in from Asia...
I wonder which method has the best chance of working (actually I don't, it's fucking obvious to any non idiot)
Well, I don't think our immigration policies are particularly racist. We generally don't want immigrants regardless of their race or country of origin, period. Our strict immigration policies are necessary, IMO, to maintain our cultural identity and unique cultural values, and most of us like it that way.
If your country accepts immigrants from all over the world and take unfair advantage of their cheap labor under the hypocritical names of justice and freedom while they suffer tremendously from racism, that's fine with us. (I lived in the United States for 12 years and I know for a fact that racism against immigrants is rampant here.) But please, for Christ's sake, respect Japan's soverinty as an independent nation. You are being racist by calling us racist *just because* our values are different from yours.
Just for your information, Hiroyuki still lives in Japan without problems. There have been numerous civil lawsuits brought against him since 1999 and he lost almost all of them. However, since he basically has no assets in Japan, nobody was able to claim a monetary compensation from him. In one of the cases, it was disclosed that Hiroyuki had a bank account in Japan with a balance little over $1000. Hiroyuki must have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, through online advertisements on 2ch, but he just doesn't keep money in Japan.
Personally I am all in support for Hiroyuki. Here in Japan, we cannot have open discussions on many topics due not to government regulations but to social/cultural pressures, so anonymous discussion forums like 2ch.net definitely have a place in Japanese society.
And to this day, US citizens generally understand that if the government ever becomes tyrannical and repressive, "we the people" have the right (and must have the means) to overthrow it.
Thank you for your informative comment. I was not aware of this piece of historical background. That being said, I still wonder whether people should be allowed to carry guns to defend themselves in the modern, 21th century United States. We certainly do not live in the Colonial Period anymore, and citizens with firearms cannot possibly fight against the US military with modern equipment. Also, the availability of firearms may help American citizens defend themselves in the short run, but it is, in my humble opinion, detrimental to society in the long run, as evidenced by this extremely unfortunate incident.
Why do you think the Samurai class continued to have power into the 20th century?
You assume that the samurai class continued to rule the nation after the Meiji restoration because they possessed swords, which is not really correct. Only a small fraction of the samurai class was able to stay in power. In fact, the merchant class became powerful towards the end of the Edo period, which is one of the reasons why the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown. Moreover, the possession of swords was also banned in 1876, soon after the Meiji restoration in 1868. Only those in the military forces and the police were allowed to carry swords afterwards.
Every time a news of shooting breaks out, I always wonder why the possession of firearms is not banned entirely in this country. I am native of Japan, and where I grew up nobody but cops were allowed to carry guns. I live in New Jersey now, and I really miss a sense of security I used to have back home. Back there I never worried about getting killed and such, whereas I feel physically threatened where I live now since there have been a number of incidents of armed robberies on campus at Rutgers and in my neighborhood. (My own apartment was robbed several years ago, too.) Seriously, it makes a huge difference when I have to take into consideration the possibility of the possession of firearms when some strangers attacked me. I am aware that there are gun lobbies working against the ban of firearms, but it never made any sense to me. Could anybody enlighten me as to why people want to carry guns at all?
Linux's notebook support is way behind Windows XP
on
Windows Vista RC1 Complete
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The last time I installed Ubuntsu on my Vaio Type U, suspend to RAM did not work at all. Furthermore, I found out that in order to use hibernation, I have to download the source code of Software Suspend 2, apply patches to the kernel source and recompile the kernel, which is quite ridiculous to demand from a user of a desktop OS. After the installation of the software, I found out that the performance of it is not as good as the hibernation function of Windows XP. Suspend to ram/disk is such a basic functionality, and I just could not believe that nobody figured out how to make it work without problems. Moreover, I had to struggle with configuration files for two days to make my Bluetooth adapter work. I was sick of XP and almost ready to switch to Linux, but these experiences really turned me off.
Linux seems to be an excellent server OS and the dedication of volunteers working on it is quite admirable, but, as a desktop OS, it is simply not in the same league as Windows XP and Mac OS X.
> Their constitution allows for fighting in defensively.
Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution does not state this. Article 9 clearly prohibits the "use of military force" to "resolve international conflicts," without making any distinctions between offensive and defensive warfare. It is true that some people believe that the Constitution allows the existence of the Self Defense Force, but, if the text of Article 9 is taken literally, SDF is clearly unconstitutional. Now, IAAJN (Japanese national), and I am of the opinion that that the Constitution should be amended to legitimatize the existence of SDF, but it seems, IMHO, that saying the current Constitution "allows for fighting in defensively" is a bit too much of stretch.
Ah, I now see where you came from. I would like to point out, however, that Tokyo and Osaka are quite different from the rest of the nation, culturally, and they are by no means representative of the whole country.
To begin with, there are huge differences between the urban lifestyle and the suburban/rural lifestyles in Japan, as is the case with anywhere else in the world. Moreover, Tokyo and Osaka are quite different culturally from the rest of the nation, and the combined population of these areas does not constitute 50% of the entire population. (The combined figure for Tokyo, Kanagawa and Osaka prefectures is about 30 million, which is less than 30% of the population. See http://www.soumu.go.jp/c-gyousei/020918.html)
Now, Nagoya, my hometown, is not exactly small, being the fourth largest city only after Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama, but I can clearly see the differences in lifestyles between Tokyo and Nagoya. It saddens me when people from outside Japan think that the busy urban life is everything you can find in this country, because I really love the slow-paced, laid-back suburban lifestyle over there.
> Actual dog owners in Japan spend well over $1000 on the real thing.
> They tend to by pure-bred dogs (toy breeds and shi tsus are especially popular)
> and feed them premium food. You
I have no idea where you got this crazy idea. I grew up in a suburb of Nagoya and my family had a dog in a tiny backyard of our house. She was abandoned by the original owner and we adopted her for free. It was very common to own dogs in my middle class neighborhood, most of them are not pure bred, and *nobody* I knew spent more than $1000 for their dogs.
Your statement *might* be true with people living in an extremely rich neighborhood in Tokyo, but it is far from the norm in Japan. Grossly inaccurate statements about Japan at Slashdot always make my head spin. Please, for the sake of Christ, do not spread another stereotype about us. We already have enough of them to deal with, really.
Interestingly enough, I am a clinical psychologist in training with an interest in cultural antholopology,
and I can definitely see the culturally relative nature of the diagnosis of mental illnesses
you mentioned in your post. The situation is getting better, I think, with the rising recognition
and adoption of multiculturalism in the field of psychology. I hope to contribute in the future to the advancement of multiculturalism in the United States as a researcher and a practitioner.
P.S. Are you in the Rinzai school of Zen, or another?
Yes, I am in the Rinzai school of Zen. I find the tradition interesting precisely because of its emphasis on dropping cognitive distinctions. It is not far-fetched, I think, to say that strong in-group favoritism and the Zen tradition are yin and yang, the two sides of the same coin that is Japanese culture. Fascinating stuff.
You, on the other hand, are exhibiting one of the most irritating traits that I have found in the Japanese people: Writing others' criticisms off as a lack of understanding, other than as a potential source for problem identification.
If you carefully read the first paragraph of my post, you would see that I never said there were no problems in Japanese society. I just simply pointed out your misunderstanding of Japanese foreign policies. I think that the racism against the Korean Japanese is a real problem, and it should be remedied as soon as possible. In fact, I have a sister trying to get married with a Korean Japanese, and I am all in her support despite the extremely strong opposition of my parents.
Fuck 'cultural relativity'. Japanese people actively discriminate against both non-Japanese and people who aren't 'Japanese Enough'; hell, the Japanese news makes it a point to mention it when a *foreigner* commits a crime, even if the criminal isn't really from another country -- they just aren't a Japanese National. This sounds like 'racism' to me, and for a first-world country to engage in it is asinine.
What you referring to here is not really racism because racism technically is a discrimination against people based on racial differences, and foreigners are equally "discriminated" in Japan regardless of their races, which is obvious in the case of the Korean Japanese. My understanding is that the Japanese tend to make strong distinctions between in-group (uchi) and out-group (soto) on any given social levels, and the discrimination against foreigners is just an instance of such in-group favoritism on a national scale. Furthermore, making such a distinction is not necessarily a bad thing, in my humble opinion, since not all foreign influences are good ones. After all, without such an attitude, we had become a colony of a Christian imperial power long before the 20th century. By saying that, I am not insisting that it is OK for us to treat outsiders without respect. I am merely pointing out that it is not making such a distinction but the general maltreatment of outsiders that is at the heart of the problem.
Homogenity? Please; NHK has to *subtitle* the dialogue from thei news broadcasts in Kagoshima, the Okinawans are treated like second-class citizens, and the amount of businesses wholly owned and operated by Korean immigrants is utterly astounding. Japan likes to put on the appearance of being 'homogenous', but the exact opposite is the case -- there is a hell of a lot of social division in Japan, more than even in the U.S., and it causes problems.
First of all, by using the term "homogeneity", I was referring not to linguistic homogeneity but to the shared core values and patterns of behaviors stemming from them. Moreover, such linguistic differences are trivial since the post-war generations all can speak the so-called standard Japanese without much difficulties. I myself is a native speaker of the Nagoya dialect, but I have no problem at all communicating with people from other regions. Secondly, the Okinawans and Korean Japanese are very small groups. In fact, each group comprises less than 1% of the whole population. The situation is very different in the United States, where only 70% of the population is the majority and African Americans, the largest minority group comprises 13% of the population. (By the way, I have no problems at all with these two minority groups in Japan. One of my best college friends is an Okinawan from the Miyako island and I really like my sister's Korean Japanese boyfriend.)
Despite all the negative transference onto me, I wish you the best for the non-trivial endeavour of understanding the Japanese. After all, it is really nice to have somebody who is interested in and tries to understand my own culture, one of the closest things to my heart.
Disclaimer: I am a Japanese national who was born and grew up in Japan.
Japan doesn't allow ready immigration mostly because of long-standing racist policies
This statement is simply incorrect. The general racist attitude of the Japanese against Koreans has little to do with what you referred to as "racist policies." The Korean Japanese have historically been treated as collective scapegoats, whereas the long-held Japanese isolationist policies are largely due to the fact that the ways the Japanese interact with each other hinge on the homogeneity of Japanese society. The nation has a history that is vastly different from the history of the United States, and referring such policies as "racist" is a serious violation of the principle of cultural relativity.
Most Japanese laugh at their religions (Shinto and Buddhism) and don't take them seriously at all
I really have to take a strong issue with this statement. I am a Zen Buddhist and I take my religious beliefs very seriously. I also know many other Japanese whose lives center around their religious values, and your statement is outrageously insulting to them. Consciously or unconsciously, these religions affect the collective Japanese psyche in fundamental ways, which is evident in every aspect of Japanese life. Probably you didn't live in Japan long enough to see that.
I don't quite understand why the parent post was modded up as "interesting", where "flamebait" is appropriate. The parent poster's naïve assumption that s/he is not "Yet Another Fuckheaded Idiot who thinks they know everything" is fairly amusing. With my experience in the United States and other vastly uninformed posts on this Slashdot story, I am under the impression that most American people really don't take enough time to understand other cultures. (The Japanese are guilty of that, too.) It takes years, if not decades, to understand any given culture, and the danger of premature judgments and hasty generalizations cannot be stressed enough.
Could anyone knowledgeable care to comment on how reliable this drive can be?
I bought an external drive from Seagate and my experience with the drive was absolutely horrendous.
It was so unreliable that I had to return the drive and paid a restocking fee.
I thought it was just me, but these user reviews suggest otherwise.
Personally I would not touch another Seagate product with a 10 foot pole.
> While I fully agree (and use the same argument to defend Americans), > it still doesn't explain people stopping in the middle of the road to grab > an ice cream or a drink from a vending machine.
Actually I could see very clearly where these weird-sounding 'Engrish' signs came from. These signs are direct translations of Japanese sentences. These translations do not make any sense because Japanese and English have different grammatical structures and there is no one-on-one mapping between Japanese words and English translations of them.
Traditionally, English education in Japan puts an almost exclusive emphasis on translations, especially from English into Japanese. So when the Japanese try to make signs in English, they usually come up with Japanese equivalents first and then directly translate them into English. This is a bad way to write in any language, but people do it anyways because that is the only way they know!
> It's that, despite having tens of thousands of american > military members living in Japan, fully capable of proofreading > for them, they decide to actually print these signs and banners > without having anyone make sure they're anywhere near coherent.
These people making signs would never think they made mistakes because they would never admit that all the years of learning English is useless when it comes to writing. They either blindly believe in the quality of education (which is non-existent in my not so humble opinion), or they have too much pride to admit their incompetency.
So these 'Engrish' signs give me mixed feelings. They are actually pretty funny, but at the same time they are a poignant reflection of a larger social/cultural problem. It is just too bad... *sigh*
> You are indeed my hero. I'm still having trouble finishing 300g of rice with a full order of curry.
The dish was actually quite a sight. I ordered the curry with a pork cutlet (very stupid, but that was the whole point!), and that big cutlet looked like a tiny island in the vast ocean of rice! It was really funny! Highly recommended to any college student with a tight budget and a huge appetite.
I really do not know what to say about these signs... All I can say is, English education in Japan is so inefficient to the point where it is a national disgrace.
The general lack of competency in English in Japan does not really mean we are linguistically incapable, though. (At least my English is good enough to get me through graduate schools in the us.)
By the way, I love Coco-ichi, too. When I was in college, I once ordered a curry with 1300g of rice so that I could get a free meal with my picture framed in the restaurant. Those were the days...
I am a graduate student studying psychology, and I make extensive use of online databases such as PsycINFO in order to find journal articles and books that are relevant to the topic I do research on. Now, there are many edited books out there, chapters in these books are contributed by different professional researchers, and these databases tell me which chapter I might be interested in, with complete chapter titles, abstracts and page numbers.
Normally if I want to get hold of these chapters I would go to the library of my school, or order them through inter-library loans if I cannot find the books there, and wait for a few weeks, which happens quite often actually. With this service, I could do my research at home (or at the school library) and instantly print out these chapters. ILLs are OK if you are not in a hurry, but this service can help a great deal if you are on a tight deadline.
Well, the TRONCHIP subproject is considered to be dead for quite a while, or at least so I read. The last TRONCHIP to be produced was the Gmicro/400, which came out in 1994.
Um, if you wnat to create a GUI application on the T-Engine platform,
you are supposed to use middleware programs such
as PMC T-Shell Development Kit (screenshot in PDF) that runs on top of T-Kernel. This development kit is a direct descendant of the BTRON operating system and still rather primitive, but the situation is not as bad as you portrayed it to be in your post.
As always, the TRON Web is the most valuable source of infomation on the TRON project in English.
You can find some good articles on the T-Engine platform here.
I really don't think Ichitaro would disappear from the market anytime soon.
Ichitaro used to dominate the word processor market back in the days of MS-DOS, just like Word Perfect did in the United States, and still remains a very important player. Major companies and a number of government branches still rely heavily on Ichitaro because it can produce documents in forms that are specific to the Japanese corporate and governmental culture, which is not possible with Microsoft Word. Just System is a major software company famous for their ATOK kana-kanji conversion system. Kana-kanji conversion systems are essential for Japanese input, and ATOK, with its smart lexical recognition AI engine, has been the unparalleled leader for over a decade.
Since the iTunes music store has a larger collection of songs and I can strip the DRM crap off my purchased songs with JHymn, what the point of starting a new service like this? Apple already knows about JHymn and has not done anything about it so far, so it is most likely Apple does not do anything about it in the future either.
Disclaimer: I don't mind paying money for good songs at all. I use JHymn to play songs on other platforms for which iTunes is not available. JHymn works beautifully for this purpose.
I don't think Apple's shipping Macs with one button mice
is not a bad idea at all. This is a good default configuration
for somebody with strong phobia towards computers.
For them, complexity leads directly to fear.
You would know this if you provided support service
at college. Some extremely intelligent professors
are really bad computer users.
Even though they are a small fraction of the entire user base,
Apple can make sure by shipping one button mice that they won't left behind
confused with mutiple buttons.
For the rest of us, there are always other options available.
I am a Japanese and therefore very proud of skilled hardware engineers and their products from my country. However, there is still one area in the technology industry in which the United States is undoubtedly far ahead of Japan: operating systems for personal computers. Although we do have some OSes in Japan, the most notable example of which is BTRON designed by Dr. Ken Sakamura of TRON fame, they are not comparable to their American counterparts by any measure in terms of functionality and the size of user base. Even though I would be hesitant to characterize products from Redmond as excellent, I use PowerBook G4 and OS X myself and I just love them. Even most Linux/*BSD hackers are either originally from the United States or have U.S. citizenship. The current state is really a shame for Japan, but it has deep roots in structural problems in society that stifles creativity and the abysmal state of the software industry in the nation with ridiculously underpaid programmers who suffer extremely long hours. Although I wish the situation would be otherwise, I do not think it will change in the foreseeable future.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I was briefly involved in the management of 2ch.sc.
This summary is at least unfair if not quite inaccurate. Hiroyuki's claim back then was that he paid a substantial amount of money to cover the costs of the servers, but Jim demanded more. Also, there is no evidence that Hiroyuki sold user data. He was just selling the right to use publicly available data for data-mining.
It was rather sad to see that people are bashing Hiroyuki based mostly on FUD like this "summary." I lost much of my interest in anonymous discussion boards because they are full of paranoid thinking. I just wish Hiroyuki good luck.
Hmmm,... I guess Japan could try to invent intelligent robots to help their decrepit population, OR they could relax their racist immigration policies and allow immigrants in from Asia... I wonder which method has the best chance of working (actually I don't, it's fucking obvious to any non idiot)
Well, I don't think our immigration policies are particularly racist. We generally don't want immigrants regardless of their race or country of origin, period. Our strict immigration policies are necessary, IMO, to maintain our cultural identity and unique cultural values, and most of us like it that way.
If your country accepts immigrants from all over the world and take unfair advantage of their cheap labor under the hypocritical names of justice and freedom while they suffer tremendously from racism, that's fine with us. (I lived in the United States for 12 years and I know for a fact that racism against immigrants is rampant here.) But please, for Christ's sake, respect Japan's soverinty as an independent nation. You are being racist by calling us racist *just because* our values are different from yours.
Just for your information, Hiroyuki still lives in Japan without problems. There have been numerous civil lawsuits brought against him since 1999 and he lost almost all of them. However, since he basically has no assets in Japan, nobody was able to claim a monetary compensation from him. In one of the cases, it was disclosed that Hiroyuki had a bank account in Japan with a balance little over $1000. Hiroyuki must have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, through online advertisements on 2ch, but he just doesn't keep money in Japan.
Personally I am all in support for Hiroyuki. Here in Japan, we cannot have open discussions on many topics due not to government regulations but to social/cultural pressures, so anonymous discussion forums like 2ch.net definitely have a place in Japanese society.
And to this day, US citizens generally understand that if the government ever becomes tyrannical and repressive, "we the people" have the right (and must have the means) to overthrow it.
Thank you for your informative comment. I was not aware of this piece of historical background. That being said, I still wonder whether people should be allowed to carry guns to defend themselves in the modern, 21th century United States. We certainly do not live in the Colonial Period anymore, and citizens with firearms cannot possibly fight against the US military with modern equipment. Also, the availability of firearms may help American citizens defend themselves in the short run, but it is, in my humble opinion, detrimental to society in the long run, as evidenced by this extremely unfortunate incident.
Why do you think the Samurai class continued to have power into the 20th century?
You assume that the samurai class continued to rule the nation after the Meiji restoration because they possessed swords, which is not really correct. Only a small fraction of the samurai class was able to stay in power. In fact, the merchant class became powerful towards the end of the Edo period, which is one of the reasons why the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown. Moreover, the possession of swords was also banned in 1876, soon after the Meiji restoration in 1868. Only those in the military forces and the police were allowed to carry swords afterwards.
Every time a news of shooting breaks out, I always wonder why the possession of firearms is not banned entirely in this country. I am native of Japan, and where I grew up nobody but cops were allowed to carry guns. I live in New Jersey now, and I really miss a sense of security I used to have back home. Back there I never worried about getting killed and such, whereas I feel physically threatened where I live now since there have been a number of incidents of armed robberies on campus at Rutgers and in my neighborhood. (My own apartment was robbed several years ago, too.) Seriously, it makes a huge difference when I have to take into consideration the possibility of the possession of firearms when some strangers attacked me. I am aware that there are gun lobbies working against the ban of firearms, but it never made any sense to me. Could anybody enlighten me as to why people want to carry guns at all?
The last time I installed Ubuntsu on my Vaio Type U, suspend to RAM did not work at all. Furthermore, I found out that in order to use hibernation, I have to download the source code of Software Suspend 2, apply patches to the kernel source and recompile the kernel, which is quite ridiculous to demand from a user of a desktop OS. After the installation of the software, I found out that the performance of it is not as good as the hibernation function of Windows XP. Suspend to ram/disk is such a basic functionality, and I just could not believe that nobody figured out how to make it work without problems. Moreover, I had to struggle with configuration files for two days to make my Bluetooth adapter work. I was sick of XP and almost ready to switch to Linux, but these experiences really turned me off.
Linux seems to be an excellent server OS and the dedication of volunteers working on it is quite admirable, but, as a desktop OS, it is simply not in the same league as Windows XP and Mac OS X.
> Their constitution allows for fighting in defensively.
Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution does not state this. Article 9 clearly prohibits the "use of military force" to "resolve international conflicts," without making any distinctions between offensive and defensive warfare. It is true that some people believe that the Constitution allows the existence of the Self Defense Force, but, if the text of Article 9 is taken literally, SDF is clearly unconstitutional. Now, IAAJN (Japanese national), and I am of the opinion that that the Constitution should be amended to legitimatize the existence of SDF, but it seems, IMHO, that saying the current Constitution "allows for fighting in defensively" is a bit too much of stretch.
To begin with, there are huge differences between the urban lifestyle and the suburban/rural lifestyles in Japan, as is the case with anywhere else in the world. Moreover, Tokyo and Osaka are quite different culturally from the rest of the nation, and the combined population of these areas does not constitute 50% of the entire population. (The combined figure for Tokyo, Kanagawa and Osaka prefectures is about 30 million, which is less than 30% of the population. See http://www.soumu.go.jp/c-gyousei/020918.html)
Now, Nagoya, my hometown, is not exactly small, being the fourth largest city only after Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama, but I can clearly see the differences in lifestyles between Tokyo and Nagoya. It saddens me when people from outside Japan think that the busy urban life is everything you can find in this country, because I really love the slow-paced, laid-back suburban lifestyle over there.
> Actual dog owners in Japan spend well over $1000 on the real thing. > They tend to by pure-bred dogs (toy breeds and shi tsus are especially popular) > and feed them premium food. You I have no idea where you got this crazy idea. I grew up in a suburb of Nagoya and my family had a dog in a tiny backyard of our house. She was abandoned by the original owner and we adopted her for free. It was very common to own dogs in my middle class neighborhood, most of them are not pure bred, and *nobody* I knew spent more than $1000 for their dogs. Your statement *might* be true with people living in an extremely rich neighborhood in Tokyo, but it is far from the norm in Japan. Grossly inaccurate statements about Japan at Slashdot always make my head spin. Please, for the sake of Christ, do not spread another stereotype about us. We already have enough of them to deal with, really.
Interestingly enough, I am a clinical psychologist in training with an interest in cultural antholopology, and I can definitely see the culturally relative nature of the diagnosis of mental illnesses you mentioned in your post. The situation is getting better, I think, with the rising recognition and adoption of multiculturalism in the field of psychology. I hope to contribute in the future to the advancement of multiculturalism in the United States as a researcher and a practitioner.
P.S. Are you in the Rinzai school of Zen, or another?
Yes, I am in the Rinzai school of Zen. I find the tradition interesting precisely because of its emphasis on dropping cognitive distinctions. It is not far-fetched, I think, to say that strong in-group favoritism and the Zen tradition are yin and yang, the two sides of the same coin that is Japanese culture. Fascinating stuff.
You, on the other hand, are exhibiting one of the most irritating traits that I have found in the Japanese people: Writing others' criticisms off as a lack of understanding, other than as a potential source for problem identification.
If you carefully read the first paragraph of my post, you would see that I never said there were no problems in Japanese society. I just simply pointed out your misunderstanding of Japanese foreign policies. I think that the racism against the Korean Japanese is a real problem, and it should be remedied as soon as possible. In fact, I have a sister trying to get married with a Korean Japanese, and I am all in her support despite the extremely strong opposition of my parents.
Fuck 'cultural relativity'. Japanese people actively discriminate against both non-Japanese and people who aren't 'Japanese Enough'; hell, the Japanese news makes it a point to mention it when a *foreigner* commits a crime, even if the criminal isn't really from another country -- they just aren't a Japanese National. This sounds like 'racism' to me, and for a first-world country to engage in it is asinine.
What you referring to here is not really racism because racism technically is a discrimination against people based on racial differences, and foreigners are equally "discriminated" in Japan regardless of their races, which is obvious in the case of the Korean Japanese. My understanding is that the Japanese tend to make strong distinctions between in-group (uchi) and out-group (soto) on any given social levels, and the discrimination against foreigners is just an instance of such in-group favoritism on a national scale. Furthermore, making such a distinction is not necessarily a bad thing, in my humble opinion, since not all foreign influences are good ones. After all, without such an attitude, we had become a colony of a Christian imperial power long before the 20th century. By saying that, I am not insisting that it is OK for us to treat outsiders without respect. I am merely pointing out that it is not making such a distinction but the general maltreatment of outsiders that is at the heart of the problem.
Homogenity? Please; NHK has to *subtitle* the dialogue from thei news broadcasts in Kagoshima, the Okinawans are treated like second-class citizens, and the amount of businesses wholly owned and operated by Korean immigrants is utterly astounding. Japan likes to put on the appearance of being 'homogenous', but the exact opposite is the case -- there is a hell of a lot of social division in Japan, more than even in the U.S., and it causes problems.
First of all, by using the term "homogeneity", I was referring not to linguistic homogeneity but to the shared core values and patterns of behaviors stemming from them. Moreover, such linguistic differences are trivial since the post-war generations all can speak the so-called standard Japanese without much difficulties. I myself is a native speaker of the Nagoya dialect, but I have no problem at all communicating with people from other regions. Secondly, the Okinawans and Korean Japanese are very small groups. In fact, each group comprises less than 1% of the whole population. The situation is very different in the United States, where only 70% of the population is the majority and African Americans, the largest minority group comprises 13% of the population. (By the way, I have no problems at all with these two minority groups in Japan. One of my best college friends is an Okinawan from the Miyako island and I really like my sister's Korean Japanese boyfriend.)
Despite all the negative transference onto me, I wish you the best for the non-trivial endeavour of understanding the Japanese. After all, it is really nice to have somebody who is interested in and tries to understand my own culture, one of the closest things to my heart.
Disclaimer: I am a Japanese national who was born and grew up in Japan.
Japan doesn't allow ready immigration mostly because of long-standing racist policies
This statement is simply incorrect. The general racist attitude of the Japanese against Koreans has little to do with what you referred to as "racist policies." The Korean Japanese have historically been treated as collective scapegoats, whereas the long-held Japanese isolationist policies are largely due to the fact that the ways the Japanese interact with each other hinge on the homogeneity of Japanese society. The nation has a history that is vastly different from the history of the United States, and referring such policies as "racist" is a serious violation of the principle of cultural relativity.
Most Japanese laugh at their religions (Shinto and Buddhism) and don't take them seriously at all
I really have to take a strong issue with this statement. I am a Zen Buddhist and I take my religious beliefs very seriously. I also know many other Japanese whose lives center around their religious values, and your statement is outrageously insulting to them. Consciously or unconsciously, these religions affect the collective Japanese psyche in fundamental ways, which is evident in every aspect of Japanese life. Probably you didn't live in Japan long enough to see that.
I don't quite understand why the parent post was modded up as "interesting", where "flamebait" is appropriate. The parent poster's naïve assumption that s/he is not "Yet Another Fuckheaded Idiot who thinks they know everything" is fairly amusing. With my experience in the United States and other vastly uninformed posts on this Slashdot story, I am under the impression that most American people really don't take enough time to understand other cultures. (The Japanese are guilty of that, too.) It takes years, if not decades, to understand any given culture, and the danger of premature judgments and hasty generalizations cannot be stressed enough.
I bought an external drive from Seagate and my experience with the drive was absolutely horrendous.
It was so unreliable that I had to return the drive and paid a restocking fee.
I thought it was just me, but these user reviews suggest otherwise.
Personally I would not touch another Seagate product with a 10 foot pole.
> While I fully agree (and use the same argument to defend Americans),
> it still doesn't explain people stopping in the middle of the road to grab
> an ice cream or a drink from a vending machine.
Actually I could see very clearly where these weird-sounding 'Engrish' signs came from. These signs are direct translations of Japanese sentences. These translations do not make any sense because Japanese and English have different grammatical structures and there is no one-on-one mapping between Japanese words and English translations of them.
Traditionally, English education in Japan puts an almost exclusive emphasis on translations, especially from English into Japanese. So when the Japanese try to make signs in English, they usually come up with Japanese equivalents first and then directly translate them into English. This is a bad way to write in any language, but people do it anyways because that is the only way they know!
> It's that, despite having tens of thousands of american
> military members living in Japan, fully capable of proofreading
> for them, they decide to actually print these signs and banners
> without having anyone make sure they're anywhere near coherent.
These people making signs would never think they made mistakes because they would never admit that all the years of learning English is useless when it comes to writing. They either blindly believe in the quality of education (which is non-existent in my not so humble opinion), or they have too much pride to admit their incompetency.
So these 'Engrish' signs give me mixed feelings. They are actually pretty funny, but at the same time they are a poignant reflection of a larger social/cultural problem. It is just too bad... *sigh*
> You are indeed my hero. I'm still having trouble finishing 300g of rice with a full order of curry.
The dish was actually quite a sight. I ordered the curry with a pork cutlet (very stupid, but that was the whole point!), and that big cutlet looked like a tiny island in the vast ocean of rice! It was really funny! Highly recommended to any college student with a tight budget and a huge appetite.
I really do not know what to say about these signs... All I can say is, English education in Japan is so inefficient to the point where it is a national disgrace.
The general lack of competency in English in Japan does not really mean we are linguistically incapable, though. (At least my English is good enough to get me through graduate schools in the us.)
By the way, I love Coco-ichi, too. When I was in college, I once ordered a curry with 1300g of rice so that I could get a free meal with my picture framed in the restaurant. Those were the days...
sushi disks1 _id=37
1 _id=60
http://sa-store.com/shop.php?category_id=25&item0
more food
http://sa-store.com/shop.php?category_id=40&item0
shinto amulet
http://sa-store.com/shop.php?category_id=50
USB camera (from the old Gegege-no-kitaro cartoon)
http://sa-store.com/shop.php?category_id=48
mice
http://sa-store.com/shop.php?category_id=46
These things make me very proud of being a Japanese, hehe...
(Yes, we do have a sense of humor, albeit a rather wacky one.)
I am a graduate student studying psychology,
and I make extensive use of online databases such as PsycINFO
in order to find journal articles and books that are relevant to
the topic I do research on. Now, there are many edited books out there,
chapters in these books are contributed by different professional researchers,
and these databases tell me which chapter I might be interested in, with
complete chapter titles, abstracts and page numbers.
Normally if I want to get hold of these chapters I would go to the library of
my school, or order them through inter-library loans if I cannot find the books there,
and wait for a few weeks, which happens quite often actually.
With this service, I could do my research at home (or at the school library)
and instantly print out these chapters. ILLs are OK if you are not in a hurry,
but this service can help a great deal if you are on a tight deadline.
Well, the TRONCHIP subproject is considered to be dead for quite a while, or at least so I read. The last TRONCHIP to be produced was the Gmicro/400, which came out in 1994.
Um, if you wnat to create a GUI application on the T-Engine platform, you are supposed to use middleware programs such as PMC T-Shell Development Kit (screenshot in PDF) that runs on top of T-Kernel. This development kit is a direct descendant of the BTRON operating system and still rather primitive, but the situation is not as bad as you portrayed it to be in your post.
As always, the TRON Web is the most valuable source of infomation on the TRON project in English.
You can find some good articles on the T-Engine platform here.
I really don't think Ichitaro would disappear from the market anytime soon. Ichitaro used to dominate the word processor market back in the days of MS-DOS, just like Word Perfect did in the United States, and still remains a very important player. Major companies and a number of government branches still rely heavily on Ichitaro because it can produce documents in forms that are specific to the Japanese corporate and governmental culture, which is not possible with Microsoft Word. Just System is a major software company famous for their ATOK kana-kanji conversion system. Kana-kanji conversion systems are essential for Japanese input, and ATOK, with its smart lexical recognition AI engine, has been the unparalleled leader for over a decade.
Disclaimer: I don't mind paying money for good songs at all. I use JHymn to play songs on other platforms for which iTunes is not available. JHymn works beautifully for this purpose.
Even though they are a small fraction of the entire user base, Apple can make sure by shipping one button mice that they won't left behind confused with mutiple buttons. For the rest of us, there are always other options available.
I am a Japanese and therefore very proud of skilled hardware engineers and their products from my country. However, there is still one area in the technology industry in which the United States is undoubtedly far ahead of Japan: operating systems for personal computers. Although we do have some OSes in Japan, the most notable example of which is BTRON designed by Dr. Ken Sakamura of TRON fame, they are not comparable to their American counterparts by any measure in terms of functionality and the size of user base. Even though I would be hesitant to characterize products from Redmond as excellent, I use PowerBook G4 and OS X myself and I just love them. Even most Linux/*BSD hackers are either originally from the United States or have U.S. citizenship. The current state is really a shame for Japan, but it has deep roots in structural problems in society that stifles creativity and the abysmal state of the software industry in the nation with ridiculously underpaid programmers who suffer extremely long hours. Although I wish the situation would be otherwise, I do not think it will change in the foreseeable future.