While they're at it, ditch GTK for QT for better cross-platform behaviour so that Mac users can ditch X11 and Windows users can have better reliability.
Better idea: speed up development of GTK integration, especially for Mac, where the deficiencies are the largest. Integrating GTK properly for WIndows and OSX is likely less work than moving Gimp to something else, and would benefit many, many other applications as well.
They need to give the source to anyone they distribute to(assuming the program is actually GPL) who asks. If they distribute free to everyone, then anyone who asks for it has to be given the source, that's the whole point of the license.
If they distribute it to their customers only and one of their customers gives it to you, then you can ask the customer for the source and they have to provide it to you. But the OP isn't a customer. He has not been given a binary of the system by anybody. GPL or not, he simply has no right to the source as things stand. He can get the source in one of two ways: he can become a customer by buying a binary, or he can ask one of their existing customers to give or sell him a binary. Only at that point does he actually have a right to get the source code (for a fee if needed) as well.
If they've release a piece of software under the GPL then they have to do this(they can close future versions of the product and stop distributing the gpl'd versions, but as far as I can determine you can't ungpl something you've already distributed as gpl). They also have to do this if any of the software they've modified or linked to is GPL(exceptions for lesser GPL). Any code that is theirs, they can change the license at will. They can't change the license on already distributed code of course, but any new version, or just the current version they distribute, can be changed.
If you got the source from them, they can't revoke the rights of GPL from that copy of the code (and any subsequent copies). But as long as they are the sole copyright holders of the code (ie. they haven't been mixing other GPL code into theirs) they are free to say that from here on the license has changed from GPL to something else. This is what happened with SSH for instance, and the community responded by taking the last open source version and going on independently from there.
They don't need to give public or cost-free access to the source. All that is required is that they give the source to their customers, for a reasonable copy and distribution fee, if they ask for it.
And as for VNC and friends, well, if they didn't change that code they don't need to give you the source either.
Exactly. Never had a problem displaying adsense ads. They don't move and distract me from reading the page content. I regularly add any moving or big graphical ads to my blocklist though; the first adsense ad that annoys me will have me block google ads as well.
The platters are often glass nowadays. We opened a failed drive a year ago (slow day at work), and the platters themselves, when they break they tend to shatter into multiple small sharp shards. I would hazard that if you can beat the drive well enough that the platters break, you can do a really good job with just three or four whacks.
Oh, I'm very clear on what you intended to say. The problem is that that's not what you actually said. You said that if I don't verify the media or do the "test media" option from the install screen, then my installation will fail. That simply isn't true. Just pointing out a place where you might try improving your communication skills. Which was stated given the premise in the previous sentence - that the CD does, in fact, contain errors. I guess it can be hard to remember the gist of the previous sentence when you're hard at work understanding the next one.
If the user doesn't verify the burned CD, and doesn't do the "test media" thing on bootup your installation will fail.
So if I don't do post-burn checks, then the disc will be a bad burn? How odd... No, if you don't do post-burn checks you don't know the burn is bad and won't burn a second disk. It's a difficult concept, I know. Think it over; you'll get it I'm sure.
i'm sorry, but "incorrectly burned CD's" ? how can someone really incorrectly burn a CD? Somewhat poorly worded, perhaps, but the parent is right. It's not that unusual for a burned CD, perhaps burned on cheap media using an old burner, to contain errors. If the user doesn't verify the burned CD, and doesn't do the "test media" thing on bootup your installation will fail.
If owning harddrive manufacturing (the actual process which, note, is already taking place in Asia) is "national security" worthy, then pretty much everything is.
For instance, Japan and Europe could - and perhaps should - argue that food production certainly is "national security", both in terms of being self-sufficient so nobody can choke off the country, and in terms of risking evil foreigners secretly poisoning the food supply, and promptly choke off any import of any food that is also produced in country. OMG! GM crops could secretly have been made to spread and disable homegrown varieties!
You could just as plausibly argue that spreading ideas and framing issues is national security, and restrict import and distribution of foreign tv-programs, movies and other media. And how about those foreign-built airplanes and cars, operating systems and essential software - how do we know there isn't a secret function in the software to disable it in case of a conflict?
Silly? no more so than this.
I'd wish for a tit-for-tat arrangement, frankly. If foreigners, Swedes, say, are restricted from owning stuff in the US, US individuals and corporations would be similarly restricted in Sweden. If foreginers need to register fingerprints and risk body cavity searches coming to the US, so should Americans when going abroad. The expense, the inconvenience and the lost business would soon make sure that only those restrictions which really are important will remain while a lot of the pointless theatrics would disappear.
I, for one, look forward to the new real-time eye-tracking monitor solutions that tracks my focus on the screen and blur everything else than that. Or, er... ..which actually exists, and is pretty cool. The idea is have a constantly shifting jumble of letters, but show the real text at the point the reader is looking. So the reader sees a screenful of clear text, but anybody trying to look over the shoulder, or film the screen or anything will jsut get meaningless junk.
Only the part you're looking at will be in focus; the rest will be out of focus. Just like in real life, where you don't have any externally imposed blur, just your own eyes looking at one part at a time.
You don't get tired watching a two-hour cartoon, after all. Or spend a whole day reading stuff on a flat, in-focus surface.
OK. Time to stop importing US-made goods then. Everybody makes their own stuff and doesn't trade with others.
Fine with me, since there are no US-made goods left, only goods made in the third world and repackaged in the United States. Which is my whole point- we need to start making STUFF again instead of just managing a bunch of contracts that have no ability to be enforced. I'm sure you'll have fun making stuff without access to imported raw materials.
Of course, it means any idea or design owned by a manufacturer in one country will be unavailable in any other. Lots of medicines and other ideas you'd be without.
No, actually, it means that any idea or design owned by a manufacturer in one country is a patent that can't be enforced in another. It's not THAT hard to reverse engineer stuff. And vice versa.
fix it at the cash register instead by refusing to buy foreign-made goods.
OK. Time to stop importing US-made goods then. Everybody makes their own stuff and doesn't trade with others.
Of course, it means any idea or design owned by a manufacturer in one country will be unavailable in any other. Lots of medicines and other ideas you'd be without.
Thirty levels instead of twenty basically means there's more headroom for higher-level adventuring before normal players have to worry about abtruse and convoluted 'epic character' rulesets/feats/whatever that often feel very non-canon.
Overall good changes, I agree, and defining thirty levels is no negative, of course. I just want to point out that level caps are not actually a problem of a system; it's a matter of the gamemaster pacing their campaign story arc so that it can be finished without people hitting the cap.
Whatever the perceived quality loss of mp3 (and tests show it's minimal), it's completely irrelevant. Whether the format, the sound is run through a noisy amplifier in a music player, television or cheapo integrated stereo, gets the bass and highest tones overly boosted, then squeezed through tinny-sounding earphones or cheap integrated speakers.
And that is just fine. Yes, you can build a great sound (note: not music) experience by spending an enormous amount of time learning about audio technology and spending a very significant amount of money on great gear that work well together. And of course almost nobody bothers - it's too much work and wayyy too much money. And frankly, music generally doesn't need it. Your tunes will be as enjoyable to you almost no matter what equipment you use to listen to it. People used to find all-mechancal gramophones perfectly acceptable, and for a long time music was heard - and greatly enjoyed - when belted out by rank amateurs that couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.
You are not fusing genetically when you marry
on
'Til Tech Do Us Part
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Moving together or getting married does not (or should not, at least) entail giving up your individuality. If you have a problem sharing some resource, keep it separate. Just because you're a couple doesn't mean that you should be doing everything together, sharing every resource, or emulating Siamese twins in any other way.
I would say that it it's beneficial for the relationship to explicitly make sure both people have a space (physical, mental and time) of their own that the other does not intrude on without a go-ahead. If you have the space, a room of your own - even if it's the size of a closet - is a great idea. That's where you store all the stuff that's yours (like clothing - no more arguing about closet space), and that's where you can do work, keep your hobbies and so on. And since it's yours, there's no argument about cleaning up or anything. Same thing with having non-common friends, times when you go out for some activity on your own and so on.
Make sure you both have room to remain yourselves and the relationship will be stronger and more stable for it.
California is 83.85 per square kilometer. New York (state) is 155.18 per square kilometer. Massachusetts is 312.68 per square kilometer. Washington State is 34.20 per square kilometer. By contrast, Montana is 2.39 per square kilometer. Sweden has 20.0 Finland has 15.5
Countries which tend to rank among the highest in this regard. If California has four times the population density as well as a much larger population in absolute numbers, I don't really see how this would be a factor against the infrastructure.
Leica produces cameras in Europe. Don't know if Hasselblad still has a factory in Europe, though (if they do, that'd be another one). And Phase One is a Danish company, though again I don't know how much manufacturing they do in Europe. These are all niche products in any case.
The big European manufacturers, though, are Nokia and Sony-Ericson. Cameras on phones are the by far largest segment of photography equipment today, no matter what actual photo hobbyists think of them. Go to a tourist spot and cameraphones will be more common than any other type combined.
In any case, with the specs listed this just seems like a way to avoid having video equipment manufacturers slap a "photo mode" onto their stuff and avoid the tariff; no device primarily meant for photography has that kind of video abilities as far as I know. Why there is a tariff in the first place is a separate, good, question of course, but that segues into the wider issue of USA, EU and Japan trade barriers in general.
Many posters seem to miss a factor here: When laptops replace desktops for people, they aren't primarily bought for the ability to work untethered, "on your lap". They are used as desktops - small, light, quiet, stylish desktops that draw little power and that can quickly and easily be folded up out of sight if you have company, or if the kitchen table is the family work area and you need to clear up the table for dinner.
The need to regularly plug in the laptop.
As opposed to the desktop?
Poor battery lifetime and recharge cycle performance
Most laptops are never going to be used untethered for any significant amount of time. They mostly stay where they are.
The need to plug in various I/O devices
How many external devices do people actually have? I mean normal people, not people like us that read slashdot. And even I have a grand total of two external devices: an external mouse and a USB drive (plugged in only when doing backups). And again, the laptop is mostly going to sit on the desk and never move more than the twenty centimeters it takes to push it into the back to clear the desk space when doing the bills.
The wearing out of laptop clamshell hinges.
Not a failure mode I've commonly seen even among laptops that actually do see heavy use. The normal laptop will not see the screen shut often in any case.
The low quality of laptop keyboards as compared to the awesome stand-alone keyboards available.
But it is perfectly fine compared to the junk-level keyboard people get with their desktop purchase and which most people never think of replacing.
The need for mice and drawing pads.
Different from a desktop how? Especially if neither is actually ever moved around much. Besides, just plug your peripherals into a cheap USB hub (lots of cool designs and colors available), and you'll have one single plug to connect.
The limited screen size of a laptop (you can of course make an ultra-large screen laptop, but then it doesn't fit in your lap very well.)
It's not going to be on your lap. And most people get a 15-17 inch "value option" low-resolution screen for their desktop anyhow. That 14-15 inch high-res screen on the laptop is giving them a better display than what they would have gotten with the desktop.
The room inside a desktop for various hardware add-ons, such as PCI bus hardware, or highly accelerated graphics engines. Room for multiple drives.
Nobody but people like us ever open their case or do any other upgrade than possibly increase the memory. And then they do not do it themselves; they go to the store and have it done for them. A laptop is much easier to bring to the store than a desktop.
The basic mistake here is to assume that our needs and wants mirror that of the computer-buying population. We don't. We are the "die-hards" mentioned in the summary, and largely irrelevant. At my company we're only buying laptops for desktop use nowadays, and among my non-geek friends, nobody even considers a desktop when they ask for advice.
Few people ever upgrade their machines in their lifetime, and for the vast majority, opening the case is not even on the horizon. Likewise for most companies; by the time it's too slow or has too little memory it's already written off and will be replaced anyhow.
At the place I work, we do have lots of desktop machines, but new ones are bought mostly for "technical" use (like in ad-hoc clusters), not as desktops. When anybody needs a new machine, they get a laptop. The cost difference is not large, and they get a machine that is quieter and draws less power (noise and power both really add up in a largish office). And they won't need a second machine for doing presentations or taking along on trips.
At consumer stores here it is clear that laptops are the most popular type, trailed by "pseudo-desktops"; small machines with a desktop:y design (monitor and keyboard are sometimes separate units), but with the internals (and expandability) of a laptop. Actual, real desktops you need to go to the electronics district to buy.
That is certainly a factor. Citation rates for, say, Swedish research are substantially higher than for German, but there's no underlying reason for it to differ all that much. What does differ, however, is that swedish is a tiny language so people in science rarely publish anything in it; just about everything, from theses onwards, is done in english. Germany, by contrast, and even more so Japan, is large enough for there to be a viable german-speaking science audience so a lot of stuff gets published in that language.
The school-girl undie thing is a bit of a red herring. There is apparently one single machine in the country, in a red-light district in Tokyo, outside an adult store that owns and operates the machine mostly as a PR gimmick (which seems to have worked splendidly, seeing as to how well-known it is).
There are quite a few "normal" weird machines here though. I lived in a semi-rural area for a couple of years, and there were rice vending machines (2kg bags), and fresh egg machines. The idea is, people driving by can get local rice and other fresh produce without having to find and disturb a farmer or find some store in the area. Some stores have vending machines for off-time purchases; tourist spots tend to have battery and film vending machines; and there's some food vending machines with stuff like cup Ramen, canned oden and stuff like that. Beer and liquor machines do exist, but mostly in places like hotels, and they're apparently disappearing, outcompeted by convenience stores.
But yeah, of course, it's what is in the vending machines that counts. Next time you're in the States, see if you can buy something from a vending machine without some type of corn or corn-syrup or corn-byproduct as a major ingredient (sometimes it's even in 'diet' products, which have their own set of health threats).
Yes, the contents are rather different. In most drink vending machines, most drinks are cold or hot green teas and coffee, with a smaller amount of juices, water and sports drinks. Actual carbonated soda is very rare; it's not that unusual to see even Coca Cola vending machines that don't actually sell cola.
and the story of vending machines and fast-food restaurants,
There is something to what you write. But, here in Japan vending machines are absolutely everywhere - really, it's crazy; I walked about 3km every morning to my previous job, in a partly rural area and I realized that there was not a single spot along the route where I could not see at least one vending machine. And there has always been lots and lots of fast-food here as well as takeout meals; many traditional Japanese dishes like soba, onigiri, oden and so on are meant to eat quickly from a counter or street vendor cart, or while going from place to place, and the bento meal is ubiquitous. A traditional Japanese meal, furthermore, is an orgy in "grazing" behavior, with dozens of small dishes to eat in turn.
No, while "fast-food" style serving may contribute to creating bad habits, the main culprit is still what people eat, and how much of it, not how you eat it. Most Japanese meals just aren't very fattening; while you often have some part of the meal that is fatty or calorie-rich, you don't get much of it, while you often do get large amounts of vegetables, pickles and other lean stuff. A steak, for instance, may be 100 grams or so, and be just one dish of a dozen you get for your meal.
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While they're at it, ditch GTK for QT for better cross-platform behaviour so that Mac users can ditch X11 and Windows users can have better reliability.
Better idea: speed up development of GTK integration, especially for Mac, where the deficiencies are the largest. Integrating GTK properly for WIndows and OSX is likely less work than moving Gimp to something else, and would benefit many, many other applications as well.
If they distribute it to their customers only and one of their customers gives it to you, then you can ask the customer for the source and they have to provide it to you. But the OP isn't a customer. He has not been given a binary of the system by anybody. GPL or not, he simply has no right to the source as things stand. He can get the source in one of two ways: he can become a customer by buying a binary, or he can ask one of their existing customers to give or sell him a binary. Only at that point does he actually have a right to get the source code (for a fee if needed) as well. If they've release a piece of software under the GPL then they have to do this(they can close future versions of the product and stop distributing the gpl'd versions, but as far as I can determine you can't ungpl something you've already distributed as gpl). They also have to do this if any of the software they've modified or linked to is GPL(exceptions for lesser GPL). Any code that is theirs, they can change the license at will. They can't change the license on already distributed code of course, but any new version, or just the current version they distribute, can be changed.
If you got the source from them, they can't revoke the rights of GPL from that copy of the code (and any subsequent copies). But as long as they are the sole copyright holders of the code (ie. they haven't been mixing other GPL code into theirs) they are free to say that from here on the license has changed from GPL to something else. This is what happened with SSH for instance, and the community responded by taking the last open source version and going on independently from there.
They don't need to give public or cost-free access to the source. All that is required is that they give the source to their customers, for a reasonable copy and distribution fee, if they ask for it.
And as for VNC and friends, well, if they didn't change that code they don't need to give you the source either.
Exactly. Never had a problem displaying adsense ads. They don't move and distract me from reading the page content. I regularly add any moving or big graphical ads to my blocklist though; the first adsense ad that annoys me will have me block google ads as well.
The platters are often glass nowadays. We opened a failed drive a year ago (slow day at work), and the platters themselves, when they break they tend to shatter into multiple small sharp shards. I would hazard that if you can beat the drive well enough that the platters break, you can do a really good job with just three or four whacks.
So if I don't do post-burn checks, then the disc will be a bad burn? How odd... No, if you don't do post-burn checks you don't know the burn is bad and won't burn a second disk. It's a difficult concept, I know. Think it over; you'll get it I'm sure.
If owning harddrive manufacturing (the actual process which, note, is already taking place in Asia) is "national security" worthy, then pretty much everything is.
For instance, Japan and Europe could - and perhaps should - argue that food production certainly is "national security", both in terms of being self-sufficient so nobody can choke off the country, and in terms of risking evil foreigners secretly poisoning the food supply, and promptly choke off any import of any food that is also produced in country. OMG! GM crops could secretly have been made to spread and disable homegrown varieties!
You could just as plausibly argue that spreading ideas and framing issues is national security, and restrict import and distribution of foreign tv-programs, movies and other media. And how about those foreign-built airplanes and cars, operating systems and essential software - how do we know there isn't a secret function in the software to disable it in case of a conflict?
Silly? no more so than this.
I'd wish for a tit-for-tat arrangement, frankly. If foreigners, Swedes, say, are restricted from owning stuff in the US, US individuals and corporations would be similarly restricted in Sweden. If foreginers need to register fingerprints and risk body cavity searches coming to the US, so should Americans when going abroad. The expense, the inconvenience and the lost business would soon make sure that only those restrictions which really are important will remain while a lot of the pointless theatrics would disappear.
Only the part you're looking at will be in focus; the rest will be out of focus. Just like in real life, where you don't have any externally imposed blur, just your own eyes looking at one part at a time.
You don't get tired watching a two-hour cartoon, after all. Or spend a whole day reading stuff on a flat, in-focus surface.
Fine with me, since there are no US-made goods left, only goods made in the third world and repackaged in the United States. Which is my whole point- we need to start making STUFF again instead of just managing a bunch of contracts that have no ability to be enforced. I'm sure you'll have fun making stuff without access to imported raw materials. Of course, it means any idea or design owned by a manufacturer in one country will be unavailable in any other. Lots of medicines and other ideas you'd be without.
No, actually, it means that any idea or design owned by a manufacturer in one country is a patent that can't be enforced in another. It's not THAT hard to reverse engineer stuff. And vice versa.
fix it at the cash register instead by refusing to buy foreign-made goods.
OK. Time to stop importing US-made goods then. Everybody makes their own stuff and doesn't trade with others.
Of course, it means any idea or design owned by a manufacturer in one country will be unavailable in any other. Lots of medicines and other ideas you'd be without.
Thirty levels instead of twenty basically means there's more headroom for higher-level adventuring before normal players have to worry about abtruse and convoluted 'epic character' rulesets/feats/whatever that often feel very non-canon.
Overall good changes, I agree, and defining thirty levels is no negative, of course. I just want to point out that level caps are not actually a problem of a system; it's a matter of the gamemaster pacing their campaign story arc so that it can be finished without people hitting the cap.
Whatever the perceived quality loss of mp3 (and tests show it's minimal), it's completely irrelevant. Whether the format, the sound is run through a noisy amplifier in a music player, television or cheapo integrated stereo, gets the bass and highest tones overly boosted, then squeezed through tinny-sounding earphones or cheap integrated speakers.
And that is just fine. Yes, you can build a great sound (note: not music) experience by spending an enormous amount of time learning about audio technology and spending a very significant amount of money on great gear that work well together. And of course almost nobody bothers - it's too much work and wayyy too much money. And frankly, music generally doesn't need it. Your tunes will be as enjoyable to you almost no matter what equipment you use to listen to it. People used to find all-mechancal gramophones perfectly acceptable, and for a long time music was heard - and greatly enjoyed - when belted out by rank amateurs that couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.
Moving together or getting married does not (or should not, at least) entail giving up your individuality. If you have a problem sharing some resource, keep it separate. Just because you're a couple doesn't mean that you should be doing everything together, sharing every resource, or emulating Siamese twins in any other way.
I would say that it it's beneficial for the relationship to explicitly make sure both people have a space (physical, mental and time) of their own that the other does not intrude on without a go-ahead. If you have the space, a room of your own - even if it's the size of a closet - is a great idea. That's where you store all the stuff that's yours (like clothing - no more arguing about closet space), and that's where you can do work, keep your hobbies and so on. And since it's yours, there's no argument about cleaning up or anything. Same thing with having non-common friends, times when you go out for some activity on your own and so on.
Make sure you both have room to remain yourselves and the relationship will be stronger and more stable for it.
New York (state) is 155.18 per square kilometer.
Massachusetts is 312.68 per square kilometer.
Washington State is 34.20 per square kilometer.
By contrast, Montana is 2.39 per square kilometer. Sweden has 20.0
Finland has 15.5
Countries which tend to rank among the highest in this regard. If California has four times the population density as well as a much larger population in absolute numbers, I don't really see how this would be a factor against the infrastructure.
Leica produces cameras in Europe. Don't know if Hasselblad still has a factory in Europe, though (if they do, that'd be another one). And Phase One is a Danish company, though again I don't know how much manufacturing they do in Europe. These are all niche products in any case.
The big European manufacturers, though, are Nokia and Sony-Ericson. Cameras on phones are the by far largest segment of photography equipment today, no matter what actual photo hobbyists think of them. Go to a tourist spot and cameraphones will be more common than any other type combined.
In any case, with the specs listed this just seems like a way to avoid having video equipment manufacturers slap a "photo mode" onto their stuff and avoid the tariff; no device primarily meant for photography has that kind of video abilities as far as I know. Why there is a tariff in the first place is a separate, good, question of course, but that segues into the wider issue of USA, EU and Japan trade barriers in general.
Many posters seem to miss a factor here: When laptops replace desktops for people, they aren't primarily bought for the ability to work untethered, "on your lap". They are used as desktops - small, light, quiet, stylish desktops that draw little power and that can quickly and easily be folded up out of sight if you have company, or if the kitchen table is the family work area and you need to clear up the table for dinner.
The need to regularly plug in the laptop.
As opposed to the desktop?
Poor battery lifetime and recharge cycle performance
Most laptops are never going to be used untethered for any significant amount of time. They mostly stay where they are.
The need to plug in various I/O devices
How many external devices do people actually have? I mean normal people, not people like us that read slashdot. And even I have a grand total of two external devices: an external mouse and a USB drive (plugged in only when doing backups). And again, the laptop is mostly going to sit on the desk and never move more than the twenty centimeters it takes to push it into the back to clear the desk space when doing the bills.
The wearing out of laptop clamshell hinges.
Not a failure mode I've commonly seen even among laptops that actually do see heavy use. The normal laptop will not see the screen shut often in any case.
The low quality of laptop keyboards as compared to the awesome stand-alone keyboards available.
But it is perfectly fine compared to the junk-level keyboard people get with their desktop purchase and which most people never think of replacing.
The need for mice and drawing pads.
Different from a desktop how? Especially if neither is actually ever moved around much. Besides, just plug your peripherals into a cheap USB hub (lots of cool designs and colors available), and you'll have one single plug to connect.
The limited screen size of a laptop (you can of course make an ultra-large screen laptop, but then it doesn't fit in your lap very well.)
It's not going to be on your lap. And most people get a 15-17 inch "value option" low-resolution screen for their desktop anyhow. That 14-15 inch high-res screen on the laptop is giving them a better display than what they would have gotten with the desktop.
The room inside a desktop for various hardware add-ons, such as PCI bus hardware, or highly accelerated graphics engines. Room for multiple drives.
Nobody but people like us ever open their case or do any other upgrade than possibly increase the memory. And then they do not do it themselves; they go to the store and have it done for them. A laptop is much easier to bring to the store than a desktop.
The basic mistake here is to assume that our needs and wants mirror that of the computer-buying population. We don't. We are the "die-hards" mentioned in the summary, and largely irrelevant. At my company we're only buying laptops for desktop use nowadays, and among my non-geek friends, nobody even considers a desktop when they ask for advice.
Few people ever upgrade their machines in their lifetime, and for the vast majority, opening the case is not even on the horizon. Likewise for most companies; by the time it's too slow or has too little memory it's already written off and will be replaced anyhow.
At the place I work, we do have lots of desktop machines, but new ones are bought mostly for "technical" use (like in ad-hoc clusters), not as desktops. When anybody needs a new machine, they get a laptop. The cost difference is not large, and they get a machine that is quieter and draws less power (noise and power both really add up in a largish office). And they won't need a second machine for doing presentations or taking along on trips.
At consumer stores here it is clear that laptops are the most popular type, trailed by "pseudo-desktops"; small machines with a desktop:y design (monitor and keyboard are sometimes separate units), but with the internals (and expandability) of a laptop. Actual, real desktops you need to go to the electronics district to buy.
That is certainly a factor. Citation rates for, say, Swedish research are substantially higher than for German, but there's no underlying reason for it to differ all that much. What does differ, however, is that swedish is a tiny language so people in science rarely publish anything in it; just about everything, from theses onwards, is done in english. Germany, by contrast, and even more so Japan, is large enough for there to be a viable german-speaking science audience so a lot of stuff gets published in that language.
The school-girl undie thing is a bit of a red herring. There is apparently one single machine in the country, in a red-light district in Tokyo, outside an adult store that owns and operates the machine mostly as a PR gimmick (which seems to have worked splendidly, seeing as to how well-known it is).
There are quite a few "normal" weird machines here though. I lived in a semi-rural area for a couple of years, and there were rice vending machines (2kg bags), and fresh egg machines. The idea is, people driving by can get local rice and other fresh produce without having to find and disturb a farmer or find some store in the area. Some stores have vending machines for off-time purchases; tourist spots tend to have battery and film vending machines; and there's some food vending machines with stuff like cup Ramen, canned oden and stuff like that. Beer and liquor machines do exist, but mostly in places like hotels, and they're apparently disappearing, outcompeted by convenience stores.
But yeah, of course, it's what is in the vending machines that counts. Next time you're in the States, see if you can buy something from a vending machine without some type of corn or corn-syrup or corn-byproduct as a major ingredient (sometimes it's even in 'diet' products, which have their own set of health threats).
Yes, the contents are rather different. In most drink vending machines, most drinks are cold or hot green teas and coffee, with a smaller amount of juices, water and sports drinks. Actual carbonated soda is very rare; it's not that unusual to see even Coca Cola vending machines that don't actually sell cola.
and the story of vending machines and fast-food restaurants,
There is something to what you write. But, here in Japan vending machines are absolutely everywhere - really, it's crazy; I walked about 3km every morning to my previous job, in a partly rural area and I realized that there was not a single spot along the route where I could not see at least one vending machine. And there has always been lots and lots of fast-food here as well as takeout meals; many traditional Japanese dishes like soba, onigiri, oden and so on are meant to eat quickly from a counter or street vendor cart, or while going from place to place, and the bento meal is ubiquitous. A traditional Japanese meal, furthermore, is an orgy in "grazing" behavior, with dozens of small dishes to eat in turn.
No, while "fast-food" style serving may contribute to creating bad habits, the main culprit is still what people eat, and how much of it, not how you eat it. Most Japanese meals just aren't very fattening; while you often have some part of the meal that is fatty or calorie-rich, you don't get much of it, while you often do get large amounts of vegetables, pickles and other lean stuff. A steak, for instance, may be 100 grams or so, and be just one dish of a dozen you get for your meal.