Unfortunately, even if you can read Japanese, most of the sellers on Rakuten auctions will not ship overseas. Almost all the auctions say: "gaikoku hassou: nihonkokunai gentei" (overseas shipping: limited to inside Japan).
Yep, because of the expense and extra uncertainty about getting paid, getting the shipping right, who pays customs (and how much is it), dealing with all these issues with someone who may not share a common language at all, and so on. More of a headache than it's worth when you have a more than sufficient domestic customer base already. There's a couple of ways around it, though:
* Set up a post box in Japan (there's companies providing such services) then forward it to your overseas address. Expensive, even more of a hassle, and only worth it if you're doing some kind of regular trading.
* Ask a friend/acquaintance in Japan to accept and forward the stuff. You can only do it for the very occasional item, you pile up debt payable in beer or favours in kind, you need to trust a third party implicitly, and you do need to know someone in Japan in the first place.
Internationally, of course there is. If you're in Japan you use Rakuten, not eBay, for instance. Unless you're looking for something you only found there, going abroad to eBay is expensive, slow and risky compared to your local auction and trading site.
That goes the other way around too, of course. If you are an American or European with a serious craving for Japanese cultural ephemera, there's a lot at Rakuten (and other sites) you will never find at eBay or European sites - but you need to be able to read Japanese and take the risk and cost of dealing in an overseas country.
If they really cared about this fine they'd refuse to pay it and watch the uproar that would ensue when it became illegal to sell Windows in the EU.
When a company or private individual refuses to pay a fine, what happens is they have the tax authorities impound goods or money up to the amount. And if they still refuse, the impounded assets are sold off to pay the fine (with any surplus going back to the previous owner of course). In the case of MS, they have various national subsidiaries with associated corporate accounts that would easily cover a fine of even this size. Nobody is going to stop selling Windows over this.
In practice, of course, if a fine is finalized, MS (or any company) pays. Having authorities raid your offices, with pictures of grim-looking officials carrying off financial records by the boxfuls is enough of a PR disaster that refusing isn't an option - especially since non-payment shows up pretty starkly in the company credit and especially since you end up paying the money in any case so you don't even actually gain anything by the pointless gesture.
For the most part, the Japanese ryugakusei seem to prefer second-rate books by hacks.
Well, you look at the book top lists in any country and you'll find the same thing. "real" literature is not normally popular - and it has never been. That is usually a fairly small insider group writing to each other. And to at least some of the practicioners and followers, the lack of popular appeal is part of the draw; it's another way to be a member of a club, something we humans seem irresistable drawn to in whatever way we can.
The question is perhaps a bit ill posed. Manga doesn't have the negative, childish connotations here that comics do in the west. At least some of it is considered literature to the same extent as books without images.
That said, at least here in Osaka, on a typical commuter train I normally see perhaps 1/3 manga to 2/3 "normal" books - of course there's plenty of trashy, cheap novels sold as commuter fodder out there worse in quality than good manga, so it reflects only on the choice of medium, not quality.
I'd also say that for everyone reading something on paper you have two or three people doing email, playing games or listening to music on their mobile phones. If you want to know what seems to overtake books as casual entertainment, there's your answer.
First, there's two kinds of robotics out there. There's the classical robotics like factory automation systems, which are made to be as reliable and predictable as possible. If you want to work in that field, you probably should have gotten an MEng in mechanical engineering and gone on to a PhD within the field specializing in control systems.
Then there's adaptive robotics, closer to what people in general think of when they hear about robots. Adaptive, self-reliant systems perhaps capable of interaction with humans and able to get about in the world on the worlds' terms, not on their own. And there, I'm afraid, a CompSci degree is not going to cut it.
Doing real adaptive robotics is a hard problem. It requires a lot of different subspecialities, from mechanical engineering to learning theory to neuroscience. You may have physicists, linguists, mathematicians, behavioral psychologists and neurobiologists all on the same team. And most of them will know AI and programming well enough already. It would have been a lot easier for you had you focused on on a field like the ones above rather than CompSci, to be frank.
What you likely need is to be accepted at a PhD program with robotics somewhere; preferably one that lets - or requires - you widen your field to really learn one of the needed specialities as you go along. Since adaptive robotics is very experimental still, there really is no good training outside a PhD program, and nobody is going to take you seriously unless you have that doctorate anyhow.
Wow. I had no idea this was happening. How can this not be a death sentence for religeon in these places?
Well, in some ways this system is.
Sweden had this system up until recently. The church is/was essentially a semi-pricate government agency, and had responisibiliy for things like the census keeping (one reason genealogy is popular in scandinavia is due to the very complete, very old records available in the state churches), death-related administrativia (don't know the term in English where you evaluate and divide an estate) and so on. Quite a large part of the church tax actually went to these functions (and another part went for cultural upkeep of valuable old buildings and stull like that).
However, I'd argue that the church-as-agency is one reason very few people are actively religious. When everybody is a "member", membership ceases to mean anything. It's like being a "member" of the local tax-paying base. As membership ceases to have a meaning, so, by association, do the rituals and traditions associated with it. I'm not saying that this is a main reason for the lack of religiosity and I'm not even sure what the causal direction is. I do think it is a real factor, though. Japan, too, had "state shinto" for a long time, and is today largely secular in a similar manner to scandinavia.
So as a happy atheist, the best way to spread the happy news ("there really is no psychotic deity out to mess up your life!") might well be to let the avowedly religious "win", thereby inoculating the society from overt religiosity. If there was a way to mitigate the damage done meanwhile, of course.
Interesting idea. Or maybe it's the other way round, that many European cities had to be rebuilt after WW2.
Widespread urban electrification happened a lot earlier than the 1940's (before or around the turn of the century I beleive). Besides which, AFAIK, there is no difference in the style of transmission between countries that participated directly and those that were largely unaffected (from an architectural point of view).
I just don't think one can argue that solving primes is more important than curing cancer.
Note that he never said it was more important, but that it was more interesting to him. Very different and makes his argument perfectly valid.
And if you take important as the scale, I would argue that SETI probably trumps cancer research in importance of a positive result for humanity (note "humanity" as distinct from "humans"). With cancer or not humanity will go on as usual, but knowing it's not the only sentient species changes a lot.
Much of central and, I think, southern Europe is similar in this regard, too.;) I don't know why, we don't usually get that much snow here; I know I was always a bit puzzled by pictures of American cities with their jungle of overhead wiring.
I think that may have someting to do with central and southern European cities largely being old and built out of stone. It means there was lots of relatively large and fairly accessible underground conduits like early sewer systems and gas lines to use. It also means there's precious little space on the narrow streets to actually put up electricity poles and run wires. And once the dense, narrow city centres went with underground wire systems, they were just extended along with everything else out into newer, suburban areas.
Or, that's my conjecture anyway - it could have been a secret society of construction company-owning hypnotists influencing local electricity boards in a nefarious plan to develop the nascent the street-digging market.
BTW, if you think US is bad with wiring, visit Japan sometime:)
In urban areas in Sweden it's all below ground. It's in part, I believe, because of snow; rural areas (where underground cables become far too expensive) have a predictable power outage mess every winter as some storm weighs down lines enough to break them (cue predictable news images of army units clearing snow off calbe poles and some farmer with no backup generator milking his cows by hand). It's also because of zoning laws - power companies have no choice. I believe much of nothern Europe at least is similar in this regard?
Here in Japan, on the other hand, it's all above ground. In part because of the relative lack of zoning laws (Japanese city architecture is delightfully, ah, surprising as a result), but according to people here it's mosty because of the prevalence of earthquakes, the one thing buried cables are not protected against. Sure, overhead cables will break too, but it'll be easier to fix.
I can understand the situation here in Japan, but really, it's a pretty hideous sight. So your power may end up getting slightly more expensive as a result (though this is dwarfed by other factors), but it's worth it. If saving money is all there is about city living, why not allow people to dump their trash in the street as well?
If anyone at all needs to be on guard it is hosting companies but to say that every user should be keeping a constant eye out for child porn is just stupid.
Well, yes. The whole point is to have users _not_ keep a constant eye out for child porn after all.
This isn't to say I disagree with your overall argument, however. I'm not so sure that the quality differences are going to be sufficiently significant to the average viewer (which would include myself) to matter.
For what it's worth, I saw a side-by-side demo today in southern Osaka. Two nice, large Panasonic plasma screens; one with a recent brand-name DVD player, one with HD-DVD. And yes, I could see the difference. A bit less artefacting, clearer small-scale detail.
But I was standing less than two meters from a large screen that was likely set up and tuned by someone who does it for a living, and the difference, while clearly visible, was nowhere near spectacular. On a setup at home (even with the identical equipment), with not very appropriate lighting, no properly adjusted image, and sitting twice as far away, I really doubt I would notice any difference whatsoever.
Who is going to pay for an Internet connection on a really long flight when their laptop battery can't carry a charge long enough to use it all the way?
I get 7-8 hours on a charge on my Panasonic laptop if I'm a bit careful. And since you don't use the laptop on takeoff, landing or when eating, it lasts me from Japan to Europe - long enough.
I've used it or some service like it (no idea if there's more than one; these flights are on an Airbus not Boeing) on flights between Japan and Europe, and believe me, it's worth every penny.
Twelve hours of slow agony is transformed into an almost pleasant experience. When you can email and IM friends and family; check all your regular sites; search and read up on research you didn't have time for earlier; check out an endless variety of flash-games and other trivia. The mediocre in-flight movies just can't compete.
When it was held in Stockholm, the university of Teheran won the final over an italian team in the big league. The best US team came fourth, I believe.
If we want to be serious for a change, why mess with bacteria (or mice)? If you're going to attach some kind of container to the disk anyway, just fill it with agood solvent. The disk surface isn't a homogenous metal plate, but a composite held together by a bonding agent. Just flush the drive with something that will either dissolve the bond, etch the surface or both, and you're done.
Of course, it's not as much fun as high-tech bacteria or high-speed mice:)
If thermite doesn't do a good job, go one better and make the platters out of thermite. Make the motor axle out of magnesium, add a fuse and you're set.
If the burning is a problem, just make the platters from cheddar cheese, and add a mouse in a cage adjacent to the drive. Open the hatch, and problem is solved.
Theo mentions "personal emails" and "previous discussions".
Something which for most people, amazingly, does not lead to the kind of immature name-calling normally reserved for the second-graders cafeteria table.
The OP is completely right; he's just made it harder for anybody to back down or find a solution. Completely unnecessarily.
Absolutely. I've worked for that kind of place myself.
It's competely understandable - they started the company, toiled night and day to make their fledging enterprise survive and thrive. They've known every single thing going on for years. It can't be easy to face up to the fact that the place really has outgrown them; that they don't know every employee personally; that they don't have, and can't have, the kind of control and knowledge that they've lived with for so long. It's their little baby, and relinquishing control must be extremely difficult.
If working for a startup only pays a normal salary, why would anybody work for one instead of a more stable company? Options are supposed to make up for the added risk of unemployment.
Again, and as the story poster found out, options are a lottery, not an income source.
What you get by working at a startup? Little bureaucracy and short decision paths; well-focused, exciting projects; tightly knit organization where everybody knows each other; quick career advancement (and commensurate salary increase) if the enterprise grows.
On the other hand, of course, you have the lack of security; long hours; greater risk of interpersonal conflicts; (megalo)maniacal owners that insist on detailed control long after the organization has grown beyond their ability to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you suggest one or more of these forwarding companies?
Nope. I live in Japan so I've never had the need. I've heard it's possible though (a friend used to get her monthly manga fix that way).
Unfortunately, even if you can read Japanese, most of the sellers on Rakuten auctions will not ship overseas. Almost all the auctions say: "gaikoku hassou: nihonkokunai gentei" (overseas shipping: limited to inside Japan).
Yep, because of the expense and extra uncertainty about getting paid, getting the shipping right, who pays customs (and how much is it), dealing with all these issues with someone who may not share a common language at all, and so on. More of a headache than it's worth when you have a more than sufficient domestic customer base already. There's a couple of ways around it, though:
* Set up a post box in Japan (there's companies providing such services) then forward it to your overseas address. Expensive, even more of a hassle, and only worth it if you're doing some kind of regular trading.
* Ask a friend/acquaintance in Japan to accept and forward the stuff. You can only do it for the very occasional item, you pile up debt payable in beer or favours in kind, you need to trust a third party implicitly, and you do need to know someone in Japan in the first place.
Nationally/internationally, there isn't.
Internationally, of course there is. If you're in Japan you use Rakuten, not eBay, for instance. Unless you're looking for something you only found there, going abroad to eBay is expensive, slow and risky compared to your local auction and trading site.
That goes the other way around too, of course. If you are an American or European with a serious craving for Japanese cultural ephemera, there's a lot at Rakuten (and other sites) you will never find at eBay or European sites - but you need to be able to read Japanese and take the risk and cost of dealing in an overseas country.
If they really cared about this fine they'd refuse to pay it and watch the uproar that would ensue when it became illegal to sell Windows in the EU.
When a company or private individual refuses to pay a fine, what happens is they have the tax authorities impound goods or money up to the amount. And if they still refuse, the impounded assets are sold off to pay the fine (with any surplus going back to the previous owner of course). In the case of MS, they have various national subsidiaries with associated corporate accounts that would easily cover a fine of even this size. Nobody is going to stop selling Windows over this.
In practice, of course, if a fine is finalized, MS (or any company) pays. Having authorities raid your offices, with pictures of grim-looking officials carrying off financial records by the boxfuls is enough of a PR disaster that refusing isn't an option - especially since non-payment shows up pretty starkly in the company credit and especially since you end up paying the money in any case so you don't even actually gain anything by the pointless gesture.
For the most part, the Japanese ryugakusei seem to prefer second-rate books by hacks.
Well, you look at the book top lists in any country and you'll find the same thing. "real" literature is not normally popular - and it has never been. That is usually a fairly small insider group writing to each other. And to at least some of the practicioners and followers, the lack of popular appeal is part of the draw; it's another way to be a member of a club, something we humans seem irresistable drawn to in whatever way we can.
The question is perhaps a bit ill posed. Manga doesn't have the negative, childish connotations here that comics do in the west. At least some of it is considered literature to the same extent as books without images.
That said, at least here in Osaka, on a typical commuter train I normally see perhaps 1/3 manga to 2/3 "normal" books - of course there's plenty of trashy, cheap novels sold as commuter fodder out there worse in quality than good manga, so it reflects only on the choice of medium, not quality.
I'd also say that for everyone reading something on paper you have two or three people doing email, playing games or listening to music on their mobile phones. If you want to know what seems to overtake books as casual entertainment, there's your answer.
First, there's two kinds of robotics out there. There's the classical robotics like factory automation systems, which are made to be as reliable and predictable as possible. If you want to work in that field, you probably should have gotten an MEng in mechanical engineering and gone on to a PhD within the field specializing in control systems.
Then there's adaptive robotics, closer to what people in general think of when they hear about robots. Adaptive, self-reliant systems perhaps capable of interaction with humans and able to get about in the world on the worlds' terms, not on their own. And there, I'm afraid, a CompSci degree is not going to cut it.
Doing real adaptive robotics is a hard problem. It requires a lot of different subspecialities, from mechanical engineering to learning theory to neuroscience. You may have physicists, linguists, mathematicians, behavioral psychologists and neurobiologists all on the same team. And most of them will know AI and programming well enough already. It would have been a lot easier for you had you focused on on a field like the ones above rather than CompSci, to be frank.
What you likely need is to be accepted at a PhD program with robotics somewhere; preferably one that lets - or requires - you widen your field to really learn one of the needed specialities as you go along. Since adaptive robotics is very experimental still, there really is no good training outside a PhD program, and nobody is going to take you seriously unless you have that doctorate anyhow.
Wow. I had no idea this was happening. How can this not be a death sentence for religeon in these places?
Well, in some ways this system is.
Sweden had this system up until recently. The church is/was essentially a semi-pricate government agency, and had responisibiliy for things like the census keeping (one reason genealogy is popular in scandinavia is due to the very complete, very old records available in the state churches), death-related administrativia (don't know the term in English where you evaluate and divide an estate) and so on. Quite a large part of the church tax actually went to these functions (and another part went for cultural upkeep of valuable old buildings and stull like that).
However, I'd argue that the church-as-agency is one reason very few people are actively religious. When everybody is a "member", membership ceases to mean anything. It's like being a "member" of the local tax-paying base. As membership ceases to have a meaning, so, by association, do the rituals and traditions associated with it. I'm not saying that this is a main reason for the lack of religiosity and I'm not even sure what the causal direction is. I do think it is a real factor, though. Japan, too, had "state shinto" for a long time, and is today largely secular in a similar manner to scandinavia.
So as a happy atheist, the best way to spread the happy news ("there really is no psychotic deity out to mess up your life!") might well be to let the avowedly religious "win", thereby inoculating the society from overt religiosity. If there was a way to mitigate the damage done meanwhile, of course.
Interesting idea. Or maybe it's the other way round, that many European cities had to be rebuilt after WW2.
Widespread urban electrification happened a lot earlier than the 1940's (before or around the turn of the century I beleive). Besides which, AFAIK, there is no difference in the style of transmission between countries that participated directly and those that were largely unaffected (from an architectural point of view).
I just don't think one can argue that solving primes is more important than curing cancer.
Note that he never said it was more important, but that it was more interesting to him. Very different and makes his argument perfectly valid.
And if you take important as the scale, I would argue that SETI probably trumps cancer research in importance of a positive result for humanity (note "humanity" as distinct from "humans"). With cancer or not humanity will go on as usual, but knowing it's not the only sentient species changes a lot.
Much of central and, I think, southern Europe is similar in this regard, too. ;) I don't know why, we don't usually get that much snow here; I know I was always a bit puzzled by pictures of American cities with their jungle of overhead wiring.
:)
I think that may have someting to do with central and southern European cities largely being old and built out of stone. It means there was lots of relatively large and fairly accessible underground conduits like early sewer systems and gas lines to use. It also means there's precious little space on the narrow streets to actually put up electricity poles and run wires. And once the dense, narrow city centres went with underground wire systems, they were just extended along with everything else out into newer, suburban areas.
Or, that's my conjecture anyway - it could have been a secret society of construction company-owning hypnotists influencing local electricity boards in a nefarious plan to develop the nascent the street-digging market.
BTW, if you think US is bad with wiring, visit Japan sometime
In urban areas in Sweden it's all below ground. It's in part, I believe, because of snow; rural areas (where underground cables become far too expensive) have a predictable power outage mess every winter as some storm weighs down lines enough to break them (cue predictable news images of army units clearing snow off calbe poles and some farmer with no backup generator milking his cows by hand). It's also because of zoning laws - power companies have no choice. I believe much of nothern Europe at least is similar in this regard?
Here in Japan, on the other hand, it's all above ground. In part because of the relative lack of zoning laws (Japanese city architecture is delightfully, ah, surprising as a result), but according to people here it's mosty because of the prevalence of earthquakes, the one thing buried cables are not protected against. Sure, overhead cables will break too, but it'll be easier to fix.
I can understand the situation here in Japan, but really, it's a pretty hideous sight. So your power may end up getting slightly more expensive as a result (though this is dwarfed by other factors), but it's worth it. If saving money is all there is about city living, why not allow people to dump their trash in the street as well?
A CF-R3 - I believe it's part of the toughbook line, yes.
If anyone at all needs to be on guard it is hosting companies but to say that every user should be keeping a constant eye out for child porn is just stupid.
Well, yes. The whole point is to have users _not_ keep a constant eye out for child porn after all.
This isn't to say I disagree with your overall argument, however. I'm not so sure that the quality differences are going to be sufficiently significant to the average viewer (which would include myself) to matter.
For what it's worth, I saw a side-by-side demo today in southern Osaka. Two nice, large Panasonic plasma screens; one with a recent brand-name DVD player, one with HD-DVD. And yes, I could see the difference. A bit less artefacting, clearer small-scale detail.
But I was standing less than two meters from a large screen that was likely set up and tuned by someone who does it for a living, and the difference, while clearly visible, was nowhere near spectacular. On a setup at home (even with the identical equipment), with not very appropriate lighting, no properly adjusted image, and sitting twice as far away, I really doubt I would notice any difference whatsoever.
Who is going to pay for an Internet connection on a really long flight when their laptop battery can't carry a charge long enough to use it all the way?
I get 7-8 hours on a charge on my Panasonic laptop if I'm a bit careful. And since you don't use the laptop on takeoff, landing or when eating, it lasts me from Japan to Europe - long enough.
I've used it or some service like it (no idea if there's more than one; these flights are on an Airbus not Boeing) on flights between Japan and Europe, and believe me, it's worth every penny.
Twelve hours of slow agony is transformed into an almost pleasant experience. When you can email and IM friends and family; check all your regular sites; search and read up on research you didn't have time for earlier; check out an endless variety of flash-games and other trivia. The mediocre in-flight movies just can't compete.
Don't mod "informative" - I was wrong and naturally thought this was about RoboCup. This is about some radio-controlled competition.
I mean, who'd think anyone would schedule anything robot-related while RoboCup was going on?
It has been in Stockholm? I remember RoboCup being here (Stockholm) some years ago. Is it related by any chance?
*slaps my head repeatedly with a frozen trout*
I thought about RoboCup the whole time. My parent post is thus _not_ "+1 informative", it's "-1000 moron at the keyboard".
I should know the difference; I was part of the group rigging the lighting for Robocup in Stockholm.
Anyone else suprised we got first?
When it was held in Stockholm, the university of Teheran won the final over an italian team in the big league. The best US team came fourth, I believe.
If we want to be serious for a change, why mess with bacteria (or mice)? If you're going to attach some kind of container to the disk anyway, just fill it with agood solvent. The disk surface isn't a homogenous metal plate, but a composite held together by a bonding agent. Just flush the drive with something that will either dissolve the bond, etch the surface or both, and you're done.
:)
Of course, it's not as much fun as high-tech bacteria or high-speed mice
If thermite doesn't do a good job, go one better and make the platters out of thermite. Make the motor axle out of magnesium, add a fuse and you're set.
If the burning is a problem, just make the platters from cheddar cheese, and add a mouse in a cage adjacent to the drive. Open the hatch, and problem is solved.
Theo mentions "personal emails" and "previous discussions".
Something which for most people, amazingly, does not lead to the kind of immature name-calling normally reserved for the second-graders cafeteria table.
The OP is completely right; he's just made it harder for anybody to back down or find a solution. Completely unnecessarily.
These kind of owners are not limited to startups.
Absolutely. I've worked for that kind of place myself.
It's competely understandable - they started the company, toiled night and day to make their fledging enterprise survive and thrive. They've known every single thing going on for years. It can't be easy to face up to the fact that the place really has outgrown them; that they don't know every employee personally; that they don't have, and can't have, the kind of control and knowledge that they've lived with for so long. It's their little baby, and relinquishing control must be extremely difficult.
If working for a startup only pays a normal salary, why would anybody work for one instead of a more stable company? Options are supposed to make up for the added risk of unemployment.
Again, and as the story poster found out, options are a lottery, not an income source.
What you get by working at a startup? Little bureaucracy and short decision paths; well-focused, exciting projects; tightly knit organization where everybody knows each other; quick career advancement (and commensurate salary increase) if the enterprise grows.
On the other hand, of course, you have the lack of security; long hours; greater risk of interpersonal conflicts; (megalo)maniacal owners that insist on detailed control long after the organization has grown beyond their ability to do so.
It's all in what you value most.