I haven't had a landline for two years. I have a mobile phone with silent ring if it's someone not in the addressbook, and Skype with contact disabled if not approved by me. No telemarketing or nuisance calls whatsoever.
They are in use, but still only for small displays such as phones and mp3 players. Expect to see the same trend for any new display technology, as it is much easier to manufacture small displays than large ones.
Don't see these as laptops; they aren't. If you click the link on the Samsung 19" machine, it's obvious that these are rather the heir to the all-in-one portable desktops that were available some years ago (they tended to look like a sewing machine, with a detachable keyboard and a screen behind a side panel).
You don't lug these around every day, and you're not expected to. Instead, they are space-saving uncluttered desktops without the hassle of cables and multiple beige boxes to move around. You can take it out into the dining or living room to work or play for a few hours with the rest of your household instead of being relegated to some study or den. When it's time to clear the table you can just unplug it and move it away.
The format just looks rather like a laptop since it's the all-in-one form people are used to by now, and lots of components are made to accomodate it. I would prefer the sewing machine model myself (and Sony has some VAIO's for the Japanse market that are pretty close).
And you don't need ask Slashdot, you just try both options and see which profiles better.
But as other people have pointed out, the answer is not trivially one or the other. It depends on the architecture you run and the compiler you use. And if you don't actually have access to the architectures and compilers where your code may be running, it makes sense to ask if there is a general rule of thumb to follow if you don't know. If compilers generally are good/bad at optimizing one or the other that may be very valuable to know.
I do think you got my point, but just to make it clearer: Bill Gates is certainly an interesting person, but the things that make him interesting are not best (or at all) experienced in a large public gathering with him speaking from a stage.
No matter what your opinion of him, if the Richest Man in the world suddenly showed up in your Computer Science class as a guest speaker, that would be mindblowing.
Um, why?
Seriously, mindblowing? What does it actually give you, other than another security hysteria headache? If you are interested in his ideas, you can read or listen to what he says about various topics at your own leisure, and with much less hassle than going to a crowded lecture.
And if you are interested in "The Richest Man In The world", then I don't get the interest at all If it was "The Bearded Lady" it would at least be something to look at; this would be more akin to seeing The Man WHo Made The Worlds Biggest Ball Of Yarn, in that the person is not the interesting part.
So, a guy who famously became the richest person in the world by skipping college and leaving a technical career in favour of business is now trying to persuade people to go to college and study technology?
For any real programming task, the question has to be: why do you care baout that? Is it, specifically, a bottleneck in your code as detected with profiling tools?
When the programming task is something like real-time image processing (computer vision), this kind of thing can make a serious difference. If 90% of your time is spent running these kinds of loops over and over again, an improvement in time will make a real difference on what combination of methods you have time for; or how exhaustively you can search for features during one frame; or what resolution image you are able to work on.
If your code does something nice and graphical where 99% of the time is spent waiting for the user, sure, you're absolutely right. And if your system is doing something inherently bounded - it works until it's done, then it stops and waits until it's time again - then all you need is to make it fast enough and no faster. But there are real-world systems that today, and for the foreseeable future, are bounded by the available processing power and that can always benefit from any improvement in execution time.
Re:if not ads, who should pay for content?
on
Why Do You Block Ads?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So who should pay for content if ads shouldn't? Would you "subscribe" to a website?
Mostly no. Because most media is not good enough to be worth paying for. And yes, if that means it will not get created at all, then so be it. Nobody has a right to make a living creating content. If you can't make it compelling enough for your audience to pay for it (whether eyeball time, clicks or cash) then you should "realign" your business.
There is plenty of content of all kinds out there created as a labour of love, as a loss leader for other stuff or that manages to draw in enough bucks through ads or sponsorship.
I used to like reading the NYTimes colmunists. They are not always (or ever frequently) right; some columnists are probably a danger to my blodd pressure. But they are always very well written, and at least nominally thought through. Now they've disappeared behing a pay wall. Do I pay? Nope. There's punditry of similar quality to have by the ton out there. I see no reason to pay a substantial sum to read those particular good writers when I could spend all my waking hours reading other writers just as good already.
Something like Salon I could imagine paying for if the quality was more even. As it is, their "watch an ad" is nonintrusive enough (you see the ad before reading the content, not during) and reasonable enough that I do so instead.
Magazines I mostly do not buy, but that's because I have little time to actually read them, not because of ads. I watch very little television, and I always flip when a commercial is on. Again, the TV ads are intrusive, the magazine ads aren't.
A comparison between magazine/newspaper ads, and webpage ads:
The print ad is silent. It is unmoving. It is generally set in a style or manner that blends in with the page as a whole. If I want to look at it, I do. If I want to ignore it, no problem.
The webpage ad is moving. It is sometimes not even silent. It does everything it can to force me to look at it instead of the content I got to the page to read in the first place. It has a graphical style that usually clashes horribly with the web page - and that especially includes flash or graphical ads that assume I sit on a Windows machine with all things set to defaults, so they use a font, color scheme and fake UI controls that look utterly and screechingly out of place on my desktop. Flash ads especially make the page loading stutter as it starts up, disrupting my reading.
Oh, I don't block Google AdSense ads or other still, unobtrusive text ads. Why should I - they're not intruding and sometimes there's something interesting there to see.
See them as salesmen in a store. A discreet person being available in the background in case I want assistance is far more likely to make a sale than a loud manic guy in a clown suit buttonholing me the entire visit, blasting a cherry-red hown in my ear every ten seconds and screeching at the top of his lungs about the great deal he can give me on something I'm not there to buy.
Well, you think so right now. But fast forward 50 years ahead, no digital copies and what? No photos except few that you liked? Look it other way -- we see one or two vintage photos and wish that we could see more, even if they aren't perfect, but we can't. The same applies to your photos. Entropy will eat your digital copy one way or another, but printed photos will stay in the album.
I had a couple of photo albums; stuff I'd taken as a teenager, mostly of my family during vacations and stuff like that. Over the past twenty years of moving I have lost them. They were maybe stuffed in some box that got lost, or undiscovered in a pile of books sold to a bookstore, or in a pile of stuff being thrown away, or forgotten in a drawer I sold or...
I don't know what happened to them. My files are certainly not entirely future-proof. I can lessen the risk by having multiple copies (which I do), have some pictures emailed to friends and relatives (that may have them still if disaster strikes) and so on, but it's certainly not 100% safe. Neither, of course, was having my B/W pictures stuffed in albums.
I do know that printing pictures will just consign them to a waste paper pile (accidentally or by design) much sooner than the image files are lost.
I think you misunderstood my post - you think I do not print because it is inconvenient, expensive and we get ripped off on ink. That is not the case.
I do not print because I need paper copies of my images like I need a crankstart for a car. Or, more accurately, I need prints of my images the way I need printouts of my text documents. Hand me a beautifully printed stack of my images, and they will end up in a pile in a box somewhere - and undoubtedly thrown away, unseen, in the next big house cleaning.
Ok, a bit overstated, but I'm serious. Of all the pictures you take, how many actually _need_ to be printed? I'd say those few you want to hang on a wall, or put in a frame. For most people that is a precious few photographs per year; if nothing else, the amount of wall space and kindly relatives to foist the prints off to is very limited.
I take on the order of 10k pictures a year, thanks to the ease of digital photography. Perhaps 1/10, or about 1000, is actually worth saving at all (since it's so easy and cheap, it's usually a good idea to take multiple exposures of any one subject to avoid duds). Of those, maybe 2/3 are purely archival - they are a memento of some event or something, and I'd like to keep it, but they aren't really of any significance. If I lost them it would be a shame but not really a big deal. Of the rest (interesting enough to actually post-process), most of them will end up on Flickr, or emailed to people that may be interested, or simply shown on-screen. The number of images I would actually want to have hanging number in the single digits - and I have yet to go to the trouble to do so.
Do you ever see anyone without a TV lusting after a big screen plasma TV? Do you ever see someone without a computer lusting after the latest AMD processor?
No - they are probably too busy lusting for the newest macrobiotic growing manual, or really wanting to go to that Extended Bible Camp - Now With 20% More Holiness! they couldn't afford this year.
The reason someone without a TV doesn't lust for a big screen is of course the same reason they don't have a TV to begin with - they don't have an interest in it. Same thing with a computer, or a car, or vacation travels. Or books. If you have no interest in reading, getting more books will not make you happy.
Or, of course, family time. Some people (I can't guess how many) aren't spending more time with "their loved ones" because they are introverted and feel they are spending too much time with other people as it is. They moved away from their home town in part to get away from all those people, and they are not married since they don't really want to live with someone else again after having had to do so for their entire childhood. Or they are married but feel people are best in small doses, and so they spend a lot of time at work or with solitary hobbies instead. And they are happy.
Point is, we aren't all the same, and what makes a happy and fulfilling life will differ.
I'm surprised the article doesn't explore Religion and it's affect on people's happiness.
Probably because religion - just like many other things - are somewhat orthogonal to happiness. Being religious does not make you more or less likely to be happy.
I dare say it's not what you take an interest in that matters, but that you do take an interest in something that is the important thing. Whether you crusade for an old testament-based judicial system with mandatory stoning for wearing mixed fibers; or campaign for the right to gay sex with donkeys dressed up as nuns in public while smoking pot from a cross-shaped bong really doesn't matter for your happiness just as long as you are passionate about it.
Where is my flying car. Get on it. I was promised one more than 50 years ago.
Dear Public,
We'll deliver you your flying car once you show you can handle the responsibility. They aren't a toy, you know. And your current record with wheeled cars frankly doesn't inspire confidence. Maybe next year.
My recent pet peeve is tiny little icons, just for the sake of tiny little icons.
Of course, the fastest growing segment of connected platforms is the mobile phone/networked PDA type devices. They have pretty limited screen estate and low resolution. 8x8 icons make eminent sense for platforms like that.
What you're annoyed over aren't "tiny little icons", but an UI that doesn't scale to your device, either automatically (difficult to detect across devices) or manually, with a nice "make it bigger" button.
And you're absolutely right about developers tending to throw in wayyy too many icons into a UI. Windows apps are especially afflicted with it for some reason, but all platforms I've seen are guity of it to some extent. Icons only make sense if they are few enough, and visually distinct enough, that you can readily recognize them literally at a glance. Far better to have just the five-six most used operations as icons (make it modal if you will), and let the rest lie in the menus.
I'm not sure I agree. I actually don't really find Japan to be all that different when it comes to conformity; yes, it is fairly conservative compared to northern Europe, but I found the US was as socially rigid, disapproving and conservative when I lived there. The way conformity is expressed differs greatly of course, which is probably why it seems so much more prevalent to visitors.
And the "foreigner gets the dates" effect is just as prevalent in other countries and cultures. The grass is perennially greener somewhere else, and the foreign and exotic is always more exciting than the familiar.
One very real effect I've sen, though, is that a lot more younger women here are pushing for change than younger men (especially well-educated men). To make a gross overgeneralization, more young women wants to make a real career, while most younger professional men are still looking for a home-staying wife to be ground support for his career. Their attitude becomes more understandable when you realize that your future status in larger organizations in part depends on you having that kind of family to show your superiors (again, not unlike larger, conservative businesses in the west and the US especially, particularily in the financial sector). And it's not only to show your stability either; the company typically wants you to give all your time to the company, working insane hours, and you can't pull that off without support from home.
But hearing my female friends talk about this, seeing the rapid increase of middle-aged divorces (almost always initiated by the (house)wife) and considering how quickly attitudes can flip in this society, I'm thinking young conservative professionals may be in for a world of existential pain in the not too distant future.
However, it seems to be true that teaching is undervalued in the typical faculty job.
That could of course be because the people teaching aren't teachers at all. They are researchers - or want to be. It is certainly what they trained for during their PhD. The PhD, which, incidentally, is awarded all on the basis of your scientific work, and none whatsoever on any teaching experience or ability you may or may not have.
Thus many of the people in your faculty aren't there because they want to teach or have any actual aptitude for it. They are there becasue they desire to do science and the teaching is a regrettable sideline. They will of course all say that teaching is important and something they love doing - if they didn't say it, they would not get a position, and with no position you don't get grant money for your research.
Of course, for the most part being intelligent and capable people, many do manage to build up a reasonable ability to fake teaching, as in organizing a class, delivering lectures and administering tests. They do not hold a candle to a real, actual trained professional teacher of course; fortunately for them, since most "problem kids" won't be showing up in university, and since students are expcected to be adult and take responsibility for their own education, they do not have to deal with real teaching challenges the way a grade-school teacher has.
This does mean that if you want the best education you're really better off at a community college. The people teaching there do so because they really do love teaching and really are good at it. They don't see it as an annoying interruption, or a way to finance their research, or see a class as a cheap, convenient source of lab assistants/lecturers/test subjects.
Also, Japan is just a veritable breeding ground for fetishes in general.
Actually, living here I suspect that it's not that various fetishes are more common here than elsewhere. It's rather that it's much less of a social stigma, and so people are more open about it - which of course increases the available audience for material catering to it, which in turn greatly increases the visibility.
Also, the concept of "fetish" is a rather slippery one (entendre intended). In psychological litterature, having a strong preference for red hair counts as a fetish, but not a similarily strong preference for blonde or black hair. Nothing is a fetish in itself; it's very dependent on the social context. Having a strong preference for tall, blonde women would make you a fetishist in Japan; in Sweden you'd just be seen as boring. If everybody would like tentacle sex, it would cease to be a fetish at all.
No, for me - and for my definition, which is different - prions aren't alive.
Viruses ("virii" is cute, and I love the term just like I like "Elvii" for a bunch of Elvis impersonators, but technically wrong) are, well, kind of, but not really, alive according to the definition. They, individually, do not fight entropy; it doesn't eat or do anything else to gain energy, and if a virus is damaged, that's it - it doesn't heal. The genes they carry, however, do fight it.
The basic problem, as any philosophy student can tell you, is that "life" belongs to a large and diverse class of concepts that can't be captured by a closed-form definition. That doesn't mean it's useless to try - we get new insights about what the concept is with each attempt. The only thing that will cover the class of "living things" is a set (a large set, probably) of exemplars, and saying that anything resembling these is most likely alive. And we'll always have a large set of corner cases, like viruses, prions and other things, where "intelligent people may reasonably disagree", to take a concept that seems to have fallen out of favour lately.
In short, don't ever expect a definition of life that will actually be definite.
A nice definition of life is something like "Active maintenance of self in the face of entropy". In other words, something that actively (and successfully) keeps itself functioning and stable even though the vicissitudes of existence constantly try to tear you down.
Or, shorter, if you fight entropy you're alive. If you don't, you aren't.
Campaign donations are the ultimate form of free speech.
Money = speech - Interesting perspective.
It would mean that "I persuade a congressman to vote for a law" and "I pay a congressman to vote for a law" is the same thing. Well if you want to live in a society like that I guess it's fine.
Possibly the single most expected post I could imagine. Everytime the question of phobias crop up in any forum, some immature kid thinks it's funny to try to trick people like this. You _really_ think I'm not careful to click on links in this kind of a situation?
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't had a landline for two years. I have a mobile phone with silent ring if it's someone not in the addressbook, and Skype with contact disabled if not approved by me. No telemarketing or nuisance calls whatsoever.
They are in use, but still only for small displays such as phones and mp3 players. Expect to see the same trend for any new display technology, as it is much easier to manufacture small displays than large ones.
Don't see these as laptops; they aren't. If you click the link on the Samsung 19" machine, it's obvious that these are rather the heir to the all-in-one portable desktops that were available some years ago (they tended to look like a sewing machine, with a detachable keyboard and a screen behind a side panel).
You don't lug these around every day, and you're not expected to. Instead, they are space-saving uncluttered desktops without the hassle of cables and multiple beige boxes to move around. You can take it out into the dining or living room to work or play for a few hours with the rest of your household instead of being relegated to some study or den. When it's time to clear the table you can just unplug it and move it away.
The format just looks rather like a laptop since it's the all-in-one form people are used to by now, and lots of components are made to accomodate it. I would prefer the sewing machine model myself (and Sony has some VAIO's for the Japanse market that are pretty close).
And you don't need ask Slashdot, you just try both options and see which profiles better.
But as other people have pointed out, the answer is not trivially one or the other. It depends on the architecture you run and the compiler you use. And if you don't actually have access to the architectures and compilers where your code may be running, it makes sense to ask if there is a general rule of thumb to follow if you don't know. If compilers generally are good/bad at optimizing one or the other that may be very valuable to know.
Bill Gates IS an interesting person.
I do think you got my point, but just to make it clearer: Bill Gates is certainly an interesting person, but the things that make him interesting are not best (or at all) experienced in a large public gathering with him speaking from a stage.
No matter what your opinion of him, if the Richest Man in the world suddenly showed up in your Computer Science class as a guest speaker, that would be mindblowing.
Um, why?
Seriously, mindblowing? What does it actually give you, other than another security hysteria headache? If you are interested in his ideas, you can read or listen to what he says about various topics at your own leisure, and with much less hassle than going to a crowded lecture.
And if you are interested in "The Richest Man In The world", then I don't get the interest at all If it was "The Bearded Lady" it would at least be something to look at; this would be more akin to seeing The Man WHo Made The Worlds Biggest Ball Of Yarn, in that the person is not the interesting part.
So, a guy who famously became the richest person in the world by skipping college and leaving a technical career in favour of business is now trying to persuade people to go to college and study technology?
For any real programming task, the question has to be: why do you care baout that? Is it, specifically, a bottleneck in your code as detected with profiling tools?
When the programming task is something like real-time image processing (computer vision), this kind of thing can make a serious difference. If 90% of your time is spent running these kinds of loops over and over again, an improvement in time will make a real difference on what combination of methods you have time for; or how exhaustively you can search for features during one frame; or what resolution image you are able to work on.
If your code does something nice and graphical where 99% of the time is spent waiting for the user, sure, you're absolutely right. And if your system is doing something inherently bounded - it works until it's done, then it stops and waits until it's time again - then all you need is to make it fast enough and no faster. But there are real-world systems that today, and for the foreseeable future, are bounded by the available processing power and that can always benefit from any improvement in execution time.
So who should pay for content if ads shouldn't? Would you "subscribe" to a website?
Mostly no. Because most media is not good enough to be worth paying for. And yes, if that means it will not get created at all, then so be it. Nobody has a right to make a living creating content. If you can't make it compelling enough for your audience to pay for it (whether eyeball time, clicks or cash) then you should "realign" your business.
There is plenty of content of all kinds out there created as a labour of love, as a loss leader for other stuff or that manages to draw in enough bucks through ads or sponsorship.
I used to like reading the NYTimes colmunists. They are not always (or ever frequently) right; some columnists are probably a danger to my blodd pressure. But they are always very well written, and at least nominally thought through. Now they've disappeared behing a pay wall. Do I pay? Nope. There's punditry of similar quality to have by the ton out there. I see no reason to pay a substantial sum to read those particular good writers when I could spend all my waking hours reading other writers just as good already.
Something like Salon I could imagine paying for if the quality was more even. As it is, their "watch an ad" is nonintrusive enough (you see the ad before reading the content, not during) and reasonable enough that I do so instead.
Because they're intrusive, that's why.
Magazines I mostly do not buy, but that's because I have little time to actually read them, not because of ads. I watch very little television, and I always flip when a commercial is on. Again, the TV ads are intrusive, the magazine ads aren't.
A comparison between magazine/newspaper ads, and webpage ads:
The print ad is silent. It is unmoving. It is generally set in a style or manner that blends in with the page as a whole. If I want to look at it, I do. If I want to ignore it, no problem.
The webpage ad is moving. It is sometimes not even silent. It does everything it can to force me to look at it instead of the content I got to the page to read in the first place. It has a graphical style that usually clashes horribly with the web page - and that especially includes flash or graphical ads that assume I sit on a Windows machine with all things set to defaults, so they use a font, color scheme and fake UI controls that look utterly and screechingly out of place on my desktop. Flash ads especially make the page loading stutter as it starts up, disrupting my reading.
Oh, I don't block Google AdSense ads or other still, unobtrusive text ads. Why should I - they're not intruding and sometimes there's something interesting there to see.
See them as salesmen in a store. A discreet person being available in the background in case I want assistance is far more likely to make a sale than a loud manic guy in a clown suit buttonholing me the entire visit, blasting a cherry-red hown in my ear every ten seconds and screeching at the top of his lungs about the great deal he can give me on something I'm not there to buy.
Well, you think so right now. But fast forward 50 years ahead, no digital copies and what? No photos except few that you liked? Look it other way -- we see one or two vintage photos and wish that we could see more, even if they aren't perfect, but we can't. The same applies to your photos. Entropy will eat your digital copy one way or another, but printed photos will stay in the album.
...
I had a couple of photo albums; stuff I'd taken as a teenager, mostly of my family during vacations and stuff like that. Over the past twenty years of moving I have lost them. They were maybe stuffed in some box that got lost, or undiscovered in a pile of books sold to a bookstore, or in a pile of stuff being thrown away, or forgotten in a drawer I sold or
I don't know what happened to them. My files are certainly not entirely future-proof. I can lessen the risk by having multiple copies (which I do), have some pictures emailed to friends and relatives (that may have them still if disaster strikes) and so on, but it's certainly not 100% safe. Neither, of course, was having my B/W pictures stuffed in albums.
I do know that printing pictures will just consign them to a waste paper pile (accidentally or by design) much sooner than the image files are lost.
I think you misunderstood my post - you think I do not print because it is inconvenient, expensive and we get ripped off on ink. That is not the case.
I do not print because I need paper copies of my images like I need a crankstart for a car. Or, more accurately, I need prints of my images the way I need printouts of my text documents. Hand me a beautifully printed stack of my images, and they will end up in a pile in a box somewhere - and undoubtedly thrown away, unseen, in the next big house cleaning.
Why print at all?
Ok, a bit overstated, but I'm serious. Of all the pictures you take, how many actually _need_ to be printed? I'd say those few you want to hang on a wall, or put in a frame. For most people that is a precious few photographs per year; if nothing else, the amount of wall space and kindly relatives to foist the prints off to is very limited.
I take on the order of 10k pictures a year, thanks to the ease of digital photography. Perhaps 1/10, or about 1000, is actually worth saving at all (since it's so easy and cheap, it's usually a good idea to take multiple exposures of any one subject to avoid duds). Of those, maybe 2/3 are purely archival - they are a memento of some event or something, and I'd like to keep it, but they aren't really of any significance. If I lost them it would be a shame but not really a big deal. Of the rest (interesting enough to actually post-process), most of them will end up on Flickr, or emailed to people that may be interested, or simply shown on-screen. The number of images I would actually want to have hanging number in the single digits - and I have yet to go to the trouble to do so.
Do you ever see anyone without a TV lusting after a big screen plasma TV? Do you ever see someone without a computer lusting after the latest AMD processor?
No - they are probably too busy lusting for the newest macrobiotic growing manual, or really wanting to go to that Extended Bible Camp - Now With 20% More Holiness! they couldn't afford this year.
The reason someone without a TV doesn't lust for a big screen is of course the same reason they don't have a TV to begin with - they don't have an interest in it. Same thing with a computer, or a car, or vacation travels. Or books. If you have no interest in reading, getting more books will not make you happy.
Or, of course, family time. Some people (I can't guess how many) aren't spending more time with "their loved ones" because they are introverted and feel they are spending too much time with other people as it is. They moved away from their home town in part to get away from all those people, and they are not married since they don't really want to live with someone else again after having had to do so for their entire childhood. Or they are married but feel people are best in small doses, and so they spend a lot of time at work or with solitary hobbies instead. And they are happy.
Point is, we aren't all the same, and what makes a happy and fulfilling life will differ.
I'm surprised the article doesn't explore Religion and it's affect on people's happiness.
Probably because religion - just like many other things - are somewhat orthogonal to happiness. Being religious does not make you more or less likely to be happy.
I dare say it's not what you take an interest in that matters, but that you do take an interest in something that is the important thing. Whether you crusade for an old testament-based judicial system with mandatory stoning for wearing mixed fibers; or campaign for the right to gay sex with donkeys dressed up as nuns in public while smoking pot from a cross-shaped bong really doesn't matter for your happiness just as long as you are passionate about it.
Where is my flying car.
Get on it. I was promised one more than 50 years ago.
Dear Public,
We'll deliver you your flying car once you show you can handle the responsibility. They aren't a toy, you know. And your current record with wheeled cars frankly doesn't inspire confidence. Maybe next year.
All the best,
Science
My recent pet peeve is tiny little icons, just for the sake of tiny little icons.
Of course, the fastest growing segment of connected platforms is the mobile phone/networked PDA type devices. They have pretty limited screen estate and low resolution. 8x8 icons make eminent sense for platforms like that.
What you're annoyed over aren't "tiny little icons", but an UI that doesn't scale to your device, either automatically (difficult to detect across devices) or manually, with a nice "make it bigger" button.
And you're absolutely right about developers tending to throw in wayyy too many icons into a UI. Windows apps are especially afflicted with it for some reason, but all platforms I've seen are guity of it to some extent. Icons only make sense if they are few enough, and visually distinct enough, that you can readily recognize them literally at a glance. Far better to have just the five-six most used operations as icons (make it modal if you will), and let the rest lie in the menus.
I'm not sure I agree. I actually don't really find Japan to be all that different when it comes to conformity; yes, it is fairly conservative compared to northern Europe, but I found the US was as socially rigid, disapproving and conservative when I lived there. The way conformity is expressed differs greatly of course, which is probably why it seems so much more prevalent to visitors.
And the "foreigner gets the dates" effect is just as prevalent in other countries and cultures. The grass is perennially greener somewhere else, and the foreign and exotic is always more exciting than the familiar.
One very real effect I've sen, though, is that a lot more younger women here are pushing for change than younger men (especially well-educated men). To make a gross overgeneralization, more young women wants to make a real career, while most younger professional men are still looking for a home-staying wife to be ground support for his career. Their attitude becomes more understandable when you realize that your future status in larger organizations in part depends on you having that kind of family to show your superiors (again, not unlike larger, conservative businesses in the west and the US especially, particularily in the financial sector). And it's not only to show your stability either; the company typically wants you to give all your time to the company, working insane hours, and you can't pull that off without support from home.
But hearing my female friends talk about this, seeing the rapid increase of middle-aged divorces (almost always initiated by the (house)wife) and considering how quickly attitudes can flip in this society, I'm thinking young conservative professionals may be in for a world of existential pain in the not too distant future.
However, it seems to be true that teaching is undervalued in the typical faculty job.
That could of course be because the people teaching aren't teachers at all. They are researchers - or want to be. It is certainly what they trained for during their PhD. The PhD, which, incidentally, is awarded all on the basis of your scientific work, and none whatsoever on any teaching experience or ability you may or may not have.
Thus many of the people in your faculty aren't there because they want to teach or have any actual aptitude for it. They are there becasue they desire to do science and the teaching is a regrettable sideline. They will of course all say that teaching is important and something they love doing - if they didn't say it, they would not get a position, and with no position you don't get grant money for your research.
Of course, for the most part being intelligent and capable people, many do manage to build up a reasonable ability to fake teaching, as in organizing a class, delivering lectures and administering tests. They do not hold a candle to a real, actual trained professional teacher of course; fortunately for them, since most "problem kids" won't be showing up in university, and since students are expcected to be adult and take responsibility for their own education, they do not have to deal with real teaching challenges the way a grade-school teacher has.
This does mean that if you want the best education you're really better off at a community college. The people teaching there do so because they really do love teaching and really are good at it. They don't see it as an annoying interruption, or a way to finance their research, or see a class as a cheap, convenient source of lab assistants/lecturers/test subjects.
Also, Japan is just a veritable breeding ground for fetishes in general.
Actually, living here I suspect that it's not that various fetishes are more common here than elsewhere. It's rather that it's much less of a social stigma, and so people are more open about it - which of course increases the available audience for material catering to it, which in turn greatly increases the visibility.
Also, the concept of "fetish" is a rather slippery one (entendre intended). In psychological litterature, having a strong preference for red hair counts as a fetish, but not a similarily strong preference for blonde or black hair. Nothing is a fetish in itself; it's very dependent on the social context. Having a strong preference for tall, blonde women would make you a fetishist in Japan; in Sweden you'd just be seen as boring. If everybody would like tentacle sex, it would cease to be a fetish at all.
If this doohickey can climb 1000 feet it can climb a hundred million, assuming the battery holds out.
Of course, then why test 300 meters? Just hang a line from the ceiling; if it can climb 3 meters it can climb 300.
No, for me - and for my definition, which is different - prions aren't alive.
Viruses ("virii" is cute, and I love the term just like I like "Elvii" for a bunch of Elvis impersonators, but technically wrong) are, well, kind of, but not really, alive according to the definition. They, individually, do not fight entropy; it doesn't eat or do anything else to gain energy, and if a virus is damaged, that's it - it doesn't heal. The genes they carry, however, do fight it.
The basic problem, as any philosophy student can tell you, is that "life" belongs to a large and diverse class of concepts that can't be captured by a closed-form definition. That doesn't mean it's useless to try - we get new insights about what the concept is with each attempt. The only thing that will cover the class of "living things" is a set (a large set, probably) of exemplars, and saying that anything resembling these is most likely alive. And we'll always have a large set of corner cases, like viruses, prions and other things, where "intelligent people may reasonably disagree", to take a concept that seems to have fallen out of favour lately.
In short, don't ever expect a definition of life that will actually be definite.
A nice definition of life is something like "Active maintenance of self in the face of entropy". In other words, something that actively (and successfully) keeps itself functioning and stable even though the vicissitudes of existence constantly try to tear you down.
Or, shorter, if you fight entropy you're alive. If you don't, you aren't.
Campaign donations are the ultimate form of free speech.
Money = speech - Interesting perspective.
It would mean that "I persuade a congressman to vote for a law" and "I pay a congressman to vote for a law" is the same thing. Well if you want to live in a society like that I guess it's fine.
Possibly the single most expected post I could imagine. Everytime the question of phobias crop up in any forum, some immature kid thinks it's funny to try to trick people like this. You _really_ think I'm not careful to click on links in this kind of a situation?