Consider that, fishing around in your pocket, a $1 bill bears a striking resemblance to a $50 bill, $20 bill, $10 bill, $5 bill, and $2 bill. Does this make the $1 bill difficult to use or identify?
Yes, it does. Most other countries use different sizes or relief printing so they are distinguishable by feel. You may not have a problem; consider people with poor eyesight, however, or situations in low-light.
If we can replace the grader with a computer program and it does as good a job, that doesn't represent a triumph for the programmer; it represents a failure of our education system.
Why is it a failure? Do you suddenly not learn the things you needed to write the paper?
The teacher already knows what you wrote. He or she has seen your arguments literally hundreds of times. That is not the valuse of the essay. Instead, the value is that you are forced to structure and use what you know, which helps you immensely with understanding.
I study Japanese at the moment, and one part of my homework for next week is to take a news item of my choice, write a summary of it in Japanese, and be prepared to discuss it in class. Now, I am very confident in my teacher's ability to read the daily paper without my help; the point of this homework - like that of undergraduate essays - is not the actual content, but that it makes me use what I learn in a structured way. If she ignores the news item itself, and Rottweiler-like latches on to my use of particles that is just expected and welcome.
Likewise, and undergraduate essay - in any subject - is not an original piece of work and is not meant to be. They are "finger exercizes", and grading them at a superficial level is not only inevitable, it is the right level for undergraduate courses.
But how would hidden talent and creativity be found? How will the teacher know if his students are actually trying hard to write their papers when all he does is check the thing with a computer program?
The subject is sociology, not English or creative writing. The papers test your undestanding of the subject matter and nothing else. If anything, being "creative" probably makes your argument needlessly hard to follow and obscures the subject matter, which is a bad thing. Being formulaic and boring means your text is easily parseable by people that know the field, which is a good thing.
If you believe teachers - even good, concientious ones - really delve into your work at more than an utterly superficial level, you are mistaken. No matter how dedicated you are, if you have fifty papers to grade, and five days to do so, you will be superficial about it. There is simply no time for anything else.
Perversely, the worse a paper is, the more time it receives; it's more important, and more difficult, to motivate a failing grade than a good one. Also, to some extent all good papers (or assignments) are alike and can be spotted fairly easily; it's the bad ones that are (regrettably) unique and need individual attention.
I see a great business opportunity for Europeans and others with good English skills. Set up your blog with a com adress and get paid by American pressure groups to blog about an American candidate, or against the opponent. And of course, since none of the blog - not the servers, ISP or blogger - has any connection to the US, this legislation doesn't apply to them.
So US-based bloggers become limited as to how much they can work for an election, whereas European bloggers (generally leaning less conservative) have no such limits. Sounds good to me.
Since advertising can just be ripped out, they would right the song about the product. Like if it was a love song, they'd be sure and mention their love of Pepsi.
Could be a bit awkward, though. I know I'd prefer hearing Whitney Houston singing "I will always love you." over "I will always love Depends" or "I will always love Burton-McClaughley Financial Reinsurance Services a subsidiary of GlobalCo Incorporated no statement shall be taken as an indication of future financial performance".
Or maybe that would be an improvement in this particular case...
Good. Now you've just justified lawyers taking a bigger cut of the victim's settlement to cover costs. I hope you still have that triumphant "I screwed someone who screws the little guy" feeling....and the worlds smallest violing is playing the worlds saddest song...
Or the business will go to lawyers that can offer better terms because they are not trolling for clients by buying medical adwords (or chasing ambulances, or doing high-pressure sales on people that are ill, injured, frightened and in pain).
I don't see a problem with disclosing contact info either.
That said, ".us" doesn't look like a government site anymore than ".se" looks like a Swedish one, or ".jp" looks like the Japanese government. Not a very good argument for it.
The point of blogging depends entirely on your desired audience. You go all the way from people fishing for as wide an audience as possible, to a blog most like a private journal, except it's sort-of public as a way to solicit feedback.
You can have blogs aiming for your chess/vintage car/BDSM-club, for other developers in your company, for your family or whatever. I write a blog, and my targeted audience is my family and my friends; in effect, it's a substitute for occasional group emails. If somebody else happens to stumble onto it they are welcome to read it, but it'll probably be pretty boring for them. That's ok - they aren't the target audience after all.
Of course, we'll have obsessive loners substituting the face of their object of desire onto every porn reel they have, further fueling the obsession. Just what we need.
Philosophically speaking, what right does one individual (the State) have to *force* another individual (me) never to choose the gender of my child?
Since you are invoking the state as just another individual, surely harm against it would be sufficient reason according to your own analysis. If you get a pronounced gender imbalance, you'll have a lot of social unrest which is patently bad for that individual.
I agree with the other poster - this project sounds like it's set up to fail.
You haven't mentioned a timeframe for the project. If it's a year or more, really, seriously consider studying Japanese half-time during your stay (you really should be able to make a good case for it, seeing as how localization is supposed to be the point). Also, make a point of befriending people and absorbing the local culture. When you are fired and the project cancelled, you have a couple of pretty weighty bullet points to add to your resume.
Oh, and don't sweat being in Japan too much. It's not all that different from Scandinavia, for example; just go with the flow, learn from your experiences and try not to make too big an ass of yourself and you'll be fine. Just like everywhere, if people percieve that you are making an honest effort, they will be very gracious about stuff and very willing to help you out.
Living in this country is a very worthwhile experience.
The Japanese code I've seen (which admittedly is a bit limited) mostly uses english-based wording for stuff like variable, function and class names.
Comments, on the other hand, are of course usually in Japanese. On the third hand, most peoples' comments don't really become any more understandable just because you have them in a language you know:)
I'd say the big challenge is in the string translations. You really need someone with both really good working (not just study) knowledge of both languages as well as at least some domain knowledge. If you haven't, it's going to be an ugly mess no matter what you do.
Evince seems very promising (not to mention the whole emerging framework thing that seems to be going around lately).
The one thing I have not seen any other reader than Acrobat do is form filling. Get that into Poppler (or would it be evince/KPDF?), and you would make a lot of people very, very happy.
There is no place on the planet that is *completely* safe from natural disaster.
You are absolutely right, of course.
However, it's not a binary choice of "safe" versus "unsafe"; it's a smooth range. And some places are inherently a lot less safe than others.
Living within the expected reach of a known active volcano is one of those less safe places. Just beneath, or on top of, a steep cliff is another. Along a river known to overflow would be a third.
The problem is that we really like those unsafe places, and for good reason. Floods and volcanic eruptions make for good farming. Steep cliffs make for amazing views.
I'd be interested in hearing about the new technology since then as well as what they plan to do.
They? Do? Who are those "they", exactly? If you are living close to an active volcano, I'd say "I" is a better way to frame that question than "they".
And as for doing, it's a volcano - if it starts acting up, you get out of the way, that's about all you can do. A very effective first step would be not living close to an active volcano in the first place.
Um, that one doesn't seem to have a tuner at all. Note that the Plextor can use both PAL and NTSC signals as well; it only has a tuner for NTSC, though.
Interesting piece of kit anyway - thanks for the link.
Half the problem (here in Japan at least) is the very patchy support for i18n - not only translations, but CJK input, printing and so on reasonably well configured out of the box. Biggest Linux distro I've seen here? "Vine Linux" - Redhat with Japanese support set up right and repackaged.
John Dvorak knows the state of Linux drivers versus Windows (or Mac) perfectly well. This is an excellent example of writing something obviously incorrect so you get a huge amount of hits and links from people that (rightly) disagree.
Exactly like the Science Citation Index, actually, but speeded up about 20 times.
I usually don't know what airplane model, or manufacturer, I fly with when traveling between Europe and Asia. I have absolutely no idea who makes the engines, ever.
And why should I know? I rely on other, knowledgeable (geeky) airplane people to make that choice for me. It doesn't make me stupid. I am way too busy with decisions that actually affect my life in a material way to bother about that kind of fluff. It does not make me stupid.
People aren't stupid. Let me say that again: people are not stupid, they are not dumb, they are not morons (with a few exceptions - and they are _few_). What they are, by and large, is interested in other things than computing - like, for instance, the work or play they want to accomplish with their computers, rather than the machines themselves.
People are perfectly able to understand the difference between Windows, OSX and Linux - they just don't particularily care. And in that situation, yes, put up enough roadblocks to Windows use and people will gradually switch, just like US people abandoned domestic cars for Japanese ones when they became compelling enough. Not everybody switched, and not all at once (since everybody has a different tipping point), but certainly enough to change the commercial landscape.
Please note that I wasn't referring to the US at all; those same rectangular packets with instant noodles are popular all over the world (including Japan itself). It's quick, it's really cheap and you need next to nothing in equipment or cooking knowledge to prepare it.
By contrast, real Ramen is much tastier but it is more expensive and very difficult to actually make yourself; boiling pig bones for several hours for the tonkotsu broth isn't something you really want to do yourself when you can buy a finished bowl down the street.
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Consider that, fishing around in your pocket, a $1 bill bears a striking resemblance to a $50 bill, $20 bill, $10 bill, $5 bill, and $2 bill. Does this make the $1 bill difficult to use or identify?
Yes, it does. Most other countries use different sizes or relief printing so they are distinguishable by feel. You may not have a problem; consider people with poor eyesight, however, or situations in low-light.
If we can replace the grader with a computer program and it does as good a job, that doesn't represent a triumph for the programmer; it represents a failure of our education system.
Why is it a failure? Do you suddenly not learn the things you needed to write the paper?
The teacher already knows what you wrote. He or she has seen your arguments literally hundreds of times. That is not the valuse of the essay. Instead, the value is that you are forced to structure and use what you know, which helps you immensely with understanding.
I study Japanese at the moment, and one part of my homework for next week is to take a news item of my choice, write a summary of it in Japanese, and be prepared to discuss it in class. Now, I am very confident in my teacher's ability to read the daily paper without my help; the point of this homework - like that of undergraduate essays - is not the actual content, but that it makes me use what I learn in a structured way. If she ignores the news item itself, and Rottweiler-like latches on to my use of particles that is just expected and welcome.
Likewise, and undergraduate essay - in any subject - is not an original piece of work and is not meant to be. They are "finger exercizes", and grading them at a superficial level is not only inevitable, it is the right level for undergraduate courses.
But how would hidden talent and creativity be found? How will the teacher know if his students are actually trying hard to write their papers when all he does is check the thing with a computer program?
The subject is sociology, not English or creative writing. The papers test your undestanding of the subject matter and nothing else. If anything, being "creative" probably makes your argument needlessly hard to follow and obscures the subject matter, which is a bad thing. Being formulaic and boring means your text is easily parseable by people that know the field, which is a good thing.
If you believe teachers - even good, concientious ones - really delve into your work at more than an utterly superficial level, you are mistaken. No matter how dedicated you are, if you have fifty papers to grade, and five days to do so, you will be superficial about it. There is simply no time for anything else.
Perversely, the worse a paper is, the more time it receives; it's more important, and more difficult, to motivate a failing grade than a good one. Also, to some extent all good papers (or assignments) are alike and can be spotted fairly easily; it's the bad ones that are (regrettably) unique and need individual attention.
"Laypeople will see a new idea and wonder 'Why?'.
A scientist will see a new idea and wonder 'Can I get funding for doung this?'"
I see a great business opportunity for Europeans and others with good English skills. Set up your blog with a com adress and get paid by American pressure groups to blog about an American candidate, or against the opponent. And of course, since none of the blog - not the servers, ISP or blogger - has any connection to the US, this legislation doesn't apply to them.
So US-based bloggers become limited as to how much they can work for an election, whereas European bloggers (generally leaning less conservative) have no such limits. Sounds good to me.
Since advertising can just be ripped out, they would right the song about the product. Like if it was a love song, they'd be sure and mention their love of Pepsi.
Could be a bit awkward, though. I know I'd prefer hearing Whitney Houston singing "I will always love you." over "I will always love Depends" or "I will always love Burton-McClaughley Financial Reinsurance Services a subsidiary of GlobalCo Incorporated no statement shall be taken as an indication of future financial performance".
Or maybe that would be an improvement in this particular case...
Good. Now you've just justified lawyers taking a bigger cut of the victim's settlement to cover costs. I hope you still have that triumphant "I screwed someone who screws the little guy" feeling. ...and the worlds smallest violing is playing the worlds saddest song...
Or the business will go to lawyers that can offer better terms because they are not trolling for clients by buying medical adwords (or chasing ambulances, or doing high-pressure sales on people that are ill, injured, frightened and in pain).
I never thought speed was a problem with Google but they seem very concerned. Why?
Perhaps it's never been a problem precisely because they are very concerned with it at all times.
I don't see a problem with disclosing contact info either.
That said, ".us" doesn't look like a government site anymore than ".se" looks like a Swedish one, or ".jp" looks like the Japanese government. Not a very good argument for it.
The point of blogging depends entirely on your desired audience. You go all the way from people fishing for as wide an audience as possible, to a blog most like a private journal, except it's sort-of public as a way to solicit feedback.
/BDSM-club, for other developers in your company, for your family or whatever. I write a blog, and my targeted audience is my family and my friends; in effect, it's a substitute for occasional group emails. If somebody else happens to stumble onto it they are welcome to read it, but it'll probably be pretty boring for them. That's ok - they aren't the target audience after all.
You can have blogs aiming for your chess/vintage car
Of course, we'll have obsessive loners substituting the face of their object of desire onto every porn reel they have, further fueling the obsession. Just what we need.
Philosophically speaking, what right does one individual (the State) have to *force* another individual (me) never to choose the gender of my child?
Since you are invoking the state as just another individual, surely harm against it would be sufficient reason according to your own analysis. If you get a pronounced gender imbalance, you'll have a lot of social unrest which is patently bad for that individual.
I agree with the other poster - this project sounds like it's set up to fail.
You haven't mentioned a timeframe for the project. If it's a year or more, really, seriously consider studying Japanese half-time during your stay (you really should be able to make a good case for it, seeing as how localization is supposed to be the point). Also, make a point of befriending people and absorbing the local culture. When you are fired and the project cancelled, you have a couple of pretty weighty bullet points to add to your resume.
Oh, and don't sweat being in Japan too much. It's not all that different from Scandinavia, for example; just go with the flow, learn from your experiences and try not to make too big an ass of yourself and you'll be fine. Just like everywhere, if people percieve that you are making an honest effort, they will be very gracious about stuff and very willing to help you out.
Living in this country is a very worthwhile experience.
The Japanese code I've seen (which admittedly is a bit limited) mostly uses english-based wording for stuff like variable, function and class names.
:)
Comments, on the other hand, are of course usually in Japanese. On the third hand, most peoples' comments don't really become any more understandable just because you have them in a language you know
I'd say the big challenge is in the string translations. You really need someone with both really good working (not just study) knowledge of both languages as well as at least some domain knowledge. If you haven't, it's going to be an ugly mess no matter what you do.
Evince seems very promising (not to mention the whole emerging framework thing that seems to be going around lately).
The one thing I have not seen any other reader than Acrobat do is form filling. Get that into Poppler (or would it be evince/KPDF?), and you would make a lot of people very, very happy.
There is no place on the planet that is *completely* safe from natural disaster.
You are absolutely right, of course.
However, it's not a binary choice of "safe" versus "unsafe"; it's a smooth range. And some places are inherently a lot less safe than others.
Living within the expected reach of a known active volcano is one of those less safe places. Just beneath, or on top of, a steep cliff is another. Along a river known to overflow would be a third.
The problem is that we really like those unsafe places, and for good reason. Floods and volcanic eruptions make for good farming. Steep cliffs make for amazing views.
I'd be interested in hearing about the new technology since then as well as what they plan to do.
They? Do? Who are those "they", exactly? If you are living close to an active volcano, I'd say "I" is a better way to frame that question than "they".
And as for doing, it's a volcano - if it starts acting up, you get out of the way, that's about all you can do. A very effective first step would be not living close to an active volcano in the first place.
Um, that one doesn't seem to have a tuner at all. Note that the Plextor can use both PAL and NTSC signals as well; it only has a tuner for NTSC, though.
Interesting piece of kit anyway - thanks for the link.
Half the problem (here in Japan at least) is the very patchy support for i18n - not only translations, but CJK input, printing and so on reasonably well configured out of the box. Biggest Linux distro I've seen here? "Vine Linux" - Redhat with Japanese support set up right and repackaged.
Please don't click the link.
John Dvorak knows the state of Linux drivers versus Windows (or Mac) perfectly well. This is an excellent example of writing something obviously incorrect so you get a huge amount of hits and links from people that (rightly) disagree.
Exactly like the Science Citation Index, actually, but speeded up about 20 times.
Not caring - the next best thing to stupid.
I usually don't know what airplane model, or manufacturer, I fly with when traveling between Europe and Asia. I have absolutely no idea who makes the engines, ever.
And why should I know? I rely on other, knowledgeable (geeky) airplane people to make that choice for me. It doesn't make me stupid. I am way too busy with decisions that actually affect my life in a material way to bother about that kind of fluff. It does not make me stupid.
People aren't stupid. Let me say that again: people are not stupid, they are not dumb, they are not morons (with a few exceptions - and they are _few_). What they are, by and large, is interested in other things than computing - like, for instance, the work or play they want to accomplish with their computers, rather than the machines themselves.
People are perfectly able to understand the difference between Windows, OSX and Linux - they just don't particularily care. And in that situation, yes, put up enough roadblocks to Windows use and people will gradually switch, just like US people abandoned domestic cars for Japanese ones when they became compelling enough. Not everybody switched, and not all at once (since everybody has a different tipping point), but certainly enough to change the commercial landscape.
Reinforcement learning type methods are not very good for problems like Go, since the credit assignment problem becomes very difficult.
Please note that I wasn't referring to the US at all; those same rectangular packets with instant noodles are popular all over the world (including Japan itself). It's quick, it's really cheap and you need next to nothing in equipment or cooking knowledge to prepare it.
By contrast, real Ramen is much tastier but it is more expensive and very difficult to actually make yourself; boiling pig bones for several hours for the tonkotsu broth isn't something you really want to do yourself when you can buy a finished bowl down the street.