Indeed, and much better-sounding than what Orwell's translator actually used, which was something sterile (like idai na kyoudai) that didn't capture the 'closeness' of the English original at all. Want to have a go at a revised translation? In Japan, this book needs all the publicity it can get.
The Japanese government is even worse. They now fingerprint, photograph, and question visitors and returning residents not only when they first enter the country, but again during all subsequent re-entries. And this is in addition to the mandatory re-entry permits (3000 yen fee!), mandatory registration of non-citizens at their local city hall, and mandatory carrying of Alien Registration Cards on one's person at all times. Don't think you're free to wander about the country after your ordeal with immigration inspectors!
It's not just the US government that does this. Great Britain has its ubiquitous video cameras. Other countries (Belgium?) force even citizens to carry around ID cards. Each country learns of more ways to control people from other countries, and then implements them without regard for the checks those places have on government power. In this way, civil liberties are steadily ratcheted downward. I can't imagine this ever flowing the other way and fear that it will eventually end in violent confrontation.
"A pint is a pound in the US and exactly nowhere else."
This actually wouldn't be a very good menmonic either -- the fluid ounce (measuring volume) and the dry ounce (to measure weight) are not necessarily equal. For water, a pint is 16 ounces, and a fluid ounce is 29.57 milliliters (and thus weighs 29.57 grams). Each ounce of weight, however, is 28.5 grams, so for water, a pint is not a pound.
If you were measuring a liquid with a specific gravity of 29.57/28.5, I suppose you could get away with it. ^_^;
I think the saying only has value in that it helps people remember that there are 16 ounces in a pound and also 16 fluid ounces in a pint. Other than that, it just gets people confused. Two different units called by the same name? Give me metric any time.
Japan generally uses the open plan, and I can assure you that it's a very unpleasant place to work. At my firm, which is typical, we have "islands" which consist of long cafeteria-style tables made of interlocking desks (each about five feet wide) pushed together. Each set of two desks faces each other, so you get a 5x2-person configuration. There are no partitions between your desk and the two people to the side of you, or between you and the person facing you.
Some people like it because all you need to do is turn your head and raise your voice, and anyone can hear you. Unfortunately, if you're doing translation work, like me, you have to deal with the cacophony of all these conversations, telephone calls, and people-talking-to-themselves (replete with grunts and wind-sucking) while you try to concentrate. (Headphones? Forget it.)
In my case I got put on the overnight shift and have this whole 10-person "island" to myself while the rest of the country sleeps, so I've got a nice quiet environment, but in general, the Japanese office is a noisy, cramped place. Cubicles look downright attractive compared to this!
How did catch that and miss "the data that is". Datum != data
The same way in which you left out the word 'you' before 'catch' just now. Good old fashioned human error.
(Though I feel compelled to mention that the philosophy of 'inclusivism' means that alternative grammatical usage is to be accepted, not criticized. This is why I was able to happily skip over what others would regard as a mistake. ^_^;)
"The FBI is shutting down botnets. They've been cracking down since the beginning of the year."
Yet I just changed from singular to plural between sentences. Would you say it:
"The FBI is shutting down botnets. It's been cracking down since the beginning of the year"?
BiggerBoat, I also find that last one ridiculous. In the world of sports in the USA (and Canada?), sentences like your first one are the rule. "Chicago is playing well again. They won the division for the second time in five years." You say 'they' because Chicago is referring to the Chicago Cubs, an uncontestably-plural noun. The only paper I've seen go against this is one of the Tampa papers, which grammar-nazi-esquely insists that 'Lightning' is always singular ('like the Army', in their words), and would refer to the Tampa Bay Lightning as 'it' ('The Lightning was trailing by a goal in the third period when...'), which really grates on the ears.
I actually like this hybrid style where grammatical number is sort of in flux. If you're perceiving the FBI as a group of people doing the same job, the FBI is 'they', and if it's a singular entity ('The FBI was founded in...'), it's 'it'.
You people annoy me sometimes; "The FBI are purging all tha data that is...." AARGH!!!!! I need more coffee...
Hopefully you import your coffee from Colombia or somewhere other than the UK where plural verbs are used routinely for organizations in this sense. 'Manchester United are wankers' and the like. The closest thing I can think of in the US is sports teams with those silly-sounding singular mass-noun nicknames like the Tampa Bay Lightning. "The Utah Jazz haven't been the same without Karl Malone"; "The Minnesota Wild are winning again", etc.
David, you are quite right and I hadn't been thinking of it from the hyper-competitive parent angle. I myself experienced more of the "never, ever care about winning or losing" adults, which only fed my and my friends' competitive fires further.
Perhaps the solution is to let kids play with as little adult supervision as possible? They'll certainly develop good skills in dealing with peers.
The trend toward non-competitive sports and not keeping score isn't for the kids any more than wiretapping and who-knows-what are "for your safety".
Kids love competition. Experiencing both winning and losing, and facing superior opponents, develops your own skills and gives you a sense of humility that you'll never get being coddled in a "noncompetitive" nursery-school sandbox.
Non-competition is so that the administrators and parents can feel good about themselves and, if the kids don't turn out as desired, can fall back with "but look how nurturing and caring we were!".
To the "Vista is #10" posters -- did CNET really rank them from #1 to #10, with the worst product at the very beginning of the article, which climaxes with the tenth-worst tech product?
I suspect that the list goes from tenth to first, Letterman-style, and that little car that nobody's ever heard of is #10, and Vista is #1.
If this isn't how it's arranged, then they really went through some contortions to make Vista, the tenth-worst tech product, look like it's the absolute worst. Just because the pages are numbered from 1 to 10 doesn't mean that the products aren't really numbered from 10th to 1st.
The 'DS' ostensibly stands for 'Direct & Smooth', not 'Dual Screen' or the like, but functionally it's got a main screen on the top and a touch screen on the bottom just like the Nintendo DS does.
You can hand-write the characters in e-mail by drawing on the screen with a stylus pen:
I've never used one myself, so I can't say why it doesn't seem to be selling well, but it's not as popular as you might think. I suspect that a hack to put a game on the top screen would certainly make this phone more attractive.
Rightfully, the state goes after the father for support of that kid. You have to pay back the money you screwed them out of (although I suspect your wife got much more than the $1600 you had to pay).
Rightfully? Your argument reasonably points out that his wife was accepting money meant for single mothers while simultaneously being supported by the father. But what's "rightful" about making him pay?
If the State's going to go after someone, it should be the mother for falsely representing herself to be "single", not the father who did his job as the father of a child. He didn't screw the State out of anything, and only ended up spending money twice over.
Of course, the State shouldn't be able to give itself the arbitrary ability to "represent" plaintiffs in cases like these, and unilateral divorce laws and the entire "child"-support system often seem specifically designed to ruin the lives of loving fathers.
These are the kinds of things that will be looked at 100 years from now by more enlightened societies as being barbaric.
Michael, you'll presumably be kept in a holding cell and questioned about various inane things, missing your flight, before finally being deported. Could you be banned from the country for a number of years, like a visa overstayer would? Maybe.
I wonder if refusing to submit to fingerprinting will actually be a crime in itself. The airport is still Japanese soil and they could construe such a refusal to be violation of Japanese law.
The reason they are doing this is because under the guise of terrorism they are attempting to reduce the number of crimes committed by foreigners, including overstaying visas. The whole idea of terrorism has nothing to do with why they passed this policy.
I disagree with this assertion. They are attempting to increase the total number of crimes committed by foreigners, or, to be more exact, the number of convictions for crimes already committed, so that the number of "crimes" committed by non-Japanese will rise.
Statistics (from jref.org; it's linked elsewhere in the comments) show that Americans, Brits, and other Westerners commit something like one-twentieth to one-tenth the crime of the Japanese. The fact that work visas are only given to college graduates -- adults with a lot to lose -- is one reason why criminals from our countries don't bother coming to Japan to begin with.
Unfortunate for the Japanese government, who has for the past decade or more been popularizing the fiction that foreign crime is rampant and always on the increase.
Until very recently, overstaying a visa for a short period of time was (provided that no criminal acts were committed in that period) a minor offense on par with letting your driver's license expire or speeding on the highway. It was an administrative problem. Now, such overstays are considered "crimes" in the statistics, despite the damage to society not being anything near murder, arson, assault, rape, and the rest of the crimes in this category. The change was made because the LDP loves to scapegoat foreigners in their always-effective tactic of using fear of The Other to gain votes. They need to keep pumping those numbers up, and getting their prints in a database and checking on them repeatedly is a good way to do that.
Test this theory yourself. If you're American or British, ask a Japanese person near you what they think the crime rate is in Japan by people of your nationality, as a percentage of the Japanese rate. They will wildly overestimate the actual figure of 0.05-0.1.
Am I supposed to just accept that this violation-by-proxy is legal?
In a word, yes.
The conditions of entry into Japan are defined by Japan.
But this rule also applies to resident foreigners. When they entered Japan, this rule wasn't in force, but there's no grandfather clause for people alerady in Japan or even for permanent residents of fifty years' standing.
In fact, even if you accept the "if you don't like Japan's rules for foreigners, become a citizen or leave" argument, people's rights are still being violated. This new law was publicized with about one month to go before being implemented, which hardly leaves enough time to tie up all of one's affairs and move away forever. Remember, they're even going to fingerprint departing foreigners! It takes a year or more of background checks and interviews to confer citizenship, so you can't stop being foreign either.
Maybe if they had announced this year that the new rules would come into effect in 2010 or 2015 it would be understandable. Future tourists can change their travel plans if they don't like Japan's politics, but resident aliens have no such luxury.
Trevor, this is true for first-time visitors to the US, but the similarities end there. (Now I've just finished what has become a very long post, and it's not a criticism of you, but rather a jumping-off point for various problems with Japan's treatment of non-citizens.)
Japan will now be fingerprinting and questioning all non-Japanese, even residents, each and every time they enter or leave the country. (So even if you hate this new law so much that you'll move back to where you came from, you can't escape the indignity! And there isn't enough time to take out citizenship -- all the checks required necessitate a wait of at least 6 months before a Japanese passport will be yours.) A resident non-citizen in the US would not be fingerprinted repeatedly.
Consider also that while the entry procedures may be becoming more US-like, once you're safely across the border, in the US your civil liberties are guaranteed to an extent that Japan has never allowed. Particularly in Tokyo, street cops will pull you over and demand that you display your Alien Registration Card on the slightest pretext. In the US, such "papers please" policing is unthinkable -- see the Kolender v. Lawson case of 1983 and, more recently, the Circuit City driver's license fiasco well-covered here on Slashdot.
So what we're getting is a Japanese system that takes the most totalitarian parts from the new US (invasive entry procedures) and their own traditions (arbitrary stop-and-search plus medieval detention procedures) and combines them together while deflecting criticism with "the US demands it" and "international terrorism". Not so fast, Minister! If you really wanted to mimic the US, the US entry procedures would come into effect and the Alien Registration Card would be abolished!
These cards contain a frightening amount of personal information -- name, DOB, POB, place of residence abroad, address in Japan, primary householder, emplyoer's name and address, date of landing, date of visa expiry, visa type, and who knows what else. Having to carry this on one's person is an identity-theft disaster waiting to happen, and they're semi-legally deputizing employers, mobile phone providers, and hotels to check these cards as well.
The US may be treating non-citizens as criminals when they try to enter the country for the first time, but Japan does this always. Even taking out citizenship won't stop the street cop looking to impress passers-by with how tough he is on foreign crime -- he'll still pull you over and you'll have to explain that you're Japanese before he lets you go.
Blaming the United States is just what the Japanese government wants you to do. Meanwhile, their violation of the civil liberties of resident aliens coninues well past the immigration gates all the way to your neighborhood street corner.
There were definitely scenes in Arthur C. Clarke's 'Ghost From the Grand Banks' in which smoking was being digitally edited out of old films, though I can't remember it it was in Snow Crash or not.
What I do remember, bizarrely, is that my copies of both of these books have very similar 1930s Art Deco-esque fonts on the covers:
how in some cases the MLB does not care who watches their games for free. Restrictions will only apply to the populace who wants it most - if the populace doesn't want it, there is no need for restrictions.
You can say that again. Here in Japan, evidently people are so desperate to watch major league baseball that MLB.com has implemented the heaviest restrictions in the world: every single game is blacked out. Forget about watching them on TV for free; here we can't even pay to watch them.
You would think that the group of fans who want to watch the Japanese-born major leaguers whose games are on satellite in Japan, and the group of fans who are more interested in English-language broadcasts of teams that don't have Japanese-born players on them, would be mutually exclusive (and that the latter group would be so small that it wouldn't be worth going to the hassle of blacking them out).
Since every game, for every team, is blacked out every single day, I just buy single games when I'm outside of Japan. And now I can't even watch those old games that I saved!?
Even "don't be evil" Google is (or was) guilty of this.
Years ago, when I first learned of their existence, I typed "www.google.com" into my browser in order to have a look.
Google automatically overrode what I had specifically typed in, and instead took me to google.co.jp, the Japanese Google, because my computer was in Japan. (There was, in their defense, a link to "Google in English" on the page.)
I found that to be so off-putting that I wrote off Google from that moment, depriving myself of their otherwise excellent services just because of their initial "physical location = language" meddling.
You'd think that in this interconnected world, computer makers and service providers would be more aware than ever of multilinguality, but it still isn't so.
Yep, the husband and his wishes. But also by the society as a whole to care for the children.
...
For example:
My mother, born in the early thirties, was at home during my upbringing. I KNOW that she sacrificed her own career to be home with me and cater hes husband.
Why? Because when she was brought up, that was what she was taught to do. I know for a fact most of her friends did the same.
What about the husbands sacrificing all their time and energy to go out and work far from their beloved families every day?
If one person's "work" consists of being around the people s/he loves and cares for and the other person has to go out to an office or construction site or coal mine or whatever and take orders from a boss, who is really sacrificing for the other?
Fathers in past generations were hardworking men who had even less choice in their lives than their wives did. Please don't disregard the sacrifices they made.
The article says that 5.2% of the totalpopulation of the UK (including both sexes) is in the database, yet of the ethnicities mentioned in the statistics on men, the lowest percentage is the 9% of whites. That's nearly double the rate of the general population! We can thus infer that very few women are being put on this database.
While women indeed commit less crime than men do, their rates of being falsely accused or falsely convicted -- things that would make such a person's inclusion on this database an outrage -- are even smaller. The famous Innocence Project (www.innocenceproject.org), a movement devoted to clearing falsely-imprisoned people, and other similar projects find that almost no women are wrongfully imprisoned.
The cynic in me thinks that this is by design -- the statists love it that half the population is thinking, "Wrongful arrest? To me, a woman!? Never happen!"
And such people gleefully support the creeping fascist state because its indignities only affect other people.
And with the never-falsely-accused law-abiding elderly white women outnumbering the law-abiding-yet-under-suspicion-anyway young black men, you've got a recipe for totalitarianism.
Armchair psychology here, but a lifetime of giving the government a several-percentage-point commission on everything you buy will certainly make a similar loss on advertised hard drive space "easy to swallow".
We've become used to the idea that advertised prices are slightly better than what we'll really be paying (sales tax), and that gross incomes are slightly more than what we'll actually be taking home (income tax), and that the price of some product might cost a few percent more next year (inflation).
Many states and countries have consumption taxes right in line with the "easy to swallow" 7.3% gap that fails to "ruffle" this author's feathers. Can you really blame hardware manufacturers for trying to get away with the same figure-fudging? Perhaps when we get to the double-digit gaps of petabytes and higher, people will start noticing. Then again, a 12.6% sales tax is downright cheap in the EU!
One thing that should have been covered long ago in HTML but in fact stil requires CSS is vertical writing (such as in Asian languages). It's suprisingly difficult to guarantee correct display for any browser, even though word processors have had this essential feature for years.
Slashdot Mirror
Aniue
Clever.
Indeed, and much better-sounding than what Orwell's translator actually used, which was something sterile (like idai na kyoudai) that didn't capture the 'closeness' of the English original at all. Want to have a go at a revised translation? In Japan, this book needs all the publicity it can get.
The Japanese government is even worse. They now fingerprint, photograph, and question visitors and returning residents not only when they first enter the country, but again during all subsequent re-entries . And this is in addition to the mandatory re-entry permits (3000 yen fee!), mandatory registration of non-citizens at their local city hall, and mandatory carrying of Alien Registration Cards on one's person at all times. Don't think you're free to wander about the country after your ordeal with immigration inspectors!
It's not just the US government that does this. Great Britain has its ubiquitous video cameras. Other countries (Belgium?) force even citizens to carry around ID cards. Each country learns of more ways to control people from other countries, and then implements them without regard for the checks those places have on government power. In this way, civil liberties are steadily ratcheted downward. I can't imagine this ever flowing the other way and fear that it will eventually end in violent confrontation.
"A pint is a pound in the US and exactly nowhere else."
This actually wouldn't be a very good menmonic either -- the fluid ounce (measuring volume) and the dry ounce (to measure weight) are not necessarily equal. For water, a pint is 16 ounces, and a fluid ounce is 29.57 milliliters (and thus weighs 29.57 grams). Each ounce of weight, however, is 28.5 grams, so for water, a pint is not a pound.
If you were measuring a liquid with a specific gravity of 29.57/28.5, I suppose you could get away with it. ^_^;
I think the saying only has value in that it helps people remember that there are 16 ounces in a pound and also 16 fluid ounces in a pint. Other than that, it just gets people confused. Two different units called by the same name? Give me metric any time.
Japan generally uses the open plan, and I can assure you that it's a very unpleasant place to work. At my firm, which is typical, we have "islands" which consist of long cafeteria-style tables made of interlocking desks (each about five feet wide) pushed together. Each set of two desks faces each other, so you get a 5x2-person configuration. There are no partitions between your desk and the two people to the side of you, or between you and the person facing you.
Some people like it because all you need to do is turn your head and raise your voice, and anyone can hear you. Unfortunately, if you're doing translation work, like me, you have to deal with the cacophony of all these conversations, telephone calls, and people-talking-to-themselves (replete with grunts and wind-sucking) while you try to concentrate. (Headphones? Forget it.)
In my case I got put on the overnight shift and have this whole 10-person "island" to myself while the rest of the country sleeps, so I've got a nice quiet environment, but in general, the Japanese office is a noisy, cramped place. Cubicles look downright attractive compared to this!
How did catch that and miss "the data that is". Datum != data
The same way in which you left out the word 'you' before 'catch' just now. Good old fashioned human error.
(Though I feel compelled to mention that the philosophy of 'inclusivism' means that alternative grammatical usage is to be accepted, not criticized. This is why I was able to happily skip over what others would regard as a mistake. ^_^;)
"The FBI is shutting down botnets. They've been cracking down since the beginning of the year."
Yet I just changed from singular to plural between sentences. Would you say it:
"The FBI is shutting down botnets. It's been cracking down since the beginning of the year"?
BiggerBoat, I also find that last one ridiculous. In the world of sports in the USA (and Canada?), sentences like your first one are the rule. "Chicago is playing well again. They won the division for the second time in five years." You say 'they' because Chicago is referring to the Chicago Cubs, an uncontestably-plural noun. The only paper I've seen go against this is one of the Tampa papers, which grammar-nazi-esquely insists that 'Lightning' is always singular ('like the Army', in their words), and would refer to the Tampa Bay Lightning as 'it' ('The Lightning was trailing by a goal in the third period when...'), which really grates on the ears.
I actually like this hybrid style where grammatical number is sort of in flux. If you're perceiving the FBI as a group of people doing the same job, the FBI is 'they', and if it's a singular entity ('The FBI was founded in...'), it's 'it'.
You people annoy me sometimes; "The FBI are purging all tha data that is...." AARGH!!!!! I need more coffee...
Hopefully you import your coffee from Colombia or somewhere other than the UK where plural verbs are used routinely for organizations in this sense. 'Manchester United are wankers' and the like. The closest thing I can think of in the US is sports teams with those silly-sounding singular mass-noun nicknames like the Tampa Bay Lightning. "The Utah Jazz haven't been the same without Karl Malone"; "The Minnesota Wild are winning again", etc.
[/multinational inclusivist grammar nazi]
David, you are quite right and I hadn't been thinking of it from the hyper-competitive parent angle. I myself experienced more of the "never, ever care about winning or losing" adults, which only fed my and my friends' competitive fires further.
Perhaps the solution is to let kids play with as little adult supervision as possible? They'll certainly develop good skills in dealing with peers.
Absolutely true.
The trend toward non-competitive sports and not keeping score isn't for the kids any more than wiretapping and who-knows-what are "for your safety".
Kids love competition. Experiencing both winning and losing, and facing superior opponents, develops your own skills and gives you a sense of humility that you'll never get being coddled in a "noncompetitive" nursery-school sandbox.
Non-competition is so that the administrators and parents can feel good about themselves and, if the kids don't turn out as desired, can fall back with "but look how nurturing and caring we were!".
To the "Vista is #10" posters -- did CNET really rank them from #1 to #10, with the worst product at the very beginning of the article, which climaxes with the tenth-worst tech product?
I suspect that the list goes from tenth to first, Letterman-style, and that little car that nobody's ever heard of is #10, and Vista is #1.
If this isn't how it's arranged, then they really went through some contortions to make Vista, the tenth-worst tech product, look like it's the absolute worst. Just because the pages are numbered from 1 to 10 doesn't mean that the products aren't really numbered from 10th to 1st.
There's already a phone like this for sale in Japan, the FOMA D800iDS:
http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/product/concept_model/d800ids/
The 'DS' ostensibly stands for 'Direct & Smooth', not 'Dual Screen' or the like, but functionally it's got a main screen on the top and a touch screen on the bottom just like the Nintendo DS does.
You can hand-write the characters in e-mail by drawing on the screen with a stylus pen:
http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/product/concept_model/d800ids/topics_02.html
I've never used one myself, so I can't say why it doesn't seem to be selling well, but it's not as popular as you might think. I suspect that a hack to put a game on the top screen would certainly make this phone more attractive.
Rightfully, the state goes after the father for support of that kid. You have to pay back the money you screwed them out of (although I suspect your wife got much more than the $1600 you had to pay).
Rightfully? Your argument reasonably points out that his wife was accepting money meant for single mothers while simultaneously being supported by the father. But what's "rightful" about making him pay?
If the State's going to go after someone, it should be the mother for falsely representing herself to be "single", not the father who did his job as the father of a child. He didn't screw the State out of anything, and only ended up spending money twice over.
Of course, the State shouldn't be able to give itself the arbitrary ability to "represent" plaintiffs in cases like these, and unilateral divorce laws and the entire "child"-support system often seem specifically designed to ruin the lives of loving fathers.
These are the kinds of things that will be looked at 100 years from now by more enlightened societies as being barbaric.
Michael, you'll presumably be kept in a holding cell and questioned about various inane things, missing your flight, before finally being deported. Could you be banned from the country for a number of years, like a visa overstayer would? Maybe.
I wonder if refusing to submit to fingerprinting will actually be a crime in itself. The airport is still Japanese soil and they could construe such a refusal to be violation of Japanese law.
The reason they are doing this is because under the guise of terrorism they are attempting to reduce the number of crimes committed by foreigners, including overstaying visas. The whole idea of terrorism has nothing to do with why they passed this policy.
I disagree with this assertion. They are attempting to increase the total number of crimes committed by foreigners, or, to be more exact, the number of convictions for crimes already committed, so that the number of "crimes" committed by non-Japanese will rise.
Statistics (from jref.org; it's linked elsewhere in the comments) show that Americans, Brits, and other Westerners commit something like one-twentieth to one-tenth the crime of the Japanese. The fact that work visas are only given to college graduates -- adults with a lot to lose -- is one reason why criminals from our countries don't bother coming to Japan to begin with.
Unfortunate for the Japanese government, who has for the past decade or more been popularizing the fiction that foreign crime is rampant and always on the increase.
Until very recently, overstaying a visa for a short period of time was (provided that no criminal acts were committed in that period) a minor offense on par with letting your driver's license expire or speeding on the highway. It was an administrative problem. Now, such overstays are considered "crimes" in the statistics, despite the damage to society not being anything near murder, arson, assault, rape, and the rest of the crimes in this category. The change was made because the LDP loves to scapegoat foreigners in their always-effective tactic of using fear of The Other to gain votes. They need to keep pumping those numbers up, and getting their prints in a database and checking on them repeatedly is a good way to do that.
Test this theory yourself. If you're American or British, ask a Japanese person near you what they think the crime rate is in Japan by people of your nationality, as a percentage of the Japanese rate. They will wildly overestimate the actual figure of 0.05-0.1.
Am I supposed to just accept that this violation-by-proxy is legal?
In a word, yes.
The conditions of entry into Japan are defined by Japan.
But this rule also applies to resident foreigners. When they entered Japan, this rule wasn't in force, but there's no grandfather clause for people alerady in Japan or even for permanent residents of fifty years' standing.
In fact, even if you accept the "if you don't like Japan's rules for foreigners, become a citizen or leave" argument, people's rights are still being violated. This new law was publicized with about one month to go before being implemented, which hardly leaves enough time to tie up all of one's affairs and move away forever. Remember, they're even going to fingerprint departing foreigners! It takes a year or more of background checks and interviews to confer citizenship, so you can't stop being foreign either.
Maybe if they had announced this year that the new rules would come into effect in 2010 or 2015 it would be understandable. Future tourists can change their travel plans if they don't like Japan's politics, but resident aliens have no such luxury.
Trevor, this is true for first-time visitors to the US, but the similarities end there. (Now I've just finished what has become a very long post, and it's not a criticism of you, but rather a jumping-off point for various problems with Japan's treatment of non-citizens.)
Japan will now be fingerprinting and questioning all non-Japanese, even residents, each and every time they enter or leave the country. (So even if you hate this new law so much that you'll move back to where you came from, you can't escape the indignity! And there isn't enough time to take out citizenship -- all the checks required necessitate a wait of at least 6 months before a Japanese passport will be yours.) A resident non-citizen in the US would not be fingerprinted repeatedly.
Consider also that while the entry procedures may be becoming more US-like, once you're safely across the border, in the US your civil liberties are guaranteed to an extent that Japan has never allowed. Particularly in Tokyo, street cops will pull you over and demand that you display your Alien Registration Card on the slightest pretext. In the US, such "papers please" policing is unthinkable -- see the Kolender v. Lawson case of 1983 and, more recently, the Circuit City driver's license fiasco well-covered here on Slashdot.
So what we're getting is a Japanese system that takes the most totalitarian parts from the new US (invasive entry procedures) and their own traditions (arbitrary stop-and-search plus medieval detention procedures) and combines them together while deflecting criticism with "the US demands it" and "international terrorism". Not so fast, Minister! If you really wanted to mimic the US, the US entry procedures would come into effect and the Alien Registration Card would be abolished!
These cards contain a frightening amount of personal information -- name, DOB, POB, place of residence abroad, address in Japan, primary householder, emplyoer's name and address, date of landing, date of visa expiry, visa type, and who knows what else. Having to carry this on one's person is an identity-theft disaster waiting to happen, and they're semi-legally deputizing employers, mobile phone providers, and hotels to check these cards as well.
The US may be treating non-citizens as criminals when they try to enter the country for the first time, but Japan does this always. Even taking out citizenship won't stop the street cop looking to impress passers-by with how tough he is on foreign crime -- he'll still pull you over and you'll have to explain that you're Japanese before he lets you go.
Blaming the United States is just what the Japanese government wants you to do. Meanwhile, their violation of the civil liberties of resident aliens coninues well past the immigration gates all the way to your neighborhood street corner.
There were definitely scenes in Arthur C. Clarke's 'Ghost From the Grand Banks' in which smoking was being digitally edited out of old films, though I can't remember it it was in Snow Crash or not.
What I do remember, bizarrely, is that my copies of both of these books have very similar 1930s Art Deco-esque fonts on the covers:
http://www.secondlifecrew.be/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/snow_crash.jpg
http://www.sfreviews.net/ghostgrand_copy.jpg
how in some cases the MLB does not care who watches their games for free. Restrictions will only apply to the populace who wants it most - if the populace doesn't want it, there is no need for restrictions.
You can say that again. Here in Japan, evidently people are so desperate to watch major league baseball that MLB.com has implemented the heaviest restrictions in the world: every single game is blacked out. Forget about watching them on TV for free; here we can't even pay to watch them.
You would think that the group of fans who want to watch the Japanese-born major leaguers whose games are on satellite in Japan, and the group of fans who are more interested in English-language broadcasts of teams that don't have Japanese-born players on them, would be mutually exclusive (and that the latter group would be so small that it wouldn't be worth going to the hassle of blacking them out).
Since every game, for every team, is blacked out every single day, I just buy single games when I'm outside of Japan. And now I can't even watch those old games that I saved!?
History will not judge Bud Selig kindly.
I wonder if, had he made them look like faux-Arabic, the police would have caught the joke a little sooner.
Even "don't be evil" Google is (or was) guilty of this.
Years ago, when I first learned of their existence, I typed "www.google.com" into my browser in order to have a look.
Google automatically overrode what I had specifically typed in, and instead took me to google.co.jp, the Japanese Google, because my computer was in Japan. (There was, in their defense, a link to "Google in English" on the page.)
I found that to be so off-putting that I wrote off Google from that moment, depriving myself of their otherwise excellent services just because of their initial "physical location = language" meddling.
You'd think that in this interconnected world, computer makers and service providers would be more aware than ever of multilinguality, but it still isn't so.
Yep, the husband and his wishes. But also by the society as a whole to care for the children.
...
For example: My mother, born in the early thirties, was at home during my upbringing. I KNOW that she sacrificed her own career to be home with me and cater hes husband. Why? Because when she was brought up, that was what she was taught to do. I know for a fact most of her friends did the same.
What about the husbands sacrificing all their time and energy to go out and work far from their beloved families every day?
If one person's "work" consists of being around the people s/he loves and cares for and the other person has to go out to an office or construction site or coal mine or whatever and take orders from a boss, who is really sacrificing for the other?
Fathers in past generations were hardworking men who had even less choice in their lives than their wives did. Please don't disregard the sacrifices they made.
Actually, that's not far off.
The article says that 5.2% of the totalpopulation of the UK (including both sexes) is in the database, yet of the ethnicities mentioned in the statistics on men, the lowest percentage is the 9% of whites. That's nearly double the rate of the general population! We can thus infer that very few women are being put on this database.
While women indeed commit less crime than men do, their rates of being falsely accused or falsely convicted -- things that would make such a person's inclusion on this database an outrage -- are even smaller. The famous Innocence Project (www.innocenceproject.org), a movement devoted to clearing falsely-imprisoned people, and other similar projects find that almost no women are wrongfully imprisoned.
The cynic in me thinks that this is by design -- the statists love it that half the population is thinking, "Wrongful arrest? To me, a woman!? Never happen!"
And such people gleefully support the creeping fascist state because its indignities only affect other people.
And with the never-falsely-accused law-abiding elderly white women outnumbering the law-abiding-yet-under-suspicion-anyway young black men, you've got a recipe for totalitarianism.
You were also kind enough to omit the first name "Max", just in case some people didn't know what the speed of light represented.
Thus, what appeared to be a simple gaff to the untrained eye is actually a sophisticated reference en passant.
Now if I could just figure out why Euler's constant is to be henceforth disregarded...
Armchair psychology here, but a lifetime of giving the government a several-percentage-point commission on everything you buy will certainly make a similar loss on advertised hard drive space "easy to swallow".
We've become used to the idea that advertised prices are slightly better than what we'll really be paying (sales tax), and that gross incomes are slightly more than what we'll actually be taking home (income tax), and that the price of some product might cost a few percent more next year (inflation).
Many states and countries have consumption taxes right in line with the "easy to swallow" 7.3% gap that fails to "ruffle" this author's feathers. Can you really blame hardware manufacturers for trying to get away with the same figure-fudging? Perhaps when we get to the double-digit gaps of petabytes and higher, people will start noticing. Then again, a 12.6% sales tax is downright cheap in the EU!
One thing that should have been covered long ago in HTML but in fact stil requires CSS is vertical writing (such as in Asian languages). It's suprisingly difficult to guarantee correct display for any browser, even though word processors have had this essential feature for years.