I'm guessing that the article submitter just transcribed phonetically what the Royal Society member said. In standard perceived pronunciation, supposedly, the "r" sounds are often left out.
The first thing you have to know about Microsoft's and Apple's attempts at clearer type is that Windows ClearType breaks each pixel into three sub-pixels sitting side by side, and thus only uses the horizontal axis, whereas Apple softens the sharp lines both horizontally and vertically.
This means that at large sizes, where you might not even be able to discern individual pixels all that well, OSX font smoothing looks great. It smooths things all the way around rather than in just one direction.
Remember, though, that pixels consist (in general) of red, green, and blue side-by-side (left, center, and right). You can't break a pixel into top, center, and bottom sub-pixels unless you rotate your screen 90 degrees..
At small sizes, though, Windows' system assures that the height of characters is a fixed, integral number of pixels. Unlike with OSX, in horizontal lines a line of black pixels will definitely be present. The middles of the letters B and E at an 8-pixel-high font size, for example, will probably have (vertically from the top) black, white, white, black, white, white, white, black. (Forget serifs for now.) The Mac will attempt to "smooth" those lines out even though there's not much space in which to do it (since you can't break a pixel vertically). Thus you get horizontal lines that become halftone grays as the renderer battles bravely to get "smooth" lines without regard for the increased difficulty of vertical smoothing.
Apple doesn't seem to expect people to attempt smooth fonts at sizes below about 9 or 10, if you look at the System Preferences. Windows will smooth them out for you at any size.
I find myself wishing for Windows-style ClearType at small sizes, and on the Mac I end up simply viewing the Web and word processing documents at immense font sizes rather than strain my eyes on the gray blurs. That's fine in these days when 1024x768 has become a small screen resolution, but it is a waste of resolution. I'd rather fit a lot more on that big screen! But I suspect that Apple's system will come out ahead as screen resolutions (both in DPI and in total) increase and we have less and less need to actually see 7-pixel-high text.
I'm sure the healthcare providers (who are reimbursed by the government for 70% of patients' fees) will find it difficult to put up much resistance.
From the article: The rationale behind the charge appears to be the Ministry's desire to control "illegal" "radio stations" and to promote "efficient" RF spectrum utilization. Japanese consumers already pay a yearly 420 Yen fee for each mobile phone.
Some advice, government: just skip the silly rationales and say what you're thinking, which is, "We want more money, and you're going to give it to us." This ridiculous pablum about "efficiency" and "safety"* is just insulting.
(*: What was used as the excuse for making various old electronics illegal to sell second-hand a few years back.)
Funny, yes, but one could really attempt to quantify this. Since there are 26 letters and 17,576 three-letter combinations, IBM could eb said to be only 26/17,576 = 1/26^2 as bad.
I feel compelled to share one anecdote regarding Brother printers -- the ML-610 scanner/fax/printer that I purchased a few years ago.
The cartridges weren't cheap, but they weren't outrageously expensive, either, so this looked like a reasonably-priced machine over the long haul.
Aside from a few system beeps that couldn't be turned off, the thing didn't bother me too much. The Windows drivers were easy to install, and it worked out of the box on the Mac. Even came with some nice fonts that I could install on the PCs. I never use it for faxing, but the scanning was decent enough and all in all it was a decent purchase.
Until one dreadful day when I tried to print a crucial homework assignment and it refused to do it, giving me the message "Cannot print: cyan ink is low".
"But I selected black and white," thought I, and proceeded to turn some of the graphics that were in the paper into black-and-white, figuring that the printer software must evaluate what colors are used in the document before actually checking to see that I don't want to print in color.
How naive and foolish I was. It turned out that if any one of the four color cartridges goes empty, or even if the ink has dropped to a certain level in any one of them, you can't print at all, even if your document makes no use of that color.
This was my first experience with a color printer, so I have no idea if these kinds of shenanigans are standard, or if it's limited to Brother, or what, but I was ready to smash that printer to pieces. There's no cyan left, so I can't print in black and white!?
And then, just to throw salt in the wounds, when I finally got some cyan ink a month later and inserted it, the printer dutifully printed the document I'd been wanting so long ago. Never mind that I'd long since gone to a computer lab to print it -- that was eight pages of black ink wasted!
I have one of those horrible JIS keyboards where @ gets its own key (to the right of the P) but you have to use shift to get the quote marks (' and ").
On these things, I can only surmise that it's pronounced as spelled: "FATCK".
'Marsbytes', sheesh! Why, in my day we had Greek and Latin from age 5, and we liked it! Monolingual kids of today will never know the pleasure I had reciting Xenophon's dialogue with Ovid as I trudged uphill to school in the snow. O tempora! O mores!
Plenty of fans are happy to pay MLB for their internet streaming video service, because it ostensibly offers every game, every day, unlike your typical cable company which only has the local teams and a few other stations.
The problems start because MLB's streaming service "blacks out" any games that MLB deems to be close enough for the fan to watch in person, or watch on local television. And this subset of games almost never coincides with the games that the fan does indeed have access to -- many fans in the Midwest are considered to be in the Rockies' or Twins' zones despite being miles away; Hawaii is somehow within blackout range of three or four teams that are not actually televised there, and most egregiously the entire nation of Japan is a total blackout zone. So you've got legions of fans with no access to their favorite teams' games, despite this wonderful modern technology that could bring broadcasts to these fans that wouldn't have any other way to see them (and pay for them).
Said fans will thus set up Slingboxes in the houses of relatives or friends who get the games they want on cable. All MLB would need to do to alleviate this is to eliminate the blackouts and make all their streams available worldwide. And they've never given the fans a satisfactory answer to why they don't do this.
Try being a baseball fan living in Japan -- every single game is blacked out, every day. I could almost get my mind around this if I were a Yankees fan and could pay for one of the Japanese satellite stations that broadcasts all of Hideki Matsui's games, but it's not just the Yankees, Red Sox, and Mariners -- it's every team in both leagues.
What could they possibly be thinking? Probably 99% of the fans here can't understand the English-language broadcasts anyway. And it's a very long plane ride to any of the ballparks where we could be buying tickets.
In 2006 yearly production of USA books was 172,000. That means an average of 472 new books EVERY DAY. How do you pick what people want out of that number? UK had an even larger increase.
As many as that is, the USA is a huge market, and English is one of the most popular languages to translate books into. Even if all 172,000 new titles in the US were written by Americans, there are still nearly 1700 non-authors for every author.
Which means that, given the many titles by Brits, Aussies, etc., and translations, and multiple works from the same author, only one person in several thousand gets a book published in a given year. Sobering odds for an aspiring writer!
Yeah, American coins can do some pretty amazing stuff. For example, did you know that any time they strike a coin of denomination greater than $1, it vaporizes within ten seconds? Strange but true.
Is that the propaganda that the fiat-money supporters are putting out these days? I thought the reason the $10 and $20 coins "vaporized" during FDR's administration was that it became illegal to own gold! ^_^;
It would be nice to have large-value coins made of genuine precious metals again. I wouldn't want to carry around a $5 coin made of dull zinc, but a little one made of silver would be great!
TFA does indeed have six rumors about Apple, but they're all related to the iPod.
Call me a stickler for accuracy, but "sixfold Apple rumour round-up" implies six different rumours (tidbits, what-have-you) about various things related to Apple. If all six were connected to the iPod, as all six do indeed turn out to be, a more meaningful headline would have bee "Apple iPod rumour round-up" or something similar -- the Slashdot summary title improves on it at least.
There are several other reasons to be excited about Apple -- possible super-thin/light MacBooks, a new revision for the iMac, and of course the now-delayed Leopard. Updates on those much-anticipated items would also have been appreciated.
There was a group of 8 students that were using up the bandwidth for the entire University. Not just the residence halls, but the entire campus. The swipe card readers on the dorms wouldn't work, because the network was saturated with illegal downloading.
I know this isn't the point of the post, but why are the dorm swipe card readers connected to a university-wide network? We're talking about the key cards that let you into the buildings, right? And they're dependent on network bandwidth in order to function?
The fact that entries into buildings need to be recorded to a massive university-level database, presumably making a record of every time a student has entered a building, seems far more draconian than any gigabyte-based limits.
I went to college a decade ago, when the big concern was having only one door instead of five (they turned the other four into fire exits) so that potential stalkers couldn't sneak in. Looks like they've got that "problem" solved and are making steady progress on the Orwellian stuff.
If every freshman is required to live in the dorms, all that swipe card data must be a goldmine for the university. Didn't anyone protest?
The battle between the disorganized and the neat-freaks is an unfair one because while the disorganized messy folk are content to leave the other side alone and let them do whatever works for them, the neat-freak side has an almost deep emotional hatred for chaos, and its members insist on imposing their will on their messy counterparts.
My wife, who's very emotional, and I, a rationalist, are opposite numbers in this situation, and she always berates me for my "organized chaos" and how "illogical" it is. I've in fact found that logical thinkers are no more likely to be neat freaks.
The emotional loathing that neat freaks have for us disorderly types can be fun to watch if we can be laid back about it. I recently had forgotten to mail a letter to my university, and called my wife from work to ask her to stick it in the mailbox.
"It's in that disgusting pile of papers near the computer!? I'm not going near that! It's a mess!"
"It's not a mess; I know where everything is."
"Oh, really? Then what's in it?"
"Well, on the top is a liguistics book I was reading, then some photocopied homework papers. Then a map of Nara folded over...."
(Her anger is building here.)
"Under that I think I've got a big envelope with more photocopies in it. Below that is a magazine, and between the pages is the envelope I need you to send."
(I can feel her anger seething through the phone.)
"The envelope's there, isn't it?"
"............yes."
"You would explode with anger if I told you that the envelope was between pages 36 and 37 of the magazine, wouldn't you?"
"...... I would."
"Good, then I won't tell you that. Just be a pal and put the envelope in the postbox, could you?"
Himself, I think the plot picks up significantly in the third (Blue) book; many years fly by and we get to see humanity's expansion beyond Mars. This was mainly described in between-chapter interludes, but I found myself looking forward to those sections more than the main story.
The problem with the later books is that while the science in Red Mars is near enough in the future that it feels realistic, eventually the technology piles up(people living 200+ years, growing new limbs, massive terraforming projects) and it becomes difficult to relate to the characters. Red Mars is the epitome of hard, thought-provoking SF. It's more than a bit wordy, but you won't be sorry for having read it.
(Disclaimer: I am a huge Kim Stanley Robinson fan and would recommend almost anything of his. My favorite, "The Years of Rice and Salt", is often found in the sci-fi section in bookstores but is much more appropriate as an extra-credit assignment for history students, not science.)
Hoard recievers and other hardware built before 2003 NOW. Hoard hardware built buy manufacturers outside of this DVB consortium.
This is a great idea, and "NOW" is the key word. Governments can always stop you by implementing even harsher restrictions than they recently did in Japan, banning second-hand sales of certain electronics made before 2001:
The American way is original, or at least it was what was in use when the American colonies were part of the British empire. Newspapers in the colonies from the late 1700s use "January 1st, 1776" and the like. I couldn't tell you when the UK changed.
Many US government forms in fact use the DD-MM-YYYY format. If you're flying into the US and are filling out immigration-related forms and hear a muttered curse word followed by the sound of a pen crossing out some numbers at the bottom and rewriting, realize that the person next to you is probably an American who wasn't expecting to have the DD/MM format sprung on them!
I know this is a joke, but your post was surprisingly easy to read and understand with all the words being spelled out.
Perhaps we could make an embedded auto-correct feature to browsers that lets you type in acronyms which are automatically converted to spelled-out words? Many people use variations of this already when they have to type in the same phrases over and over. Or a feature that lets you toggle between acronyms and full spelling, just like the Traditional/Simplified toggle that the Mac has for Chinese characters.
Full spelling: tough on the fingers, easy on the brain!
>>Maybe we should require that all bills be read aloud in their entirety in an open session of congress?
Amen. Maybe this would help reduce porkbarreling too. If they are forced to listen to the entire thing they wouldn't be so quick to add random stuff to it.
>Better yet -- make the members of Congress write out all bills passed into law by hand.
That would cut down on obfuscation and legalese in a hurry.
It is short-sighted and foolish to only fight against a law/policy when it is enforced.
Well, yes. But if you've been visiting Canada regularly up to now despite having stolen a bicycle (or whatever) in your youth, and have never been denied entry before, you and your Canadian friends (who would be doing the fighting) are probably not going to be aware of these laws and policies.
Suddenly enforcing them now and claiming that they've been excessively lenient all those times in the past (and just not telling you about it) is dangerously close to ex post facto legislation.
If you don't like it, well, don't do things to limit that option for yourself, or visit some other place. Their country, their rules.
Such a statement cedes an awful lot of power to a national government. Remember, until now people could get into Canada even having done bad things. The 60-year-old who got caught driving drunk back in 1980 and has already repaid society for it can't undo what he once did. If a Canadian company wants to hire him, or Canadian relatives want him to visit, what can they do? Lobby the government to start being more lenient?
This will ultimately lead to even more privacy-violating information sharing as potential employers demand to know about any minor misdemeanor a potential hire has ever committed. They'll have to do this in order to be sure that their new employee doesn't get turned away at the border, but in the process the principle of being able to repay one's debts to society after a transgression will be even further eroded.
Fifty years ago these incidents went into dusty file boxes in the back closet of city hall; now they're in every border agent's database and are impeding people's movement. Should our societies consider mitigating these previously-impossible long term effects by shortening prison terms and lowering fines? Politically, how can one argue that without being seen as soft on crime?
My cheapie Brother printer will not print unless all four ink cartridges contain ink. If you run out of even one color, you still can't print in black and white until you fill that color cartridge again.
At first I thought this was just an artificial way to drum up sales of proprietary ink, but now I realize that it's much more sinister -- all documents must contain the Big Brother Yellow Dots! ^_^
Slashdot Mirror
"Received", nor "perceived". A joke right on the border of humorousness can erally be ruined by a typo, can't it?
I'm guessing that the article submitter just transcribed phonetically what the Royal Society member said. In standard perceived pronunciation, supposedly, the "r" sounds are often left out.
The first thing you have to know about Microsoft's and Apple's attempts at clearer type is that Windows ClearType breaks each pixel into three sub-pixels sitting side by side, and thus only uses the horizontal axis, whereas Apple softens the sharp lines both horizontally and vertically.
This means that at large sizes, where you might not even be able to discern individual pixels all that well, OSX font smoothing looks great. It smooths things all the way around rather than in just one direction.
Remember, though, that pixels consist (in general) of red, green, and blue side-by-side (left, center, and right). You can't break a pixel into top, center, and bottom sub-pixels unless you rotate your screen 90 degrees..
At small sizes, though, Windows' system assures that the height of characters is a fixed, integral number of pixels. Unlike with OSX, in horizontal lines a line of black pixels will definitely be present. The middles of the letters B and E at an 8-pixel-high font size, for example, will probably have (vertically from the top) black, white, white, black, white, white, white, black. (Forget serifs for now.) The Mac will attempt to "smooth" those lines out even though there's not much space in which to do it (since you can't break a pixel vertically). Thus you get horizontal lines that become halftone grays as the renderer battles bravely to get "smooth" lines without regard for the increased difficulty of vertical smoothing.
Apple doesn't seem to expect people to attempt smooth fonts at sizes below about 9 or 10, if you look at the System Preferences. Windows will smooth them out for you at any size.
I find myself wishing for Windows-style ClearType at small sizes, and on the Mac I end up simply viewing the Web and word processing documents at immense font sizes rather than strain my eyes on the gray blurs. That's fine in these days when 1024x768 has become a small screen resolution, but it is a waste of resolution. I'd rather fit a lot more on that big screen! But I suspect that Apple's system will come out ahead as screen resolutions (both in DPI and in total) increase and we have less and less need to actually see 7-pixel-high text.
I'm sure the healthcare providers (who are reimbursed by the government for 70% of patients' fees) will find it difficult to put up much resistance.
From the article: The rationale behind the charge appears to be the Ministry's desire to control "illegal" "radio stations" and to promote "efficient" RF spectrum utilization. Japanese consumers already pay a yearly 420 Yen fee for each mobile phone.
Some advice, government: just skip the silly rationales and say what you're thinking, which is, "We want more money, and you're going to give it to us." This ridiculous pablum about "efficiency" and "safety"* is just insulting.
(*: What was used as the excuse for making various old electronics illegal to sell second-hand a few years back.)
Funny, yes, but one could really attempt to quantify this. Since there are 26 letters and 17,576 three-letter combinations, IBM could eb said to be only 26/17,576 = 1/26^2 as bad.
I feel compelled to share one anecdote regarding Brother printers -- the ML-610 scanner/fax/printer that I purchased a few years ago.
The cartridges weren't cheap, but they weren't outrageously expensive, either, so this looked like a reasonably-priced machine over the long haul.
Aside from a few system beeps that couldn't be turned off, the thing didn't bother me too much. The Windows drivers were easy to install, and it worked out of the box on the Mac. Even came with some nice fonts that I could install on the PCs. I never use it for faxing, but the scanning was decent enough and all in all it was a decent purchase.
Until one dreadful day when I tried to print a crucial homework assignment and it refused to do it, giving me the message "Cannot print: cyan ink is low".
"But I selected black and white," thought I, and proceeded to turn some of the graphics that were in the paper into black-and-white, figuring that the printer software must evaluate what colors are used in the document before actually checking to see that I don't want to print in color.
How naive and foolish I was. It turned out that if any one of the four color cartridges goes empty, or even if the ink has dropped to a certain level in any one of them, you can't print at all, even if your document makes no use of that color.
This was my first experience with a color printer, so I have no idea if these kinds of shenanigans are standard, or if it's limited to Brother, or what, but I was ready to smash that printer to pieces. There's no cyan left, so I can't print in black and white!?
And then, just to throw salt in the wounds, when I finally got some cyan ink a month later and inserted it, the printer dutifully printed the document I'd been wanting so long ago. Never mind that I'd long since gone to a computer lab to print it -- that was eight pages of black ink wasted!
How exactly did the guy pronounce "f@ck"?
I believe it's pronounced as FSHIFT2CK!
I have one of those horrible JIS keyboards where @ gets its own key (to the right of the P) but you have to use shift to get the quote marks (' and ").
On these things, I can only surmise that it's pronounced as spelled: "FATCK".
Earth : Terrabytes :: Mars : Areobytes
'Marsbytes', sheesh! Why, in my day we had Greek and Latin from age 5, and we liked it! Monolingual kids of today will never know the pleasure I had reciting Xenophon's dialogue with Ovid as I trudged uphill to school in the snow. O tempora! O mores!
This is not actually the main problem.
Plenty of fans are happy to pay MLB for their internet streaming video service, because it ostensibly offers every game, every day, unlike your typical cable company which only has the local teams and a few other stations.
The problems start because MLB's streaming service "blacks out" any games that MLB deems to be close enough for the fan to watch in person, or watch on local television. And this subset of games almost never coincides with the games that the fan does indeed have access to -- many fans in the Midwest are considered to be in the Rockies' or Twins' zones despite being miles away; Hawaii is somehow within blackout range of three or four teams that are not actually televised there, and most egregiously the entire nation of Japan is a total blackout zone. So you've got legions of fans with no access to their favorite teams' games, despite this wonderful modern technology that could bring broadcasts to these fans that wouldn't have any other way to see them (and pay for them).
Said fans will thus set up Slingboxes in the houses of relatives or friends who get the games they want on cable. All MLB would need to do to alleviate this is to eliminate the blackouts and make all their streams available worldwide. And they've never given the fans a satisfactory answer to why they don't do this.
You guys think you have it bad?
Try being a baseball fan living in Japan -- every single game is blacked out, every day. I could almost get my mind around this if I were a Yankees fan and could pay for one of the Japanese satellite stations that broadcasts all of Hideki Matsui's games, but it's not just the Yankees, Red Sox, and Mariners -- it's every team in both leagues.
What could they possibly be thinking? Probably 99% of the fans here can't understand the English-language broadcasts anyway. And it's a very long plane ride to any of the ballparks where we could be buying tickets.
In 2006 yearly production of USA books was 172,000. That means an average of 472 new books EVERY DAY. How do you pick what people want out of that number? UK had an even larger increase.
As many as that is, the USA is a huge market, and English is one of the most popular languages to translate books into. Even if all 172,000 new titles in the US were written by Americans, there are still nearly 1700 non-authors for every author.
Which means that, given the many titles by Brits, Aussies, etc., and translations, and multiple works from the same author, only one person in several thousand gets a book published in a given year. Sobering odds for an aspiring writer!
Yeah, American coins can do some pretty amazing stuff. For example, did you know that any time they strike a coin of denomination greater than $1, it vaporizes within ten seconds? Strange but true.
Is that the propaganda that the fiat-money supporters are putting out these days? I thought the reason the $10 and $20 coins "vaporized" during FDR's administration was that it became illegal to own gold! ^_^;
It would be nice to have large-value coins made of genuine precious metals again. I wouldn't want to carry around a $5 coin made of dull zinc, but a little one made of silver would be great!
And it is free for everybody. And everybody pays for it on their tax bill.
So, which one is it?
TFA does indeed have six rumors about Apple, but they're all related to the iPod.
Call me a stickler for accuracy, but "sixfold Apple rumour round-up" implies six different rumours (tidbits, what-have-you) about various things related to Apple. If all six were connected to the iPod, as all six do indeed turn out to be, a more meaningful headline would have bee "Apple iPod rumour round-up" or something similar -- the Slashdot summary title improves on it at least.
There are several other reasons to be excited about Apple -- possible super-thin/light MacBooks, a new revision for the iMac, and of course the now-delayed Leopard. Updates on those much-anticipated items would also have been appreciated.
There was a group of 8 students that were using up the bandwidth for the entire University. Not just the residence halls, but the entire campus. The swipe card readers on the dorms wouldn't work, because the network was saturated with illegal downloading.
I know this isn't the point of the post, but why are the dorm swipe card readers connected to a university-wide network? We're talking about the key cards that let you into the buildings, right? And they're dependent on network bandwidth in order to function?
The fact that entries into buildings need to be recorded to a massive university-level database, presumably making a record of every time a student has entered a building, seems far more draconian than any gigabyte-based limits.
I went to college a decade ago, when the big concern was having only one door instead of five (they turned the other four into fire exits) so that potential stalkers couldn't sneak in. Looks like they've got that "problem" solved and are making steady progress on the Orwellian stuff.
If every freshman is required to live in the dorms, all that swipe card data must be a goldmine for the university. Didn't anyone protest?
I really agree with this and the GP.
... ... ...yes."
... I would."
The battle between the disorganized and the neat-freaks is an unfair one because while the disorganized messy folk are content to leave the other side alone and let them do whatever works for them, the neat-freak side has an almost deep emotional hatred for chaos, and its members insist on imposing their will on their messy counterparts.
My wife, who's very emotional, and I, a rationalist, are opposite numbers in this situation, and she always berates me for my "organized chaos" and how "illogical" it is. I've in fact found that logical thinkers are no more likely to be neat freaks.
The emotional loathing that neat freaks have for us disorderly types can be fun to watch if we can be laid back about it. I recently had forgotten to mail a letter to my university, and called my wife from work to ask her to stick it in the mailbox.
"It's in that disgusting pile of papers near the computer!? I'm not going near that! It's a mess!"
"It's not a mess; I know where everything is."
"Oh, really? Then what's in it?"
"Well, on the top is a liguistics book I was reading, then some photocopied homework papers. Then a map of Nara folded over...."
(Her anger is building here.)
"Under that I think I've got a big envelope with more photocopies in it. Below that is a magazine, and between the pages is the envelope I need you to send."
(I can feel her anger seething through the phone.)
"The envelope's there, isn't it?"
"...
"You would explode with anger if I told you that the envelope was between pages 36 and 37 of the magazine, wouldn't you?"
"...
"Good, then I won't tell you that. Just be a pal and put the envelope in the postbox, could you?"
Had to tiptoe into the house that night, I did.
We need a soletta.
Himself, I think the plot picks up significantly in the third (Blue) book; many years fly by and we get to see humanity's expansion beyond Mars. This was mainly described in between-chapter interludes, but I found myself looking forward to those sections more than the main story.
The problem with the later books is that while the science in Red Mars is near enough in the future that it feels realistic, eventually the technology piles up(people living 200+ years, growing new limbs, massive terraforming projects) and it becomes difficult to relate to the characters. Red Mars is the epitome of hard, thought-provoking SF. It's more than a bit wordy, but you won't be sorry for having read it.
(Disclaimer: I am a huge Kim Stanley Robinson fan and would recommend almost anything of his. My favorite, "The Years of Rice and Salt", is often found in the sci-fi section in bookstores but is much more appropriate as an extra-credit assignment for history students, not science.)
Hoard recievers and other hardware built before 2003 NOW. Hoard hardware built buy manufacturers outside of this DVB consortium.
This is a great idea, and "NOW" is the key word. Governments can always stop you by implementing even harsher restrictions than they recently did in Japan, banning second-hand sales of certain electronics made before 2001:
http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news-11230-2nd+h and+electronics+sales+will+soon+be+illegal+in+Japa n.html
(Also covered on Slashdot, if you want to search.)
Needless to say, the reason given by Japanese authorities for this bit of soft totalitarianism was: safety.
The American way is original, or at least it was what was in use when the American colonies were part of the British empire. Newspapers in the colonies from the late 1700s use "January 1st, 1776" and the like. I couldn't tell you when the UK changed.
Many US government forms in fact use the DD-MM-YYYY format. If you're flying into the US and are filling out immigration-related forms and hear a muttered curse word followed by the sound of a pen crossing out some numbers at the bottom and rewriting, realize that the person next to you is probably an American who wasn't expecting to have the DD/MM format sprung on them!
I know this is a joke, but your post was surprisingly easy to read and understand with all the words being spelled out.
Perhaps we could make an embedded auto-correct feature to browsers that lets you type in acronyms which are automatically converted to spelled-out words? Many people use variations of this already when they have to type in the same phrases over and over. Or a feature that lets you toggle between acronyms and full spelling, just like the Traditional/Simplified toggle that the Mac has for Chinese characters.
Full spelling: tough on the fingers, easy on the brain!
>>Maybe we should require that all bills be read aloud in their entirety in an open session of congress?
Amen. Maybe this would help reduce porkbarreling too. If they are forced to listen to the entire thing they wouldn't be so quick to add random stuff to it.
>Better yet -- make the members of Congress write out all bills passed into law by hand.
That would cut down on obfuscation and legalese in a hurry.
It is short-sighted and foolish to only fight against a law/policy when it is enforced.
Well, yes. But if you've been visiting Canada regularly up to now despite having stolen a bicycle (or whatever) in your youth, and have never been denied entry before, you and your Canadian friends (who would be doing the fighting) are probably not going to be aware of these laws and policies.
Suddenly enforcing them now and claiming that they've been excessively lenient all those times in the past (and just not telling you about it) is dangerously close to ex post facto legislation.
If you don't like it, well, don't do things to limit that option for yourself, or visit some other place. Their country, their rules.
Such a statement cedes an awful lot of power to a national government. Remember, until now people could get into Canada even having done bad things. The 60-year-old who got caught driving drunk back in 1980 and has already repaid society for it can't undo what he once did. If a Canadian company wants to hire him, or Canadian relatives want him to visit, what can they do? Lobby the government to start being more lenient?
This will ultimately lead to even more privacy-violating information sharing as potential employers demand to know about any minor misdemeanor a potential hire has ever committed. They'll have to do this in order to be sure that their new employee doesn't get turned away at the border, but in the process the principle of being able to repay one's debts to society after a transgression will be even further eroded.
Fifty years ago these incidents went into dusty file boxes in the back closet of city hall; now they're in every border agent's database and are impeding people's movement. Should our societies consider mitigating these previously-impossible long term effects by shortening prison terms and lowering fines? Politically, how can one argue that without being seen as soft on crime?
My cheapie Brother printer will not print unless all four ink cartridges contain ink. If you run out of even one color, you still can't print in black and white until you fill that color cartridge again.
At first I thought this was just an artificial way to drum up sales of proprietary ink, but now I realize that it's much more sinister -- all documents must contain the Big Brother Yellow Dots! ^_^