"A smart Japanese would study English and either Korean or Chinese (or both)."
I agree. When you consider that Japan is always going to have to be a "trading country," because of its lack of resources, you wonder why they aren't doing more to promote business communication skills.
"They should either drop the facade, or actually teach people to speak English."
"Follow the money." If they did that, I wouldn't have a job. Therefore, half-assed teaching is A-OK 100% with me!
Yeah, they really need to redo English education from top-to-bottom, but I don't think anyone has the political will to fire as many people as is necessary to do it. It would take a while to do it too. First, Japan would have to sponsor a bunch of Japanese departments in colleges across America. Then they'd have to recruit those bilingual graduates to teach in elementary schools, and then finally they would have to fire today's English teachers and just hire a bunch of natives with the proper teaching skills for the middle and high schools. Today's system is to have most instruction done by Japanese teachers with terrible accents and occasionally shakey grammar starting in middle school with occasional visits by native speakers with little knowledge of either Japanese or teaching. (Having teaching done by people who don't know Japanese is probably not a bad idea for higher level classes, but at the lower level, it's just a needless handicap. As for teaching experience, the only thing that recommends for its lack is the lower salary of untrained employees.) The results of today's system? Engrish, of course.
Yeah, at the higher level schools, it is closer to 5 hours of English a week for the top students. That's not the average though, and even with that level of involvement, results are mixed.
Most Japanese students only get about an hour or two a week of English. In school, I got at least 3 of Spanish for 4 years, and I still sucked at it, even though Spanish is a lot closer to English than English is to Japanese. My high school students have been studying English for up to 6 years, and my 4 years of on and off Japanese study kicks their linguistic ass, no questions. (In fairness though, I have lived in Japan, where most of them either haven't been abroad, or went for two weeks on school trip.)
I was thinking last night, and I realized that Engrish is a situation where it helps to follow the dictum "follow the money." Who is profitting from the "Engrish" meme? . . . Answer: The people who want to go to Japan and find work translating things into English and the people who sell those t-shirts.
And now it all makes sense. If you're a Japanese company, why the hell should you spend money making sure the English text on your product makes sense? How are you going to earn one more sale by spending this money? If anything, you're going to lose a sale, when Engrish hounds pass you by.
Look, I find Engrish amusing too; I took a picture of a garbage can that said "Waste Please" yesterday because I found it funny that if you interpret "waste" as a verb, the meaning changes to "please discard things prematurely," but I recognize that if that park had bothered spend even one yen hiring an idiot like me to "fix" the garbage can, it would have been money right down the drain. "Waste please," indeed. The Engrish heads are trying to embarrass Japanese companies into giving them jobs, but frankly, if they had business sense, they would just keep getting the lowest intern in the company to scribble whatever the hell he wants on stuff.
How would you know that space-time was denser? When you move your ruler inside of it, wouldn't the ruler's size fit the density of space, showing in the case of the basketball that can fit a house that it actually is the size of a house, since it can fit a house's worth of rulers inside? Since space is just a measure of distance and distance is a measure of chemical bonds strengths over space and whatnot, it seems like it would be hard to measure space to be any more or less than 1/1.
If there were a GUI XML tool you could a) use remote login and do it on the server in X11 or b) configure it on your computer, save the XML, upload it to your remote server then swap the files. Being headless is no excuse for being GUI-less.
So, you want to know about GAME DIALOGUE? There are rumors that if you PRESS X, you can learn more about GAME DIALOGUE from THE OLD MAN IN DIAOLG VILLAGE. Of course, these are just rumors. I am too wizened of a cliche not to dismiss them out of hand. An N. P. C. like myself wouldn't know anything about it. Just remember PRESS START when you want to read this again.
Do you think if I get a patent on giving a score from one to ten on graphics, sound, gameplay, and replayability plus a non-composite overall score, I could get royalties from the industry? What with how the Patent Office is too lazy to detect prior art and the review industry is too lazy to make a proper review, I could make a killing!
The ESRB was formed back in the 16-bit era, so why is this only now being implemented? In retrospect, it's blindingly obvious, isn't it? I mean, even the PS2 has a parental lock out-- for DVDs. (This was a total pain in the ass in my experience, since my friend couldn't figure out how to turn his off, but whatever.) So, why didn't Sony take that extra step and also do ESRB lockouts? Is there any explanation for it that doesn't make the game industry look either absent minded or greedy?
If I'm reading you correctly, you just compared Sony to figs, gamers to monkeys, Kojima to a bee, and First Person Shooters to humidity? Dude, that's awesome!! Best. Analogy. Evar.
I'm aware, but you gotta admit, it would be a pain in the ass for the feds to tap it. Not saying they couldn't do it, but it's nice to know you'd be wasting a couple hours of their time.:D
...is that after all the time that's passed since B5 was on the air, they could probably take the actual CGI models that they used to make the show and render them in real time on an XBox 360 or whatever. At the time, the CGI was really cool, but it probably wouldn't be that hard to surpass anymore.
Pocket calculators didn't change the world, but computers are also just a fad. What really changes the world are slide rules. Let's all use them! They make an excellent present for any occasion, and they're 100% biodegradeable*.
Carl Johnson VP of Marketing SlideCo Algorithms Inc.
*Claim only applies to new Ultra WoodSlide(TM) model slide rules.
They were jerks during the NES era. Everyone wanted to put out cheap and cheesy games, but Nintendo didn't let them. You had to buy your cartridges from them and pay license fees, etc.
This isn't flamebait at all, and it's a shame that the mods can't see that. The fact is, the grandparent is full of crap, and even the hard religious right isn't interested in outlawing masturbation, condoms, etc. But whatever, it's totally easier to fight an enemy that you don't understand, right? Sheez, and people wonder why they keep losing elections.
Precisely. You know, since 56k was a hack that took advantage of the physical whatnot of the phone system, that definitely won't work. What's more the compression of the signal by Skype, et al. will probably further limit the possible transfer rates. I'm guessing, best case scenario 28.8 or 14.4, but don't even count on that much.
In other words, it's the good ole days again! FidoNet, here we come.
Create a software modem to connect through a VoIP service like Skype and you can get free dial-up over broadband(!). I'm not sure how useful this would be, but you've gotta admit, it's nerdy as hell. The first one to do it will totally get slashdotted.
I believe the great-grandparent meant it in the literal sense, that the iPod is a 100 foot tall wooden horse filled with soldiers who will destroy your town.
But at $399, it's a bargin. Hiring that many soldiers usually costs at least twice as much.
Britney Spears hasn't been a force in pop music for several years, and even when she was, she was aimed at little kids anyway-- ie. people too young to know the difference. Complaining about Britney Spears is as pointless as complaining about Barney. Of course it sucks! But if you know enough to realize that, then it's not aimed at your demographic anyway.
A closer analogy is this: Sony sends out PSP firmware updates, but won't let you install the PSP OS on homebrewed hardware. A Mac is an integrated piece of hardware and software. If Apple doesn't want to sell you just the software, that's their business.
Film? My understanding is this was the catch phrase for Mac OS 8's voice password feature. It's been a long time though, so I could be wrong about the details.
High noon is only high for people in the center of a time zone anyway. For other people it's off by 15 minutes on average. Being a minute or so off solar time wouldn't really be a big deal.
I gotcha all beat: My Voice Is My Password. Not a hint of English text there.
Hey, incidentally does anyone know why I'm the only person to show up to my MUG in the last 5 years? I'm really eager to discuss my favorite extensions to disable, but no one else comes to the meetings.
Slashdot Mirror
"A smart Japanese would study English and either Korean or Chinese (or both)."
I agree. When you consider that Japan is always going to have to be a "trading country," because of its lack of resources, you wonder why they aren't doing more to promote business communication skills.
"They should either drop the facade, or actually teach people to speak English."
"Follow the money." If they did that, I wouldn't have a job. Therefore, half-assed teaching is A-OK 100% with me!
Yeah, they really need to redo English education from top-to-bottom, but I don't think anyone has the political will to fire as many people as is necessary to do it. It would take a while to do it too. First, Japan would have to sponsor a bunch of Japanese departments in colleges across America. Then they'd have to recruit those bilingual graduates to teach in elementary schools, and then finally they would have to fire today's English teachers and just hire a bunch of natives with the proper teaching skills for the middle and high schools. Today's system is to have most instruction done by Japanese teachers with terrible accents and occasionally shakey grammar starting in middle school with occasional visits by native speakers with little knowledge of either Japanese or teaching. (Having teaching done by people who don't know Japanese is probably not a bad idea for higher level classes, but at the lower level, it's just a needless handicap. As for teaching experience, the only thing that recommends for its lack is the lower salary of untrained employees.) The results of today's system? Engrish, of course.
Yeah, at the higher level schools, it is closer to 5 hours of English a week for the top students. That's not the average though, and even with that level of involvement, results are mixed.
Most Japanese students only get about an hour or two a week of English. In school, I got at least 3 of Spanish for 4 years, and I still sucked at it, even though Spanish is a lot closer to English than English is to Japanese. My high school students have been studying English for up to 6 years, and my 4 years of on and off Japanese study kicks their linguistic ass, no questions. (In fairness though, I have lived in Japan, where most of them either haven't been abroad, or went for two weeks on school trip.)
I was thinking last night, and I realized that Engrish is a situation where it helps to follow the dictum "follow the money." Who is profitting from the "Engrish" meme? . . . Answer: The people who want to go to Japan and find work translating things into English and the people who sell those t-shirts.
And now it all makes sense. If you're a Japanese company, why the hell should you spend money making sure the English text on your product makes sense? How are you going to earn one more sale by spending this money? If anything, you're going to lose a sale, when Engrish hounds pass you by.
Look, I find Engrish amusing too; I took a picture of a garbage can that said "Waste Please" yesterday because I found it funny that if you interpret "waste" as a verb, the meaning changes to "please discard things prematurely," but I recognize that if that park had bothered spend even one yen hiring an idiot like me to "fix" the garbage can, it would have been money right down the drain. "Waste please," indeed. The Engrish heads are trying to embarrass Japanese companies into giving them jobs, but frankly, if they had business sense, they would just keep getting the lowest intern in the company to scribble whatever the hell he wants on stuff.
It's true that my friend's PS2 was always buggy. But my Gamecube was not.
Conclusion: Two pieces of data are all you need to draw a perfectly statistically valid inference. NINTEND0 r00lz!
Or maybe not.
How would you know that space-time was denser? When you move your ruler inside of it, wouldn't the ruler's size fit the density of space, showing in the case of the basketball that can fit a house that it actually is the size of a house, since it can fit a house's worth of rulers inside? Since space is just a measure of distance and distance is a measure of chemical bonds strengths over space and whatnot, it seems like it would be hard to measure space to be any more or less than 1/1.
If there were a GUI XML tool you could a) use remote login and do it on the server in X11 or b) configure it on your computer, save the XML, upload it to your remote server then swap the files. Being headless is no excuse for being GUI-less.
So, you want to know about GAME DIALOGUE? There are rumors that if you PRESS X, you can learn more about GAME DIALOGUE from THE OLD MAN IN DIAOLG VILLAGE. Of course, these are just rumors. I am too wizened of a cliche not to dismiss them out of hand. An N. P. C. like myself wouldn't know anything about it. Just remember PRESS START when you want to read this again.
Do you want me to explain that again?
>YES< NODo you think if I get a patent on giving a score from one to ten on graphics, sound, gameplay, and replayability plus a non-composite overall score, I could get royalties from the industry? What with how the Patent Office is too lazy to detect prior art and the review industry is too lazy to make a proper review, I could make a killing!
The ESRB was formed back in the 16-bit era, so why is this only now being implemented? In retrospect, it's blindingly obvious, isn't it? I mean, even the PS2 has a parental lock out-- for DVDs. (This was a total pain in the ass in my experience, since my friend couldn't figure out how to turn his off, but whatever.) So, why didn't Sony take that extra step and also do ESRB lockouts? Is there any explanation for it that doesn't make the game industry look either absent minded or greedy?
If I'm reading you correctly, you just compared Sony to figs, gamers to monkeys, Kojima to a bee, and First Person Shooters to humidity? Dude, that's awesome!! Best. Analogy. Evar.
I'm aware, but you gotta admit, it would be a pain in the ass for the feds to tap it. Not saying they couldn't do it, but it's nice to know you'd be wasting a couple hours of their time. :D
...is that after all the time that's passed since B5 was on the air, they could probably take the actual CGI models that they used to make the show and render them in real time on an XBox 360 or whatever. At the time, the CGI was really cool, but it probably wouldn't be that hard to surpass anymore.
Pocket calculators didn't change the world, but computers are also just a fad. What really changes the world are slide rules. Let's all use them! They make an excellent present for any occasion, and they're 100% biodegradeable*.
Carl Johnson
VP of Marketing
SlideCo Algorithms Inc.
*Claim only applies to new Ultra WoodSlide(TM) model slide rules.
They were jerks during the NES era. Everyone wanted to put out cheap and cheesy games, but Nintendo didn't let them. You had to buy your cartridges from them and pay license fees, etc.
This isn't flamebait at all, and it's a shame that the mods can't see that. The fact is, the grandparent is full of crap, and even the hard religious right isn't interested in outlawing masturbation, condoms, etc. But whatever, it's totally easier to fight an enemy that you don't understand, right? Sheez, and people wonder why they keep losing elections.
Precisely. You know, since 56k was a hack that took advantage of the physical whatnot of the phone system, that definitely won't work. What's more the compression of the signal by Skype, et al. will probably further limit the possible transfer rates. I'm guessing, best case scenario 28.8 or 14.4, but don't even count on that much.
In other words, it's the good ole days again! FidoNet, here we come.
Take that up a notch:
Create a software modem to connect through a VoIP service like Skype and you can get free dial-up over broadband(!). I'm not sure how useful this would be, but you've gotta admit, it's nerdy as hell. The first one to do it will totally get slashdotted.
I believe the great-grandparent meant it in the literal sense, that the iPod is a 100 foot tall wooden horse filled with soldiers who will destroy your town.
But at $399, it's a bargin. Hiring that many soldiers usually costs at least twice as much.
Britney Spears hasn't been a force in pop music for several years, and even when she was, she was aimed at little kids anyway-- ie. people too young to know the difference. Complaining about Britney Spears is as pointless as complaining about Barney. Of course it sucks! But if you know enough to realize that, then it's not aimed at your demographic anyway.
A closer analogy is this: Sony sends out PSP firmware updates, but won't let you install the PSP OS on homebrewed hardware. A Mac is an integrated piece of hardware and software. If Apple doesn't want to sell you just the software, that's their business.
Film? My understanding is this was the catch phrase for Mac OS 8's voice password feature. It's been a long time though, so I could be wrong about the details.
High noon is only high for people in the center of a time zone anyway. For other people it's off by 15 minutes on average. Being a minute or so off solar time wouldn't really be a big deal.
I gotcha all beat: My Voice Is My Password. Not a hint of English text there.
Hey, incidentally does anyone know why I'm the only person to show up to my MUG in the last 5 years? I'm really eager to discuss my favorite extensions to disable, but no one else comes to the meetings.
If they used Ackbar, everyone would think that being an officer is a trap.
That was the best worst nerd joke ever. :)