I was raised a very "on fire" Evangelical Christian, but have since seen the light and accepted myself as my Personal Lord and Savior--a spiritual condition which has brought me much more happiness and peace than Jesus ever did.
As such, I think I have a very keen insight into the psychological differences between highly religious people and agnostic/atheistic people.
Basically, the belief in an afterlife that is great (for you and people who agree with you, anyway) really shields you from ever having to sit down and think, "I am going to die. It's not going to be some other person--some old man--who looks like me. It's going to be me. Just like I am now, but I'm going to look like that old man." Instead, the whole concept of mortality is couched in language like "going to a better place" or "being with Jesus" or whatever. Your entire concept of death is euphemistic. As a result, you have a sense of peace and well-being because you don't need to worry about death.
All that changes, I imagine, however, when the time actually comes. Suddenly you can't be euphemistic anymore. It isn't so much this "meta" idea of death. It is your lungs filling up with fluid. It is pain wracking your body as the cancer spreads. It is the heartbreak of knowing that you and your loved ones are going to be separated now, and you don't know when you'll see them again, or in what form (this is assuming you really believe in heaven). Suddenly it's not so beautiful. Suddenly it's the nuts and bolts of your body--the only vessel you know--falling apart and failing you. Suddenly it is very real and very immediate.
And you weren't ready for that.
Atheists, however, accept death--the nuts and bolts--as inevitable, and probably first thing you have to come to terms with if you are an atheist is how you're going to think about death. And, I think, most people have to put themselves through that process of thinking and realizing that, yes, you are going to die. Your lungs will fill with fluid. Your body will be wracked with pain. By the time you get to that point, you have already thought a lot about this, and have resigned yourself to the pitiful, painful, undignified end almost all of us eventually face.
So you don't see any point in fighting.
Furthermore, a mindset that believes in a "super-natural" world--a world and truth and story that supersedes and explains everything we experience and in which we play an important part--comes to see death as more important than it really is. Part of the benefit of religion is that it makes one feel that everything they do is part of a Grand Plan, that everything fits together and has meaning. As an atheist, I know that it doesn't. I know that whether I live or die is wholly inconsequential. I am the product of an incredibly complex physical system that started moving billions of years ago when something exploded. Whether I lived or did not makes no difference whatsoever.
And herein lies one of the most important distinctions between religious people and atheists: Religious people find that viewpoint hopelessly sad and question why we would want to live. Atheists think that the pleasure of typing into a textbox on Slashdot while nibbling black licorice is plenty reason to keep processing oxygen and sugars for as long as they can. The warmth and camaraderie of friends and family are enough. Life is worth living for life's sake. That may be the genes, who are selfish and want to be propagated, talking, but who cares?
Religious people's peace and happiness are conditional, and when the conditions change, they often don't know how to cope. Atheists are unconditional, and therefore don't kick up such a fuss when it's over.
I used OO.o for most of grad school, and liked it quite a bit. I really think it's a highly usable program, with a few neat features I wish Word had.
However, my work uses a lot of stats tables, and I find the OO.o tables (and those of Apple's Pages) a nightmare to use.
Even if the tables were as smooth to use as Word's, however, I still would have problems with the fact that people want.doc files. Yes, OO.o does export, but when I was using it, I was quite unimpressed by the export... especially with tables. Pages does even worse.
I'm not saying that OO.o is crap. It's not. But Word has the polish and--more importantly--the total market saturation to put it above OO.o. Granted, along with the polish is a whole lot of cruft and crap and you have to deal with MS, which is always a hassle because their products are designed by the marketing department, but overall, it's still the winner, IMO.
I first got turned on to LaTeX here on Slashdot, in my earlier days of being an academic. Some people said "oh yeah, serious journals all use LaTeX."
Bull.
I think that what they meant, and what the summary means, is that engineering and CS journals use LaTeX. Never once have I found a journal in linguistics or psychology (the fields I work in) that had even heard of it. Good job that I found it clunky and stupid to work with, bringing no more to the table than styles in any word-processing program, and making shitty looking documents to boot (I once had a stats course and the teacher had written the book in LaTeX--I could see through his terrible, though correctly-formatted, prose to the LaTeX inside--i.e. it looked amateurish and distractingly ugly, like most things pure-class engineers do--and that includes most of my friends, so I'm just saying).
In fact, in my field, I'm on a constant campaign to introduce people to styles. These people know about cognitive load and semantic networks; they don't know that they can just mark a string of text "Heading" and be done with it. It's not their area of expertise. And yet it seems that many academic Slashdot readers think they are using--or should use--or even can use--LaTeX? It's laughable! And it's not even a very good idea.
Here's what most journals I've dealt with take in these fields: Microsoft Word. That's basically it. You could probably send an RTF, but only after showing that it could open in Word.
Standard in academic writing... Ugh. The hard sciences are hardly the only fields in academia. I won't defend the intelligence of those in nonsense fields like literature (full disclosure: unfortunately, I have a BA in this BS), but the soft sciences have a lot of very smart, very analytical people... who do not use LaTeX or anything like it.
I'd chalk all of this up to all long-term politicians being crooked as hell. I really, truly believe that Obama isn't. He hasn't been in the game long enough to have either changed his ways (for the worse) or gotten out of the game altogether. We, as a nation, jumped him into that position because of his refreshing naivete, and although I knew that it would be rough going and he'd have to change tack on a lot of things once he got started, I still think we made the right call.
What??? Market forces can't solve every problem??? Are you honestly saying that the behavior of a huge conglomeration of greedy, stupid people (that includes everyone I know, and myself, of course) doesn't combine to result in effective, ideal solutions to serious problems?
Oh, I know why. It's because the jackbooted thugs in the government are meddling with their regulations. If we'd only cut the corporations loose from any responsibility whatsoever, there'd be no problems to speak of.
A few niche items (like the R4 card for the DS) are easier to find in Tokyo than in the suburbs of the US. But it would be just as easy to find in a major city like New York or Chicago.
Maybe (although I don't think "Western" is as big a deal as just "new"--let's get over ourselves, shall we?).
However, what I have noticed is that when someone gets it for its novelty, they don't like it. This is because it does not work the way that they are used to. It works like a computer (which is why I like it), and they are used to thinks working like a cellphone (i.e. barely).
Once I show them how to get around, and the power of applications, their outlook changes and they come to really like it.
That being said, only people like you and me, who do mostly roman-character input, would like a QWERTY keyboard (real or virtual). Japanese text entry with a numeric keypad is actually really easy, especially for people who are used to that as their primary input method (surpassing actual keyboards). This is probably the biggest hurdle to Japanese iPhone adoption--it was designed partially out of the understanding that the user hates text entry on the numeric keypad, and that just isn't the case here.
A few niche items (like the R4 card for the DS) are easier to find in Tokyo than in the suburbs of the US. But it would be just as easy to find in a major city like New York or Chicago.
Indeed.
I live in Japan, and actually, in many cases, it is easier to find tech gadgets in the US than here. And it is always cheaper. I just got back from the US, where I spent 2 weeks seeing friends and family, after an almost-two-year hiatus. During that time, I purchased my first HDTV over here. My 37-inch Mitsubishi LCD HDTV was just over $1000--that was almost half-price because they were phasing the model out. My wife and I kind of want to replace our dying bedroom TV with a small HDTV, but aren't thrilled by the $700 price tag for the cheapest, smallest one.
In the US, for $1000, I could have gotten a 42" Sharp Aquos. That TV is over $2000 here. I could also, for $700, put a 27" TV in the bedroom. I picked up a nice US-region DVD player (my old one died) for $40. Also, a 16GB USB flash drive for $40. Both of those are closer to $100 here.
Japan is not a technological wonderland. In fact, it's quite backward. People don't typically know how to use computers, and the cellphones are crap (yes, they have long feature lists, but I've never gotten them to work--that's why I was giddy when the iPhone finally came out here--I'll take a shorter feature list if all those things are actually usable).
I would like to create a nonprofit that pays for Western geeks to actually come over here for a few weeks and live with normal Japanese people and get over their Japan fetish. Don't get me wrong; I love Japan, and don't want to move away any time soon. But it is not the technowonderland we've been told it is.
I think you may be missing the point. Basically, the Wired writer cobbled together an article without doing any real research (just pulling notes from interviews much earlier) and made a strong claim that was wholly unsupported by the evidence cited.
At least, that's what bothers me here. This is the problem with journalism. In academia, where I work, if we make a claim in something we write, we either have to back it up with data we've collected and analysed, or we have to cite the person who did. Journalists can just pull whatever they want out of their asses and vomit it out into the world, and people believe them. In this case, yeah, it's not the end of the world (although I love my iPhone--as does everyone I know who has one), but it could have a negative impact on Apple's stock price, which could mean jobs lost, which could add to the unemployment problem in the US where the company is based...
Everything is connected, and in the information age, putting out bad information from a position of authority, whether it be deliberate or negligent, is serious business. Wired is supposedly a respected and respectable technology magazine. In this case, a writer abused that reputation to try to get away with just throwing some crap on paper and cashing his paycheck.
I think I just sprayed coffee all over my monitor.
Have you ever lived here (Japan) man??? The construction is shit! Absolute, unadulterated shit!
Buildings are built to last 30 years, not 100, and are torn down between owners. At the heart of that, whether people realize it or not (they don't), is a strong latent cultural belief that used things are "dirty," which stems from Shinto. People don't like the idea of moving into a house that has been "used" (have you ever considered a house "used?"), so they tear it down and build a different shitty one that someone else will tear down. They aren't built to last, but no one seems to care.
They are also profoundly energy inefficient. Just now, we are finally seeing double-paned windows. Just now. The first house I lived in that had those was a cheap modular my family moved into in 1980, and it was almost 10 years old then! Japanese people often clack their tongues at us "wasteful" Americans who heat our entire homes with a central furnace, not realizing that the furnace is far more efficient than the awful little camp heaters we heat individual rooms with here (I'm running mine right now--mmm, smell the fumes), and that, since the heat doesn't just disappear right out the windows, it doesn't take much energy to just keep it warm. My utility bills here are always substantially higher for a substantially smaller place (energy is a little more expensive here than the US, though).
What Japanese houses do have that I would love to incorporate in a house should I ever have on in the US are:
"Washlet" bidet toilet seats. People snicker at them, but after you start using one you can't figure out why Americans like to scrape poop remnants off their anuses and then walk around all day with what they missed. Washing with warm water is both more comfortable and more hygienic.
Heat-on-use water heaters. I have sometimes seen these in the US, but they are uncommon. Imagine drawing a bath and taking a shower and doing the dishes and everyone else in the family getting a shower, all in the space of an hour, without ever running out of hot water. It's heaven. I just got back from a 2-week trip to see friends and family in the US, and every damned morning, it seems, the hot water ran out when it was my turn to shower. Why do we put up with that?
Two things. That's it. And they have nothing to do with home construction.
Please stop believing that everything in Japan is great and wonderful. It's not. I have lived here for a long time; I like it here, a lot, but my first year here (10 years ago, yikes!) was a solid year of having every image of Japan I'd ever fostered smashed to smithereens. It is not efficient, it is not technologically advanced, and workmanship on just about everything (aside from consumer electronics and automotive--you know, the things they are famous for) is pretty godawful poor.
However, the people are wonderful, I enjoy the Japanese work philosophy (they are actually serious about team-building, and your co-workers start to feel more like family), you're not called a commie because you think that tax money should be able to fund social services for everyone--and actually the government doesn't even have to force these things because people in this country understand that they live in a society--a stark contrast to the greedy sociopathic American culture of "individualism", and the food is great.
Don't believe everything you see on the news. News crews covering Japan take the Narita Express from Narita Airport to Tokyo Station, change to the Yamanote Line, stop at Shinjuku and Shibuya to shoot some footage just outside the stations, and head home.
What I'd like to see is an encryption program that throws a few hundred KB onto a large number of files in the filesystem. You'd have to know what they are so you don't throw anyway, but I'm talking about steganography across the whole drive. It'd be basically undetectable, albeit quite clunky/slow to use...
You are a moron, and should be quarantined on an island with all the other people who, in the face of decades of research findings to the contrary, know goddamned well that vaccines work and have led to a healthier populace overall.
You'd probably thrive for generations, mistaking this for a vindication of your dunderheaded beliefs--until someone from civilized society visited, sneezed on you, and watched you all succumb in a year.
Finally... a profitable busines??? Since when??? Vaccines have a tremendously short shelf life and most go unused. That's money down the drain. In the smallpox terror scare a few years back, the reason it was scary was that the companies couldn't really afford to make the vaccine anymore because business on it had dropped off to nothing. There wasn't any available because it had been so effective in eradicating the target disease. Public money had to be used to get some back out there.
There is nothing that drives me crazier than anti-vaccine nutjobs like you. You don't deserve to live in civilized society.
I am an assistant professor. If you came to my office and told me to use anything, I'd kick your IT-fiddle-monkey-ass to the door.
Here's something I really want university IT guys to get through their thick skulls:
You work for us. Not the other way around.
If I want to use a Windows machine, you need to figure out how to let me. If I want to use a Mac (which I do), you need to make sure I can get to my servers. If I want to use Linux (which I hope to be doing one day--when the software I need to do my research is available on the platform), I expect your support there, too.
In the specific case of what you're proposing--moving to OSS for all everyday tasks, I have to be totally clear and honest here: You are wholly unqualified to make that call. It's not your job; it's not your responsibility; it's none of your damned business. You don't even know what I do; how could you know what I need?
Finally, let me say this: My first jobs in academia were in IT support, and I, too, got drunk on the power. I, too, was young and full of myself, and I, too, ran around telling people what they should do, instead of listening to what it is that they needed to do, and helping them do it. Now that I'm on the other side (and older and less full of myself), I see why I pissed people off so much in those days. I sucked at my job.
If you try to meddle in your customers' business, you suck at your job, too.
But then I wonder: "Why not release MS products for Linux?"
If I were in charge of the antitrust cases against MS in the US, I'd already have split the company up. I think this would even be good for the company (well, the applications part anyway), as they could finally be free to do better work with Office, etc. without getting in trouble for possibly hurting Windows.
Let's face it: MS Office is great. I don't want to have this conversation anymore. It is the best out there, bar none. The newest Mac version, I think, has got to have been crippled. Excel 2003 running on Fusion with XP runs faster. But this hasn't been pushing me off the Mac, back to Windows (hell, I just got here!); it's been making me look at competitors. I don't feel like giving a company money just so they can insult me with their shitty products because they want me to buy their shittier product (Windows) to get my performance back.
In fact, if MS got serious about other platforms, I wouldn't have jumped ship to the Mac, but to Ubuntu, which I like quite a bit, but with no native MS Office, I just didn't see as a viable alternative. I actually first got interested in the Mac because it kind of reminded me of Ubuntu/Gnome.
If the US DOJ had handled the antitrust cases right, we could all be happily Excel-ing away in Linux or on the Mac, and the Windows team would have to start getting serious about making an OS that people actually liked.
Actually, I got the message that iTMS was not to be used from outside of the US months ago (I live in Japan). They said they might check. Thus far, they haven't. I wouldn't worry about it.
Also, Amazon MP3 won't sell to me anymore, although they do for my friends. I had to buy a book for work from the US site and registered my Japanese credit card (my work can only reimburse expenditures made in yen), and then, like magic, Amazon MP3 stopped working. I've even tried making a new account with a different US credit card, and yet Amazon now knows I'm in Japan, but doesn't know that my buddy down the street, who has only ever used his US credit card with the US site, is as well.
I absolutely hate pirating music. I reject it on ethical grounds, and I hate tracks being mis-labeled (I have never entered track names by myself--who are these people who can't spell who are entering ID3 tags on pirated songs???) and having no control over the bitrate I get, and the album art requiring looking and futzing... It's just a shitty way to get music for all involved.
But when I'm not even allowed to buy it online (except for on CD--which I still do for music I really, really like, so I can rip it lossless), what's a boy to do?
The world was looking so pretty, without all those borders... Why do companies and governments need to redraw them through technological means? The promise of the internet is being quashed everywhere you look...
I, too, used to use my real name. Then, time went on, I grew up, mellowed, and suddenly the political screeds I penned in the heady days of youth looked like, um, really bad ideas. And in one case, I was a complete sanctimonious prick and was correctly called out for it...
I've been on pseudonyms ever since. I have a lot, and they are kind of characters depending on what kind of presence I want to have on that site. Slashdot is the only place where I kinda just speak freely, although this is also a pseudonym.
I used OO.o exclusively for about a year when I was in grad school. I quit when I was writing my thesis because I could not afford to have any problems with file compatibility with word, having it going back and forth between me and my advisor for comments. I had a little trouble, and that was trouble enough.
It seems that Writer is a lot better these days (although tables still suck), but I use Excel all the time. Calc and iWork Numbers are pretty great apps, but they aren't Excel, and I just plain have to have Excel.
If your memo or whatever doesn't look as great as it should, that makes you look like a tool. But if your spreadsheet doesn't work, your business could be sunk.
My own advice for this guy is "Just don't do it." MS Office can really be frustrating, and OO.o is really pretty great these days (given that it is free), but MS Office is industry standard, and that's what most people need.
This is about a bill that gives people the option of getting a little extra money if they want to replace their cars with one that is more fuel-efficient.
How is government making a decision for people?
Furthermore, what is government for, if not to protect shared public assets, such as, I dunno, the entire earth, which, if my geography serves, includes the United States of America? And if by doing this, the cash flow to enemies of the US can be reduced, that's following another major charter of the federal government: defense.
And Slashdot tilts way to the right. If you think it's left, then... how the hell did you get internet access all the way out in that highly-fortified shack in the woods?
I have a Daihatsu Mira. 660cc engine. Cute as a button. You can see one identical to mine here.
It gets 19mpg.
It is also not street-legal in the US, because if you're in an accident, it crumples like a soda can.
It can't go at highway speeds.
The Toyota Duet (the name I know that car you linked to) is not a super-mini. It's just a small car. There are plenty of such cars on the road in America (Honda Fits are supposedly doing very well, as is the Toyota Ist, rebranded as the Scion xA). But you know what? Their mileage specs aren't really that all-fired great. They beat an SUV, of course, but that '93 Corolla is about as good as it gets before you go hybrid (provided you are mostly on electric).
I worked at BB for a couple months when I was really hard-up for work. Here's why no one can find anything:
The inventory team moves shit around nightly. You'll work until close on Tuesday, come back Wednesday morning, some customer asks for a such-and-so, you smile and confidently guide them over to where they are... No, where they were... Like... 12 hours ago...
You then smile and ask them to wait, and run around the store trying to figure out where they hell they put the such-and-sos, check the inventory computer (the inventory system at BB, BTW, I thought was pretty impressive and easy to use), see that we have some somewhere.
Eventually you have to go back to the customer who is impatiently waiting in the aisle and say:
there are 6 of the item remaining in stock, but... uh... "We can't seem to find them.
Sometimes I'd find the stuff had been put away in the back. It was still available for sale, but was invisible to the customer and required the sales person to wander around in the dark for 10 minutes to find it. Ugh.
From the US, going to Japan requires a pre-approved visa. Leaving Japan requires payment of a tax of some sort. It has been a while, but I don't think there is a payment required for the visa up front.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong.
I live in Japan, and have done for almost 10 years. I've entered on student, work, and tourist visas. You obviously need to pre-approve for the two former, but the latter is just a matter of getting off the plane.
There is no exit tax. You very well may be thinking of the former airport tax at Kansai International in Osaka. For whatever stupid reason, you had to pay that tax not with the cost of your ticket, but by buying a stupid little 2500-yen ticket that you handed to someone as you entered security screening. This caused a lot of trouble to people who were leaving, gleeful that they had spent every last yen, only to find they needed to produce 2500 yen cash to be able to board the plane!
I don't know how long "a while" it's been for you, but it sounds like it was longer ago than 1998, the first time I came to Japan.
Slashdot Mirror
I was raised a very "on fire" Evangelical Christian, but have since seen the light and accepted myself as my Personal Lord and Savior--a spiritual condition which has brought me much more happiness and peace than Jesus ever did.
As such, I think I have a very keen insight into the psychological differences between highly religious people and agnostic/atheistic people.
Basically, the belief in an afterlife that is great (for you and people who agree with you, anyway) really shields you from ever having to sit down and think, "I am going to die. It's not going to be some other person--some old man--who looks like me. It's going to be me. Just like I am now, but I'm going to look like that old man." Instead, the whole concept of mortality is couched in language like "going to a better place" or "being with Jesus" or whatever. Your entire concept of death is euphemistic. As a result, you have a sense of peace and well-being because you don't need to worry about death.
All that changes, I imagine, however, when the time actually comes. Suddenly you can't be euphemistic anymore. It isn't so much this "meta" idea of death. It is your lungs filling up with fluid. It is pain wracking your body as the cancer spreads. It is the heartbreak of knowing that you and your loved ones are going to be separated now, and you don't know when you'll see them again, or in what form (this is assuming you really believe in heaven). Suddenly it's not so beautiful. Suddenly it's the nuts and bolts of your body--the only vessel you know--falling apart and failing you. Suddenly it is very real and very immediate.
And you weren't ready for that.
Atheists, however, accept death--the nuts and bolts--as inevitable, and probably first thing you have to come to terms with if you are an atheist is how you're going to think about death. And, I think, most people have to put themselves through that process of thinking and realizing that, yes, you are going to die. Your lungs will fill with fluid. Your body will be wracked with pain. By the time you get to that point, you have already thought a lot about this, and have resigned yourself to the pitiful, painful, undignified end almost all of us eventually face.
So you don't see any point in fighting.
Furthermore, a mindset that believes in a "super-natural" world--a world and truth and story that supersedes and explains everything we experience and in which we play an important part--comes to see death as more important than it really is. Part of the benefit of religion is that it makes one feel that everything they do is part of a Grand Plan, that everything fits together and has meaning. As an atheist, I know that it doesn't. I know that whether I live or die is wholly inconsequential. I am the product of an incredibly complex physical system that started moving billions of years ago when something exploded. Whether I lived or did not makes no difference whatsoever.
And herein lies one of the most important distinctions between religious people and atheists: Religious people find that viewpoint hopelessly sad and question why we would want to live. Atheists think that the pleasure of typing into a textbox on Slashdot while nibbling black licorice is plenty reason to keep processing oxygen and sugars for as long as they can. The warmth and camaraderie of friends and family are enough. Life is worth living for life's sake. That may be the genes, who are selfish and want to be propagated, talking, but who cares?
Religious people's peace and happiness are conditional, and when the conditions change, they often don't know how to cope. Atheists are unconditional, and therefore don't kick up such a fuss when it's over.
My $0.02.
Could be worse. Could be Cory Doctorow.
I used OO.o for most of grad school, and liked it quite a bit. I really think it's a highly usable program, with a few neat features I wish Word had.
However, my work uses a lot of stats tables, and I find the OO.o tables (and those of Apple's Pages) a nightmare to use.
Even if the tables were as smooth to use as Word's, however, I still would have problems with the fact that people want .doc files. Yes, OO.o does export, but when I was using it, I was quite unimpressed by the export... especially with tables. Pages does even worse.
I'm not saying that OO.o is crap. It's not. But Word has the polish and--more importantly--the total market saturation to put it above OO.o. Granted, along with the polish is a whole lot of cruft and crap and you have to deal with MS, which is always a hassle because their products are designed by the marketing department, but overall, it's still the winner, IMO.
I first got turned on to LaTeX here on Slashdot, in my earlier days of being an academic. Some people said "oh yeah, serious journals all use LaTeX."
Bull.
I think that what they meant, and what the summary means, is that engineering and CS journals use LaTeX. Never once have I found a journal in linguistics or psychology (the fields I work in) that had even heard of it. Good job that I found it clunky and stupid to work with, bringing no more to the table than styles in any word-processing program, and making shitty looking documents to boot (I once had a stats course and the teacher had written the book in LaTeX--I could see through his terrible, though correctly-formatted, prose to the LaTeX inside--i.e. it looked amateurish and distractingly ugly, like most things pure-class engineers do--and that includes most of my friends, so I'm just saying).
In fact, in my field, I'm on a constant campaign to introduce people to styles. These people know about cognitive load and semantic networks; they don't know that they can just mark a string of text "Heading" and be done with it. It's not their area of expertise. And yet it seems that many academic Slashdot readers think they are using--or should use--or even can use--LaTeX? It's laughable! And it's not even a very good idea.
Here's what most journals I've dealt with take in these fields: Microsoft Word. That's basically it. You could probably send an RTF, but only after showing that it could open in Word.
Standard in academic writing... Ugh. The hard sciences are hardly the only fields in academia. I won't defend the intelligence of those in nonsense fields like literature (full disclosure: unfortunately, I have a BA in this BS), but the soft sciences have a lot of very smart, very analytical people... who do not use LaTeX or anything like it.
I'd chalk all of this up to all long-term politicians being crooked as hell. I really, truly believe that Obama isn't. He hasn't been in the game long enough to have either changed his ways (for the worse) or gotten out of the game altogether. We, as a nation, jumped him into that position because of his refreshing naivete, and although I knew that it would be rough going and he'd have to change tack on a lot of things once he got started, I still think we made the right call.
I'd rather a profitable, productive company like Hitachi keep the money than the parasitic government.
Yes, but that's because you think that if we adopted your feudal economic system again, you'd be a lord, not a serf.
That is to say, you are a moron.
What??? Market forces can't solve every problem??? Are you honestly saying that the behavior of a huge conglomeration of greedy, stupid people (that includes everyone I know, and myself, of course) doesn't combine to result in effective, ideal solutions to serious problems?
Oh, I know why. It's because the jackbooted thugs in the government are meddling with their regulations. If we'd only cut the corporations loose from any responsibility whatsoever, there'd be no problems to speak of.
For sure.
A few niche items (like the R4 card for the DS) are easier to find in Tokyo than in the suburbs of the US. But it would be just as easy to find in a major city like New York or Chicago.
Maybe (although I don't think "Western" is as big a deal as just "new"--let's get over ourselves, shall we?).
However, what I have noticed is that when someone gets it for its novelty, they don't like it. This is because it does not work the way that they are used to. It works like a computer (which is why I like it), and they are used to thinks working like a cellphone (i.e. barely).
Once I show them how to get around, and the power of applications, their outlook changes and they come to really like it.
That being said, only people like you and me, who do mostly roman-character input, would like a QWERTY keyboard (real or virtual). Japanese text entry with a numeric keypad is actually really easy, especially for people who are used to that as their primary input method (surpassing actual keyboards). This is probably the biggest hurdle to Japanese iPhone adoption--it was designed partially out of the understanding that the user hates text entry on the numeric keypad, and that just isn't the case here.
A few niche items (like the R4 card for the DS) are easier to find in Tokyo than in the suburbs of the US. But it would be just as easy to find in a major city like New York or Chicago.
Indeed.
I live in Japan, and actually, in many cases, it is easier to find tech gadgets in the US than here. And it is always cheaper. I just got back from the US, where I spent 2 weeks seeing friends and family, after an almost-two-year hiatus. During that time, I purchased my first HDTV over here. My 37-inch Mitsubishi LCD HDTV was just over $1000--that was almost half-price because they were phasing the model out. My wife and I kind of want to replace our dying bedroom TV with a small HDTV, but aren't thrilled by the $700 price tag for the cheapest, smallest one.
In the US, for $1000, I could have gotten a 42" Sharp Aquos. That TV is over $2000 here. I could also, for $700, put a 27" TV in the bedroom. I picked up a nice US-region DVD player (my old one died) for $40. Also, a 16GB USB flash drive for $40. Both of those are closer to $100 here.
Japan is not a technological wonderland. In fact, it's quite backward. People don't typically know how to use computers, and the cellphones are crap (yes, they have long feature lists, but I've never gotten them to work--that's why I was giddy when the iPhone finally came out here--I'll take a shorter feature list if all those things are actually usable).
I would like to create a nonprofit that pays for Western geeks to actually come over here for a few weeks and live with normal Japanese people and get over their Japan fetish. Don't get me wrong; I love Japan, and don't want to move away any time soon. But it is not the technowonderland we've been told it is.
I think you may be missing the point. Basically, the Wired writer cobbled together an article without doing any real research (just pulling notes from interviews much earlier) and made a strong claim that was wholly unsupported by the evidence cited.
At least, that's what bothers me here. This is the problem with journalism. In academia, where I work, if we make a claim in something we write, we either have to back it up with data we've collected and analysed, or we have to cite the person who did. Journalists can just pull whatever they want out of their asses and vomit it out into the world, and people believe them. In this case, yeah, it's not the end of the world (although I love my iPhone--as does everyone I know who has one), but it could have a negative impact on Apple's stock price, which could mean jobs lost, which could add to the unemployment problem in the US where the company is based...
Everything is connected, and in the information age, putting out bad information from a position of authority, whether it be deliberate or negligent, is serious business. Wired is supposedly a respected and respectable technology magazine. In this case, a writer abused that reputation to try to get away with just throwing some crap on paper and cashing his paycheck.
And that's not right.
I think I just sprayed coffee all over my monitor.
Have you ever lived here (Japan) man??? The construction is shit! Absolute, unadulterated shit!
Buildings are built to last 30 years, not 100, and are torn down between owners. At the heart of that, whether people realize it or not (they don't), is a strong latent cultural belief that used things are "dirty," which stems from Shinto. People don't like the idea of moving into a house that has been "used" (have you ever considered a house "used?"), so they tear it down and build a different shitty one that someone else will tear down. They aren't built to last, but no one seems to care.
They are also profoundly energy inefficient. Just now, we are finally seeing double-paned windows. Just now. The first house I lived in that had those was a cheap modular my family moved into in 1980, and it was almost 10 years old then! Japanese people often clack their tongues at us "wasteful" Americans who heat our entire homes with a central furnace, not realizing that the furnace is far more efficient than the awful little camp heaters we heat individual rooms with here (I'm running mine right now--mmm, smell the fumes), and that, since the heat doesn't just disappear right out the windows, it doesn't take much energy to just keep it warm. My utility bills here are always substantially higher for a substantially smaller place (energy is a little more expensive here than the US, though).
What Japanese houses do have that I would love to incorporate in a house should I ever have on in the US are:
Please stop believing that everything in Japan is great and wonderful. It's not. I have lived here for a long time; I like it here, a lot, but my first year here (10 years ago, yikes!) was a solid year of having every image of Japan I'd ever fostered smashed to smithereens. It is not efficient, it is not technologically advanced, and workmanship on just about everything (aside from consumer electronics and automotive--you know, the things they are famous for) is pretty godawful poor.
However, the people are wonderful, I enjoy the Japanese work philosophy (they are actually serious about team-building, and your co-workers start to feel more like family), you're not called a commie because you think that tax money should be able to fund social services for everyone--and actually the government doesn't even have to force these things because people in this country understand that they live in a society--a stark contrast to the greedy sociopathic American culture of "individualism", and the food is great.
Don't believe everything you see on the news. News crews covering Japan take the Narita Express from Narita Airport to Tokyo Station, change to the Yamanote Line, stop at Shinjuku and Shibuya to shoot some footage just outside the stations, and head home.
What I'd like to see is an encryption program that throws a few hundred KB onto a large number of files in the filesystem. You'd have to know what they are so you don't throw anyway, but I'm talking about steganography across the whole drive. It'd be basically undetectable, albeit quite clunky/slow to use...
You are a moron, and should be quarantined on an island with all the other people who, in the face of decades of research findings to the contrary, know goddamned well that vaccines work and have led to a healthier populace overall.
You'd probably thrive for generations, mistaking this for a vindication of your dunderheaded beliefs--until someone from civilized society visited, sneezed on you, and watched you all succumb in a year.
Finally... a profitable busines??? Since when??? Vaccines have a tremendously short shelf life and most go unused. That's money down the drain. In the smallpox terror scare a few years back, the reason it was scary was that the companies couldn't really afford to make the vaccine anymore because business on it had dropped off to nothing. There wasn't any available because it had been so effective in eradicating the target disease. Public money had to be used to get some back out there.
There is nothing that drives me crazier than anti-vaccine nutjobs like you. You don't deserve to live in civilized society.
I am an assistant professor. If you came to my office and told me to use anything, I'd kick your IT-fiddle-monkey-ass to the door.
Here's something I really want university IT guys to get through their thick skulls:
You work for us. Not the other way around.
If I want to use a Windows machine, you need to figure out how to let me. If I want to use a Mac (which I do), you need to make sure I can get to my servers. If I want to use Linux (which I hope to be doing one day--when the software I need to do my research is available on the platform), I expect your support there, too.
In the specific case of what you're proposing--moving to OSS for all everyday tasks, I have to be totally clear and honest here: You are wholly unqualified to make that call. It's not your job; it's not your responsibility; it's none of your damned business. You don't even know what I do; how could you know what I need?
Finally, let me say this: My first jobs in academia were in IT support, and I, too, got drunk on the power. I, too, was young and full of myself, and I, too, ran around telling people what they should do, instead of listening to what it is that they needed to do, and helping them do it. Now that I'm on the other side (and older and less full of myself), I see why I pissed people off so much in those days. I sucked at my job.
If you try to meddle in your customers' business, you suck at your job, too.
You mean for hosting, right? Moodle itself is FOSS. You can host it from the laptop in your office if you want.
But then I wonder: "Why not release MS products for Linux?"
If I were in charge of the antitrust cases against MS in the US, I'd already have split the company up. I think this would even be good for the company (well, the applications part anyway), as they could finally be free to do better work with Office, etc. without getting in trouble for possibly hurting Windows.
Let's face it: MS Office is great. I don't want to have this conversation anymore. It is the best out there, bar none. The newest Mac version, I think, has got to have been crippled. Excel 2003 running on Fusion with XP runs faster. But this hasn't been pushing me off the Mac, back to Windows (hell, I just got here!); it's been making me look at competitors. I don't feel like giving a company money just so they can insult me with their shitty products because they want me to buy their shittier product (Windows) to get my performance back.
In fact, if MS got serious about other platforms, I wouldn't have jumped ship to the Mac, but to Ubuntu, which I like quite a bit, but with no native MS Office, I just didn't see as a viable alternative. I actually first got interested in the Mac because it kind of reminded me of Ubuntu/Gnome.
If the US DOJ had handled the antitrust cases right, we could all be happily Excel-ing away in Linux or on the Mac, and the Windows team would have to start getting serious about making an OS that people actually liked.
Actually, I got the message that iTMS was not to be used from outside of the US months ago (I live in Japan). They said they might check. Thus far, they haven't. I wouldn't worry about it.
Also, Amazon MP3 won't sell to me anymore, although they do for my friends. I had to buy a book for work from the US site and registered my Japanese credit card (my work can only reimburse expenditures made in yen), and then, like magic, Amazon MP3 stopped working. I've even tried making a new account with a different US credit card, and yet Amazon now knows I'm in Japan, but doesn't know that my buddy down the street, who has only ever used his US credit card with the US site, is as well.
I absolutely hate pirating music. I reject it on ethical grounds, and I hate tracks being mis-labeled (I have never entered track names by myself--who are these people who can't spell who are entering ID3 tags on pirated songs???) and having no control over the bitrate I get, and the album art requiring looking and futzing... It's just a shitty way to get music for all involved.
But when I'm not even allowed to buy it online (except for on CD--which I still do for music I really, really like, so I can rip it lossless), what's a boy to do?
The world was looking so pretty, without all those borders... Why do companies and governments need to redraw them through technological means? The promise of the internet is being quashed everywhere you look...
I, too, used to use my real name. Then, time went on, I grew up, mellowed, and suddenly the political screeds I penned in the heady days of youth looked like, um, really bad ideas. And in one case, I was a complete sanctimonious prick and was correctly called out for it...
I've been on pseudonyms ever since. I have a lot, and they are kind of characters depending on what kind of presence I want to have on that site. Slashdot is the only place where I kinda just speak freely, although this is also a pseudonym.
I used OO.o exclusively for about a year when I was in grad school. I quit when I was writing my thesis because I could not afford to have any problems with file compatibility with word, having it going back and forth between me and my advisor for comments. I had a little trouble, and that was trouble enough.
It seems that Writer is a lot better these days (although tables still suck), but I use Excel all the time. Calc and iWork Numbers are pretty great apps, but they aren't Excel, and I just plain have to have Excel.
If your memo or whatever doesn't look as great as it should, that makes you look like a tool. But if your spreadsheet doesn't work, your business could be sunk.
My own advice for this guy is "Just don't do it." MS Office can really be frustrating, and OO.o is really pretty great these days (given that it is free), but MS Office is industry standard, and that's what most people need.
Yeah, progress in the merging of new and existing technology to better and lengthen lives is stupid.
This is about a bill that gives people the option of getting a little extra money if they want to replace their cars with one that is more fuel-efficient.
How is government making a decision for people?
Furthermore, what is government for, if not to protect shared public assets, such as, I dunno, the entire earth, which, if my geography serves, includes the United States of America? And if by doing this, the cash flow to enemies of the US can be reduced, that's following another major charter of the federal government: defense.
And Slashdot tilts way to the right. If you think it's left, then... how the hell did you get internet access all the way out in that highly-fortified shack in the woods?
I have a Daihatsu Mira. 660cc engine. Cute as a button. You can see one identical to mine here.
It gets 19mpg.
It is also not street-legal in the US, because if you're in an accident, it crumples like a soda can.
It can't go at highway speeds.
The Toyota Duet (the name I know that car you linked to) is not a super-mini. It's just a small car. There are plenty of such cars on the road in America (Honda Fits are supposedly doing very well, as is the Toyota Ist, rebranded as the Scion xA). But you know what? Their mileage specs aren't really that all-fired great. They beat an SUV, of course, but that '93 Corolla is about as good as it gets before you go hybrid (provided you are mostly on electric).
Click here.
Scroll down to "education."
Seriously, that's a very well-known statistic.
I worked at BB for a couple months when I was really hard-up for work. Here's why no one can find anything:
The inventory team moves shit around nightly. You'll work until close on Tuesday, come back Wednesday morning, some customer asks for a such-and-so, you smile and confidently guide them over to where they are... No, where they were... Like... 12 hours ago...
You then smile and ask them to wait, and run around the store trying to figure out where they hell they put the such-and-sos, check the inventory computer (the inventory system at BB, BTW, I thought was pretty impressive and easy to use), see that we have some somewhere.
Eventually you have to go back to the customer who is impatiently waiting in the aisle and say:
there are 6 of the item remaining in stock, but... uh... "We can't seem to find them.
Sometimes I'd find the stuff had been put away in the back. It was still available for sale, but was invisible to the customer and required the sales person to wander around in the dark for 10 minutes to find it. Ugh.
From the US, going to Japan requires a pre-approved visa. Leaving Japan requires payment of a tax of some sort. It has been a while, but I don't think there is a payment required for the visa up front.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong.
I live in Japan, and have done for almost 10 years. I've entered on student, work, and tourist visas. You obviously need to pre-approve for the two former, but the latter is just a matter of getting off the plane.
There is no exit tax. You very well may be thinking of the former airport tax at Kansai International in Osaka. For whatever stupid reason, you had to pay that tax not with the cost of your ticket, but by buying a stupid little 2500-yen ticket that you handed to someone as you entered security screening. This caused a lot of trouble to people who were leaving, gleeful that they had spent every last yen, only to find they needed to produce 2500 yen cash to be able to board the plane!
I don't know how long "a while" it's been for you, but it sounds like it was longer ago than 1998, the first time I came to Japan.