Thanks for checking. I live in Japan, too, and my wife is going to have to fill this idiotic thing in in a few days. The double-byte thing is a major problem.
My wife's first complaint was "what about people who don't have computers or internet access?" No one in my Japanese family does. My wife didn't until she fell in with the bad company that is me. I've had people approach me looking for business advice for Japan before, and mine is always "make sure your site has a mobile version."
I am an American, living abroad, and I, too, used to go home once or twice a year to see friends and family.
I haven't been back for almost 2 years, but I'm scheduling a trip now, and dreading it.
My wife is foreign, so that means that even if I am spared the various indignities and hassles (and honestly, citizens aren't spared much of those), I still have to go through them with her. The one time we went through immigration separately like we are supposed to (me in the citizen line, her in the visitor line), they almost didn't let her in because she only had $5 on her and was staying for three weeks (evidently the DHS hasn't gotten the memo about ATMs yet). She was saying that she was married to an American, but US embassies won't even let you register your marriage anywhere with them, so of course there's no record of that (married in Japan). I was finished with immigration and was standing just past the booth, waiting for my wife to appear and getting really panicky, when I was ordered to leave. I went into the hallway and stood at the very edge so I could still see most of the immigration booth, and finally heard my wife's voice calling my name. I looked way down the line and saw a bunch of black-paramilitary-uniformed DHS personnel gathering around her, waving frantically to me. I waved back (still not allowed to join her), and that was somehow proof that we were married and they let her through.
Now we go together and if they don't like it I just play dumb.
Also, the TSA has, on two occasions, obviously dumped our luggage onto a floor to check it, then just scooped it back into the bag. They neglected to screw the top of a bottle of shampoo back on after opening it, and ruined all the gifts for my wife's family in that bag. They scratched my mint Strat that I was bringing back to the US to sell.
And on top of all of this, every person, government or private, at the airport, is curt, rude, and overbearing. Toss into that the possibility that my laptop could be confiscated or my drive mirrored or worse, and going home to see family has become such a burden that I just plain don't do it anymore.
Seriously, this is a big part of why I ditched Windows for the Mac last year. I looked at Vista and could see that MS was accentuating the parts of Windows I hated (the chattiness, the endless clicking and bullshit and popups and everything), while Apple was introducing more of the things I liked (commodity hardware, robust developer community). I just played with the Windows 7 beta last night on a VMware virtual machine, and I was dismayed to see that it actually is even more annoying, in my personal opinion, than Vista.
Honestly, I really, really loved Windows 2k, and got to like XP quite a bit (running the Classic UI and fixing idiotic things like the search dog with TweakUI), but with Vista I saw the future of MS OSes and just went, "uhhhhmmm... No."
I find Ubuntu and the Mac equally easy to use and they stay out of my hair, but the Mac has MS Office and I don't have to dick around looking for device drivers, and, well, just please believe me when I say that's important.
Yeah, that's why. I drive a silly little car, but when I see a fancy car, I appreciate them. Making up a bunch of silliness about why they have one is just envy I think.
People spend their money on the things they like. When people from my job come to my apartment and see that everything is networked and computerized, they say "my god, how much more do you make than me???" But we all make the same (same contract), and that's just where my values are. They go on 2-month sojourns through the windswept mountains of Kafoonistan; I stream movies from the office to the TV. Mine is still way cheaper, and I enjoy it every day of the year.
But that's values. There's just no reason to criticize other people's "fun."
As a matter of fact, I do play instruments, and even majored in music (vocal performance) for my first 2 years of college, until I realized I didn't want to be a music teacher, and that was all I'd be able to do with that degree.
So, I'd like to think I know a little about music. I don't know as much as my buddy in his PhD course, doing his dissertation on some godawful obscure nook of music theory, but I know a lot more than the average bear.
The Beatles wrote straight-up, standard pop music. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about them, aside from the hype that surrounded them. Don't get me wrong; comparing them to Britney is absolutely unfair, but they aren't really any more skilled or special than, say, Smashing Pumpkins. In fact, Corgan's guitar skill probably outdoes any of the Beatles (why he moved to synths, which he's no good at, I'll never know). It's on the top end of pop-music-seriousness scale, but it's still just pop music.
I have gotten into feelings-hurt-level arguments about this, but it just has to be said: The Beatles are/were nothing special, musically.
Somehow I must question those surveys. While quite a number of people I know use Windows, almost no-one I know actually uses IE as their default browser.
It's interesting you should point that out...
Virtually everyone I know and work with is on Windows, both at work at at home. And I don't know anyone who uses IE as their primary browser... I'm thinking hard, too... I can't remember the last time I saw a Windows machine without that little orange icon. And these aren't tech-savvy people; these are English teachers. I mean... They're low. Lower than my parents in many cases.
You seem to be implying that companies should change their UI frequently... Soo... I mean... MS Office 2007 is all I'm sayin'...
Seriously, when I went back to the Mac after 10 years off the platform last year, part of what I really appreciated was that so little of the UI had changed since System 8.5 that I just sat right back down, found the things that had changed since 10, and went to work. The fact that they get a great UI from the start and then leave it alone is one of the best things Apple has going for it.
One more example of what happens when you don't do that: MS designed the "blade" interface for the Xbox 360. It won design awards. It was quick, easy, and intuitive to use. Everything from the most basic to most advanced options were easy to find. I, for one, loved it, and I can't remember the last time I actually liked a MS product.
Then they updated it. Now I can't find anything and I have to shuffle through a seemingly endless pile of 3D frames, half of which seem to be ads, to use my machine. It's preposterous. You know what they should have done to improve the UI? Nothing. When you nailed it, you nailed it.
Careful, every time I take that position I have a bunch of people tell me I'm too dumb to see.
The only good thing I can say about the CFLs I have all over my house now is that they die far sooner than the packages claim, which allows you to replace them with real lightbulbs that don't make you feel like you're living in a hospital, or in a hospital with weird pink lighting.
I also have not noticed any particular savings on my electric bill. When PSUs have crept up into the kW range, it ain't the lightbulbs that are pushing your bill up.
Oh, there's more trouble with tables than that. In fact, OO.o's shit table support is the reason I failed to switch to it during grad school (ca 2004), and even though I always keep the current version installed, hoping that one day it'll work right, it hasn't been fixed yet.
OO.o's bizarre idea that cells have borders that are theirs alone (as opposed to being shared with adjacent cells) means that trying to get table lines to look nice is a nightmare. If you don't do it just right, you'll end up with double-thick lines in some places, and weirdly off-center lines everywhere else.
Trying to get all the rows or columns to be the same size is an exercise in frustration.
Exports of documents to either.rtf or.doc sees the tables' careful formatting destroyed when opened in Word (please spare me the "that's a Word problem!" BS; Word is the industry standard--everyone else needs to fit it, not the other way around).
Paragraph spacing doesn't seem to affect tables. In Word, the best way to make your table's rows even is to apply a paragraph style that has, say, 1pt above and below. This way, no row boundary can get closer to the text than that, and all you have to do to make everything tidy is have the table conform to the contents. It looks great and is trivial to do. Not the case in OO.o. You have to fiddle with crap.
OO.o is phenomenal, considering its free, and it hits all the major necessary features solidly. But there are enough little unpleasant surprises lurking in there as to make it a no-go for people who have to prepare a lot of documents for work or whatever.
It's not finished, and I actually don't understand what has changed since 1.1.1 (the version I started out with). Version 3.0 seems to be the same program. It's clear that, although it's not finished, the devs are finished with it.
That brightened my day. Sometimes the things that are modded up here sound like the kind of justifications some nerdy loser in high school comes up with to explain why he doesn't have any friends ("Everyone is so stupid. Buncha sheep."). Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine that they really are 15 years old, but I know in my heart they're actually 45 and still have the opinions they had when they were 15.
People are unique, but not special. Everyone is different from everyone else, which means everyone is kinda the same. If something is popular that you don't like, it's not because you are better than the other people; it's that you are different. And that is totally unexceptional.
And if people don't like you? Well, that just means you're a prick.
I started out on Abit boards and loved them, but after a few years I started having more and more problems with them. I switched to Asus and the problems went away. I was surprised they were still around.
I am a teacher. I am a techie geek. But these are the same questions I had.
Here is what happens in education: Some idiot thinks up a sexy idea like giving laptops to all the students. He or she runs around squawking about it until it gets to the ears of the person controlling the money (or maybe it's a grant). Idea goes forward.
Then people ask what they should be doing.
No one knows, so a bunch of people who don't know anything about computers or video cameras or whatever it is that has been purchased try to incorporate them in their lessons, because they are there. It's not clear why they need to be in the lessons, but they feel like they are wasting something if they don't use it.
Totally simple, straightforward things that were meant to teach, say, research skills, now become a byzantine mess of dealing with people's crappy PowerPoint skills, printing out webpages, stammering, and teachers trying (and probably failing) to address technical issues (and then coming to my office for me to sort them out).
You know how many computers I use in my classes?
None. And I eat computers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I just don't think they offer much in the way of education. They have revolutionized what kind and how much research we can do. They have made it very easy to write academic prose (in the old days you literally had to cut and paste, and then re-type). They allow you to move information around quickly and easily.
They are tools. That's all. Learning does not magically happen the moment you crack open a laptop.
Design the curriculum first, then get laptops if it calls for them as necessary.
But, speaking from experience, it probably doesn't.
It is indeed ridiculous, but not for the reason you mention.
As a guy in the education industry (it's an industry--lotta money), I can say with complete confidence that these laptops were CHEAP by the time Apple got done with the deal. Apple has always been great to work with for teachers and students, partly because their culture is pretty lefty and they like education, but also because, hey, give these kids Macs and they might not want to go back.
No, the reason this is ridiculous--and this is from a happy MacBook owner whose MacBook slowly just became his main work machine instead of a regular laptop--is that the MacBook ain't gonna last 6 years. Well, maybe the new aluminium ones will... I don't know. But if they're anything like this white one, I just don't see it happening.
Just as an n-size of one, I'd like to say I've had no connection problems at all here in Japan on SoftBank's 3G network. None at all. I really suspect that its an infrastructure problem in other countries. Japan's had 3G the longest of anyone, and I live in the Tokyo area.
The lack of copy/paste is the only thing that has irked me.
SoftBank here in Japan charges a monthly fee for it, but I don't actually pay for it because I get maybe 1 voicemail a year and don't mind paying 20 yen to retrieve it. It's less than 315 yen a month.
Thanks. I get so tired of the grumpy "featurism" of Slashdot posters. My old phone did everything and more than what my current iPhone does... on paper. In truth, I never got the music player to work anywhere near as well as my iPod, the display of Office documents was illegible, I couldn't find contacts worth a damn, every time I installed a program, it didn't work, and even though it had a 2 megapixel camera with optical zoom, the pictures from my iPhone look as good or better.
You can't judge a product by reading a feature table. You have to try to actually use it. What Apple did is what they always do: Take a product that someone already thought of, and made it actually do what the original people promised.
Even when people email me their work, I still print it out and mark it up. A few reasons:
1) The markup tools in Word, etc., are much more suited to what they're designed for: collaboration. I use them all the time when I'm working with colleagues on joint research papers. But for paper comments, they are slow and kludgy.
2) On paper, I can do things like circle a phrase and draw an angry red arrow back to where it should actually be. I can do a lot more than just add margin notes, and I can communicate state of mind better. A typed "Huh?" on a comment does not communicate my total inability to work out what the student is trying to say the way a big, red one with a giant question mark and an underline or two does.
3) Turning things in electronically is great for the student, not for the teacher. See, for this to work, I have to have all my students in my address book. This is a lot harder than you'd imagine, especially with people who have the same names, people who don't use their university mail, etc. When it's paper, I look at it, comment it, rate it, put the grade in my computer, and move on. It gets back to you the next class, when I'm going to see you anyway. Mailing them back to each person is akin to me having to put printed copies in a student's pigeon hole. It's an extra clerical task that takes time from doing more important things and is failure-prone (and here in Japan, sending the wrong paper to the wrong student can get you sued/fired--privacy law).
4) There's been a lot of research on corrective feedback for writing. Guess what? It's useless. You give it, some students get better, some don't. You don't, same thing. Now, as a student, no one wants to just turn in something that took them hours and hours and get nothing back, and, as a teacher, I don't want people to think I'm not even reading them, because, truthfully, I read every word, all the time (I like to see what people have to say), so we comment them, knowing full well that people either won't read them or will read them but not take them to heart. So, what I'm saying is that there's no reason for these comments to live on forever on our hard drives. Paper will get read and tossed. That's the appropriate life cycle for that exchange.
5) Finally, you can't search a paper to speed up grading. If there's fluff in there, I'm going to nail your ass. Every sentence is important, and if it's not, I need to read it anyway to tell you that it's not. No one wants to get a grade on a paper based on a couple sentences.
Basically, as a student, turning things in electronically is great. As a teacher, in my personal opinion and experience, not so much.
Also, his command for her to read Japanese was not actually a Japanese command. It was an English command translated to Japanese (i.e. in English a command is issued with just the uninflected simple non-past verb, whereas it has to be conjugated to form a command--and there are several politeness levels--in Japanese).
What we are seeing here is a creepy foreigner with a creepy Japanese otaku fetish.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for checking. I live in Japan, too, and my wife is going to have to fill this idiotic thing in in a few days. The double-byte thing is a major problem.
My wife's first complaint was "what about people who don't have computers or internet access?" No one in my Japanese family does. My wife didn't until she fell in with the bad company that is me. I've had people approach me looking for business advice for Japan before, and mine is always "make sure your site has a mobile version."
I foresee trouble.
I'll go one further.
I am an American, living abroad, and I, too, used to go home once or twice a year to see friends and family.
I haven't been back for almost 2 years, but I'm scheduling a trip now, and dreading it.
My wife is foreign, so that means that even if I am spared the various indignities and hassles (and honestly, citizens aren't spared much of those), I still have to go through them with her. The one time we went through immigration separately like we are supposed to (me in the citizen line, her in the visitor line), they almost didn't let her in because she only had $5 on her and was staying for three weeks (evidently the DHS hasn't gotten the memo about ATMs yet). She was saying that she was married to an American, but US embassies won't even let you register your marriage anywhere with them, so of course there's no record of that (married in Japan). I was finished with immigration and was standing just past the booth, waiting for my wife to appear and getting really panicky, when I was ordered to leave. I went into the hallway and stood at the very edge so I could still see most of the immigration booth, and finally heard my wife's voice calling my name. I looked way down the line and saw a bunch of black-paramilitary-uniformed DHS personnel gathering around her, waving frantically to me. I waved back (still not allowed to join her), and that was somehow proof that we were married and they let her through.
Now we go together and if they don't like it I just play dumb.
Also, the TSA has, on two occasions, obviously dumped our luggage onto a floor to check it, then just scooped it back into the bag. They neglected to screw the top of a bottle of shampoo back on after opening it, and ruined all the gifts for my wife's family in that bag. They scratched my mint Strat that I was bringing back to the US to sell.
And on top of all of this, every person, government or private, at the airport, is curt, rude, and overbearing. Toss into that the possibility that my laptop could be confiscated or my drive mirrored or worse, and going home to see family has become such a burden that I just plain don't do it anymore.
The whole situation is absolutely unforgivable.
Seriously, this is a big part of why I ditched Windows for the Mac last year. I looked at Vista and could see that MS was accentuating the parts of Windows I hated (the chattiness, the endless clicking and bullshit and popups and everything), while Apple was introducing more of the things I liked (commodity hardware, robust developer community). I just played with the Windows 7 beta last night on a VMware virtual machine, and I was dismayed to see that it actually is even more annoying, in my personal opinion, than Vista.
Honestly, I really, really loved Windows 2k, and got to like XP quite a bit (running the Classic UI and fixing idiotic things like the search dog with TweakUI), but with Vista I saw the future of MS OSes and just went, "uhhhhmmm... No."
I find Ubuntu and the Mac equally easy to use and they stay out of my hair, but the Mac has MS Office and I don't have to dick around looking for device drivers, and, well, just please believe me when I say that's important.
Yeah, that's why. I drive a silly little car, but when I see a fancy car, I appreciate them. Making up a bunch of silliness about why they have one is just envy I think.
People spend their money on the things they like. When people from my job come to my apartment and see that everything is networked and computerized, they say "my god, how much more do you make than me???" But we all make the same (same contract), and that's just where my values are. They go on 2-month sojourns through the windswept mountains of Kafoonistan; I stream movies from the office to the TV. Mine is still way cheaper, and I enjoy it every day of the year.
But that's values. There's just no reason to criticize other people's "fun."
I am so sick of this response.
As a matter of fact, I do play instruments, and even majored in music (vocal performance) for my first 2 years of college, until I realized I didn't want to be a music teacher, and that was all I'd be able to do with that degree.
So, I'd like to think I know a little about music. I don't know as much as my buddy in his PhD course, doing his dissertation on some godawful obscure nook of music theory, but I know a lot more than the average bear.
The Beatles wrote straight-up, standard pop music. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about them, aside from the hype that surrounded them. Don't get me wrong; comparing them to Britney is absolutely unfair, but they aren't really any more skilled or special than, say, Smashing Pumpkins. In fact, Corgan's guitar skill probably outdoes any of the Beatles (why he moved to synths, which he's no good at, I'll never know). It's on the top end of pop-music-seriousness scale, but it's still just pop music.
I have gotten into feelings-hurt-level arguments about this, but it just has to be said: The Beatles are/were nothing special, musically.
We have a winner!
Yes, but most of Obama's money came from small donations from people like me ($50).
Somehow I must question those surveys. While quite a number of people I know use Windows, almost no-one I know actually uses IE as their default browser.
It's interesting you should point that out...
Virtually everyone I know and work with is on Windows, both at work at at home. And I don't know anyone who uses IE as their primary browser... I'm thinking hard, too... I can't remember the last time I saw a Windows machine without that little orange icon. And these aren't tech-savvy people; these are English teachers. I mean... They're low. Lower than my parents in many cases.
Who is this 70%, I wonder?
You seem to be implying that companies should change their UI frequently... Soo... I mean... MS Office 2007 is all I'm sayin'...
Seriously, when I went back to the Mac after 10 years off the platform last year, part of what I really appreciated was that so little of the UI had changed since System 8.5 that I just sat right back down, found the things that had changed since 10, and went to work. The fact that they get a great UI from the start and then leave it alone is one of the best things Apple has going for it.
One more example of what happens when you don't do that: MS designed the "blade" interface for the Xbox 360. It won design awards. It was quick, easy, and intuitive to use. Everything from the most basic to most advanced options were easy to find. I, for one, loved it, and I can't remember the last time I actually liked a MS product.
Then they updated it. Now I can't find anything and I have to shuffle through a seemingly endless pile of 3D frames, half of which seem to be ads, to use my machine. It's preposterous. You know what they should have done to improve the UI? Nothing. When you nailed it, you nailed it.
Newer is far from always better.
Um, the iPhone doesn't have BT keyboard support.
Careful, every time I take that position I have a bunch of people tell me I'm too dumb to see.
The only good thing I can say about the CFLs I have all over my house now is that they die far sooner than the packages claim, which allows you to replace them with real lightbulbs that don't make you feel like you're living in a hospital, or in a hospital with weird pink lighting.
I also have not noticed any particular savings on my electric bill. When PSUs have crept up into the kW range, it ain't the lightbulbs that are pushing your bill up.
Oh, there's more trouble with tables than that. In fact, OO.o's shit table support is the reason I failed to switch to it during grad school (ca 2004), and even though I always keep the current version installed, hoping that one day it'll work right, it hasn't been fixed yet.
OO.o's bizarre idea that cells have borders that are theirs alone (as opposed to being shared with adjacent cells) means that trying to get table lines to look nice is a nightmare. If you don't do it just right, you'll end up with double-thick lines in some places, and weirdly off-center lines everywhere else.
Trying to get all the rows or columns to be the same size is an exercise in frustration.
Exports of documents to either .rtf or .doc sees the tables' careful formatting destroyed when opened in Word (please spare me the "that's a Word problem!" BS; Word is the industry standard--everyone else needs to fit it, not the other way around).
Paragraph spacing doesn't seem to affect tables. In Word, the best way to make your table's rows even is to apply a paragraph style that has, say, 1pt above and below. This way, no row boundary can get closer to the text than that, and all you have to do to make everything tidy is have the table conform to the contents. It looks great and is trivial to do. Not the case in OO.o. You have to fiddle with crap.
OO.o is phenomenal, considering its free, and it hits all the major necessary features solidly. But there are enough little unpleasant surprises lurking in there as to make it a no-go for people who have to prepare a lot of documents for work or whatever.
It's not finished, and I actually don't understand what has changed since 1.1.1 (the version I started out with). Version 3.0 seems to be the same program. It's clear that, although it's not finished, the devs are finished with it.
Will you marry me?
That brightened my day. Sometimes the things that are modded up here sound like the kind of justifications some nerdy loser in high school comes up with to explain why he doesn't have any friends ("Everyone is so stupid. Buncha sheep."). Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine that they really are 15 years old, but I know in my heart they're actually 45 and still have the opinions they had when they were 15.
People are unique, but not special. Everyone is different from everyone else, which means everyone is kinda the same. If something is popular that you don't like, it's not because you are better than the other people; it's that you are different. And that is totally unexceptional.
And if people don't like you? Well, that just means you're a prick.
Um, "exclusive" means "only sold in one place" here.
I started out on Abit boards and loved them, but after a few years I started having more and more problems with them. I switched to Asus and the problems went away. I was surprised they were still around.
I am a teacher. I am a techie geek. But these are the same questions I had.
Here is what happens in education: Some idiot thinks up a sexy idea like giving laptops to all the students. He or she runs around squawking about it until it gets to the ears of the person controlling the money (or maybe it's a grant). Idea goes forward.
Then people ask what they should be doing.
No one knows, so a bunch of people who don't know anything about computers or video cameras or whatever it is that has been purchased try to incorporate them in their lessons, because they are there. It's not clear why they need to be in the lessons, but they feel like they are wasting something if they don't use it.
Totally simple, straightforward things that were meant to teach, say, research skills, now become a byzantine mess of dealing with people's crappy PowerPoint skills, printing out webpages, stammering, and teachers trying (and probably failing) to address technical issues (and then coming to my office for me to sort them out).
You know how many computers I use in my classes?
None. And I eat computers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I just don't think they offer much in the way of education. They have revolutionized what kind and how much research we can do. They have made it very easy to write academic prose (in the old days you literally had to cut and paste, and then re-type). They allow you to move information around quickly and easily.
They are tools. That's all. Learning does not magically happen the moment you crack open a laptop.
Design the curriculum first, then get laptops if it calls for them as necessary.
But, speaking from experience, it probably doesn't.
It is indeed ridiculous, but not for the reason you mention.
As a guy in the education industry (it's an industry--lotta money), I can say with complete confidence that these laptops were CHEAP by the time Apple got done with the deal. Apple has always been great to work with for teachers and students, partly because their culture is pretty lefty and they like education, but also because, hey, give these kids Macs and they might not want to go back.
No, the reason this is ridiculous--and this is from a happy MacBook owner whose MacBook slowly just became his main work machine instead of a regular laptop--is that the MacBook ain't gonna last 6 years. Well, maybe the new aluminium ones will... I don't know. But if they're anything like this white one, I just don't see it happening.
My dad has one (claims adjuster) and loves it. He was sold on it when another adjuster in the field put it in the dishwasher and ran it.
Awesome computers. More than I need, but if I needed an indestructible computer, I know where to look.
Just as an n-size of one, I'd like to say I've had no connection problems at all here in Japan on SoftBank's 3G network. None at all. I really suspect that its an infrastructure problem in other countries. Japan's had 3G the longest of anyone, and I live in the Tokyo area.
The lack of copy/paste is the only thing that has irked me.
SoftBank here in Japan charges a monthly fee for it, but I don't actually pay for it because I get maybe 1 voicemail a year and don't mind paying 20 yen to retrieve it. It's less than 315 yen a month.
Thanks. I get so tired of the grumpy "featurism" of Slashdot posters. My old phone did everything and more than what my current iPhone does... on paper. In truth, I never got the music player to work anywhere near as well as my iPod, the display of Office documents was illegible, I couldn't find contacts worth a damn, every time I installed a program, it didn't work, and even though it had a 2 megapixel camera with optical zoom, the pictures from my iPhone look as good or better.
You can't judge a product by reading a feature table. You have to try to actually use it. What Apple did is what they always do: Take a product that someone already thought of, and made it actually do what the original people promised.
Even when people email me their work, I still print it out and mark it up. A few reasons:
1) The markup tools in Word, etc., are much more suited to what they're designed for: collaboration. I use them all the time when I'm working with colleagues on joint research papers. But for paper comments, they are slow and kludgy.
2) On paper, I can do things like circle a phrase and draw an angry red arrow back to where it should actually be. I can do a lot more than just add margin notes, and I can communicate state of mind better. A typed "Huh?" on a comment does not communicate my total inability to work out what the student is trying to say the way a big, red one with a giant question mark and an underline or two does.
3) Turning things in electronically is great for the student, not for the teacher. See, for this to work, I have to have all my students in my address book. This is a lot harder than you'd imagine, especially with people who have the same names, people who don't use their university mail, etc. When it's paper, I look at it, comment it, rate it, put the grade in my computer, and move on. It gets back to you the next class, when I'm going to see you anyway. Mailing them back to each person is akin to me having to put printed copies in a student's pigeon hole. It's an extra clerical task that takes time from doing more important things and is failure-prone (and here in Japan, sending the wrong paper to the wrong student can get you sued/fired--privacy law).
4) There's been a lot of research on corrective feedback for writing. Guess what? It's useless. You give it, some students get better, some don't. You don't, same thing. Now, as a student, no one wants to just turn in something that took them hours and hours and get nothing back, and, as a teacher, I don't want people to think I'm not even reading them, because, truthfully, I read every word, all the time (I like to see what people have to say), so we comment them, knowing full well that people either won't read them or will read them but not take them to heart. So, what I'm saying is that there's no reason for these comments to live on forever on our hard drives. Paper will get read and tossed. That's the appropriate life cycle for that exchange.
5) Finally, you can't search a paper to speed up grading. If there's fluff in there, I'm going to nail your ass. Every sentence is important, and if it's not, I need to read it anyway to tell you that it's not. No one wants to get a grade on a paper based on a couple sentences.
Basically, as a student, turning things in electronically is great. As a teacher, in my personal opinion and experience, not so much.
Please don't say "rig."
Also, his command for her to read Japanese was not actually a Japanese command. It was an English command translated to Japanese (i.e. in English a command is issued with just the uninflected simple non-past verb, whereas it has to be conjugated to form a command--and there are several politeness levels--in Japanese).
What we are seeing here is a creepy foreigner with a creepy Japanese otaku fetish.
So I guess there wasn't a "Perceiving Sarcasm" course in your degree program?