I find this pretty par for the course for many Windows developers through the years; heavy-handed attempts to get the user to install bundled software that they don't want or really need. Google does this as well (no I do *not* want the Google toolbar!), and, yes, MS does it in their own auto-update feature (new software offered and not just updates), and an opt-out required). Google's gotten pretty bad about trying to get other companies to bundle their toolbar and hard-wire or at least default their browser searches to Google as well (Safari and Firefox). This is not customer-friendly behavior, and Apple seems to be excelling in being completely obnoxious about it, but they are by no means the only big player doing this kind of crap.
Cool, thanks. After I read the OO.o 3 feature list and noticed it was called Notes2, I realized that there must be something there already.
However, the person I was working with was using Office, so I think it might have been a moot point, anyway. I'll have to do a test and see how compatible it is.
Personally, I'd love to be able to have a notes feature. I was just recently collaborating remotely on a business letter and we had to type our justification for changes directly into the document. Screwed up the formatting, to say the least, and wasn't that great for readability, either.
Outside of complaining about privacy concerns, your average person, in Japan or elsewhere, isn't going to cancel their ISP contract because they're no longer useful. Sure, if the only reason you got internet service was to download files off of Winny, then yes, it would become useless. However, if you use email, the web, VoIP, or the latest video-on-demand services that a lot of the fiber-based ISPs are starting to offer, then you're going to be hard-pressed to simply drop the internet entirely.
Japan has been known to rescind certain laws and practices due to privacy concerns before, so maybe this will die a quick, quiet death. However, their music and copyright lobbies are incredibly tight-fisted about giving things away for free (note the incredible lack of high-quality, large-resolution images of Japanese celebrities on the web). Your average Japanese citizen is fairly law-abiding, and despite the amazing amount of techno-bling coming out of Japan, no more savvy on average than most other people in the world when it comes to using computers.
Your interpretation doesn't say "who" should get to keep and bear arms. Does militia mean a government-sponsored military force, or a grassroots vigilante group intent on overthrowing what they view to be a corrupt government? Or perhaps it refers to able-bodied men who may be called upon to defend their country in times of need (after all, the original army that rebelled against England was a grass-roots militia with no official government to give them a mandate, yet who fought to defend a collective group of lands which they viewed as their own country.
I believe that ritualized mysticism like astronomy, tarot, etc. is a great way to get an insight into your own subconscious (or not-so-subconscious) desires. It's a mental shortcut for people who need an excuse to act on what they really want to do, or find out what it is they really want in the first place.
If you're a Phd who has spent your whole life researching and proving something then you're likely to opposed someone proving eactly the opposite. That's just human nature and has been the downfall of many scientists including Einstein and many other greats.
More than just human nature, it makes sense. If I believe strongly that something is the truth, then it seems only logical that I'd oppose somebody who says that my theory is completely wrong. Also, I think that Max Planck might have been being just a bit facetious in the quote you mentioned; while powerful, wrong-headed opponents may be the bane of every great endeavor, simply waiting for them to die still doesn't make you right. If you die first, it doesn't make you wrong, either. Scientific truths win out because they continue to be true. The scientific method may not serve the personal ambitions of fame-seeking individuals very well, but it does tend to work out pretty well for the advancement of science, even if the undeserving-yet-better-funded end up getting all the credit.
Wow, I got scored as a troll? That's a first. Come on, guys, I meant it as humor, tongue-in-cheek kind of thing. Note the title of my comment; I was referring to IE 5.5 *specifically* as getting things right by dint of its crappiness. I'm sorry, but it's a well-documented fact that it has a horrible render engine chock-full of bugs. As a web developer, I've earned the right to say that the browser has its problems.
I have to say that 7.0 is a lot easier to code for and seems to actually be respecting my CSS. Of course, I still have to go back and tweak things to work under 6.0, because it fails to render the page correctly.
Anyway, I also know what the Acid test is for, and that it represents everything you can get wrong in web page coding. It's a measure of how well a render engine can stand up to the worst conditions, not how well it can deal with properly written code.
I guess it just goes to show you that two wrongs do make a right. IE's abilities to render a web page reliably go so far into the realm of incompetence that they've gone straight through and come out the other side.
Cultural contamination? They had their constitution written for them by the United States military, their Diet was first borrowed from the Germans and then reformed into a British style, their school system is modeled after the German, and their current pacifistic ways were forced upon them by external powers as well. In daily life, they're inundated with western pop culture. Granted, the Japanese core is still largely the same, but their youth is moving in liberal directions and the older generation are blaming the West for it. Some of the most recent annoyances for the government include unionization and public demonstration. In Osaka, for example, the UN's International Labor Organization is backing the teacher's union, which is suing the board of education based on what they believe to be an unconstitutional review system (basically, teachers' salaries and tenure are determined by a letter grade, and the grounds for the grade they receive are kept secret, and there is no way for the teacher to dispute or appeal the results).
Despite the surface changes, the Japanese government operates in pretty much the same way it always has; a few people in power who hand the laws down to the common folk and the common folk are expected to bear it. Theoretically, these people in power are supposed to have the good of the people in mind, but the reality differs somewhat. The Japanese people have an inherent faith in their government, although that faith is eroding rapidly in recent years; hence the rapid change of prime ministers since Koizumi.
I live in Japan, which means I've been off DST for six years. Not a big deal at all, except for remembering to draw your curtains in the summer so that the sunrise at 4:30 AM doesn't wake you up.
You seem to be referring to the wireless carrier as a cell phone provider and a mobile device internet provider at the same time. Is that your intention?
In Japan, cell phones are irrevocably locked to the provider, and access to the internet outside of the walled garden, while possible, is exorbitantly expensive (try paying $3 just to start up the browser). Japan is one of the worst markets in the world for vendor lock-in vis a vis the cell phone.
The ISPs, on the other hand, are very reasonable, advancing rapidly, and even starting to push things like television on demand through their fiber connections.
Japanese do not have more freedom than Americans, and their system works, but only barely. They have a low crime rate because fewer crimes are reported, not because they're not occurring (something that has been changing in recent years). There is no Patriot Act, but I'm now required to have my fingerprints and photo taken every time I come home to Japan, even though I've lived here for six years, work as a teacher, and have a Japanese wife, and despite the fact that the only terrorist acts ever committed in Japan were done by Japanese.
Election campaigns only lasting a few weeks means that the people have less time to hear about what's going on, have less time to discuss, and are usually less informed when they finally vote on somebody. Also, candidates are legally limited by how much of the population they can attempt to reach at any one time outside of certain channels - hand-outs, for example, can only be distributed to 8% of the voting population.
How are restrictions on how the press reports on a candidate beneficial? When they're discouraged from revealing things that might cast a candidate in a negative light, even though everybody might be a lot better off knowing? Also, while the Japanese press never writes negative articles about all things Japanese, they feel no such restriction when it comes to writing libelous articles about foreign governments, companies or individuals.
Japan manages to function pretty much exactly the way it always has for the last couple of centuries despite the imposition of the American-written constitution because just like any country, their politicians know how to interpret the law in ways that benefit their own agendas. Those that are in power tend to stay in power; Diet seats still manage to be passed down through powerful families, regardless of the "democratic" process, and the government is currently trying to instill fear into their citizens to serve their own ends.
I recently had my conversation class at the high school where I teach writing about critical issues, and some of the students chose "internet regulation" as a topic. I let them write about it, even though I wasn't sure just how it counted as a critical issue, but now I see by this article that they were responding to the tripe that the media has been feeding people as the government ramps up to passing these stricter regulations.
Remember, in Japan, "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down." The Japanese don't appreciate dissent, and those that are above you are supposed to be all-knowing and infallible, come hell or high water.
It's not HTML's fault, it's due to poor programming practices and Microsoft's attempt to "improve" the standard with their own proprietary extensions. The other problem is that HTML is still evolving, and web browsers have to maintain the ability to render pages written with old standards as well as new ones. Finally, on the bad programming front, they have to be able to make some sort of attempt to properly render a page even when it's been coded badly, and without breaking.
If you switched over to a PDF-based web, you'd still be beholden to schisms between Adobe vs. the open PDF standard, plus Adobe no doubt making its own attempts to "improve" things. You'd merely be changing the language and the location, but not the game.
If "a fully graphical web" means making things image based, that would be a total disaster. Not only would you be looking at a massive spike in page download times, even people without accessibility issues would find it hard to use; copy-and-paste would be impossible, compression artifacts would distort text, and an image rendered for a computer monitor is by no means large enough to make clean, legible text on a print-out.
Again, this idea is prone to rigging. If you have an inventor with a great invention but poor marketing/distribution, he can be told that the idea is worth a lot of money but be unable to afford the taxes on it. So he should simply hand it over to the person who can afford to market and distribute it? He who has the most money wins again, and ends up making more money. Not a good deal.
Apple probably sent then a CnD under the auspices of the DMCA, which says you're not allowed to circumvent copyright protection. Apple is contractually obligated to not allow people to break their DRM. This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of Apple using legal means to honor its agreements, and the Hymn Project breaking the law, no matter how unfair that law may seem.
Anyway, I've never had trouble using Apple's built-in loophole of burning a playlist to a CD. Yes, it's limited, and yes, the conversion process probably degrades the music further, but if you're buying music off of the iTunes Store, you're probably willing to make sacrafices on quality, anyway.
This is all a moot point. Obviously, the industry is moving away from DRM and is starting to offer DRM-free downloads on a major scale. They're just still in the petulant, "I want to punish Apple for forcing us to offer the same price for every song and not giving us a kick-back on iPod sales" snit. If things continue to move in the upward direction they have been, this will all be ancient history in a year or two.
So they're insisting that evolution be called a scientific theory, which is exactly what scientists would want you to name it, because that's what it is. No scientist using the terminology in its purest form ever goes around calling things science facts. So those who don't think evolution should be "believed" as a theory also apparently don't "believe" in using dictionaries. I imagine the conversation went something like this:
"I won't be satisfied until you admit that evolution is a theory!"
"Um....it *is* a theory."
"Hah! See? I was right all along!"
Come on, people. Science explains how things work, religion explains why. There is no conflict here. Next thing you know, people will start claiming that gravity is the will of God. So is our continued attraction to the Earth's surface merely punishment for our sins? Wow. What does the Earth's attraction to the sun represent? What did the Earth ever do to God?
Could you point out the specific context in the page you linked to? All I could find, over and over again, was in a similar vein as the following ("Implementation Actions", (5)(a)):
"Ensuring the continued functioning of our form of government under the Constitution, including the functioning of the three separate branches of government"
And from further up ("Definitions", (2)(e)):
""Enduring Constitutional Government," or "ECG," means a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government, coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial branches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers among the branches, to preserve the constitutional framework under which the Nation is governed and the capability of all three branches of government to execute constitutional responsibilities and provide for orderly succession, appropriate transition of leadership, and interoperability and support of the National Essential Functions during a catastrophic emergency"
So, yeah, if you ignore the actual literal wording and broad intent of the directive, which is to protect and maintain the separation of the three branches of government under the Constitution, then perhaps it could be otherwise interpreted to mean that Bush could declare an autonomous dictatorship overnight.
More like long-overdue integration. I think this is the kind of feature that will make add-ons more accessible, since your average user probably misses the URL-like link in the bottom corner of the window. Also saves a step and also means less time spent loading useless web pages when all you want is a text description and a download link.
That's the disadvantage for the iPhone in Japan: fantastic phones already being present. Even though the interface doesn't compare with the iPhone, Japanese cell phones have long since been about style, and even on a bad day, they make "fantastic" American phones look pretty sad indeed.
Be smart about what you put online and for pete's sake don't let anyone take naked photos of you, 'cuz they *will* end up online, and it will be *hilarious*.
Don't feel bad; even though I'm a long-term resident of Japan with a teacher's visa and a Japanese wife, they still treat me to the criminal treatment every time I come back from a trip.
Wonder what they're going to do when a foreign resident arrives with their Japanese children? The children qualify to go through the residents' line, but the parent doesn't? That, or the treat the children as second-class citizens as well? Cool.
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I find this pretty par for the course for many Windows developers through the years; heavy-handed attempts to get the user to install bundled software that they don't want or really need. Google does this as well (no I do *not* want the Google toolbar!), and, yes, MS does it in their own auto-update feature (new software offered and not just updates), and an opt-out required). Google's gotten pretty bad about trying to get other companies to bundle their toolbar and hard-wire or at least default their browser searches to Google as well (Safari and Firefox). This is not customer-friendly behavior, and Apple seems to be excelling in being completely obnoxious about it, but they are by no means the only big player doing this kind of crap.
Cool, thanks. After I read the OO.o 3 feature list and noticed it was called Notes2, I realized that there must be something there already.
However, the person I was working with was using Office, so I think it might have been a moot point, anyway. I'll have to do a test and see how compatible it is.
Personally, I'd love to be able to have a notes feature. I was just recently collaborating remotely on a business letter and we had to type our justification for changes directly into the document. Screwed up the formatting, to say the least, and wasn't that great for readability, either.
Outside of complaining about privacy concerns, your average person, in Japan or elsewhere, isn't going to cancel their ISP contract because they're no longer useful. Sure, if the only reason you got internet service was to download files off of Winny, then yes, it would become useless. However, if you use email, the web, VoIP, or the latest video-on-demand services that a lot of the fiber-based ISPs are starting to offer, then you're going to be hard-pressed to simply drop the internet entirely.
Japan has been known to rescind certain laws and practices due to privacy concerns before, so maybe this will die a quick, quiet death. However, their music and copyright lobbies are incredibly tight-fisted about giving things away for free (note the incredible lack of high-quality, large-resolution images of Japanese celebrities on the web). Your average Japanese citizen is fairly law-abiding, and despite the amazing amount of techno-bling coming out of Japan, no more savvy on average than most other people in the world when it comes to using computers.
Your interpretation doesn't say "who" should get to keep and bear arms. Does militia mean a government-sponsored military force, or a grassroots vigilante group intent on overthrowing what they view to be a corrupt government? Or perhaps it refers to able-bodied men who may be called upon to defend their country in times of need (after all, the original army that rebelled against England was a grass-roots militia with no official government to give them a mandate, yet who fought to defend a collective group of lands which they viewed as their own country.
I believe that ritualized mysticism like astronomy, tarot, etc. is a great way to get an insight into your own subconscious (or not-so-subconscious) desires. It's a mental shortcut for people who need an excuse to act on what they really want to do, or find out what it is they really want in the first place.
If you're a Phd who has spent your whole life researching and proving something then you're likely to opposed someone proving eactly the opposite. That's just human nature and has been the downfall of many scientists including Einstein and many other greats.
More than just human nature, it makes sense. If I believe strongly that something is the truth, then it seems only logical that I'd oppose somebody who says that my theory is completely wrong. Also, I think that Max Planck might have been being just a bit facetious in the quote you mentioned; while powerful, wrong-headed opponents may be the bane of every great endeavor, simply waiting for them to die still doesn't make you right. If you die first, it doesn't make you wrong, either. Scientific truths win out because they continue to be true. The scientific method may not serve the personal ambitions of fame-seeking individuals very well, but it does tend to work out pretty well for the advancement of science, even if the undeserving-yet-better-funded end up getting all the credit.
Figures. Ah well, can't always be right...
Wow, I got scored as a troll? That's a first. Come on, guys, I meant it as humor, tongue-in-cheek kind of thing. Note the title of my comment; I was referring to IE 5.5 *specifically* as getting things right by dint of its crappiness. I'm sorry, but it's a well-documented fact that it has a horrible render engine chock-full of bugs. As a web developer, I've earned the right to say that the browser has its problems.
I have to say that 7.0 is a lot easier to code for and seems to actually be respecting my CSS. Of course, I still have to go back and tweak things to work under 6.0, because it fails to render the page correctly.
Anyway, I also know what the Acid test is for, and that it represents everything you can get wrong in web page coding. It's a measure of how well a render engine can stand up to the worst conditions, not how well it can deal with properly written code.
I guess it just goes to show you that two wrongs do make a right. IE's abilities to render a web page reliably go so far into the realm of incompetence that they've gone straight through and come out the other side.
Cultural contamination? They had their constitution written for them by the United States military, their Diet was first borrowed from the Germans and then reformed into a British style, their school system is modeled after the German, and their current pacifistic ways were forced upon them by external powers as well. In daily life, they're inundated with western pop culture. Granted, the Japanese core is still largely the same, but their youth is moving in liberal directions and the older generation are blaming the West for it. Some of the most recent annoyances for the government include unionization and public demonstration. In Osaka, for example, the UN's International Labor Organization is backing the teacher's union, which is suing the board of education based on what they believe to be an unconstitutional review system (basically, teachers' salaries and tenure are determined by a letter grade, and the grounds for the grade they receive are kept secret, and there is no way for the teacher to dispute or appeal the results).
Despite the surface changes, the Japanese government operates in pretty much the same way it always has; a few people in power who hand the laws down to the common folk and the common folk are expected to bear it. Theoretically, these people in power are supposed to have the good of the people in mind, but the reality differs somewhat. The Japanese people have an inherent faith in their government, although that faith is eroding rapidly in recent years; hence the rapid change of prime ministers since Koizumi.
I live in Japan, which means I've been off DST for six years. Not a big deal at all, except for remembering to draw your curtains in the summer so that the sunrise at 4:30 AM doesn't wake you up.
You seem to be referring to the wireless carrier as a cell phone provider and a mobile device internet provider at the same time. Is that your intention?
In Japan, cell phones are irrevocably locked to the provider, and access to the internet outside of the walled garden, while possible, is exorbitantly expensive (try paying $3 just to start up the browser). Japan is one of the worst markets in the world for vendor lock-in vis a vis the cell phone.
The ISPs, on the other hand, are very reasonable, advancing rapidly, and even starting to push things like television on demand through their fiber connections.
Actually, they're working on relaxing the immigration laws in order to help offset the aging population problem.
Japanese do not have more freedom than Americans, and their system works, but only barely. They have a low crime rate because fewer crimes are reported, not because they're not occurring (something that has been changing in recent years). There is no Patriot Act, but I'm now required to have my fingerprints and photo taken every time I come home to Japan, even though I've lived here for six years, work as a teacher, and have a Japanese wife, and despite the fact that the only terrorist acts ever committed in Japan were done by Japanese.
Election campaigns only lasting a few weeks means that the people have less time to hear about what's going on, have less time to discuss, and are usually less informed when they finally vote on somebody. Also, candidates are legally limited by how much of the population they can attempt to reach at any one time outside of certain channels - hand-outs, for example, can only be distributed to 8% of the voting population.
How are restrictions on how the press reports on a candidate beneficial? When they're discouraged from revealing things that might cast a candidate in a negative light, even though everybody might be a lot better off knowing? Also, while the Japanese press never writes negative articles about all things Japanese, they feel no such restriction when it comes to writing libelous articles about foreign governments, companies or individuals.
Japan manages to function pretty much exactly the way it always has for the last couple of centuries despite the imposition of the American-written constitution because just like any country, their politicians know how to interpret the law in ways that benefit their own agendas. Those that are in power tend to stay in power; Diet seats still manage to be passed down through powerful families, regardless of the "democratic" process, and the government is currently trying to instill fear into their citizens to serve their own ends.
I recently had my conversation class at the high school where I teach writing about critical issues, and some of the students chose "internet regulation" as a topic. I let them write about it, even though I wasn't sure just how it counted as a critical issue, but now I see by this article that they were responding to the tripe that the media has been feeding people as the government ramps up to passing these stricter regulations.
Remember, in Japan, "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down." The Japanese don't appreciate dissent, and those that are above you are supposed to be all-knowing and infallible, come hell or high water.
It's not HTML's fault, it's due to poor programming practices and Microsoft's attempt to "improve" the standard with their own proprietary extensions. The other problem is that HTML is still evolving, and web browsers have to maintain the ability to render pages written with old standards as well as new ones. Finally, on the bad programming front, they have to be able to make some sort of attempt to properly render a page even when it's been coded badly, and without breaking.
If you switched over to a PDF-based web, you'd still be beholden to schisms between Adobe vs. the open PDF standard, plus Adobe no doubt making its own attempts to "improve" things. You'd merely be changing the language and the location, but not the game.
If "a fully graphical web" means making things image based, that would be a total disaster. Not only would you be looking at a massive spike in page download times, even people without accessibility issues would find it hard to use; copy-and-paste would be impossible, compression artifacts would distort text, and an image rendered for a computer monitor is by no means large enough to make clean, legible text on a print-out.
Again, this idea is prone to rigging. If you have an inventor with a great invention but poor marketing/distribution, he can be told that the idea is worth a lot of money but be unable to afford the taxes on it. So he should simply hand it over to the person who can afford to market and distribute it? He who has the most money wins again, and ends up making more money. Not a good deal.
Apple probably sent then a CnD under the auspices of the DMCA, which says you're not allowed to circumvent copyright protection. Apple is contractually obligated to not allow people to break their DRM. This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of Apple using legal means to honor its agreements, and the Hymn Project breaking the law, no matter how unfair that law may seem.
Anyway, I've never had trouble using Apple's built-in loophole of burning a playlist to a CD. Yes, it's limited, and yes, the conversion process probably degrades the music further, but if you're buying music off of the iTunes Store, you're probably willing to make sacrafices on quality, anyway.
This is all a moot point. Obviously, the industry is moving away from DRM and is starting to offer DRM-free downloads on a major scale. They're just still in the petulant, "I want to punish Apple for forcing us to offer the same price for every song and not giving us a kick-back on iPod sales" snit. If things continue to move in the upward direction they have been, this will all be ancient history in a year or two.
So they're insisting that evolution be called a scientific theory, which is exactly what scientists would want you to name it, because that's what it is. No scientist using the terminology in its purest form ever goes around calling things science facts. So those who don't think evolution should be "believed" as a theory also apparently don't "believe" in using dictionaries. I imagine the conversation went something like this:
"I won't be satisfied until you admit that evolution is a theory!"
"Um....it *is* a theory."
"Hah! See? I was right all along!"
Come on, people. Science explains how things work, religion explains why. There is no conflict here. Next thing you know, people will start claiming that gravity is the will of God. So is our continued attraction to the Earth's surface merely punishment for our sins? Wow. What does the Earth's attraction to the sun represent? What did the Earth ever do to God?
Could you point out the specific context in the page you linked to? All I could find, over and over again, was in a similar vein as the following ("Implementation Actions", (5)(a)):
"Ensuring the continued functioning of our form of government under the Constitution, including the functioning of the three separate branches of government"
And from further up ("Definitions", (2)(e)):
""Enduring Constitutional Government," or "ECG," means a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government, coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial branches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers among the branches, to preserve the constitutional framework under which the Nation is governed and the capability of all three branches of government to execute constitutional responsibilities and provide for orderly succession, appropriate transition of leadership, and interoperability and support of the National Essential Functions during a catastrophic emergency"
So, yeah, if you ignore the actual literal wording and broad intent of the directive, which is to protect and maintain the separation of the three branches of government under the Constitution, then perhaps it could be otherwise interpreted to mean that Bush could declare an autonomous dictatorship overnight.
More like long-overdue integration. I think this is the kind of feature that will make add-ons more accessible, since your average user probably misses the URL-like link in the bottom corner of the window. Also saves a step and also means less time spent loading useless web pages when all you want is a text description and a download link.
So, basically, it's a subscription service, with the extra caveat of being tied to your phone? What a pain.
That's the disadvantage for the iPhone in Japan: fantastic phones already being present. Even though the interface doesn't compare with the iPhone, Japanese cell phones have long since been about style, and even on a bad day, they make "fantastic" American phones look pretty sad indeed.
Be smart about what you put online and for pete's sake don't let anyone take naked photos of you, 'cuz they *will* end up online, and it will be *hilarious*.
Not for us who have to look, ugh!
Don't feel bad; even though I'm a long-term resident of Japan with a teacher's visa and a Japanese wife, they still treat me to the criminal treatment every time I come back from a trip.
Wonder what they're going to do when a foreign resident arrives with their Japanese children? The children qualify to go through the residents' line, but the parent doesn't? That, or the treat the children as second-class citizens as well? Cool.