angus77

GPL violations are copyright violations. Where's the hypocrisy?

All that means is that Japanese young people are getting married later than was customary 30 years ago. For the eldest son, it's still expected in some families that he will never move out, even after getting married (my brother-in-law was roped into this, after having moved away to Kanagawa. He gave up his job and moved back into his parents home because his father more-or-less ordered him to). It's cultural as much as economic.

ATMs in banks and train stations, sure, but not the ones in 7-11s. (You'll notice nandemo said "in convenience stores").

"Bullshit" is a lack of concern over whether what you've said was true or not.

"We’re not tracking you when you’re logged out" was a straight up lie.

Maybe the deal didn't go through.

Funny, I seem to run into people everywhere saying you can't trust Wikipedia. Where are all these people who take it as Gospel?

I think that definitely depends on where you live. Here in Shizuoka, in the 90s, pretty much all big public works projects came to a standstill. Roads they were building just stopped being built partway through construction. A few years into the 2000s, and they revved things up again, at a pace that makes it look like they were trying to catch up on all the projects that were abandoned in the 90s. A few years ago, the papers announced that rent downtown had bounced back up to Bubble-era rates, and construction downtown has been particularly active.

Isn't it weird that this article is trying to squash the myth of the "lost decade"--the 1990's--by Japan's affluence since 2000? Big screen TVs, advanced cellphones, high-speed internet, etc etc.

There's a lot of diversity in North American comics, just not in their sales. All the diversity gets shoved into the back corner of the store, where only those already "in the know" would dare venture. Check out Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly and their decades-long output of original, reprint and translated material, on about as many different subjects as you can name.

I hate it when I don't know why I'm being downvoted---did I make some kind of error? did I word things wrong? or do people just disagree with me?

What if there were a separate "flag" that people could click for trolls and spam, but when you downvoted someone, you were forced to post a reply explaining why?

The packages are text files, not executables.

When e-readers get down to the $10 price point, I'll certainly consider buying a stack for my kids!

I just about upvoted you until you threw in that last parenthetical comment.

The article wasn't about agreeing or disagreeing with Stallman's beliefs, it was about all the comments that inevitably pop up about how fat, weird, smelly, unkempt, etc. he is, which has absolutely nothing to do with his beliefs.

Tablets?

Is there an advantage to this for someone who owns no Apple products and has no iTunes account?

EDIT: Looking at http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_compa... it looks like the only clear advantage ALAC has is iTunes/iDevice support. FLAC has faster encoding/decoding speeds, and it's unknown if ALAC has error handling (which FLAC has). FLAC also supports RIFF chunks, has pipe support and is ReplayGain compatible, and has some support for embedded CUE sheets.

But that's taken from all the software available in the repos, not the software that's actually installed on people's systems. For instance, the pie chart shows slices for both Gnome and KDE. How many people have both installed on their systems? Or neither?

Now compare that to how many people have none of the GNU software on their systems.

I agree with a lot of what you've written, except for one of my favourite topics that you've stumbled across--- the idea that increasing education funding will result in more education. I've pointed out a couple of times on hn that Canadians spend about $3000 less per student per year than Americans, and yet Canadian students consistently rank higher on average than American students.

I don't have hard numbers, but I wold like to point out that Japanese students spend more days per year and longer hours in school, as well as hours of cram school on top of it for most of them, than Canadian schools, and yet Canadian students overall end up ranked higher on than Japanese students on every ranking I've ever seen.

Canadian schools also spend more than $3000 per student per year on average than American schools.

What American schools need is more quality, not more quantity.

The thing with the winding streets is that they came out organically---nobody planned them that way. You can't really fix that without doing something horribly draconian.

The newspaper inserts, magazines and websites, though...you'd think someone could just say, "Wow, this is an incredible eyesore that's impossible to navigate," and, you know, just not do that anymore.

I've got a Panasonic TV with an HDD recorder(can't remember the model, I'm at work) that is incredibly simple and intuitive to use. Want to record a show? Click one button on the remote, and you're given a grid of the upcoming TV listings. Click on the show you want, and it's done. Even my 6-year-old son knows how to use it. I can't imagine Apple doing better. Good UI can certainly be done in Japan.

Wow. I've only owned Toshiba phones (on both au and SoftBank) before I got my HTC Desire, and making a call was always a matter of clicking the 電話帳 button and selecting the name. Although I've used other people's phones plenty of times, and it was always pretty much the same. I've never used anyone's Sony Ericsson, though.

Except that most people (even Japanese people) don't know his name.

Canada's got at least the diversity the US has, and yet regularly ranks quite high in worldwide educational standards.

Edit: added the following link

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-ed...

Who's forcing whom to do anything? Why is having the option to do something such a bad thing? Windows gives its users plenty of opportunity to tinker. Most of them don't bother. With the ipad, however, the option itself is taken away.

I have an HTC Desire, and the Twitter and Facebook apps are always turning themselves on. I can kill them, but I can't prevent them from coming back on. And I don't even have a Twitter account!

Why is so unreasonable to want to free up some space on the phone by getting rid of (or at least disabling) an app I will never consider using?

One point Jobs' father made was that he was surprised Steve didn't contact him to find out information about his family's medical history. I was adopted, too. I never had any inclination to track down my birth parents (not out of anger or anything, it's just something that's never interested me). Now that I have a flock of kids, however, my wife and adoptive mother are pushing me to track them down so I can learn about my bloodline's medical history.

When Jobs "stepped down", he remained on the board of directors. He became remarkably less active, but certainly wasn't presented as being "gone".

There are Swype, SlideIT and ShapeWriter sliding inputs available for Android devices that you can't get for iOS devices. I use the (unfortunately discontinued) ShapeWriter on my Desire phone, and it's awesome. The keyboard for the iPad is a chore to use.

Oh, it does, too. I don't know how I couldn't have noticed that. I always curse not having that whenever I fat finger "flag".