Apple pulls products from major electronics retailers’ Internet shops – The Mainichi Daily News.
wow… apple pulling its own products off of internet websites seems very very suspicious… especially if they are worried about brand image.
U.S. Expat Taxes Drive Americans to Give Up Citizenship – TIME.
luckily(?) for me, working in a japanese company you could never possibly make $90K!
On another note… 3 years ago with teh exchange rate that $90k in u.s. dollars would have been about 12 million yen, but because the dollar has lost 40%of it’s value, it’s only 6million yen now. Which is still hard to go over in japan unless you are working at an american company or part of management. The point being that, why should i have to pay tax all of a sudden if the value of the american dollar tanks? Which is what alot of people are probably complaining abuot.
haha… i found this article funny, while completely true. And probably is a response to all the flak they got from critiquing an old game that is not available anywhere but japan. But still it’s nice that they actually covered their ass, or rather posted this so that it doesn’t turn into a hate campaign against japan
According to the 2009 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap report, Japan ranked 101 out of 134 countries, called abysmally low by women’s groups
Why would ‘RapeLay’ thrive in Japan? – CNN.com.
just one auxillary comment. And i’ve posted about this before on facebook, but thought i’d mention it here since it’s applicable. Last year at IKEA in japan i was forced a considerably long time to receive my furniture and when i asked why it was taking so long the response from a FEMALE employee was “I’m sorry for the wait, but your order is being put together by a women and it takes them a little longer because they lack physical strength” and i was just like WOAH…. almost felt like complaining to the management only because it’s a HUGE international company that probably has policies on sexual harassment and such.
The following is a response i posted in regards to an article on compression software comparison i saw posted on Tom’s hardware that i thought was very uninformative
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i would just like to point out that in the world of compression technologies, Compression time is seldom a factor and the main goal is #1 compressed size and #2 decompression speed (if you even look at speed), so your lack of comparison on decompression speed is unfortunate.
Also, as reference for others, there is actually a data corpora in existence used by researchers to test various compression methods and it might have been best to at least include those in your tests. Back in the day it was the canterbury corpus or the calgary corpus, but i’m not sure what’s in use now.
Also, LZ77, the 77 stands for 1977… that’s a pretty old compression technology if you ask me. Unfortunately i don’t know about lzma2, but while the LZ dictionary based mnethods were effective they were replaced by other technologies in the early 2000s.
One last note, it may be have been nice to also include Bzip or whatever is in use now by the unix community as they typically have the forerunner for compression technologies. It may have made for a nice comparison to what’s mainstream.
One last point, i wouldn’t expect much growth/change in the text compression field as most of the compression research is being aimed streaming content and audio/video (more so the latter).
Japanese magazines today inundate us with the message that women should be “womanly.” They tell us that we must be “feminine and cute” and that being “liked by men is a woman's true happiness,” and it is not rare for women to openly profess that they are looking to find rich men to marry.Some people take a positive view of such phenomena, saying that it is the result of a society that has achieved gender equality, in which women now have the freedom or leeway to enjoy fashion.
Just interesting how the japanese women struggle with equality, but yet don’t against it, while it is a moot point in the u.s., comparatively.
Staggering holiday calendar could be a shot in the arm for tourism – The Mainichi Daily News.
The idea is an interesting one, and for the layman would be awesome. It still wouldn’t alleivate the traffic issues since EVERYONE in the same region would still be using the same highways to leave said region, there wouldn’t be so much traffic from other regions going through yours i geuss.
Though while i think it won’t pass because it really does cheapen some of the holidays, but there are holidays that can be chopped off like “national fitness day”. Now it doesn’t go into the detials, but the main holidays liek golden week and obon and syogatsu probably won’t change, but eliminating other holidays into a 5 day break would be nice.
And while there are people at my company with over 40 days of unused vacation, there are others like me with only 2 left for this year (year ends in march and starts in april here). But really what i would liek to see more of is people taking long vacations… My co-workers when they take a vacation it’s always just 1 day here, 1 day there… hardly a break imo.
‘Toyota defense’ could reverse criminal conviction – CNN.com.
i’m not debating the innocence of this guy… but the family of the killed relatives are money grabbing whores.
Relatives of the victims, who asked the judge to give him the maximum sentence, now support him, said Bob Hilliard, a Texas lawyer who is preparing a lawsuit against Toyota on the family’s behalf.
The 1996 Camry [Involved in the crash] is not a part of Toyota’s recall.
And the ONLY reason these people changed their mind is cause if the sue Toyota they can get a huge wad of cash, whereas the guy that actually killed their is in prison and can’t pay them anything.
Massive earthquake, aftershocks rattle Chile; tsunami warning issued – CNN.com.
Well before people start plowing in on the ethical conversation about “OMG all the Chileans!!! How could you be so happy about that! You heartless fleabag!!!”… Just stop, cause yeah i’m with you on that, but that’s not the point i’m trying to make and don’t turn it into that.
The reason i’m happy has nothing to do with that it’s Chile. The key part here is that it was greater than an 8.0 AND that it wasn’t in Japan. Why you ask, well first of all according to all powerful Wikipedia – Richter Scale
Great earthquakes[8.0+] occur once a year, on average.
So “statistically” that means for this year, i don’t have to worry about a large hitting where i live in Japan, the place with the most earthquakes in the world.
On a slight tangent, not all places in japan have constant earthquakes, Nagoya being one of those lucky places, but along the same lines of thinking, the Japanese think tornadoes run rampant all over the entirety of the U.S.
Now back to my 2nd point why this earthquake is a good thing. While Nagoya experiences a lack of earthquakes compared to the prefectures immediately surrounding it (in the 3 years i’ve been here there has been 1-2 that i’ve been able to feel, about Shindo 1, a year.(For those who don’t know about the japanese shindo earthquake system, you should check out my post explaining the system)), they do have a thing called the Great Tokai Earthquake. This 8.0+ earthquake occurs in between Tokyo and Nagoya in a place called Shizuoka, where mt. fuji is, and has hit like clockwork every 110 year +- 33 years for the past 5 earthquakes. And currently, in this cycle the current earthquake is 25 years late… so everyone has been on high edge for quite some time. There are even governmental disaster plans and such dealing in particular with when this quake will strike.
Harajuku goes Jamaican – Time Out Tokyo.
Finally a jamaican restaurant in japan with real patties!
here’s teh link for the location
http://www.timeout.jp/en/tokyo/venue/2554/
Airline to introduce women-only lavatories – CNN.com.
besides how against i am to this… reintroducing segregation when there really is no need. I wanted to point out that i read the same exact news story from the japanese yahoo news service and it was referring to it as not a women’ only bathroom, but more so as a place where women can more easily put on their make-up… since japanese women are retarded when it comes to make-up (i’m talking like $300-500 a month for their makeup).