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angus77 | 14 years ago | on: The myth of Japan's failure

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.

angus77 | 14 years ago | on: The myth of Japan's failure

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

angus77 | 14 years ago | on: Bullshit

"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.

angus77 | 14 years ago | on: The Myth of Japan's lost Decade

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.

angus77 | 14 years ago | on: The Myth of Japan's lost Decade

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.

angus77 | 14 years ago | on: Nerds and Male Privilege

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.

angus77 | 14 years ago | on: Trolls (2008)

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?

angus77 | 14 years ago | on: Dave Winer: Why I stand up for Stallman

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.

angus77 | 14 years ago | on: Apple Lossless Audio Codec is now open source (Apache license)

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.

angus77 | 14 years ago | on: Richard Stallman’s rider

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.

angus77 | 14 years ago | on: It’s Not China; It’s Efficiency That Is Killing Our Jobs

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.

angus77 | 14 years ago | on: Steve Jobs to Obama: “You’re headed for a one-term presidency”

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.

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