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A comment on The last new subway line in Japan. Parent comment

Re:The last new subway line in Japan by isolate on Friday December 18, 2015 @11:42PM (#10762654)
> It's like they're super-high-tech in everything - except computers, which are very expensive compared to what you can get here in the US.

High-tech/lo-tech and expensive/cheap are different axes. Everyone in Japan was doing the whole text message thing 15 years ago, back when most of us were just coming to terms with email. The same can be said about GPS navigation.

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Re:The last new subway line in Japan by deciplex on Saturday December 19, 2015 @03:41AM (#10763050)
On the other hand, 12 years ago MP3 players were commonplace just about everywhere, but in Japan Minidisc was still the big thing.
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Re:The last new subway line in Japan by isolate on Saturday December 19, 2015 @04:36AM (#10763134)
Good point, but then again ATRAC encoding >> MP3 encoding at typical bitrates back then.
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Re:The last new subway line in Japan by golergka on Saturday December 19, 2015 @07:19AM (#10763384)
But convenience is so much more imprortant than codec quality for mass market.
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