paulific

Interesting. I didn't know they moved the Siegessäule. Reminds me of what I read about the approach to the Vatican and the way Mussolini obliterated bits of (messy) historic city to achieve a suitably scenic and impressive vista.

Microbrewery? ;-)

The blind leading the blind and both shall walk into a transparent wall.

The Monty Python custard pie lecture is also hilarious.

For a look at just how hands on early motoring was, check out this article about Kipling and cars (he was an enthusiastic "early adopter"): http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_steamtactics_kipearly.htm Reading this really does sound like the early days of computing (or as I imagine from reading about it).

Part of the politics is that the Republic of China still officially claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China. So it really is recognize one or the other. Politics within Taiwan have so far prevented declaration of Taiwanese independence from China in any form, and the One-China policy that everybody agrees to prevents recognition of the PRC and establishment of two-state relationships. Until either of these political realities change, the formal fiction of unrecognized statehood is unlikely to change.

I guess this is why I have free to play games sitting on my phone but never play them. They take me through a tutorial full of tasks and menus and resources and I subconsciously feel intimated by all the work.

Yup. By no means a developer, but I Python was the first programming language I learned and I always felt it was my native language. I was happy to stick around with 2.7 for as long as it was there, but I guess this is the motivation I needed to learn Ruby or Haskell. :-(

I learned that from Tony Robinson's "Worst Jobs in History"

http://www.unofficialtonyrobinsonwebsite.co.uk/pages/worst_j...

The quotes in the Wired article are all kind of the opposite though. For example:

"Today, 99.9 percent of humanity cannot beat the best commercial software at blitz chess. Within the decade, it's likely the machine on your desk will know how to play chess better than any human has played the game since its invention in AD 600."

I suppose that really just makes your point though. Even in 1995 we were only really trying to delay the inevitable. If playing chess is ultimately a mechanical process and baking bread is ultimately a mechanical process, then ultimately we should be make able to make a machine that does it better than we can.

Yes, I remember my local supermarket had 'recommended' products that were marked like they were specials, but were not actually discounted at all. I appreciated the business logic, but basically stopped shopping there.

Yup, almost everything in I have ever worked with in Japanese to English translation has been shackled by the need to produce English translations optimized for English speaking Japanese readers.

I think I'm going to go back and finish Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife. It feels less like dystopian science fiction and more like realistic observation than ever at this point.

Well, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy had both. The premise of William Gibson's The Peripheral also seems to be that the development of futuristic technology is not going to stop, it's just going to exacerbate the unequal distribution of resources.

From the article: "From left to right, these rosettes show the surprisingly beautiful paths of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus as seen from Earth. "

https://earthsky.org/space/what-is-retrograde-motion kind of gives you an idea

One of the university labs I had to use did not allow access to Netscape for whatever reason, so I actually used Lynx a lot. For reading text on webpages it actually did a quite sturdy job.

You can pass N2 in one year of full time study (if you apply yourself). The multiple years tend to be when people are trying to pass it doing part time study.

Oh, I thought it was the Cumaean Sybil. But I guess that is where Trelawney's name comes from.

If you only hear it spoken, or you don't understand the naming convention and start making guesses about what you think is going on. People in countries where middle names are normal also tend to make the assume that one of the syllables is a middle name.

I deal with the reverse of this problem all the time. Living in Japan, my bank cards (and other ID) all have my name in the Japanese order, with my surname first followed by my first name and my middle name last. Without fail, the staff at the counter will address me by my middle name, on the assumption that foreigners' names have the family name last, so that must be the right name to use.

Notably there have only been two reigning empresses since the 8th Century and none at all in the modern era. The current Imperial Household Law only allows males to ascend the throne, so they were in real trouble 10 or 15 years back before the birth of the current Emperor's nephew who is now 2nd in line to the throne. The succession is not fixed by the constitution, so they could change the law any time they like. But they probably won't unless they have to.

That was more or less the point of Tolkien's Lecture "The Monster and the Critics". He compared it to building a tower out rocks that came from a historical ruin. Everybody was interested in taking it apart to see where the rocks came from, but he felt it had value in considering it as a single creative work in its own right.

I think the original comment only really mentioned taxes in passing and then the discussion went off down a rabbit hole; but a wonderful rabbit hole in which each subsequent comment added more interesting and relevant information.

That is the point. The Japanese approach to creating legal documents is to make them as ambiguous as possible so that they can be interpreted any way the creator likes. This is somewhat true of overbroad legislation in other jurisdictions as well. The authors of the legislation don't want to create a fair and empirical test, what they want is the discretion to arrest anyone they feel has crossed a subjective line.

US jurisprudence may be different from the Australian law I studied, but as I understand it the "more likely than not" applies to the facts in a civil case not to the legal issue of what constitutes an act of war. That is a question of existing legal precedent and statute law. If there isn't a clear legal definition of cyber war they may indeed have a difficult time proving that cyber attacks are an act of war. But they may think it is worth the effort to try and establish a precedent.

Well if you believe Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_N... the tallest NY building voluntarily demolished to date was the Singer Building at 185m. My guess is that there is a point of diminishing returns at which there is no economic return in knocking down your existing building to build an even larger one. In JPMorgans case they have a 50 year old building that they are planning to replace with one that doubles their office space so they seem to have a good rationale.

Are people worried that they're trying to eradicate free software at the source?

I don't know how much good advice I have, but I've been in a similar situation, so I can at least offer sympathy. I spent three years building up my translation work to get "self sponsorship" and then got dumped by the agency that was sponsoring and providing the bulk of my work. Now I'm back working in-house at a Japanese company. I don't regret having taken a shot at self employment, even if it was a little over optimistic. And at least I know what I was doing wrong. So I say just take it calmly and do what you have to do to stay here and keep working and at the end of the day it's all still forward progress.

That happens to me too, and I find it equally annoying, but I think it is a deliberate design choice. As I understand it they are trying to make it hard to accidentally turn off the alarm and go back to sleep, which would be a critical failure if you missed an interview or were late for work. Presumably irritation at the difficulty of switching it off is seen as the lesser of two evils

The variety in transit cards is mostly due to the variety of operators who use different systems. Japan Rail has Suica, Tokyo Subway lines use Passmo. Some regional operators have their own ones. As you say you can mostly use them interchangeably, probably because it is less trouble for everybody that way.