yena

Although Linus is from Finland, he comes from the Swedish-speaking minority population there and his native language is Swedish. Sweden itself is pretty PC, but I don't know if that goes for the Finnish-Swedish as well, or if it is just Linux being Linus

Sounds like you should try Linux Mint Debian Edition. I've been using it since I gave up on Ubuntu 11.04

Actually we don't know that, since most of the reactor building in inaccessible. Also, the latest info from Tepco says that they lost coolant before the tsunami struck, which suggest major earthquake damage. However, if the tsunami hadn't been this severe and they had kept power, perhaps they could have brought the situation under control.

The _atmospheric release_ is reported to be 10% of Chernobyl. Nothing has been said about the release in the sea, which we all know has been huge.

It's not normal at all. Something was building up

The slides are interesting, but I'd like them in context. Is a video of a seminar covering this material available somewhere?

Yes, ClojureCLR. It is supposed to work on Mono as well.

The Guardian was running an article on the Old Spice commercials yesterday.

That's what my old math professor always said: "Now let's pick a random number, say 17, and ..."

I'm in Tokyo, and I have lived here for 12 years. The paper is quite interesting, and I have no major disagreement, but of course it is not the full picture. As I see it, the main problem Japan has is that the education and work culture is good at iterative learning and refinement, but bad at picking up and acting upon ideas that are far from how things are currently done. This is a consensus society, and things have to be broadly agreed upon in the group/company to have a chance. If there is a risk of disagreement the idea will either be buried in endless meetings, or simply dropped without discussion. This makes decision making slow and unimaginative.

Software is a good example. Most software and home pages in Japan look like they have been designed by committee, where every person in the room has a pet feature that has to be on the front page. This leads to software that is cluttered and hard to use. There is also little innovation; most new software seems based on designs already in use.

However, there is one aspect where Japan shines. People care about visuals, and graphics and icons are often pleasing. This at least is an advantage in game software, where Japan is not lagging as badly as in business software.