I wouldn't rely on nationmaster.com for reliable, up-to-date information. That data is from 1998 and converted into US dollars based on 2001 PPP measurements. I would not say that is the most reliable source of information on the current state of education spending. According to that Thailand is outspending countries like South Korea, Singapore and Belgium on education..

No only VB, XXXX and Tooheys New are good enough to match the exacting standards of taste and quality that Australians expect from their beer....

I think the MacBook I bought in December 2008 has a 160 (or 120?) gb HDD. That's less than 4 years ago...

You may not care about having an SSD but I do. By far the biggest performance limitation on all my computers is disk read speed. Increasing read speed has a far bigger performance impact than adding more ram or more cores to the CPU. If you want mass storage buy an external USB drive. I think you can get a 1TB disk for around $100 these days. The disk you have the operating system on _should_ be an SSD in any half decent modern system.

Also if I recall correctly in 2000 I was a Compaq PC with a 4gb HDD

Ahhh... I what a beautiful verb to have missed... Wish /. had an edit button

It's an SSD so not even comparable.

Also if I recall correctly in 2000 I was a Compaq PC with a 4gb HDD. I think around 2001 I added a 30gb drive to it and that seemed big. 128gb would have been considered huge in 2000.

Meh all that's happened so far is a bunch of ministers have expressed the sentiment that Facebook should delete racists material from its website. Personally, I support their right to express that sentiment. If they go and make laws requiring websites to delete content deemed offensive on request then it will be a different issue all together but that hasn't happened so far.

So the internet filter was dropped and the government has been absolutely silent on it since then. We're not going to have browser history data retention laws. iiNet won its case and was found not responsible for its users copyright infringement and we haven't seen any government attempts to introduce French/NZ three-strikes or similar laws since then either. Oh and finally games are going to get an R-rating.

All in all, Australian democracy has worked quite well these last few years and the Australian internet is looking pretty free compared to a lot of other western countries. Oh and work on the nation wide fibre optic network continues as well.

Russia is about 2.2x the size of Australia. I think you've been fooled by map projections.

That and authors and solicitors and technical documentation writers, patent writers, translators .etc. also use the word processor as their primary tool. Since he/she mentions spreadsheets as well he could also be involved in "small-data" data-modeling, office administration or similar. Just because you lack the imagination to see otherwise doesn't mean he/she is stuck in a low level job. Although even if he/she was there would be no need to be an offensive ass about it. Typists and secretaries play a necessary role in society.

From the linked page:

A graphics processor helps increase the performance of certain features, such as drawing tables in Excel 2013 Preview or transitions, animations, and video integration in PowerPoint 2013 Preview. Use of a graphics processor with Office 2013 Preview requires a Microsoft DirectX 10-compliant graphics processor that has 64 MB of video memory. These processors were widely available in 2007. Most computers that are available today include a graphics processor that meets or exceeds this standard. However, if you or your users do not have a graphics processor, you can still run Office 2013 Preview.

Also it would seem the requirements are rounded to the nearest 0.5gb and probably are for extremely heavy usage cases.

Thank you. Just out of curiosity which other East-Asian languages have adopted hangul? I can't think of any. The Chinese haven't. They use their own characters and Roman characters for phonetic purposes. The Japanese haven't they use Chinese characters along with hiragana and katakana. The Mongolians haven't. They have their own native writing system that predates the creation of hangul. The Vietnamese (not sure if they count as East Asian) haven't. They use Roman characters. The Taiwanese speak Chinese and use non-simplified Chinese characters. I think that covers all of East Asia outside of Korea, unless there are some ethnic languages inside China that are using hangul...

Slashdot doesn't support unicode; welcome to the 20th century your time machine is working ;p I know the characters you're talking about though so it doesn't really mater.

Anyway I think if you re-read my post you would see that what you just demonstrated is exactly what I am talking about, although perhaps my explanation was less than perfect. Explaining using English terminology without relying on too much jargon or making the explanation too long is hard.

I'm not really talking about simplified Chinese vs Traditional Chinese. I'm saying two things 1. (just like you I think) that you have a set of basic characters which are used as phonetic components in other characters. I'm sure you're aware of this and 2. (again just like you I think) that most words are formed by combining characters together, and in fact many characters don't form words on their own, instead they have to be combined to have meaning.

Based on these two points, I think we can see clearly that the Chinese writing system operates on a lower unit than words and sentences, contrary to what the post I was replying to was suggesting :)

I'm not saying that the characters don't have their own individual meanings, just that many don't form words on their own and that the majority of Chinese words are formed through combinations of characters. In other words in a sense the characters are like an alphabet, albeit one where individual characters represent syllables and have their own semantic meaning. I don't think we're actually in disagreement here :)

Anyway, that along with the fact that most individual characters are constructed from more basic units, shows that the Chinese writing system operates on a much lower unit than words and sentences.

Kind of but not really. There are far, far more words in Chinese than there are Chinese characters and characters often don't stand on their own as words. Rather individual characters represent morphemes with a single (or small number of) sounds, which often have no real meaning on their own. These morphemes are then combined to form words. In that sense Chinese characters are like an alphabet, albeit with characters which represent complete syllables rather than individual sounds and which generally (but not always) have some sort of semantic meaning. Secondly if you look at the way characters are formed in Chinese, there is a set of basic characters which are used as phonetic units in constructing most of the other characters. Most of the other characters end up consisting of a basic character indicating the phonological sound and a radical to (very broadly) indicate the semantic meaning of the character. So in terms of both 1. how the characters are used and 2. how the characters are constructed Chinese characters still deal with sound and meaning at a sub-word level.

Decent enough article although a lot of hyperbole and ignores a lot of inconvenient facts.

Firstly to say that the lost decade (or twenty) years has been a creation of western psychology is silly. There's a lot of pessimism in Japan among Japanese about the last twenty years and with generally good reason. The system of lifetime employment has collapsed and a new social underclass of non-permanent workers has been created. The number of families relying on government assistance has massively increased and the 4.4 or 5% unemployment rate is only being maintained because the government is literally paying companies to keep people employed. Government debt has ballooned to 200% of GDP and shows no signs of slowing down. Meanwhile the healthcare and pension systems are lumbering towards collapse requiring evermore government (debt) funds to make up the massive funding shortfalls.

To say that there was any policy choice to decrease the birthrate is silly. Policy makers have spent the last decade or more worrying about and doing nothing about the low birthrate. I think decreasing the population is eventually a good thing but to say that there has been a deliberate choice and that Western commentators have missed that is silly.

Trade pressure has eased on Japan in part because the markets have opened up somewhat and in part because production has shifted overseas. The Japanese current account surplus these days is much more based on earnings from overseas assets. However the pressure is not completely gone. Just go have a look at the TPP talks..