I think Google is very happy about the existence of Mozilla and its plethora of open source projects.

Google is focusing on breaking up the traditional desktop application way of doing things and moving it all to the web. They also want to loosen Microsoft's stranglehold on the computer industry.

Supporting Mozilla helps to achieve both of these goals. The fact that it also helps decrease the number of users using Chrome is of lesser importance IMO.

I lived in Japan, one of the richest and most "successful" democracies in the world for 2 years. Some things I found out/noticed.

- An obscene amount of advertising.
- A ridiculously high suicide rate (32,000 or so a year)
- Pathetic rights for workers. (I did homestay and the father worked from 9am to 10pm 6 days a week. For his "day off" he only worked 8 hours.)
- A great lack of ability to change jobs or career paths. (If you do, you have to be lucky and be prepared to work very hard from the bottom again)
- (Arguably) the hightest part time employment rate in the world (about a 3rd of the populace) and a low minimum wage (~$8 USD per hour)

Granted it may be better than China, but democracy (capitalism) has hardly proven to be a wondrous solution.

That's assuming that comments add a significant amount time to a project. Granted, that extraneous comments are not a good thing, however the whole reason it is considered a good idea in the community, is because a comment takes 10 seconds to write for the developer. When you wrote a piece of code you know exactly what it is doing and can comment with very little effort.

You also need to consider, that it is dangerous not to have standards on when to comment. You may be very good about only commenting when appropriate, but there are many developers who put simply suck. They either write confusing code, or they just don't think too much about comments and add them almost randomly. With strict standards, you get a product that has been commented consistently, even if somewhat extraneously, which is a lot better than a lack of comments.

As an example, you can comment methods in C# describing the method and the parameters which then show up in intellisense (tooltips). You could only comment methods that are not immediately understandable from the name of the method. But then, you don't know how other people might interpret these names. So you then play it safe and do ones that could be slightly confusing. Then you have 90% of them commented and the other 10% missing, which will likely concern other developers as to why they are missing. So, it is generally not worth the tiny amount of time you save being selective with comments.

The other aspect is, I think it is excellent practice to write comments before you code. This way, you often find flaws in your logic before you write any code, thus saving time. Once it is all good, then you just fill in the blanks, in which case commenting doesn't add any time at all.

It's a big assumption to say that all future developers to look at a block of code will understand it, especially when to you as the developer who wrote it it is all obvious.

Support people have a whole range of skills that developers don't have. However, (good) developers should be almost just as competent at looking after their own machine.

But seriously, what setting?

As a developer, I don't play with settings because they shouldn't be a problem. I change them because I either need to, or they make things a lot easier for me. In other words, I change settings as part of my job. Not taking minor risks like this results in ugly workarounds. We have settings for a reason.

Let's deal with problems as they come up, rather than being super cautious with our machines.

(I personally have never gone to a sysadmin other than to get privileges granted.)

Or you could find something he is interested in and let him do that. I love programming, but I see a lot of people who do it and don't like it at all and they suck.

It's not something you should choose as a career unless you really get into it IMO.

I lived in Japan for 2 years and experienced all the things you mention (minus the cops) and they bugged me the same way, but since coming back to my home country I have gained some perspective.

That is not racism. Japanese people are just on the whole very very culturally insensitive. We (English speakers) generally don't compliment each other and when we do it is usually heart felt. The Japanese people do it ALL THE TIME. Especially when they meet someone new and especially when they are nervous, like when meeting a gaijin.

Similarly, they don't see people in American using chopsticks on TV and spent years and years learning kanji in a mind numbingly ineffective method, so they won't expect you to be able to use chopsticks or write kanji.

You can't really expect much else from a country with something like 1% foreigners. Plus they still show Full House on TV.

However, as a foreigner you can know their culture. You are the one who needs to show cultural sensitivity and respond in ways they expect when they compliment you. They may be insensitive but there is no ill intent.

I really suggest reading "An Intelligent Life - A Practical Guide to Relationships, Intimacy and Self-Esteem" by Julian Short. It sounds like you don't have a lot of self-esteem and this book teaches you how to address the problem. It's very scientific and ties into our evolution. I also don't have a lot of self-esteem and it has really helped me.

There are ways to do the first touch as if it is inadvertent. Or you can even just relax about avoiding touching a girl and you will sometimes brush each other accidentally. You could always kind of usher her through a door or a crowd guiding her back with your hand or something.

However, I don't think you need to worry too much about touching them first before making a move/kissing them. There is nothing wrong with doing this as long as you already have something of a rapport with them and you make your move in a clear and deliberate way and they are aware of what you are doing. You don't need to do this in situations that are super scary (suddenly kissing a hot stranger). If you are the center of attention then I don't doubt you will meet or know girls who are sending you signals that they like you are want you to make a move. When you are talking to them and you sense this, wait for a pause, keep looking into their eyes and start moving into the kissing position.

They will realise what you are doing and start moving their heads, or they will not move their head or pull back. Anyway, it should be really obvious from their faces as to how they feel about the idea so you will know whether to proceed (some girls with play hard to get and not let you know they want you to kiss them, but not many I think). The important thing to remember (I hope I can remember it!) is that you will be fine if they reject you for whatever reason and will learn from the experience.

Probably the reason you can't have conversations with people who are worse than you, is that you feed off each others anxieties (he looks anxious, I'm not doing a good job). You just need to work on your self-esteem I think.

1. "An Intelligent Life" by Julian Short - Goes into the nature of self esteem and the importance of relationships, which is tied back to our evolutionary roots.
2. "Passionate Marriage" by David Schnarch - All about romantic relationships.
3. "Manhood" by Steve Biddulph - About men and how they mature.

I would read them in that order.

Some advice.
- Don't limit yourself to meeting geeks. You (I assume since you posted this) need to grow more as a person. You won't broaden your horizons if all your friends are like you. As others have suggested take something up.

- Don't treat relationships, in particular romantic relationships as problems to be solved. Relationships are about intimacy and basically showing yourself. You are not showing yourself if you are hiding behind calculated action. This is even more true with sex. If you are running through check lists of things to do and constantly analyzing you are not connecting with your partner which is what produces good and passionate sex.

- Throw yourself into it. If you are not experienced it will take a while before you gain confidence. Try to make lots of friends. You will slowly learn what kind of people you really want to spend time with and develop your social skills.

That will teach him to masturbate.

*slowly closes porn windows*

They are not racist, they just have stereotypes of foreigners, much like we all do. The main difference is that as a culturally undiverse place, they naturally place more weight on them.

This is completely human and normal. The foreigners that come to Japan have certain tendencies and TV also likes to depict them in a certain light which reinforces mistruths. If all the foreigners you have met or seen before were fun loving and rambunctious then you aren't going to try and engage one you just met in a discussion about foreign policy!

Regarding having them understand your Japanese. The test you are talking about would be the JLPT I take it, which doesn't test speaking or pron, so it doesn't mean people should be able to understand you. However, I do agree many people, especially old people just assume you are speaking English and don't listen to you. I also hate it when I ask a question like "What time will the next train depart?" and they feel the need to show the numbers on their fingers.

Anyway, I do not think the large majority of them are racist. I just think they are culturally immature and insensitive. Don't forget they do tend to get enamoured by us easily due to their false stereotypes. My friend who has been in Australia for 7 years said she still sometimes gets nervous speaking to people with blond hair and blue eyes from the awe she feels. It's hard to call that racism.

I don't think that the other ads were bad. Microsoft is seen as a heartless and monolithic corporation. They knew that if they just came straight out with an ad campaign trying to sell more computers or change their image, many people would just shrug it off, without really paying attention to it's message. The Seinfeld ads served to shake up this view and made people more inquisitive as to what MS has to say.