This joke has come around in a number of forms. I've heard it about IBM parts, GM car parts, and a few others. So far I have no definitive answer as to whether or not it has a true beginning. I'd love to hear from someone who knows. I suspect it's untrue, but the idea of sending defective parts separately packaged because they were requested is so true to Japanese culture that I really hope it is true.

Actually, Japan's immigration rules are extremely relaxed. For "engineers" (programmers qualify), if you have a degree and a job offer, you're good to go. The new rules even allow a 5 year visa which doesn't necessarily terminate if your job does. If you are a native English speaker (you have to have 12 years of education in the English Language), have a university degree and a job offer, you can teach English. Other categories exist for business owners, etc.

I haven't looked at every country, but I think Japan is probably the easiest country to come and work in the G8. Why are there so few foreigners? Culturally it's hard if you are inflexible and you don't speak Japanese. Even though there are actually quite a few jobs available for English only speakers, Japanese culture is really linked to the language. I don't know how to explain it properly except that there is "inside" and there is "outside". If you only speak English (or Japanese poorly), you will always be "outside". Outside is sometimes kind of nice because nobody has any expectations of you. But similarly, you get few benefits. You're always the hanger on, never part of the in group.

Even without language issues, many people have difficulty because Japan is an intensely moral culture. There are things that are absolutely morally right and absolutely morally wrong. The problem is that these things are often quite different than what is morally right and wrong in the west (especially the US, which is also a very moral culture). People from some certain cultures seem to have a great deal of difficulty dealing with Japanese ways of doing things. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not great if you want to live in Japan :-)

Anyway, if you want to work in Japan, and have a university degree, you can do it. One last issue... The Japanese work system is really different. You get hired after university and you stay at your job forever. It's really hard to get a regular job if you aren't coming right out of school. It's nothing to do with immigration policies -- workers whose companies fold on them suffer too. This is why you get stuck in a "temp" job. It used to be that "temp" workers often got stuck with 1 year visas, which were renewed every march. If a company wanted to get rid of foreign workers, all they had to do was make it known that they didn't want to have the visas renewed and problem solved. But with the new system (starting next week, I think), they can no longer do that. Visas are 5 years and usually extend past the end of the job.

The major downside for having a "temp" job is that usually you don't get paid a quarterly bonus or certain benefits. If you are a programmer, you can often negotiate these details. If you are a teacher, you can't and you will end up getting paid about half of what regular teachers get paid. However, the responsibilities are *much* less, so personally, I can't complain about it.

Anyway, I live in Japan. I'm actually off abroad for a couple of years so that my wife can learn to speak English, but apart from that I'm here permanently. It's my home now. People here are friendly and welcoming of foreigners if you try hard to fit in.

Does an American school history textbook not present itself as a consensus of history. Does it caution the reader that the material biased based on government regulated curricula, and may not accurately represent the facts? I suspect it does not. I only spent grade 3 in the US and I don't really remember that much about the school system, but I do remember studying Paul Revere's ride. I can tell you that I fervently believed the account that matches the historically inaccurate (according to Wikipedia ;-) ) Longfellow poem. In fact, I only learned a few years ago about my misunderstanding when I was corrected by someone.

Books are biased. All of them. It's not a major problem if you understand that fact.

The museum in Hiroshima is excellent. I have nothing bad to say about it at all. In fact, I've also been to the museum at Yasukuni Shrine and while I'm sure many Americans would disagree with some of the treatment of the second world war, I found the point of view very interesting. I live in Japan, which is why I used this as an example. I was not intending to imply that Japanese school coverage of WWII was inferior to American coverage. Only that it is different.

It is kind of interesting that in your reply you seem to assume that I meant the Japanese textbook was biased (and I don't mean that as an attack on you). Why wouldn't it my post mean that the American version is biased? This is a good illustration of what the problem is. It doesn't even occur to us that *our* textbooks are biased (and I say that generally, as I am not American).

That's why I say it isn't just Wikipedia. Every publication has a slant. It's really easy to miss it if it happens to coincide with our own view of the world. Stepping out of that viewpoint is a great way to learn about the world.

You think there isn't a person in microsoft who tags some web pages out there? It's not an all or nothing situation. It is certainly possible (even overwhelmingly likely, IMHO) that the list is made by a computer and then modified by humans. A human certainly could block a handful of sites that Microsoft doesn't like. They almost certainly do this for sites that don't get picked up by their heuristics. There aren't going to be that many you would want to block.

Does that mean it is not a mistake? No, but I would very much like to hear what criteria made their filter identify the FSF donation page as a gambling site. The fact that it accepts BitCoin has been brought up as a possibility. If this were the only criteria, then I think it would indicate that their filtering is very poor. Other explanations are more likely, IMHO (including the possibility of some employee or group of employees overreaching their authority).

Read any US school textbook on topics like Pearl Harbor, and the circumstances around dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now read any Japanese school textbook on the same topics.

Compare and contrast.

It's not just Wikipedia.

But it's not a middle ground. It's not related.

Let's say I'm trying to get to the bus station. You live in the area and so I ask you how to get to the bus station. You say, "I don't really want to tell you that." I get pissed off and complain loudly that even though you know the way to the bus station, you won't tell me. People start saying, "Boy, that guy's not friendly at all, is he?"

So in order to avoid the bad reputation you say, "Well, I still don't want to tell you where the bus station is, but what if I offered to cut your grass. Would that help matters?"

Of course I would love for you to cut my grass, but it isn't at all related to the issue of the bus station. It's not a middle ground, it's a red herring.

Actually, I have an HD6950 in my box. I had been running the proprietary driver basically because it was set up by default and I was too lazy to change, but yesterday I decided to give it a go. In terms of performance, it is not garbage (I haven't looked at the code). There are actually quite a few advantages to the open source driver.

For one, the 2D operations seem to be significantly faster. I had to screw around with Catalyst on the proprietary driver to get good desktop performance, but the open source driver is considerably snappier out of the box. Also, Gnome Shell was crashing on me frequently with the proprietary driver (usually when doing an expose type event), but this seems to have stopped completely with the open source driver (it has also never crashed with my Intel card on my netbook). Finally video playing seems to have been improved. No matter what I did there would always be some situations where I would get tearing with the proprietary driver, but I never get tearing with the open source driver. There is probably a way to fiddle with Catalyst to get everything working well on the proprietary driver, but I could never seem to find the sweet spot in terms of performance and stability

I'm not a big gamer, but I have a few games. Some games work flawlessly. Some have reduced framerate. One game (the World Forge Ember client did not run at all due to driver problems.

Apart from Ember (which is kind of screwy most of the time anyway), every game I've tried is playable at a reasonable framerate and resolution. I suspect that hard core gamers would not be happy playing some of the more modern windows games under wine, but I don't have any of those to test. On the whole, for a casual open source gamer, the open source driver actually has a better user experience for me. Admittedly, I have a fairly high end card, so I don't know what it's like for a cheaper one, but I don't get a dramatic drop off in performance. The improvement in other areas more than makes up for it in my mind.

Quite possibly for a specific application you have in mind, it's not acceptable, but that's a far cry from "garbage".

I have an HD6950 which has relatively good horsepower, I guess. I had been using the proprietary driver simply because that's what my distro set up and I've been too lazy to change it. I don't really play games all that often, but I have one or two kicking around. As you mentioned this, I decided to try out the open source driver.

On the plus side, the performance of 2D and video is actually quite a lot better than the proprietary driver. Everything is quick and smooth and no tearing. I had to fiddle with the proprietary driver to get it to look good and it never worked as well as the open source driver does. Some old games work really well. I fired up World of Padman and at full resolution I've got more FPS than I need. I also happened to have World of Goo kicking around. As long as I set the resolution of the game to my normal desktop resolution everything worked great. If it's set to 800x600, the screen gets crushed into an 800x600 block in the center of the monitor, though.

On the down side, I ran Torcs and get pretty significantly reduced frame rate. I didn't have time to fiddle with it, but I think I can probably set up something playable, but with the proprietary driver, I've got FPS to burn. I also tried Ember and it was a total disaster with screen artifacts and serious problems. Dmesg was telling me that the driver was encountering an error. Ember's kind of flaky anyway, but I never ran into these kinds of problems with the proprietary driver.

I wanted to try something under wine, but not being a gamer, I don't really have anything appropriate.

For me, I'm definitely going to stick with the open source driver. For one I get the advantages of free software. But it's also considerably better for every day use. If I were using this machine for games, the open source driver would not be acceptable, I think. It's definitely getting there, but it's not there yet.

I hate to say this, but Obama's election really cemented my view of how deluded the average person is wrt to politics. It's not just American's either. I live in Japan and when Obama was elected it was treated almost as if it was the second coming. He even won a Nobel Peace Prize ostensibly based on what he was *expected* to accomplish. It's crazy.

Before the election somebody asked him what his stance was on the continued bombing of Pakistan. He replied that he was in favour of it. If I'm to understand the situation correctly (and since I don't pay attention, it's quite possible I've got it wrong), it seems that the US gives Pakistan arms in exchange for the permission to drop bombs on Pakistan. This allows the US to assasinate terrorist leaders. (Again, if I've got this wrong, please reply with better info...)

Whether or not you think this is right or wrong, it's blantantly clear that there was never, ever going to be a major shift of foreign policy. This is pretty much business as usual for the US (whether or not you agree with it -- though I will say that the US has a history of this strategy biting them in the ass).

The interesting question for me is whether Obama himself believed that he would significantly change things. He seems like charismatic and relatively effective leader. If he can't make changes, what does that say about the ability of the democratic system to change government policy? If he never believed that he would change things significantly, what does that say about the level of propoganda in US politics?

To be fair, I don't mean to concentrate only on US politics. I could level these suspisions at pretty much any democratically elected government today.

Yeah, it's crazy, but it's just the way it is. My Canadian banks are the same way. No credit card unless I'm resident there. I can lie to them and say I'm living at a friend's place, but it's not worth the hassle. Online banks have the same restrictions as far as I know. If they are not operating in the country that I'm living in, they can't do anything for me. The ones that *do* operate in Japan have the same restrictions. The governments/banks have it all locked up. There is some good reason for it, though. It makes it difficult to launder money from country to country.

I used to do online shopping using Pay Pal, but they've shut me out since my bank is located in Canada and I always access it from Japan. I've been trying to get through to them, but they have been less than helpful. Something like Bitcoin could be very helpful, but I seriously doubt that Bitcoin is it. Putting aside potential scam issues for the moment, I'm not convinced that the transactional costs will be appreciably lower than what the banks are offering. As money volume goes up, the advantage to cheat becomes greater. Thus you need to offer higher transaction fees to build the blocks.

What would be nice is a system that poofed Xcoins into existence *all* the time to cover transaction fees, dependent on the volume going through. This would also ensure that the system was inflationary. The problem is that you can't do that with a computer. Eventually you overflow.

Not to beat a dead horse, but every time I look at Bitcoin (whether it is a scam or not) and try to think how an *honest* person building the same system would build it, I run into serious problems like the above. It's quite an interesting problem, and whether it is a scam or not, Bitcoin contains some interesting ideas.

Probably.

Functional programming leads to a completely different set of coding idioms. These can be very convenient in many applications. Since it is not the kind of programming that most people are used to, it can be awkward at first. There are a lot of things that are much more elegant and obvious when done this way, but you have to get over the barrier of thinking procedurally first. I would say that it isn't simply that hard core CS types like the aesthetics of functional programming. I think it's more that, being hard core CS types, they are exposed to functional programming and once the get immersed find it easier to express what they want to say.

Of course there is nothing really stopping you from writing functional code in any language. It's just that notationally, functional languages make it much easier. In the same way, you could write object oriented code in any language, but the verbosity would negate it's usefulness.

Personally, I don't think a programmer's education is complete without achieving some level of fluency in functional programming. Personally, I sadly lack any competence at all and I really should spend more time practicing.

Actually, there's another reason for a sore back -- inflexibility. If you have very inflexible hamstrings and you have the seat at the normally correct height, you will get lower back pain. It happened to me after I had quite a long layoff from cycling. Stretching solves the problem.

And bitcoin was (presumably) written by a Japanese guy. As it happens I live in Japan. You're arguing that this kind of service is not needed because you, as an American, do not need it.

To be honest, the only reason I replied was because I've seen other posts by you and (apart from Bitcoin) I've found you to be an intelligent and reasoning person. This is the second time I've responded to you on this subject only to have you pawn me off with an argument that equates to "Well, I really don't care about you because your opinion differs from mine". It's probably a huge waste of my time trying to get you to see this, but you never know.

I'm happy to be corrected if I've made an error, but I'm not quite understanding your point. I had no interest in the example just to keep it simple.

The idea is that if I make enough money to be able to afford paying back 0.1Y in year 1 values, since the currency is deflating my ability to pay back (numerically) diminishes. I keep making the same amount of value, but the numerical amount of money I receive diminishes.

Essentially, I have to pay the interest rate *and* the deflation rate in order to pay off the loan. It's not impossible, but is makes borrowing considerably less attractive.