Do we mean better, or do we mean more amenable to japanese political influence?
I mean better. That's how the Germans have succeeded in Japan. That's how the French rebuilt Nissan. Meanwhile, the American makers for the last 30 years have been unable to even capture their homemarket and instead have been leaning on Washington to intervene.
Unfortunately, if you know anything about the markets you know that even while the Japanese may not place tariffs on automotive products from the US, their market is absolutely closed to US product through a number of other legal but fairly immoral actions.
Yet strangely, German cars do well in Japan, and Japan's second largest maker is owned by the French. Maybe if the American makers made better small cars and medium sedans, there would be more interest in them.
Is the 4D bulk universe a black hole in a 5D hyper-bulk universe within a 6D
Yeah but only up to 42D.
Dear AC,
TFA shows that the bricks are a light brown. Should go quite well in warm, sunny climates (like... you know Australia!). Although even if they were black, I'm sure they could be painted with a reflective coating.
Are they flammable? The only compressed carbon i know offhand is coal. Nobody will want flammable bricks.
Diamond is another famous form of compressed carbon. These aren't coal or diamonds though. They are a carbon compound. If you stopped to think for a few seconds, you'd realize that they are almost certainly not flammable. High flammability means it has lots of energy stored. This rock is being made from the waste product (CO2) left over from extracting energy.
Are they cheap? It's hard to beat concrete for price.
Probably not but if the cost can be offset through carbon trading schemes like those active in Australia*, Europe and China they might be quite cost effective. The entire point of TFA is that they have found a way to make the conversion method practical.
Also btw. if you are worried about heat absorption, then you don't want to use concrete as a building material!
Solve those three potential problems and you might have something. And if they do you might want to forget about bricks and pavers and replace the cement block with them. That would sell. Billions of them.
Would it have been so hard to read the article and think before posting?
(*Technically Australia has a carbon tax but will be converting to an emissions trading scheme)
Precisely. They are almost irrelevant now, as Apple will be soon. China phone maker Xiaomi took 30,000,000 orders for its new "Red Rice" phone in just 5 hours. http://www.gizchai.com/2013/08/30000000-xiaomi-hongmi-aka-xiaomi-red.html
Yes.. 2-3% of China's population ordered that phone within 5 hours of release... I'm sure that press release is completely bullshit free.
I understand and feel the revulsion that a healthy adult has towards child porn, but from an objective/legal point-of-view, the West got stupid about how they enforce such laws. Here's why: The basis of laws surrounding it is that the production of child porn harms a child - something that makes perfect sense, and should have laws in place to prevent/limit as much as logically possible. OTOH, who exactly is harmed in a comic strip? One would think that it would present a means of release for those pervs who do get into such crap, and to let them do so without harming anyone in the process. A teenaged kid sexting his/her SO should get a stern talking-to by the parents, and definitely should be enlightened on why that is a monumentally stupid idea - but no, the kid should not get tossed in the slammer and stigmatized for life.
Nice to see people speaking logically about this. Honestly I don't think youth gets sexualised any more in Japan than it does elsewhere and reading the news in my home country (Australia), I see a lot more incidents of child sexual abuse than reading/listening to the news in Japan.
As for TFA? I can see why it would make sense for some Japanese men to simply withdraw from society... Japan isn't exactly an easy-going culture to live in, competition for anything (females, jobs, status, whatever) is incredibly intense, and there are few other routes available to the typical Japanese man that doesn't involve a shitload of money (e.g. move self and family to another country whose culture you may get on better in.) These men still have a non-negotiable duty to care for their parents, and real estate/rent is frickin' astronomical anyway. They spent nearly every waking hour of their childhood with little outside of intense study and discipline, so it's not like they learned to be social mavens in the first place - they likely only found peace when they were alone.
I don't think this is a fair portrayal of modern life in Japan at all.
Rent for the most part in Japan is heap. I live in central Tokyo and pay $1000 in rent a month for a 3-room + toilet/bathroom modern flat next to a large park area. I would probably pay about $700 a month living in areas surrounding Tokyo (Chiba/Saitama/Kanagawa). Housing as well is generally quite affordable. $200,000-$300,000 will get you a large flat/town-house within reasonable commute distance of central Tokyo.
Competition for jobs is actually a lot less intense than I experienced back home in Australia. Japanese companies are much more willing to train employees, especially when they are young. Unemployment is currently at about 4% which is historically very high. Additionally in my personal experience it is a lot easier to get into fulltime employment in Japan than in Australia.
I'm married so it is hard for me to comment on the competition for available women but most people seem to find girlfriends/wives without too much problem.
Also your characterization of Japanese childhood is incredibly unfair. Japanese children do study more than I saw back-home but it is hardly every moment of their childhood and in exchange they get to slack off for 4 years in university
Hell - even if they do find a job and a wife, they may not leave home anyway. The answer why is pretty simple; If their parents own and don't rent, they stand a better chance of inheriting their parents' home than they do of ever being able to afford one of their own - which is pretty traditional in its own right. In most cases, it's not like they have as much potential competition from siblings, what with smaller family sizes over the decades.
Japan has changed a lot since the end of the bubble twenty years ago. Most young Japanese manage to go out into society and support themselves just fine.
I want it to do more, but I don't want it to be running Linux, or Android, or any other mainstream OS. Sure it means that I may get more apps, as developers are more familiar with it, but these general purpose operating systems just seem to slow things down in the end. My console just needs to play games, allow me to watch videos, and surge the web
So in other words the kernel only needs to provide:
Might as well use Linux by this stage. It would sure beat re-inventing the wheel. Plus it gives you a much greater chance of developers actually supporting your platform. The fact that your Android device slows down when receiving messages while gaming sounds like a problem with the design of Android.
Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable, and three parts which are still under development.
