There's a tendency in Japan to place the blame for serious problems on the people up top. For instance, political campaign scandals in Japan, which may often only involve people in the middle of the organization, can and have landed many politicians in jail. It works similarly with the yakuza and likewise with corporations.

So even though the fault clearly lies with the moderators, they're trying to blame the person at the top, the founder.

Then I wish someone would explain to me how WBC can picket almost anywhere with relative ease, but something like "Occupy Wall Street" gets relegated to "free speech zones" out of the way of all eyes and ears.

If that's not censure, then I don't know what is.

Ghost in the Shell just got a bit closer to being real. Now we just need to advance microbot and nanotechnology.

Technology, the result of engineering, is applied science.

I can concur with this. Anytime I hit the heavy crowded areas, Shinjuku, Akihabara, I basically lose my connection a lot. As soon as I'm headed back up north toward Saitama and Ibaraki, signal/connection comes right back no problem. I use a Galaxy S2.

This was brought up on here once before and there was a good solution to this. Go get yourself a gun carrying license first. Get a gun or simply by a part of a gun, like the barrel. Get a gun carrying case with a lock. Also get a heavy duty lock for your bag. When you travel and don't want something stolen from your bag, bring the piece. Tell the counter you are checking a gun (part). Even gun pieces are treated like a whole gun. If TSA wants to check the bag they will need to do it while in front of you, after that you can lock the suit case and they won't be able to open the suitcase after that. This is the gist of it.

I don't know how posted this, but I read it on here and found it to be a very good idea.

Still in use on every modern Japanese cell phone.

It's funny you should mention something like this. In Japan, there is a lack of an online purchasing system. Stuff like Newegg/TigerDirect don't really exist and there are loads of brick and mortar stores to shop at, meaning shopping around in Japan can be quite a challenge. One of Japan's version of BestBuy, YodobashiCamera, actually has a system where you sign up for a point card and then everything you buy and use the point card with accumulated points. It just happens to work out such that the points equal the sales tax usually, and sometimes you even get sales that let you acquire say 5% more points from the purchase price. These points then work as real money where 1 point = 1 yen and you can return and buy items in nothing but points. So if I bought a 10,000yen item I would get 1000 points back if I paid in cash (credit cards only got you 8%). I always thought this system was somewhat ingenious as it sort of created a system where once people started buying big price items from there and started getting points, its likely they would want to continue to return. Even with the point savings though, many other stores still tended to have much better prices on some items than Yodobashi did; you just couldn't use those points there :).

Pretty sure its 20 yrs old to drink in Japan. I was there for a year recently.

The drinking culture there is completely different from the culture in the states. There alcohol is treated as just another beverage that can make you sick if you drink too much. No one thought it really odd to have someone passed out on the street or throwing up on the side of the road, it was normal. That would get you jailed in the states for public drunkenness. Craziest thing I still remember and I had already been there for 7 months so it shouldn't have caught me off guard, I walked into a liquor store to buy some import beer and the guy at the register after I bought it asked "” took me a second to realize he was asking if I wanted to the cap removed so I could drink it on the go. Even after having been there almost a year, the idea of walking down the street chugging a beer still seemed foreign to me.

I suppose this might fit in with your (a) but...

I read a BCI panel report put together by Theodore Berger some 3 years ago and the one thing I took away from the report was that the problem with BCI right now (for invasive implants) isn't the matter of "Where to put the implant" and "How to communicate," but a problem with keeping it permanently there. I hadn't realized prior to reading that report that the body was actually the number one "enemy" in any kind of long term study involving invasive implants. At the time that panel report was published (2007), the longest running implant had been just about a year. There were still a lot of open questions as well as to what was causing the implants to eventually fail.

Unless the implant tech has improved in the last 3 three years; it seems to me the biggest hurdle will be getting implants that can last longer than a year.