It's a common passtime for frustrated language learners and bewildered outsiders to claim that Chinese and Japanese would be better off without hanzi/kanji. Unfortunately, your argument is based on nothing but hyperbole and a false sense of superiority.

The Japanese writing system is one of those monolithic, looming monstrosities of inefficiency and folly that make you question how it could ever have evolved

Ignoring your "folly" troll, your first problem is a lack of reasonable definition of "efficiency" for a writing system. Yes, it takes longer to learn kanji/hanzi than most phonetic alphabets, but you make up a lot of that time with benefits such as instantaneous understanding of novel words (because you know the component characters). I frequently come across e.g. technical terms that are self-explanatory in Japanese, but are gibberish in English without a background in Latin and/or Greek.

Or would you care to measure "efficiency" as "expressiveness per unit length of text?" In that case, Chinese and Japanese absolutely destroy English.

In Japanese, kanji help the eye parse text by indicating word boundaries. That's why reading all-hiragana children's books is an exercise in frustration (despite the fact that they add spaces between words when usually there are none).

As others have noted, Japanese has a high frequency of homophones that kanji are useful for distinguishing between.

Widespread use of computers has made kanji/hanzi more accessible. Computerized input has made previously-obscure characters much more common. While I don't have data to cite here, I suspect overall kanji literacy has increased over the last few decades.

I'm sure I could come up with more, but I'll stop here.

Basically, these "I don't like kanji" whines are old hat, and really serve no useful purpose. Chinese and Japanese writing systems work just fine as-is for the people who actually use them. The only people arguing for getting rid of hanzi/kanji are non-literate people who don't really have a dog in the race to begin with. And if you're a native English speaker who really wants or needs to learn hanzi/kanji, you absolutely can. I did.

Peter Hessler covers this very well in Country Driving. Young migrant workers flock from the poor inland regions to the coasts looking for factory work. They want to work as much overtime as possible 1) because they want to earn as much money as possible as quickly as possible, and 2) because they are far from home and aren't interested in spending time or money on leisure (their "real lives" are back home, and they've come out solely to work).

Because of this, jobs offering more working hours and less vacation are desirable from the workers' point of view.

You can argue that this situation is problematic; it exists because wages are too low and there's an oversupply of labor; without these issues, individual workers would have more leverage to secure a decent living wage without having to work ridiculous hours. But given the current reality, the fact is that massive overtime is not only common, it's sought after.

"The" is not just a filler word. Articles "the" and "a" serve to determine the specificity of the noun they precede. "The girl" is a known, specific girl who has already been identified within the flow of conversation. "A girl" is an as-yet unspecified girl who is newly being introduced to the conversation. "Girl," with no article whatsoever, is likely to be interpreted as a proper noun of some sort.

The possessive "its" does not have an apostrophe anywhere, either before or after the "s".

Here here.

It's "hear, hear".

Yes. From the announcement:

- Default character set is now UTF-8, but other character sets are
    supported via an improved internationalization support. See
    http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/setup-locale.html

It depends on the model. I once had an iBook that required an almost complete teardown in order to get at the HDD. But these days most Apple machines have easily-accessible HDDs that are of course considered to be "user-replaceable."

stay well away from Apple's AAC DRM-ed nonsense

Apple no longer sells DRMed AACs. AACs you rip yourself have never had DRM.

Minidisc is certainly not "extremely popular" in Japan. Just like everywhere else, it has been almost entirely supplanted by MP3 players like the iPod and by music-playing mobile phones.

I don't believe for a second that American kids spend more time in school than Japanese kids do. Japanese kids, starting from middle school (7th grade), are pretty much required to participate in after-school "clubs" (sports teams, band, language, or other activities). These keep them stuck at school until 6pm almost every weekday, and for much of their Saturdays. Then on top of that many kids are forced to go to cram school or equivalents as early as pre-elementary school.

Having worked with the Japanese education system while on the JET Program, I feel that it's horrible how micromanaged Japanese kids' lives are. They have basically no free time for themselves. There is no way American kids spend more time in school. In the classroom maybe. But that time is not necessarily spent effectively.

You clearly missed "nmae" in the title of his post.

As ridiculous as it seems, many Mac users have a rabid hatred for any deviation from the OS X UI standards. For instance in "favorite browser" threads on the MacNN forums, there are always lots of people claiming to dislike Firefox because it's "not Mac-like enough." Forget the fact that Safari has no actual plugin support (witness the breakage of all existing 32-bit plugins with the move to 64-bit Safari in Snow Leopard), unlimited extensibility means nothing if Firefox doesn't have exactly the same percentage transparency in its menus and use the system-provided slide effect for its menubar config sheet.

It's Hik i komori. At least you got the link right.

And NEET is not really the same thing at all. NEETs tend to be plenty social; they're just not doing anything with their lives.

Actually that's a poor comparison. English spelling is different from Japanese in that there are lots of unpronounced letters, as well as single sounds spelled with multiple letters. What if we redo that with a more phonetic respelling* (imagine "hard" vowel pronunciation).

Uncukd: 2 vowels, 4 consonants
Wet: 1 vowel, 2 consonants
Ris: 1 vowel, 2 consonants
Egs: 1 vowel, 2 consonants

That's consistently twice as many consonants as vowels. This is generally true because English syllables generally have one vowel and several consonants in various patterns (VCC, CVC, CCV) whereas, like I said, Japanese is almost always one consonant plus one vowel (CV).

*I don't know IPA, but that would probably have been a better comparison.