Current versions of eBub doesn't do Japanese properly; you really want support for things like furigana for instance. The format really is not good enough as it is used today.

Maybe we should steal the model of [â¦] research fundingâ¦

You mean, the author writes it for free, pays a publisher several hundred dollars to give away the copyright, and the publisher then proceeds to charge $35 for a ten-page paper or thousands of dollars wor a shoddily printed magazine?

I'm not sure paying several tens of times more per textbook and not compensating the author is all that god an idea myself.

I looked at your blog - relax, brah. Your deep commentary about having omaraisu for dinner aren't going to get you censored, or targeted for re-education.

It's a fair point, and no, I don't expect my blog to get noticed by anybody, much less censored.

But I've come to realize almost all of my net prescense is based in one single country where I have no representation, no voice and no rights; and in one single company that - for all that they want to do no evil - sees me as a product, not a customer.

This concentration of power over my online presence to entities I have no control at all over is making me increasingly uncomfortable, and I want to diversify a bit. Not that I expect anything to happen, but, well, better safe than sorry.

So, any good online alternatives in general? There is supposed to be a good German cloud offering, I believe, though I don't remember the name; and Gitorius seems like a good code hosting service. Are there decent European alternatives to GMail, Google Calendar, Blogger, and so on?

The Japanese fiscal year runs from April 1st to March 31. April 1st is when you begin the school year (from kindergarten to grad school), when you begin a new job, the accounting period both for private companies and the state, research funding period and so on and so on. What would be extraordinary is if you have a shuffle at the top at any other time than April 1st.

Anybody have a recommendation for an alternative blogging platform? Preferably one hosted in Europe by a non-US company, and one where it is reasonably easy to migrate from Blogger.

Aluminium was once phenomenally rare and expensive. Napoleon had a set of highly valued plates made of the stuff. Breakthroughs in manufacturing made it a cheap, common material. I suspect this will go the same way, with synthetic versions becoming a utilitarian material among others. The cape will become an amusing historical footnote.

So, he does care just a little, little bit. What is the problem with that.

"write once, run everywhere"

Write once, run in Chrome.

You really want to return to the days when sites required a specific browser to let you in?

Really large tightly coupled clusters are usually offered in a time-sharing arrangement. One Exa-scale system could normally support hundreds to thousands of concurrent users, each with a temporary slice of the machine. Truly large-scale jobs would be run only at specific times.

At that point you can offer the facility to a much wider range of users, and be much less selective about what kind of jobs are worthy of getting time on the machine. That easy availability is arguably more important than the peak performance, but is of course not headline-grabbing in the same way.