I wonder if it will continue to randomly turn off the Nexus 4, like 4.3 does.

They were very low to ground. That's how they got a signal.

>nor have standing for my words to carry weight

I see what you did there.

First there was the green card
Then it got slow, bloated and hard to get.
So they invented the H1-B which was quick and easy.
Then it got slow, bloated and hard to get.
So they invented the guest worker pass
continue....

Just fix the green card and the others are unnecessary. If someone is a net benefit to the country, there's no reason to limit their stay.

The US government provided the visas and the visa rules to Infosys. It looks to me that they took the hint. The US does not look like it 'wants' people on H1s or Green cards because it makes it a stupidly slow, expensive and complex process to get them. The message they send by making the B1 relatively easier to get is - "Get a B1, we want to you get a B1, not those other visas".

They could write a program instead. A web browser is just about the worst container for an application.

Nothing is wrong with the HTML5 audio tag.
What I hate it the PERLesque - There's more than one way to do it. You know there will be 15 billion ugly, unreadable javascript hacks the the API interface where the HTML interface would have been just fine, as with all other areas of overlap between HTML and javascript.

Indeed. Spending some money to have people sit down and think for a change seems like money well spent.

Unfortunately it's a Javascript API.

You can't actually write a web page in HTML with some kind of HTML-A audio inline, like you can put SVG or MATHML inline.

I think you should be more careful when throwing accusations of fatanticism around.

I think you failed to comprehend the points I was making, however, as long as you are happy with the idea that a corporation which controlled a government would be less powerful than the government it controlled, I will accept your argument. I think two people can disagree civily over who's more powerful, the horse or the rider, and both can even be correct according to the value they place on the various types of power.

I'll let your fanatical "NewsCorp topples America" hypothesis stand on its own merits.

It's fantastical, not fanatical. It would be fanatical if I were proposing that NewCorp should or would do it. You didn't ask that though, you asked if they could do it, and with enough money it's certainly possible. And any company were to try it, I wouldn't bet on them being able to control the country after they toppled the government. A much more likely scenario is NewsCorp providing favourable media coverage to try and influence elections so that the government works for them. But, of course, that would never happen.

It helps if you actually show how an argument supports your position rather than just claiming victory empty-handed. You might want to read up on NewsCorp's assets, for starters. I don't think you give corporations enough credit for the soft power that they wield.

You should also look at world-wide comparisons. Medicare and other public healthcare programs in the US account for more dollars per capita spent than all or almost all universal health-care systems in other countries, and deliver lousy results comparatively.

Canada--with our nominally single-tier, public, single-payer health care system--has longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, and better outcomes by any number of other measures. Critics (sometimes justly) focus on input measures like wait-times, but at the end of the day what matters is that we are getting health care and getting good outcomes. We aren't even the best in the world--just middling-decent as these things go.

So the real question is not "why can't government launch a website" but "why can't the US Federal government, alone amongst all governments in all developed nations, provide a reasonable level of basic, universal health care at costs comparable to those in every other developed nation on Earth?"

This isn't a "government" problem. It is a uniquely American problem, and the solution does not lie in any general ideological fix, but in the detailed structure of the specifically American, particularly broken, Federal government.

Which government? NewsCorp is a powerful force in at least Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. I sincerely doubt any of those governments can actually shut down all of NewsCorp on their own. Maybe if all three ganged up on them, they could destroy the entirety of NewsCorp.

I'm sure NewsCorp could actually afford to hire a (small) mercenary army to commit a military coup in Washington. Heck, their reporters already have access to all of the top chain of command in the United States, they could, in theory, assassinate the President and Vice-president nearly simulatenously if they really, really wanted to. So, I'm going to give the point to NewsCorp. The American government can severely inconvenience NewsCorp on their own, but NewsCorp could actually topple the American government.

The part that makes him a leftist. Obama's definitely seems like a right of center politician.

Dual citizenship can be an issue of course - that's the main reason I haven't considered naturalization - but to me that's really one of those things where reasonable people can disagree. There's perfectly good, valid argument both for and against dual nationality, and it really comes down to how you perceive citizenship as an institution. Japan is far from the only country that normally disallows it, by the way (there's a few rare exceptions where Japan allows it).

I don't think people can ever become stateless here, as the law expressly forbids that to happen. Children can have dual citizenship; if either of their parents are Japanese they automatically gain Japanese citizenship, even if they also gain another citizenship at the same time. They only have to choose and renounce one or the other when they become adults. But if they're born on Japanese soil and would become stateless (normally because their parents are) they also gain Japanese citizenship.

Have you tried to settle permanently in Japan and get the citizenship? It is almost impossible unless you have Japanese roots.

No, it's quite easy. I have permanent residency, and plenty of people do become Japanese citizens, without any "roots" to Japan other than what you develop by living here.

You might want to check this blog/information site about naturalization in Japan, written by a former US citizen whow is now Japanese: http://www.turning-japanese.info/ Specifically this post about naturalizing without being ethnically or racially japanese: http://www.turning-japanese.info/2013/03/does-one-get-japanese-citizenship-by.html