There's also the insanity of "sovereign immunity" or "prosecutorial immunity" here, where basically the police and district attorneys can do nothing wrong, if it's in the execution of their duties. So, the police can break into a house (with no warrant), "accidentally" kill all the pets, attack the residents, "accidentally" shoot the owner, and when they find out it's the wrong address, basically get away without even apologizing or making restitution.

Well, take your own stance in reverse, just because Manhattan is overly dense doesn't mean that Wyoming is overcrowded, and doesn't mean that Wyoming needs to concentrate on the issues that Manhattan does, such as public transportation and construction zoning.

To make a blanket statement about any country based on one region of that country is irrational. Even saying something "on average" or "per capita" doesn't work since reality isn't evenly dispersed.

Surprisingly little, if you're a Japanese citizen. There are fields going fallow because the children are not staying on the farms of their parents and grandparents, and Japan doesn't have the "factory farms" like they have in the US, ADM et. al. haven't managed to get a foothold there. There are likely plots of land becoming available through death or displacement of the elderly owners. I have seen ads for Western-style housing developments outside Tokyo. I also know of a couple from the US who bought a house and small plot of land in the countryside for somewhere around US$10,000, but on the condition that they repair it on their own dime. I think they were part of a Japanese government program, possibly experimental, and I don't know if they had been residents of Japan for any time prior.

Go outside Tokyo or Osaka, like a few 10s of kilometers north or east, and you won't find the crowding you do in the megaplexes. Trust me, I've ridden the shinkansen from Tokyo to Hachinohe a few times, and once you're past Saitama you have endless fields, peppered with a few houses grouped together. There are a few larger towns between them, but most of Japan outside the main cities is no more crowded than Ohio or Indiana.

So, why the hell can't they find a box I shipped from Japan last November? It left the New Jersey sorting facility and vanished, no further tracking on that number exists. I sent in a form and photos of what the box would look like, along with the contents, and nothing. Now it seems the government may know where it is, but there's no way for me to find out.

I hope whoever got the manga and J-Pop CDs enjoys them in whatever Customs or other office has them. Bureaucratic b**tards.

If they fly with that luggage it would be "pi in the sky"...

Sorry.

It's okay, it would need a PIN number to activate, just like at your ATM machine...

The scary part is, there is a court, set up to only deal with them, just like the IRS Tax Court only deals with IRS cases. So, since the FISA court almost never turns down a request for a subpoena, it's a thin bandaid of legality over a suppurating sore of government abuse of power.

QED is Latin for "DuhDoy"...

Exactly right. I prefer someone tell me where they stand when they report something, rather than falsely make some high-handed claims to "objectivity."

I wish I had mod points, this is exactly right.

Do they even still teach the Halting Problem in Computer Science these days?

No matter how thoroughly tested software is, there will be places where it breaks in production, through no fault of the developers and testers. If you don't believe this, you haven't worked on enough systems, or they haven't been complicated enough.

Most of the time the customer asks for xyz and doesn't tell the developer about w, and complains that it's not there. Or the customer forgets to tell the developer that their data integrity isn't checked, and that data outside the spec sometimes slips in. Sometimes the customer forgets to mention that other systems are used with the data and will sometimes make changes to the data that weren't documented in the spec. Putting all the blame on the developer is nice from a pure management perspective, but it breaks too often in the real world.

Not to mention that for any project maintenance is the largest percentage of the project's lifetime. It kind of sounds like this guy doesn't really understand what constitutes a "bug," at least doesn't understand that not all bugs are caused by developers making mistakes. There are bugs caused by invalid data entering the system by user error, or by parts of the system outside the control of the developers, or by bugs in the compiler or libraries used in the system that only show up during run-time, or by changes in the business rules after development starts, and many many other causes. To hold the developers responsible for finding these beforehand, and refusing to pay for any work needed to come up with fixes or work-arounds, sounds like he's not really interested in maintaining the systems he builds.

He also sounds like a real peach of a guy to work for in other respects, as well. I wish him good luck in finding his cheap experienced expert developer.