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.

He's probably referring to the frequency with which vowels appear in any given word. Yes, Japanese has only 5 vowels, but because almost all syllables in the language are simple (1 consonant)(1 vowel) pairs, almost every other letter in a written word is a vowel.

A common tongue twister:

Nama-mugi, nama-gome, nama-tamago (uncooked wheat, uncooked rice, uncooked eggs)

Notice the abundance of vowels.

If that's what they meant, then why didn't they just say so, rather than misapply a term commonly understood to mean something completely different?

I'm a US citizen living in Japan, and I wanted to see what my friends and coworkers will have to deal with, so I checked out the Japanese version of the registration website.

It's very poorly planned out in the following ways:

1. Translation is confusing and broken in parts. There were sentences that just broke off halfway through.

2. Due to the details of Japanese text input on computers, you have to specifically tell users to enter single-byte characters in text forms, and actually enforce the this requirement with proper input validation because many people don't really understand the difference. This is unless, of course, you're prepared to handle double-byte alphanumerics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullwidth_form) on the back end. Anyway, the form tells you to enter your info in the Latin alphabet (romaji), but nowhere does it specify single-byte. I wanted to test the form to see how well it coped with double-byte characters, but I didn't want the DHS knocking down my door in the middle of the night.

3. The website is not designed with mobile access in mind (or so I assume; I couldn't even connect to the site on my AU phone). Many, many Japanese people don't have PCs, and do all their internet activities on their mobile phones with very limited browsers.

4. The website does no geo sniffing and ignores preferred language settings, defaulting to English and throwing up a giant legalese JavaScript popup. Talk about unfriendly.

Ultimately I suspect that people will end up leaving all this bullshit to travel agents, and very few people will personally deal with the system on any level (unless that's not allowed; of course I didn't RTFA).