either Japan nor any Japanese company has the financial solvency to undertake such an effort

Japan is a weird country financially. Government debt is high, however many large companies are sitting on cash and the people of Japan have ridiculously large piles of the stuff even if it's not earning any interest.

Japan probably has $3-4 trillion which needs a home.

This reminds me of the show Californication. (I'm at the end of season 1.)

During season 1, we see the main character have sex with a girl (whom we can see naked on top of him) and is later revealed to be 16.

The main character is shocked and while he is a womanizer he says that sleeping with a 16 year old is wrong. It's an exercise to the reader if he really believes that or just chooses not to (the show is at best indifferent--because we got to see a "sixteen year old's" breasts bouncing up and down as they were having sex.) We later encounter another character who truly is bad--he takes underaged students to his house and drugs them up (though it appears that they do so voluntarily.)

The point here is that context I guess is important. But moreover, the show is hypocritical if it's trying to make us dislike the guy who drugs up underaged girls for sex, if it's also trying to titillate us with sex with 16 year olds anyway.

Rather than seeing themselves as what they actually are--just nerds running computers--they like to perceive themselves as freedom fighters battling all forms of censorship in the world.

That's an interesting sentence. The issue is that there is no way that they can just be "nerds running computers." Any position they take regarding the content on the servers means they are making a policy choice, regardless if that policy choice is passive or active (which is your preference.) If they are censoring content they take on a law enforcement like position, even if the content they are censoring is universally censored.

The truth is that they are policy makers, and in some way they are quite powerful in that position. I find your sentence here belittling to people whom you disagree with.

I think the worst thing about this is that the public in general will see his drug use as being worse

I hope that isn't the case anymore. Actually I was wondering if FBI background checks are as obsessed with drug use as they once were. It seems quite old fashioned to me. (In the same way that figuring out who is a communist is also pretty old fashioned too.)

I seem to recall that some of these tests are strange or written badly, to my expense. I remember taking such tests to assess my knowledge of, for instance, MS Office, but the software specifically required that I accomplish a task in one way and one way only. If I knew a perfectly valid way of accomplishing the task, but it wasn't the (presumably more common) way that the software wanted I got the question wrong. (Worse yet, they did this in a simulated MS Office environment...the only way to get the question right was to choose all the correct menus the first time. If the correct answer was to do something with File:Properties but I went for the Edit menu first, it was wrong immediately.)

In 2008 or so I was at a temp agency and they tested my abilities to do PC break/fix work. They asked the question which IRQ # is associated with COM1. I was furious to know that I was being graded on my knowledge of things that I hadn't had to worry about in at least 10 years.

looking back I think I would have missed out on a lot of social interaction that was probably really important.

And that's true. Putting it in more stark terms, a lot of higher education is really just a lifestyle for 19 year olds. That's not a bad thing, hell, I've lived that life far longer than one human should.

But colleges make this lifestyle absurdly expensive, when all you really need to do is set aside a neighborhood for 19 year olds.

Other documents are accepted for proving identity for this purpose. I use my voter registration card and social security card, so I never have to reveal my age.

do you know how much more expensive prepaid is?

I do. I pay $38/month for unlimited texting and calling. I use H20 wireless which piggybacks on the AT&T network. In fact, you don't even have to unlock your phone to use it it it were already and ATT phone. Just stick the H20 sim card in (which I did on my iPhone.)

That's basically half the cost I was paying when I had ATT. I couldn't be happier.

The Anglo-Saxon countries don't fingerprint for passports. Australia, NZ, UK, Ireland, US, Canada....

Keeping in mind, the EU requirement is only for the prints to be stored on the passport and not in a central archive. Only the Netherlands, apparently, stores them in a central archive.

The USA actually doesn't. They only require a biometric passport, and facial recognition is sufficient for that. Ireland, the UK, Australia, NZ, and a few others are in visa waiver and don't collect fingerprints for passport issuance.

The fingerprint requirement is an EU requirement, and Ireland/UK used an opt-out.

Ireland and the UK used an opt-out and do not require fingerprints for their passports.

I believe it is the lye in the tile grout that causes brick/tile layers to have no fingerprints.

I've never seen an European car with automatic beat a manual on the mileage.

2011 BMW 535i

Manual: 19 city, 28 highway, 22 combined
Automatic: 20 city, 30 highway, 24 combined (fueleconomy.org)

High end cars are the easiest examples, since they are getting the more advanced automatic transmissions. Autos can have 7 or 8 gears, which mean you can have a couple of really high gears for great fuel economy, whereas manuals are stuck with six gears max.

Any idea why automatics are built the way they are?

It's a historical thing. The first automatics didn't have computers obviously. They just continued refining the tech.

Manual transmissions save money on the initial purchase price and long term maintenance.

They can but not always. Some automakers build outstanding automatics that are bulletproof and maintenance free (other than fluid changes), whereas their manuals, like all manuals, need their clutches replaced.