Not quite true. The relevant law mandates metabolic syndrome checks for people aged 40-74, and it catches people with (1) waist size >= 85cm (90cm for women) or BMI >= 25 and (2) high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or high blood sugar. Supposedly there's a financial penalty for not taking the exam, or for not following the directions (diet, etc.) you're given, but I haven't been able to find any specific mention of such.

I don't think it's that clear-cut. Maybe you'd enjoy spending time tweaking your health level, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who'd find their lives less pleasurable that way. It's like smoking (modulo the secondhand smoke issue): yes, it's bad for you and can cut years off your life, but if you enjoy life more while smoking, it's not anyone else's place to tell you to stop.

I do think this is the sort of thing that should be introduced to children from a young age, since one's definition of "enjoyable" is so dependent on one's environment growing up.

Which, interestingly enough, is almost exactly e years. The natural log base strikes again!

It was used with all the games I had at the time--let's see if I can remember; my German has suffered greatly over the intervening years:
- Bilderpuzzle (Memory-like card matching game)
- Seeschlacht (Battleship-like game)
- Fische Fischen (fishing game)
- Rasenmaeher ("Lawnmower"--try and mow the lawn without running into obstacles or out of gas, or something like that)

You lucky folks with a disk drive had it good. I had to sit around and wait while my Atari 410 cassette recorder shoveled its bits into the system at an amazing 40 bytes per second. (At least it let you hear the audio track, so you could have cassettes that played music while they loaded.)

I live in Japan, I ride those trains, and yes, people can and do watch TV on their cell phones no matter how crowded it is. The trick is getting your phone (and arm) into position before you get packed into the crowd.

Instead you spend the time rummaging through your toolbox trying to look for the one wheel that's exactly the right size, with the proper axle connections and everything, and pray that it doesn't fall off when you make a left turn.

(I jest, I jest. But I have found that after a certain point, the effort required to deal with complex libraries properly begins to outweigh the benefit of code reuse.)

In this day and age? Hardly. Not when the virus writer got around a blocking attempt by including a 75k data file right in the virus itself.

Just not for you.

I was wondering that too. I've worked for one big/traditional and a couple of smaller/newer companies in Tokyo, and while they all subsidized transportation to work, none of them ever said "you have to take the train" (and indeed, some people came by bicycle, presumably by filing their transportation cost as zero).

Maybe the company in question recently had a legal problem with somebody crashing their car or some such? One thing Japan is notorious for is blaming the company for the acts of an individual, so I could see a company forbidding the use of private transportation to protect itself.

I'm not sure why that would've happened on a domestic flight (maybe it's because it was connecting), but apparently the US requires that "random" checking on all US-bound flights, where "random" means "take the first person that comes by, then when you're done with them take the next person who comes by, and repeat until everyone's on board". So I'd give good odds they didn't choose you specifically--you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Japan's fingerprint screening system can be fooled by putting tape over your fingers. Seriously.

The Ministry of Justice said they'll have to "review the procedures" because there's "still some trial and error going on". I guess one can always hope they'll see the light, but it looks more likely they'll just say "Grab people's hands and make sure there's no tape on them."

That could be why they chose triangles: so no matter which way the colors are misaligned, they have a good chance of figuring out what the original code is. With squares, for example, if the misalignment is exactly along one axis you could end up with twice as many half-width rectangles. Newspapers and the like are probably also why they chose cyan, magenta, and yellow (the primary colors of printing).

I don't know about "catching on" in the sense of people actually using them (I don't), but they're incredibly common in Japan, and have been for the last few years. Advertisements have them, magazines have them, McDonald's hamburger wrappers have them... Granted, it could all be a mass delusion of marketroids, but I doubt so many companies would go to the effort of putting the codes on--and continuing to put them on year after year--unless there was feedback saying it was effective.