Dunno that its worth replying to ACs, but anyway... just FYI I've lived here for the past 15 years and have been involved in the hotel industry for the past 7 of of those, so have quite broad experience trying to assist guests in getting hold of cash. Even to the point of doing things like exchanging Paypal payments for cash after driving them to all the usual suspect ATMs in town. I'll give you that it was a little hyperbolic in the sense that although the 711 service has been available for longer, its only in the past 2years that we've really been able to list it as an option for getting cash in our correspondence - before that we had to have a highlighted warning in our emails cautioning people to bring cash. For example 3 years ago ALL Mastercard service was discontinued for about 8 months through 7-11. A significant proportion of Post Offices don't even have ATMs and its only the main ones that are open until 7pm, with most closing at 5. Banks transfers, even between accounts on the same local bank will only happen during business hours, excluding Saturdays. My local bank ATMs all close at 7pm and despite the 7-11 ATMs, of my 3 Japanese bank accounts, there's only one that I can actually draw money from between 7pm and 7am. There's quite a bit more to Japan than the Tokyo/Osaka experience...

Actually you could almost exactly be describing a trip this year rather than 25 years ago. The only change is that you *might* be able to get money using an overseas Visa Card at a 7eleven now, but that only started in the last 2 years.... Funny thing is you'd actually be at an advantage over someone with a local bank account - after 7pm my card is useless! Then again, we can put coins in our ATMs!

The whole thing is not about about ROI at all... my understanding is that the thinking is that "it would be cool if there were some realistic swordplay SDK/API/thing out there" . Neal Stephenson has the pull and is therefore putting his face to it (random geek has kickstarter project is not a /. story, nor would it have turned up on my G+ feed a few days ago) because he thinks current swordy games suck and would like to have some kind of *open* system out there for whoever to build on. He admits that the game is probably going to be boring at first iteration. This is about getting the funds together to hire a few skilled people to code up the research they've been doing into a platform.

CF: "Hello everybody out there using minix -I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) ..."

IFTFY: "Hello everybody out there into swordfights -I'm doing a (free) platform for swordfight games (just a hobby, won't have any backstory yet, just I think it would be cool)"

So geohot is in the top 10 programmers/hackers in the world...

or the top 100..
or top 1000
or top 10000
...
or top 10 000 000
or whatever.

lets forget the the multitude of "legitiate" uses of marihuana for a bit, and just wonder what exact detrimental effect the narcotic use thereof is supposedly having on its users that the government and its agents should be protecting us from.

I know the the english word "assasin" is supposedly derived from the arabic for hashish, but I seriously want to know where the harm is when its not interfering with high-level functionality.

The umbrella's get in the way of accurate readings unfortunately.

As someone who lives in a mountainous area of Japan, I will hazard a guess:
Japan is not exactly teaming with wildlife choices are:

Bear
Deer
Rabbit
Fox
Tanuki (a dictionary will tell you its a racoon-dog, more to the racoon end of the scale though)
Kamoshika (Hairy mountain goat thing)
Monkey

Throw everything out that hibernates.
Throw out everything that has terrain limitations in very dense bush, or steepness.
Throw out things that are difficult to catch or dangerous.
Think Kamoshika's are protected/endangered are pretty elusive and don't leave the mountains....

Monkeys seem like a good choice, and are probably slightly more similar to us (in case they start showing full blown radiation sickness) than an Andrias japonicus

IE9 is not a decent browser. If it was 2007 maybe, but its lack of compatibility with modern web standards makes the whole IE family a massive ball and chain holding back web progression. Please see if any of the other 'alternative' browsers give you better power consumption. IE is not the solution. For anything.

Changing the firefox search engine default via the pulldown only affects searches entered in the search bar... this version will use bing for searches entered into the address bar too. (which otherwise needs a change in about:config).

Considering that 96.42% of firefox users don't even know that about:config exists even if they wanted to change it back to google, there is a vague point.

(I won't even get into the amount of times I've boggled at people entering yahoo.co.jp into the search bar and then typing out a full www... into the yahoo box)

and FreeBSB too. FreekingBSD.

No problems with my Fedora/KDE here... in fact have started installing this for new linux users too where I previously would have put Ubuntu since the Unity debacle... my only problem is that Fedora versions get EOL'ed a bit quickly, so probably needs an upgrade at least yearly... systems are of course ok, but a bit concerning when software updates stop working too.

I agree, he sounds like he would be better suited to education in Soviet Russia...

Don't have much to compare it with, but its easy on Fedora.... only commandline you need at least as far as LAMP goes is setting up your mysql root password. Although Ubuntu has historically been the noob-friendly version, changes with the latest version has been chasing a lot of people away. That said I'm a KDE user anyway, so don't know if the Gnome changes have affected Fedora too.

On any modern Linux, think LAMP is going to be pretty much part of the install process anyway... the part that might frustrate is getting your head around firewalls and permissions, but that doesn't necessarily involve commandline either. The Red Hat family has a good server reputation and you could pick up a bit of a marketable skill while you're at it...

Ok, maybe you're right about needing someone to update it full time, but...

http://freshdigital.info/computer/patent-wars-diagram-who-is-actually-suing-who/

Yahoo is still "The Internet" in Japan... weather, shopping auctions = yahoo. Search? About three weeks ago I was trying to help a student with their English google-fu... (I got sucked back in to teaching after the earthquake)... when I asked them to show me how they were trying to search, the first thing they typed into google: yahoo.jp

Not sure exactly how much of a separate company they are over here though, they were actually one of the biggest early pushers of broadband, handing out free ADSL modems + 6 months free access a few years back outside train stations.

Wikipedia also tells us the Yahoo Japan did $3.8 billion dollars in revenue last year, so I guess someone is still using it....

this.

Already in this thread there are so many "Fedora SUX" type comments, and its beyond me that people won't at least try another desktop before heading off elsewhere... with Ubuntu (and presumably all the other default gnome distro's) all getting the same response, this is turning into a "Linux SUX" issue, especially for first-installer types...

What concerns me in particular, is that at least with the KDE 4.0 debacle, there were quite a few "This is BAD... But I can see it being good in a few versions" type comments.... with Gnome 3, can't think I've seen a single positive comment, at best "changes are sorta manageable".

(KDE *is* really nice now too (Fedora 15 here)... in the same way that gnome is now giving people a poor impression of a lot of distro's I think the poor implementation in Kubuntu has caused a lot of ill will towards KDE too, although I can't speak for recent versions )