gonemad comments

As others have mentioned, Japan's productivity is already quite low when compared to other western countries. With an increase of only 15% (not 13%) in 29 years, which is less than 0.5% increase per year, Japan would be left behind in the dust. Actually, much higher increases in productivity are required if Japan wants to keep up with the rest of the world. Japan has much bigger problems than the population decline.

If torture is part of the price you pay for targeting our law abiding communities with terror

@Akula, how come you don't see the inherent contradiction?

Takata acknowledged the concealment but told the Journal that the instances were not related to the airbag explosions.

Then what else do you hide?

@Illyas, politics is a completely different matter than business and the fact that somebody is attacked from his political foes doesn't mean much if anything. Apart from that, I'm not familiar enough with the details of Trump's career so that I don't want to comment on this particular case. At least he's still successful with his other companies.

How come that I already knew the main suspects before reading the article? I think it's time to apply the laws against organized crime, finally.

I'd like to add one cultural item to the list, which from my point of view has a big impact: it's the way how society deals with failure. When you start your own company and it fails (which is not rare), in most parts of Europe or Japan you would have a really hard time to find employment again or the capital to start yet another company. Your career is burnt. In contrast, in the US, both companies and venture funds appreciate your experience. Your start-up may have failed, but you still learned a lot of valuable things. It just depends on yourself to get on your feet again.

To me, anyway, what the teen put together looked a lot like a bomb

No personal offense, but that's what happens when people get their knowledge primarily through TV series and Hollywood films. Big red LED display + wires = bomb. I just wonder what will happen next. Will buyers of cheap LED clocks automatically be put on terrorist watch lists?

Children don't need censorship. They need parents which care and which they can talk to.

Don't get fooled by the word "secondary". It indicates that the water circulation is separated from the primary cycle, but both have to work in order to cool the reactor. Corrosive salt water in the secondary cycle is a serious issue with regard to long term reliability.

I see, but still Japan does not need to follow Britain or any other country.

@tinawatanabe, why follow the bad examples when there are so many better ones around?

So what do you stand for? If you think this world is just some big "global union" and everyone is the same, then you don't understand human nature. Let me ask this, for any school that you may have gone to, did you or did you not support any team that the school may have put forth? If so, does that not make you a patriot and proud of that school? If not then I guess you don't care about the rest of the world around you.

@Alphaape, it may sound like a strange concept to you, but I have never supported any team just because it was the one of my school, university, company, city, country or whatever. Just because I happen to belong to that organization and someone decided to spend my taxes or fees to subsidize a certain team does not make me feel that I should support them. On the other hand, I have always supported the teams, in which my friends played in. And when they won, it made me feel happy, but not proud.

By the way, as others have pointed out, if you don't want to respect the nation at the university level, it is these university graduates that in the future will be in charge. If all they are interested in is their "own piece" they will have no problems selling out Japan just to justify their own self interests.

It's exactly by teaching to revere empty symbols that you get people who are only interested in their own profit. Instead, you should teach them how they can contribute to society or the organization they belong to. When they see the success of their contribution, they have something to be proud of.

This is the top headline in the politics section while at the same time three dead cats make the top headline in the crime section. I'm quite sure there are many more important issues...

but a heartfelt apology isn't facing up to history?

The problem is, such a heartfelt apology from Japan doesn't exist. Yes, some few representatives have apologized and while I believe their intention was honest, this isn't the case any more for the current generation of Japanese (politicians). While Abe is still beating the bush, all his comments and all his actions show that for him an apology is nothing but a lip service to appease the neighbors. I can't say how Korean or Chinese people feel about it, but for me Abe's disingenuousness is even worse than no apology at all.

Still, there is too much speculation here. It is unknown whether the sick leave certificate had anything to do with his mental illness. The kind of illness is not written on the certificate. Furthermore, it is unknown whether the doctor who treated him knew anything about his job. Health insurance data does not typically include the profession.

Prosecutors in Duesseldorf, where Lubitz had an apartment, said the psychotherapy occurred over an extended period before he received his pilot’s license, and that medical records referred to “suicidal tendencies.” They provided no dates.

When it was before he received his pilot's license, then probably doctors didn't know anything about his future profession. Whom should they have warned and how?

All pilots must undergo regular medical checks that include a cursory psychological evaluation, according to Dr. Hans-Werner Teichmueller, the agency’s head. But such tests rely on patients being honest with their doctors, and even a seriously mentally unstable person would have been able to put a “mask” on for the investigation, he said.

The key point is that without cooperation of the pilot, medical evaluations will find anything but the most extreme cases. Is there any incentive for the pilot to cooperate? His career will fail and then...? To me, it looks like pilots have every reason to hide mental illness from their employer. How can we win over pilots to cooperate?

In other words, US auto makers want to sell polluting and dangerous cars in Japan.

While I don't agree with the "dangerous" here, the first part is right. Main concern of US makers is the progressive taxing with the strong preference of kei cars. The US is the only(?) developed country which has no progressive taxing based on engine displacement or emissions, which results on comparatively large engines developed for and sold in the US market. Although the additional tax burden over the lifetime of the vehicle is rather small compared to the price differences of different cars, cars with such large engines are almost unsellable in Japan. It shows that the psychological control effect of the taxes is more effective than the purely economical impact of the higher fuel consumption. Since the (addressable) market is obviously judged too small to justify developments specifically for the Japanese market, US makers turn instead towards complaining about alleged non-tariff barriers.

Sorry, but this is only because Germany and Sweden threatened to mirror Japan's practice of individually inspecting each and every new car, and increasing the distribution costs of foreign cars.

The individual inspection is only required (for any importer, from whatever country) when you don't have a type approval. Thus it is only relevant when you plan to import just a few cars, so mainly for small series luxury cars. The same kind of procedure exists in the US and Europe, btw.

If you want to buy an American car in Japan, you will have to pay about 1/3 more for it than it would cost in America.

You know that price is determined by supply and demand, not by cost.

Ford has produced some of Europe's best selling cars, like the Cortina, Fiesta, Focus, and the ever popular Combi. All of these were available with RHD, yet, despite all being the world's top-selling cars, you will never see one in Japan.

These cars were/are developed and made in Europe and it has been Ford's policy for a long time to favour US made models in many markets. It is only since a couple of years that a more globalized thinking started at Ford, and GM for that matter.

This is completely false. Safety and emissions standards are higher in America and Europe than they are in Japan. No car made for the domestic Japanese market may be sold in America, as these cars do not meet minimum safety requirements. Japanese cars sold in America must have heavier bumpers, door reinforcements, and gas tanks relocated before they can be sold in America. No car made in America requires any modification whatsoever to be sold in Japan.

@sangetsu03: if what you write were true, then why do US makers complain? Fact is that there are different requirements and you cannot cannot simply sell cars made according one country's requirements in the other without making modifications. It goes both ways and when you call it a non-tariff trade barrier, then the US has probably more than Japan. There are discussions ongoing between the relevant authorities in all major industrialized countries on a unification of the (emission) standards, but there is still a very long way to go.

What I'm afraid of is that TPP will rather be a step back in this context. Maybe the partners will agree to accept each other's standards to some extent, on the basis of the lowest common requirements. On the other hand, TPP will cement existing requirements where any future improvements with regard to safety or pollution have to be agreed by all trade partners. Japan or California moving ahead with emission standards like in the past will practically not happen any more.

Well, there are always two sides to every question. What do you do when you are small company with some patents, which you offer for license to one of the large corporations. They chose to ignore you and use your invention in their products, assuming that you are too small to have the resources to fight them in court without putting your own business in danger. Then, one of your options is to sell your patents to the so-called patent trolls. You get at least some money, get rid of the risks and can focus on your key business. This is absolutely not an unusual case.

The problem is not the non-practicing entities, but rather the quality of the patent granting process. Especially the USPTO is known to be rather poor in terms of filtering out prior art or trivial "inventions" and it is based on deliberate political decisions, driven by the lobbies of the large corporations. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.

It would seem that in Germany (and probably many western countries) doctors don't inform the employers of their patients if they have a mental illness such as depression even though the patient's work is as critical as an airline pilot. Sounds like it is time for a change in the laws and if anyone disagrees then do a web search as to how many people have been killed by airline pilots going over the edge and crashing their aircrafts.

@Hawkeye: as a result, people with depression or other mental problems will lose trust and not consult doctors any more when they fear their career may be disrupted. Things would become worse instead of better. But perhaps some regular and mandatory screening by the airline companies could be a solution.

Two people killed by IS is just an excuse. When the NPA takes the lead, the direction is clear: the target are Japanese citizen in Japan.

“From the time the malware left North Korea to the time it got to Sony’s headquarters in California, it crossed four different commanders’ lines or areas in the U.S. construct.”

This sounds so much like auto-translated Japanese, yet this guy is American. Can anybody make any sense out of these words?

It's about time that some company gets sued for this practice. True, as several writers mentioned, it is general industry practice and not at all limited to Apple. That doesn't make it any better. The minimum requirement from my point of view is that companies inform the typical size of the OS, pre-installed applications and other space which may be reserved for system purposes. This gives users the possibility to make an informed decision about how much memory they should buy in their device. It is even more important for devices which do not allow any hardware upgrade of the memory in the form of memory cards - which leads us back to Apple... Cloud storage is not a solution for everybody.

An how do they want to control it?

And that certain set of nutritional guidelines would be......?

I was wondering the same. I cannot imagine that any bento sold at a convenience store would ever get this label if the guidelines were meant to be honest...

Technically speaking, digital download should be best, but only when you get uncompressed files, which means FLAC or lossless file formats. The lossless formats support higher resolution and sample rates than the CD, so the sound quality should be superior in theory. I don't hear the difference, so I don't care to shell out extra money for overpriced high-resolution audio files.

Ripping FLAC from CD is not the same as downloading a 16bit/44.1kHz FLAC. Reason is the poor error correction of the CD and that you almost never get a perfect CD.

MP3 can be anything from terrible to very good quality, depending on the type of music and the data rate used. Therefore I never buy MP3s.

Vinyl sounds different, whether it is better or worse depends on your taste. Technically it is just additional distortion and noise, which you could as well emulate with a digital filter it you really want...

The Sendai plant cleared the Nuclear Regulation Authority’s (NRA) initial safety hurdle last month, but the utility was supposed to hand in additional, detailed paperwork on specific safety features at the site and how they planned to construct them.

Considering the schedules, in plain text this can only mean that the NRA is willing to allow the restart based on plans, which do not have to be implemented before the plant starts again but rather some more ot less distant future. Nothing will ever change in this industry...

For example, if you have 5 people with the following salaries, $10k, $5k, $1k, $5k and $500k the "median" value is $104.2k, which in no way represents what the average man is earning.

Many of you don't seem to understand what the median is. In your example, the median is $5k. When you have a few rich people, the impact on the median is almost negligible.

If what the article claims were true, we would see a sharp rise in wages. I haven't seen any statitics which supports that, so my bllsht indicator started to flash heavily...

So does that mean I can write a novel about Tom Sawyer as a terrorist enlisted by the US President to rid America of zombie nuns?

Yes, in a free society you are allowed to write (almost) any crap you like. Just because the author might start to spin in his grave doesn't mean we should put limits to free expression.

Not really. It's extremely easy to hide all your personal information, as well as your browsing history, from Facebook.

No, it is not easy and most people, including you obviously, don't understand how to hide personal information from Facebook. What you have to do is to block connection to any of the Facebook sites (including all the cdn sites) when you are surfing on other sites than Facebook itself. There are browser plugins which can do this, but they are inconvenient and not easy to use for the ordinary user.

Facebook is still relatively easy to filter. When it comes to others like Google it becomes much more difficult. The reason is that many sites - including this one, do you listen moderator? - don't give a damn about the privacy of their users and in order to save writing a few lines of own code include scripts from Google which you cannot block without losing the functionality of the site.

Most people believe that technical information like IP addresses, browser and OS type and version etc etc. does not constitute personal information. That was true more than ten years ago, but it is not the case anymore in the days of Big Data. Trackers store complete fingerprints for every access, which consist of hundreds of pieces of technical information, each for itself harmless. In combination, the fingerprint is unique for every single device/user. Even when some parameters change, which they typically do, there are many additional techniques which allow to join the different tracking profiles again. So every single access from any site which references the tracker is added to your profile.

Now you might think that the tracker still doesn't know your name. Well, for his purposes he typically doesn't care. He can assign all activities to one unique person and just adding a name to the profile would be redundant. But when the tracker sells the profile to other companies which know your name, the connection between name and profile can be indirectly established through the fingerprint.

Let me give you one example how this works. You apply for a job at company A. You receive an email back from them, asking you to click a certain link in order to see a status, get some more information, fill in a questionnaire or whatever. They either ask you for your identification on the web site or they sent you a personalized link in the email (in case you have ever wondered about the long strings of seemingly random characters in links in emails to you, you now learned the purpose). Now that you accessed the website of A, they have your fingerprint and they have matched it to your name. A then sends the fingerprint to tracking company B and B returns the browsing profile, from which A might see that you have a preference for sites with the wrong political colour, wrong religious belief, sites which are about certain diseases, whatever. Based on this, A refuses the job to you.