greenlight comments

I'm 194cm so I barely fit in the seats even when they're not reclined. People in front of my are welcome to recline as much as they want, but they're going to get two wriggling knees in their back the whole flight.

Luckily I can usually snag an emergency exit row seat by checking in early/online, or use my frequent flier miles to upgrade to premium economy/business.

All the focus is on RIKEN and Obokata but what about everyone else involved? Charles Vacanti (Professor at Harvard Medical School) was a co-author but you never hear anything about him. Why didn't he tell the results were too good to be true? How did the paper pass the editors at Nature, who did they get to review it?

Dismantling their nuclear, and killing people in Ukraine by increasing EU dependence on Russian gas so that the EU doesn't dare implement proper sanctions.

Always wear your seatbelts folks, even when the sign is off!

@JoeLarabell.: The GMT6 thing was from the Amachan drama, they're not a real group

The new company will be a monster of network technologies - Sprint has iDEN, CDMA2000 and WiMAX and T-Mobile have EDGE, UMTS and LTE

If the 787 hadn't had the other (actual) battery problems, this would never have been reported in the news. Indicator glitches like this happen on all plane models, even ones that have been flying safely for decades. I was on an A340 that stopped on the runway since an indicator showed there was a fire in the engine (there was no fire), the pilots ran the fire extinguisher anyway to be sure, and we had to return to gate and fly the next day.

As a European, I'd love to gloat over Airbus vs Boeing, but a lot of these small reports (broken toilets? seriously?) are non-issues that happen to any plane with 100 airframes in the sky.

@taiko666: Your friends are literally dumber than AKB48 idols

Despite what all the bitter expats here who haven't actually watched the show say, it's a charming little drama. Just when you think it's getting formulaic, it veers off to the left. Aki may be a little air-headed at times, but the strong-headedness of characters like her mother more than make up for it. And the much-lamented idol part also has quite a lot of criticism for the industry and its fans (the fakery involved is a major plot point).

I don't know about iD, but for Mobile Suica and Edy, you don't need the SIM card in the phone to use the payment card, only to recharge it. Once the payment card is written to the phone's NFC store, you don't even need the phone to be turned on for it to work, let a lone a SIM inserted.

Bankers will never be punished. Not in Japan, not elsewhere. For a western example, HSBC laundered hundreds of millions of dollars of drug cartel money, and nobody was ever blamed.

I love how NHK, supposedly a public broadcaster, basically promotes and uses the private entertainment industry to boost its ratings

Boost their ratings? God forbid they show something people want to see...

But the way JAL communicated the decision - with a curt message delivered to officials’ inboxes just as it was publicly announcing the deal, according to Japanese government sources and a person close to the airline - was just as momentous

The real revolution here is that it was an email and not a FAX.

Didn't pay protection money to the right clan?

No mention of JKT48, the official Indonesia-based AKB48 spinoff?

Removing human judgement is a recipe for success

@gokai_wo_maneku Your data is old. As of November 2012 it was at 40%, and just going up, probably even higher now...

Coming from Scandinavia, with 25% VAT/sales tax and 40-60% income tax - bring it on!

JoshuYaki: "too crowded"? It's the opposite - there's zero competition. In the same geographic area, Europe has over 100 carriers, and far better networks with better deals.

@USNinJapan2:

787 Deliveries:

ANA: 19 JAL: 8

Air India: 6 China Southern: 1 Ethiopian: 4 LAN Air: 3 LOT Polish: 3 Qatar Airways: 5 TUI Travel: 2 United Airlines: 6

I imagine it has a lot to do with the media and culture of openness in the different countries. No way in hell are you going to hear about problems with planes in Qatar or India due to how secretive and corrupt the companies and media are there.

The tickets sold out in 2 minutes this year. It was a mad dash to mash the "purchase" button, and anyone who didn't have their credit card info prefilled was toast. Lots of people were plagued with site errors that made it impossible to buy.

Luckily I was one of the lucky few who made it in time.

Maybe I'm out of touch with the common man, but does a 30 yen price difference really make that big of a difference for anyone? Unless you're eating like 100 bowls of the stuff...

Just looked up the articles on Boeing's fix. They still don't actually know what went wrong or how to fix it, so they're just adding measures so a battery fire isn't as dangerous (separating cells, more insulation, smoke vent to outside the plane). WTF.

@Ewan Huzarmy: As if manufactured pop never existed before? It's not that music in general was better before, it's that the crap tends to get forgotten. There was lots of completely manufactured super-popular music like "The Archies", or even The Monkees in the beginning

Nobody else cares, certainly not the younger Koreans under the age of 50 really care anymore about what Japan does

B.S. whenever there's a one of those "korean school kids show their feelings" projects online, maybe 10% of the drawings are "kill japan" or "dokdo is korean" type stuff.

mike23thurgood: Same thing happens every now and again in Europe as well. Before evacuating people onto slippert tracks in the dark with dangerous overhead power lines‚ possibly other traffic on nearby lines etc, they have to be REALLY sure they can't somehow get the train going again. In Sweden it happened in the middle of the hot summer, passengers broke a window for fresh air since they feared a baby would get heatstroke and without power the aircon was dead.

There is no obvious trend or similarity to the problems, which suggests they are more likely the result of quality control than a design flaw, aviation safety experts said.

This scares me more than a design flaw. With a design flaw at least they know what to look out for, and once it's diagnosed it can be fixed. With poor quality control, any part can fail at any time...

WA4TKG: The Rolls Royce jet engines are actually the ones that have had the most issues. For instance, the one that exploded on a A380 was a RR.

blackrock: That hasn't been true for a while. Each new standard has just been a war between corporations as to who can jam their patents in there so they can profit off the next generation, instead of picking the best technical solution. It's been like this since GSM. Even if there were no patents, corporations would still need to compete on technical solutions.

Software and standards patents need to die. Yesterday. It's all a massive scam to keep any innovative new players out of the business, and keep the big entrenched corporations in their comfortable positions.