REMzzz comments

Going to listen to some Joy Division to cheer myself up.

Classic Band, timeless music, heck, I should do the same

Either that or Soft Cell :)

I discovered them same day, several years ago...

If there's anyone like me who likes that. A self-made band of two, original mood/spirit/personality and real, meaningful lyrics, if not for the explosive success of Tainted Love, which was the beginning of commercial success and the beginning of the end .... Say Hello Wave Goodbye on the other hand... Marc could really sing... and dress himself and write the songs... burned out too fast. But the sarcasm, showmanship and angelic voice of 30 years ago will always sound catchy, real and fresh.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x203ib_soft-cell-say-hello-wave-goodbye_music

If you look past the theatrics, his words also carry a sharp and accurate critique of our society, a lot of timeless truth and wisdom you don't find in today's chart-topping pop.

I also recommend Frustration, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tzqxE0bcyI Also very Soft Cell, with a cheap and crazy video to match the soundtrack and take away from the gravity of those words...

I hear things like who is your favorite, cutest, best dressed and so on. Being cute is everything here. Also, Japanese like cute lyrics, chimes and melodies, upbeats.

I wonder if Strawberry Switchblade, a Scottish girl group from the '80s was inspired by the Japanese, or the Japanese inspired by them... seen a few seconds of a video once 5 years ago, not sure how they sound, but the costumes are unmistakable.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl0zi0FoauU

Googled, and sure as hell they have a following in Japan...

Osaka Mayor Hashimoto has repeatedly been making comments related to national issues. This is apparently because he wants to be viewed as influential in national politics

So does Ishihara.

RIP. :(

But boys will be boys. They will sneak out out while you are in the shower. Like the family cat, but sneakier, since a cat doesn't have an opposable thumb. Then they'll come back and paint the cat a garish color with the packet of Kool-Aid you accidentally left on the kitchen table....

That was quick. A different photo to take our minds off nukes and Noda.

Hope they are doing well.

I've lived through more than you think, and heard stories from my family of things that weren't published in the newspapers. Trying to keep kids oblivious to the world around them does more harm than letting them realize that the world is a living, dynamic place. Not everything one sees is gospel and not everything is theatre. There's satire and painful truth, there are happy moments that happen randomly on any given day, simple things that one remembers forever.

You can't learn to walk without falling down. You can't learn about reality by reading comic books or playing videogames.

The parents aren't making the boy chant slogans and hold a sign. They aren't angry. But they have come together in what looks like a show of solidarity. Look at them. A blue collar family that seems to spend a lot of time outdoors rather than manicured office workers with the latest mobile phones and the hair dyed just the right shade of brown, fashionably sipping the latest cold canned drink.

What do you see? I see a family of farmers. Maybe not farmers themselves but people close to the earth and not alienated by a wall of flat screen TVs, vending machines and air conditioners, endless anime and combini food. People who feel they have the most to lose of the land around them becomes contaminated and unlivable, and by land i mean soil, not slabs of concrete and sticky blacktop... the most to lose if they have to pack up and move to where no one knows them and where their kid will be bullied in school for being "radioactive". It's people like this who won't panic if there's a power outage. People who can move forward and rebuild the country. Strong, simple and honest. Let them protest. They are living in the real world.

Make Hybrid Cars!!!!!!!!!!!!

Blech. Seriously. You want one, you drive one. Want automatic transmission, hundreds of pounds of batteries? Enjoy it then.

Not everyone does. Without gov't subsidies, hardly anyone would buy, when you never really break even, with high car payments and a high cost of gas.

Today's Civic is a whale compared to say '89, when the Accord was that size if not a little smaller. I guess people's tastes change, but where is simplicity when you really need it. You can get 50MPG without a ****load of batteries if they build a reasonably light car. Power steering and a $600 radio are a little overrated. Intelligent climate control with twice the freon capacity, HID lights, thick plushy carpets and an oversized gas tank.... a little bit of this, a little bit of that, adds hundreds of lbs and thousands of dollars.

I don't need a high tech land yacht when a simpler, lighter car built with today's technology would be more fun to drive, simpler to repair and waste less energy to produce, just like it was already done 20, 30 years ago, before many of the current advances were made.

@Vesperto,

You think? They all know that their South Korean brothers are living well and not being oppressed, even if not everyone is well off. A four year old wouldn't understand, but a 15 year old would. They are still Korean, with a common culture and ancestry. They would reach out to each other. It's like the Berlin wall coming down... at some point people get tired of hating and isolation, of government hypocrisy. Curiosity and the human nature of wanting creature comforts cannot be eradicated. They are not mindless, selfless robots that will give up everything for a fat lobster-eating bastard when their own child is malnourished and will inherit nothing but crumbling roads and a vague idea that someday the sacrifices must end when the goals are achieved.

Remember Romania, the riots of '89. Remember why it happened. Yeah. It was also a communist regime with forced austerity and strictly regulated television, newspapers, a profound lack of free speech, not to mention the ever-present Securitate hiding in the shadows of daily life, ready to grab anyone that they suspected of expressing disagreement with the state policies. But the public patience had its limit. The austerity policies were the center of simple discontent. Formerly compliant people booed the president in a televised speech and since there was no delay in the live broadcast, the whole country saw a glimpse of that for a few seconds. Protests erupted, and when factory workers were brought in by train to beat up the protesters they joined in instead. Politburo officials, seeing all this sided with the populace, since it was the only way to retain some power.

In China, the slow reform toward a capitalist economy was also with the approval of those in power. Things change, you can't keep people chained down and hungry forever.

@Simon,

He might not understand it now to the full degree, but he will, years later. Trust me. Memories like that matter, i have my own... the things that took years for me to wrap my mind around. But when the pieces come together, the picture will be complete. The young mind is like a tape recorder... you remember the sights, the sounds and the emotions. The way the air smelled that day. Then one day it makes a whole lot of sense, and the little irrelevant details suddenly take on subtle meaning. A church is not exactly a place for a child, with its boring and repetitive nature, but a more colorful, fleeting moment like this will leave more impression than forcing a textbook opinion on the child and sheltering him from real life with its ups and downs, social discourse and very real emotion, tied to real events. It's when kids are herded together an taught a sterile redacted and whitewashed history that they end up as apathetic adults with no opinion of their own.

As long as China props up the North Korean puppet state, things will continue as they are. The average family will starve and Politburo will continue to gorge on lobster, while pretending nothing is wrong. But without China, Korea would have reunited years ago for economic reasons.

Aww :)

Another good picture for my collection. And good for the boy, it's an important lesson in life, to speak up and be heard when it really truly matters, otherwise it would be too late. Civic participation needs to be encouraged from a young age, and so should the awareness and understanding of social issues, so that public opinion is not easily swayed, bought or sold. Onniyama, if you read this, check your email :)

They haven't always been scared of them! They were seen as an art originally. It hasn't been until "recently" that tats equals yaks.

But it was the gamblers who took up this tradition when the emperor declared that only his household and/or nobility could own ornate clothing. That was several centuries ago. So tattoos = Yakuza has longer history than just the last few decades.

Wait a minute, what happened to that retired general who advocated corporal punishment and maniacal laughter? Why wasn't he invited to Hashimoto's event?

Like i've already said, i'm thinking the police give a "snapshot" number at a given moment, and the organizers keep track of who has come and gone throughout the day. So both numbers could be correct.

@akkk1

Yes, I've seen enough Asians, and i agree on that, but it's not just them. Fairly small, light built people, like myself and a few of my friends happen to look younger than our age, like the girl who at 25 got lectured for being a teenage mother by an old woman who thought she was 16... I think it has something to with our growth hormone levels or something like it

Here in this case it has more to do with the look on her face. The rest of the girls look 15 to 18 and even 19 to me, however she has a look that's more like 13 or 14. Maybe it's just her facial expressions and the look in her eyes. I somewhat expected it to be a little more jaded and mature, not so sugary and blank.

Well. Heres to me deleting everything I have ever downloaded. Better throw these external hard drives in a dumpster somewhere oto. Looks like my iPhones music is about to be cut in half.

I hope you're joking. Just encrypt them with a third party app, something stronger than .zip or .rar file encryption, which can be broken. I can look into what can also make the drive look empty, with a few innocuous files.. it's done by marking files for deletion but not deleting them entirely.

Encrypted files can't be searched, and deceptive filenames on "deleted" files can make them not "worthwhile"

Seriously, i hope you reconsider throwing away usable hardware. If you want to erase files at all costs, zero out the drives. There's an app for that and it's free. Spybot Search and Destroy has a free file shredder utility as well, which scrambles files to make the unreadable.

Your iPhone should be off-limits to anyone, if you sign up for the remote erase service that Apple provides. The phone will wipe itself also if it is programmed to if someone enters the wrong pin/password 3 or so times.

Whoever wants to throw away 250 DVD-RWs, you don't have to hurry up and do it now. You can set the disk on "erase" and write a small (~50mb) file on each. It won't erase the data but will make it unreadable/unplayable, and you can put them all in a box that says that they are all blanks. That way, they can be reused rather than having several pounds of BPA (bisphenyl-a) released into the atmosphere. DVDs are polycarbonate plastic, so they contain quite a bit of that stuff, which is a carcinogenic artificial "female hormone". Look, i'm not telling anyone what to do, it's just enough time till October the 1st to overwrite those disks and not risk anyone's health. Furthermore, i'm not sure if anyone purposely look for them if you aren't arrested for downloading in the first place

I don't keep much DATA on my computers, just what need for OS and some daily stuff. All of my DATA is kept on external drives

@zichi,

While you almost have it right, there's still something of a breadcrumb trail on your computer, if it's a Windows machine. There are MRU lists (most recent used), such as "recent documents" and a few others. Ad-aware can be used to clear those and a few other utilities can. I would think a registry setting can disable MRU lists, though i can't say for sure.

The other less obvious one is the "unused" portion of your hard drive, where the Windows memory pagefile used to be. While digging around in the pagefile leftovers isn't something the average computer forensics lab likes to do, it's still there. If you want to prevent that, the thing to do is to have 4GB+ RAM and turn off memory swapping. The pagefile can also be assigned to a different drive, usually for performance reasons.

Using a "portable" web browser set to run from the USB drive can prevent browser history and cache from being left on the computer, same goes for P2P apps

The last thing AFAIK would be the hibernate memory dump, aka hiberfil.sys

It's a snapshot of your RAM (i assume only physical although with references to the virtual sections in the pagefile), written to the harddisk so that you could resume a previous Windows session from a cold boot. When you boot up and log in, it doesn't get immediately overwritten. That's important, because many computers are configured by default to go from standby/sleep into deep sleep/hibernate when the battery level falls below a certain level, or after a set period of time if the machine is left unplugged.

I hope everyone enjoyed my well meaning if cryptic summary of Windows "data leaks"

Girl in the very center has a serious case of camera redeye... almost a vampire...

People are now scared of tattoos

They already were for centuries, AFAIK

@tideofiron,

If you really want a fair comparison, at least use the Monkees... the original "prefab four". They were "designed" and planned from scratch, like these girl bands. John Z Delorean, of General Motors even had the red Monkees car made for them as a sort of product placement marketing trick.

The Stones on the other hand had made some effort of their own, before they were picked up by the usual marketing machine, and continued to act up. Not smiling in the studio photo was their idea AFAIK and not the promoters'

@pamelot,

The reality of compromise is that you rarely get what you ask for. So one has to ask for a little more, so what you finally have to settle for is good enough for you.

This is why i support those protests. They know full well that they won't get what they are demanding, but their continued presence keeps politicians on their toes, and i'm all for that.

Downloading old Disney movies for my daughter is going to come to a screeching halt because of this nonsense that you praise. We are not all well-off individuals. Nor are we selling. Most of us are just watching.

Speaking of Disney, the whole "Disney vault" thing is ridiculous. They are bringing the whole piracy thing on themselves, if they only re-release a film every 7 years (AFAIK). What are parents supposed to do in between if the little ones have pulled the tape out of the VHS cartridge to play with the cat, or stuck the DVD halfway inside the dad's toolbox. Come on Disney, you have to be realistic..

on YouTube Japan, there's a limit on downloading 2 MP4 files every hour

You mean watching in Hi-Def? Or does it distinguish between a download request from the Flash module and the browser? I assumed both ran as a pause-able octet stream that you gain access to by supplying the right signature/passcode.

The main server generates signatures which are valid for ~2 months and any of the cache servers can fulfill the request for as long as your sig is valid. This way i've watched a dozen deleted videos i happened to have bookmarked on my phone, which keeps signatures for reuse. Eventually the sigs did expire but it was worth knowing how their current system works. Years ago, their database was flv-only... '06 i believe, and then sometime in '07 they started archiving the mp4 originals, which they later used when the service was upgraded to high def. Sometime in late '08 or early '09 they changed the video request URL system to what they have now, to discourage downloaders. While it complicates things, it does absolutely nothing to keep me from archiving the cat videos and whatnot :P

Did they rip them off or did a teacher give them to the boys?

Aluminum and copper is easy, but magnesium, i don't know. Maybe they tore apart a NeXT cube? Steve Jobs must be rolling in his grave. http://media.techeblog.com/images/nextcube.jpg

teh Stones and Pink Floyd

They wrote their own songs too.. this assembly line "talent" doesn't...

"And when you lose control, you'll reap the harvest you have sown.... And as fear grows.." yeah...... love the Animals album, for the words and the creativity... and social commentary that is still relevant today... and sheep bleating that seamlessly melts into the electric guitar :)

Piracy is not theft, nothing physical is lost from a user "illegally" downloading content. It is a copyright issue, due to potential loss of sale and therefore should be between the distributor of the unlicensed content and the content owner.

That's a perfect way to put it. In the days before MP3 and the iPod, kids used to tape-record songs from the radio.

Same old thing. An MP3 has a noticeable reduction in quality over a brand new CD, just as a radio recording is less satisfying than owning a vinyl record. But somebody doesn't want to realize that it's the people who couldn't be bothered to buy the high quality brand new product in the first place.

Some people like myself like to keep the original pristine.

I'm glad to have done that myself with some of mine. Disc rot can be a real pain, when they use a cheap varnish on the foil side and it starts to oxidize in random places

Special guest speaker at Saturday’s ceremony was Tokyo Gov Shintaro Ishihara who spoke about his views on national politics as well as his plan to buy the Senkaku Islands.

At first i thought this was satire. Birds of a feather i suppose, so totally expected

18? Really?

Looks a lot younger to me. I'd say "jailbait" almost. I know i'll get voted down for this, but it's like the Chinese gymnastics team, where they had a 12 year old who had a fake birth certificate to say she was 14.

Gotta love chemical fires, esp magnesium, sodium or phosphorus... Next time they'll be right back there, making Thermate (metal explosives, and the same chemical composition as stuff found at ground zero after the towers collapsed, in molten pools that took many days to cool down).. you know, iron oxide, sulfur, magnesium, other metals, all in the right proportion.

Or maybe we'll find them taking a stick of pure sodium out of its oil bath and dropping it in the middle of an urban road late at night. Carefully add some water from a ways away and run run run. Watch the fireworks and the firefighters.

Ok. Sorry. I'm past that age now. But we've all had our "experiments" when we were younger :)

LMAO at the harlequin doll costume... it's like an optical illusion of some strage sort... a lot cuter if you don't see the hem and legs...

The bill says that a person who is aware that the the download or stream results in a copyright infringement can face charges. As a result, even watching a YouTube video could result in prosecution if the viewer is aware that streaming the media is illegal.

That's taking things a little too far. I hate when people drafting laws are ignorant as to how technology works...