Blissful Japan

I went to Akihabara last month to help my friend buy a terabyte drive (only 17,500 yen now!) and external case (4500 yen for a nice one), where I was of course deluged with cute girls in costumes handing out flyers to come to their stores. Here’s the first flyer that I received, along with [...]

Sometimes you’ve got to love Japanese commercials.

Speedtest.net has put aggregated statistics for all people using its Internet speed test service - pretty cool. You can view the speed test results from anyone, anywhere in the world. Check out the speed data for ISPs from Tokyo. I’m on USEN which currently tops the upload speeds at 17571kb/s, and is ranked near the [...]

My coworker sent this page with 4 videos showing people making popcorn with radiation from their cell phones. Think it’s impossible? Check it out. Apparently if you put 3-4 phones in a circle around some kernels of corn and call them all at once, the corn will pop. I’d try it if I had enough [...]

Recently I found this article from the New York Times entitled High-Tech Japan Running Out of Engineers. (Warning: free registration and login required to read). It discusses the decreasing numbers of students choosing engineering majors in Japan. I found it particularly interesting because as an American engineer in Japan, I have long fought with the [...]

From Wikipedia’s COBOL entry:
Critics have argued that COBOL’s syntax serves mainly to increase the size of programs, at the expense of developing the thinking process needed for software development. In his letter to an editor in 1975 titled “How do we tell truths that might hurt?”, computer scientist and Turing Award [...]

This is a crazy new law being proposed which will give border guards and security personnel the right to inspect the contents of your laptop, iPod, cell phone for content that infringes on copyright laws (music and movies): Crazy ACTA Trade Agreement (Wikileaks)
Apparently they already have in some cases the right to look at anything [...]

Today I found out about this lovely law passed in the U.K.
According to Wikipedia:
The RIPA allows the government to access a person’s electronic communications in a very unrestricted manner, thus infringing in the privacy of their correspondance in a manner many would not tolerate regarding their postal communications. The act:

Enables the government to demand that [...]