Tokyo University of Foreign Studies announced Wednesday it will provide ¥100,000 grants by March to 30 exchange students who are paying their own expenses but suffering from the yen's appreciation. (The Japan Times)
Of course this only applies to non-scholarship students. Nevertheless I find it mildly annoying that ever since I came to Japan the tendencies were quite not in my favour. Firstly every single year there was a slight drop in the amount of scholarship I received, kudos to the Japanese government. Secondly the Yen was worth less and less compared to the Euro or HUF. In 2004 when I came here the Yen sold at almost 2 HUF. Just recently it dropped to less than 1.5, making my scholarship worth a lot less. For example the international plane tickets never changed with the conversion, if anything they cost more.
That is before the economic crisis started. Suddenly the Yen-HUF conversion flared up to 2.4. Which is quite typical: in a few months I will stop getting scholarship...
The technology is called HDCP - High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection - and its main purpose is to protect digital content traveling through various high definition capable display ports from being copied. In this case it also prevented the teacher from showing a movie to his class on a projector.
Arguably a presentation of a movie to a classroom of kids stretches Fair Use or Private Viewing, and I don't know what the relevant US laws say. But still I think that if any DRM causes this kind of frustration to the rightful owners of the content, then it is flawed, and very much so.
Also if we assume that the exact same thing could happen to anyone who would want to watch a perfectly legally obtained HD movie at home, it's hard to argue that the protection used is effective. (In the teacher's case the Mini DisplayPort - VGA adapter caused the error.) Rightful owners should not be treated like criminals.
Commenters pointed out that the incorporation of the HDCP technology is probably the price Apple had to pay for getting a permission to put BluRay devices in future Macs. Also, since Apple is in the unique position of offering a download-and-carry model with the iTunes Store - meaning the customers will have a fully assembled movie file on their end when buying content - the licensors can play all kinds of hardball games with Apple in exchange for letting their content in.
Proposition 8 was a California ballot proposition that changed the state Constitution to restrict the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman and eliminated the right of same-sex couples to marry. (src) A lot of prominent people opposed the proposition in many ways, however I found this one unique: Funny Or Die's Prop 8 - The Musical, starring - among others - Jack Black, John C. Reilly, Neil Patrick Harris.
Visitors won't notice much - maybe slight speed improvements - but for me it's a huge change. The revamped admin interface is a pure win. Almost everything is a box: reorganisable, customisable and removable. The whole blogging experience is starting to feel like using a desktop software. It puts in such sharp contrast the times when I used to edit HTML by hand in Notepad for each and every post. And it wasn't even that long ago.
Kudos to the WP team who continue giving this awesome CMS away, absolutely free of charge.
I have finally created a page for the Make It Worn WordPress template. It is now available for download and (strictly non-commercial) use. The only changes I made for the release are a slightly better accentuated blockquote style and validation of the code. I hope at least some people would find the template to their liking.
I should have suspected this when I saw the service truck stop in front of the block.
Before a new tenant moves in the apartments are usually refurbished. Mostly just the wallpaper changed but sometimes more. So now all morning I've been listening to holes being drilled, nails being hammered and wooden planks being sawed. Of course, what better time to do construction work than a Saturday morning.
This commitment to work the Japanese have can prove pretty annoying.
Should I start asking people walking down a street if they agree with the importance of the freedom of speech I bet most of them would nod vehemently. But what if I asked if it's OK to draw profane cartoons about Islam? Or Christianity? Or cartoons in which the Simpsons kids are having sex?
Now we know what the law thinks, least in Australia:
Now this one raises a plethora of questions. Does it mean cartoon characters have human rights as well? What constitutes as a cartoon character? If an Australian kid scribbles an obscene cartoon on the side of his math book in class using stick figures can he be prosecuted? And why is pornography special when in almost any cartoon the characters break the law in many ways?
If you accept -- and I do -- that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don't say or like or want said.
The blocked page of the online encyclopaedia shows an album cover of German heavy metal band Scorpions, released in 1976. Internet providers acted after online watchdog the Internet Watch Foundation warned them its picture may be illegal. The IWF said it was a "potentially illegal child sexual abuse image".
I tend to think looking at that album cover or the comic with the Simpsons can't turn anyone into a pedophiliac. And I believe it's absurd that something drawn, i.e. not real, can be grounds for child porn prosecution.
Besides the new look Google Reader now has the option to hide the number that shows how many unread items a folder or feed has. I haven't really made up my mind if I'd want that or not, however someone pointed out in a comment I'm too lazy to look up that it could end the frustration and forced reading of feeds you're not really interested in just because you have a Reader backlog.
It's a valid point. My news folder usually bloats to 1000+ unread in matters of days. Even though I usually just scan the headlines for interesting bits of information. I also have a hard time keeping up with Sorozatjunkie: the parts that interest me are accompanied with a lot of completely irrelevant noise.
On more than one occasion I forced myself to read, or rather scan through, feeds I ignored for days just to make the unread number disappear. I can be very obsessive-compulsive about things like that. I'd also feel guilty about removing the feeds that I only rarely check. On the other hand I don't have a problem using "Mark all as read" to clean things up.