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P/CLOUDY
The consumption tax increase next April will hit every household in Japan hard, with many people's financial future hanging on whether their wages rise enough to offset the impact of the hike, experts say.
Every parent is all too familiar with The Tantrum. The screaming, the flailing arms, the angry head butting — and the timing (normally in the most inconvenient public place possible).
International events undermine Japan's democracy. Shame on the International Olympic Committee for being a party to it.
Tucked away behind the main museums in Ueno, the Tokyo University Art Museum may not be on most people’s radar, but it is definitely one of the city’s top museums in terms of curatorial quality. Whenever I go there, I am always delighted by ...
Francisco Liriano showed up at PNC Park on Tuesday afternoon in a suit with his suitcase packed for a trip St. Louis. The message reverberated through the Pittsburgh Pirates clubhouse. After 21 years away from the playoffs, it was time for the best story ...
Dearly beloved: our subject this morning is online pornography and what to do about it. The fact that there is a good deal of erotic material on the Internet is beyond dispute, though the precise amount is unclear. Let us assume that X percent ...
“To be remembered after we are dead,” wrote William Hazlitt, “is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.” Cue U.S. President “George W” Obama in the matter of telephone surveillance by his National Security Agency. The fact that for ...
Watching British Foreign Secretary William Hague doing his avuncular routine in the Commons on June 10, I was reminded of the way establishment figures in the 1950s used to reassure hoi polloi that they had nothing to worry about. Everything was in order. The ...
A reader writes: “Dear John Naughton, As you write about the Internet, I wondered if you knew how long it takes Yahoo to get back to people. I have an iPad, but went to the library to print a document (attached to an email). ...
“The best is the enemy of the good,” said the 18th-century French writer Voltaire. It’s a maxim that has a particular resonance for tech designers, because it highlights the intrinsic tension between ambition and pragmatism that haunts them. Many perfectly viable products have never ...
You may have noticed the hullabaloo last week over the news that Yahoo!, a weighty Internet giant, had paid $1.1 billion to acquire Tumblr, a blogging platform allegedly popular with the yoof of today. What you may not have noticed is the declaration by ...
“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost,” wrote Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist of his day, “not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.” Which is another way of saying that ...
When, in early 2011, Eric Schmidt stepped aside from his position as Google’s CEO to become the company’s executive chairman, some of us were reminded of Dean Acheson’s famous gibe about postwar Britain — which had “lost an empire but not yet found a ...
The news that a few jokers in Texas calling themselves Defense Distributed have succeeded in creating a working handgun using 3-D printing technology has thrown the cat into the pigeon coop. The reaction from legislators in the United States has been hyperactive. Democratic Congressman ...
The Chinese name their years after animals — the year of the goat, the rat and so on. In the tech world, we name years after devices. Thus, 2007 was the year of the iPhone and 2010 was the year of the iPad. It’s ...
On Tuesday, April 23, a tweet from Associated Press (AP) revealed startling news. There had been explosions in the White House and Obama had been injured. The tweet was a hoax — the AP Twitter account had been hacked via a clever phishing exploit ...
In 1975, a computer scientist named Fred Brooks published one of the seminal texts in the literature of computing. It had the intriguing title of “The Mythical Man-Month” and it consisted simply of a set of essays on the art of managing large software ...