Japanese company Toto makes the Washlet, a robo-toilet that sprays a jet of water to cleanse your nether regions and then dries you off, making toilet paper virtually unnecessary. I have similar units in my new house, and they're awesome. But it's definitely a hard sell until you've tried one for yourself.

Blogger Gen Kanai notes that Toto is now marketing the Washlet in America; check out this comprehensive flash-based website. It's kind of funny to watch the actors on the site talk about the product while dancing around the subject of what it's actually doing.

You may have noticed the number of posts here falling off the last week or so. Well, I just have too much to do these days, what with work, planning a wedding, and looking for a new house here in Tokyo. I simply don't have the time right now to make Riding Sun the kind of blog I want it to be, and it's been showing.

There are plenty of issues I want to discuss — Iraq, Iran, Japan's upcoming, stricter exhaust pipe noise regulations — but they will have to remain undiscussed by me at this time.

I will probably keep posting here from time to time, but not on my usual daily basis. To my readers and commenters, thanks for your support. I'll be back — and not in the bad, Terminator way, either.

I found this in the ol' inbox just now:


I sure hope I'm not in trouble with the eBay Deppartament. They might canacell my akkownt.

You may have notice the Save the Internet ad that's been in the right sidebar for a while now. Save the Internet is a group fighting for "Net Neutrality" — the principle that Internet infrastructure operators shouldn't be able to discriminate among the different websites whose data flows through their pipe. If you surf over to Site A, you should get the same data transmission speed as if you had gone to their competitor, Site B.

Telecom companies don't like net neutrality, because they want to be able to charge companies extra fees for fast data transimission speeds. But this creation of a two-tiered Internet means telecom companies would be able to give special treatment to sites they like, while punishing those they don't. If Verizon, for example, starts a video sharing service, it could send that site's traffic through its high-speed pipes, while banishing competitors (and, one presumes, sites critical of Verizon) to the slow lane. And the potential for unethical shenanigans doesn't stop there. A politician supports giving Verizon some tax breaks or other special treatment? Fast lane. His opponent doesn't? Slow lane.

On the other hand, instead of trying to explain the whole thing, I should just show you Save the Internet's latest video:


Visit their site for more information.

That's right, you heard me. I'm Time magazine's person of the year. And so are you. Via LGF, Drudge reports:

**EXCLUSIVE** 7:38 PM ET... IT’S YOU! YOU were named TIME magazine ‘Person of the Year’ Saturday for the explosive growth and influence of user-generated Internet content such as ‘blogs’, video-file sharing site YouTube and social network MySpace... You — YES, YOU — beat out candidates including Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, China’s President Hu Jintao, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi... YOU, YOU, YOU....

Don't worry; I won't let it go to my head.

FOLLOW-UP:
Here's an Associated Press article on Time's choice, linked by Drudge.

ANOTHER FOLLOW-UP:
Wow, this guy is good. (Via Michelle Malkin)

Via Fark, Ministry of Tech reports on the D’Vinci Forgiato Radurra clear wheels, made from solid polycarbonate, for your motorcycle (or car):


And here is the Osmos hubless wheel, still under development:


Neither of these designs may be very practical — the clear ones will soon get covered in dirt and scratches, while the hubless ones are still just a prototype — but they sure look cool. Still, I am quite happy with my Marchesinis.

I forgot to post about it, but Riding Sun turned two years old on December 1st.

I usually get photos from my camera onto my hard drive by popping the camera's memory card into a PCMCIA card that slides into an appropriate slot on my PC.

But recently, Windows XP stopped recognizing the PCMCIA card. It used to show up as a device in the "My Computer" folder, but now I stick it in and nothing happens (quit snickering). The card doesn't show up in "My Computer". Windows apparently doesn't know it's there.

If you think you might know how to solve this problem, please tell me in the comments.

Via Digg, check out this unintentionally hilarious news report about Leet — which, you may not have realized, is a "potentially dangerous code".

If James Lileks lived in Japan and could read Japanese, he would be No-Sword.

Apparently, Google has "improved" its Blogger blogging platform. It seems to be doing some sort of location detection so that if you're accessing the Internet from Japan, the comments pages of Blogger blogs show up in Japanese — even if the blog and its comments are all in English. For example, instead of:

Mr. Smith comments...

we see:

Mr. Smithさんのコメント...

Not a fatal problem, but annoying and unhelpful. Which is usually the result of "features" and "improvements" that presume to know what the user really wants.

Bikes in the Fast Lane reports that Spanish bike maker Derbi's new motorcycle, the Mulhacen 659 X-Vision, comes with built-in cameras and an LCD TV screen that lets you record your ride:

The "X" in X-Vision represents the four directions in which its micro-cameras can focus. An LCD screen (with a memory function) on the handlebars lets you see the world surrounding you and record it.

In fact, with this system, the biker can record their motorcycle rides, saving them and organizing them on their computer (or upload them to the internet)

Very nice. And before you say that having a TV on your motorcycle is a bad idea, well, it would be if you tried to watch a show while riding. But if you used it together with the cameras to see what's going on behind you, it could actually be a safety enhancement.

FOLLOW-UP:
Gizmodo says it's a concept bike that's not for sale at this time.

How can you tell that the right to speak anonymously is (as the U.S. Supreme Court says) an essential component of the right to free speech?

Easy: China wants to get rid of it. ESWN translates an article from the Chinese press:

Several tens of millions of Chinese bloggers are concerned about the fate of their blogs. On October 31, this reporter learned that the real-name blogger registration system is about to enter on the agenda list of the Ministry of Information Industry. This means that there is a chance that test trials of the real-name blogger registration system will be held soon.

...The provincial research department deputy director Li Houqiang told the media: "If you don't trample on other people's right to speech and you don't engage in activities outside of the law, you should not be afraid of using your real name. If you don't tell lies, you won't have a guilty conscience and you'll have nothing to be afraid of."

Spoken like a true totalitarian. Of course, the real danger Chinese bloggers face comes not from telling lies, but from telling the truth.

Not much time for blogging of late, as I've been poring through financial statements all day, trying to finish up a report for work tomorrow.

Not all my weekends are full of fun and adventure, you know.

On September 1, Time Warner shut down Office Pirates, the painfully lame humor site I reviewed here. The officepirates.com URL now redirects to Sports Illustated.

I guess no one noticed, because no one was reading it.

Time magazine has named YouTube its "Invention of the Year" for 2006, while emphasizing that old-line content and media companies should see it as a revenue opportunity, not a threat:

...YouTube has to start conducting itself with a little more legal and financial gravitas. That means making money — mostly through advertising — and convincing the TV, movie and music executives who find copyrighted material on YouTube that it's a revenue opportunity and not grounds for litigation. The learning curve is still steep. "The people marketing content see it as a great new platform, but the legal side of the business doesn't know how to react," Hurley says. "We have instances where someone within the company uploaded something, and the other side's asking you to take it down."

But YouTube isn't Napster. It already has partnerships with NBC, CBS, Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music. And come on — it's the one place on the Net where people willingly, knowingly click on ads, like Nike's legendary clip of sharpshooting soccer star Ronaldinho. If you can't find money on YouTube, you're in the wrong economy, buddy.

That's right, media companies: YouTube users will voluntarily watch your ads — if they're compelling enough. It's a point I've made before. But the Time piece is also a great review of how significantly, and how quickly, YouTube has transformed media and Internet culture. Read the whole thing.

In the wake of allegations of censorship, YouTube has attempted to clarify its previously-inscrutable standards for what kinds of content are unacceptable on the site. But its new "Community Guidelines" leave things just as vague and unclear as before, and even raise new problems. A review:

YouTube is not for pornography or sexually explicit content. If this describes your video, even if it's a video of yourself, don't post it on YouTube.

Sounds clear enough in theory. But while hardcore porn is off-limits, YouTube still features countless videos of people doing sexually suggestive dances and other acts. As it tries to enforce this particular rule, YouTube will find itself in the untenable position of drawing a line between the obscene and the merely erotic. Good luck with that one.

Don't post videos showing dangerous or illegal acts, like animal abuse or bomb making.

What about dry ice bombs? And certainly any video of "Jackass"-style stunts or extreme sports shows "dangerous acts". What about BASE jumping, for example? Again, good luck drawing the line here.

Real violence is not allowed. If your video shows someone getting hurt, attacked, or humiliated, don't post it.

Okay, so all those boxing and mixed martial arts videos have got to go, not to mention plain old street fights and (rowr!) catfights. And enough about fights; what about motorcycle crashes?

YouTube is not a shock site. Don't post gross-out videos of accidents, dead bodies and stuff like that. This includes war footage if it's intended to shock or disgust.

So remember, if you have an anti-war video, make sure it's not shocking or disgusting. Same goes if you have a pro-war video — no footage of Saddam's thugs torturing political prisoners, or insurgents beheading their hostages. And what about stuff that's actually scientific or educational, but still gross? Like eye surgery?

We encourage free speech and defend everyone's right to express unpopular points of view. But we don't permit hate speech which contains slurs or the malicious use of stereotypes intended to attack or demean a particular gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or nationality.

Okay, but what about using news footage of actual events to criticize a particular religious faction? That should be okay, right?

With its new rules, then, YouTube has set itself the impossible challenge of drawing black and white distinctions among infinite shades of gray. Well, actually, that's not quite correct — it's dumped that burden on its users:

Please take these rules seriously and take them to heart. Don't try to look for loopholes or try to lawyer your way around them — just understand them and try to respect the spirit in which they were created.

There's no reason, however, to think that a community of millions of users will successfully arrive at the exact same definition of what's acceptable that YouTube has in mind. So what's the solution? Ironically, it appears at the end of the Guidelines page itself:

You may not like everything you see. Some of the content here may offend you... [If so, then] consider just clicking on something else — why waste time watching videos you don't like?

Indeed.

I'm browsing with the new Firefox 2.0, and it's pretty sweet. The active spell-checking is particularly cool.

Plus, on the "Add-Ons" page, there's a picture of a chopper:


I wonder if Mozilla's Gen Kanai had anything to do with that image choice.

FOLLOW-UP:
Okay, here's a nitpick: The old Firefox had a red "x" box at the far right end of the tabs row. Clicking the "x" closed whatever tab was open on the screen at that time. Now the far-right "x" box is gone and instead each tab has its own red "x" box. I think the Mac's Safari browser works this way, too. Yet it's a bad idea, because instead of always moving the cursor to the same place to close the currently open tab, you have to figure out where the tab is in the tabs row and move the cursor there to close it. Unpredictability = bad user interface design.

Moreover, including a separate red "x" box in each tab means you can keep fewer tabs simultaneously visible in the width of the tabs bar. (Correction: The red "X" boxes disappear from all but the active tab as the number of tabs becomes too large to fit in the row otherwise. That is smart.)

What was wrong with simply right-clicking on a tab and choosing "Close Tab", as the old version had us do? The new way gives us more visual clutter and less visible information.

Gen, what say you?

ANOTHER FOLLOW-UP:
Commenter Scott points out that Firefox 2.0 is highly customizable and can be made to look like the older version.

Via LGF, of all places, comes an update on Japanese movie, TV, and record companies' paranoid, knee-jerk reactions to YouTube. Reuters reports:

Google Inc.'s YouTube.com removed 29,549 video files from its popular Web site after receiving a demand from a group of Japanese media companies over copyright infringement, an industry group said on Friday.

The television, music and movie clips had been posted without the permission of copyright holders, the Tokyo-based Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers said in a statement.

The group, which represents 23 media companies including TV networks and movie distributors, said it would ask YouTube to set up screening and other measures to block postings of unauthorized files. It also called on Internet users not to post video clips in violation of copyright laws.

Good luck with that, guys. I first blogged about Japanese content companies' irrational fear of YouTube here. YouTube is basically paying out of its own pocket to host and stream up to 10-minute-long clips of these companies' shows, commercials, music videos, and what have you. Moreover, YouTube doesn't offer the ability to download and save video clips, so the average user (i.e., one who doesn't turn to hacks and work-arounds) isn't saving these clips to his hard drive or video iPod and swapping them with friends. I don't call that piracy; I call it free advertising.

Example: In surfing around on YouTube a while ago, I came across a clip from Disney's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". I've seen just about all of Disney's modern animated films (e.g., from "The Little Mermaid" onward), but I skipped "Hunchback". Never saw it. I guess when it came out in 1996, I just thought it looked silly, and I wasn't interested. But the YouTube clips — like potato chips, you can't watch just one — showed that the movie had great animation, powerful songs, and a more mature storyline and darker tone than the average Disney film. I mean, just check out this one, for example.

I wanted to see the whole thing, so I hopped over to Amazon.com and ordered the DVD, which is on its way to me as we speak. If I hadn't seen those clips on YouTube, I wouldn't have bought the DVD. It's just that simple.

Some American media companies have recognized YouTube's value as a promotional tool; NBC, CBS, and others already post clips of their shows on the site. I hope their Japanese counterparts come to the same realization soon.

FOLLOW-UP:
Also via the same LGF post, it looks like the tit-for-tat YouTube censorship battle I warned against here is, sadly, in full swing.

ANOTHER FOLLOW-UP:
The BBC reports that a British soccer league is demanding that footage of goals scored in its games be pulled from YouTube, too. Sigh.

This page of quotes, collected by J Greely of Dot Clue, is a fun read. (And I'm not just saying that because it includes a quote from one of my posts.)