.::REALITYRECALL::.

pIn the wake of the earthquake and tsunami, Japan has been noticeably absent of looting and crime. Naturally, we all assume that the Japanese are just that orderly, polite and all those other enviable traits. These things are true, but a target=”_blank” href=”http://www.slate.com/id/2288514/pagenum/all/#p2″Slate and Jake Adelstein/a added a little more depth to why these traits exist./p
pSlate points out something I was never really aware of: there’s a well-built punishment and reward system for following the rules, especially when it comes to losing items. Oftentimes, a reward of 5-20% of the objects worth will be given to the finder, and if nobody claims it, then the finder gets it after six months. If you went ahead and just took it? The police would be a lot harsher to you./p
pA more interesting angle, courtesy of Jake Adelstein: the yakuza./p
pAccording to Adelstein, the major yakuza families have squads formed that walk the streets, just like the police officers do, to make sure that crime doesn’t happen during this crisis. According to one yakuza boss: “In times of crisis, there are not Yakuza and civilians or foreigners. There are only human beings and we should help each other.”/p
pIt’s good to know that everyone is pitching in to help out in Japan, from the top of the government to the furthest outskirts of the law./p
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Today, Adobe Flash 10.2 will hit the Android Market for devices running Froyo, Gingerbread and Honeycomb, and by now you’re probably familiar with what it brings — increased performance for dual-core smartphones running Android 2.2 and Android 2.3, and the promise of seriously sped-up Flash content and better battery life for Android 3.0 tablets (not to mention Flash, period). Well, we’ve already spent a full day with the latest build of Flash 10.2 for Android and quizzed the company thoroughly about the release, and there are a couple surprises in store.

First off, you don’t absolutely need a dual-core phone to take advantage of Flash 10.2 — Adobe VP Danny Winokur told us, and we confirmed in testing, that there are slight performance improvements on earlier devices too. With our trusty Droid 2’s 1Ghz OMAP3 chip, we saw a slight but noticeable boost in framerate when playing a YouTube trailer at 480p, which admittedly only took took that particular video from “unwatchable” to merely “fairly jerky.” With the Tegra 2-toting Motorola Xoom, however, 480p videos ran perfectly smooth, even as the tablet had trouble rendering 720p content as anything but a series of images. However, Adobe says even that will change soon, as this beta release doesn’t take advantage of full hardware acceleration — it’s actually turned off right now. Though the Tegra 2 is natively decoding video, Adobe told us that hardware rendering and compositing will be added in a subsequent release, and when they are it “will bring 720p playback to a really smooth, enjoyable level.” We also noticed that phone temperatures seemed slightly cooler with Flash 10.2, which suggests better battery life. The other work-in-progress is Flash integration into Google’s Honeycomb browser, which presently has trouble detecting finger taps when Flash isn’t played full screen, but which will — Adobe hopes — play exactly the same inside and outside the browser when work on Flash 10.2 is complete. Sounds promising, no? Then why not download it yourself this evening and give it a go?

Flash 10.2 hits Android today, Adobe hopes for viewable 720p playback in a matter of weeks originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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