Actually, Diego Garcia (the British/American military base) already has it's own ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code, DG: [1]
It's "Exceptionally reserved" "at the request of International Telecommunication Union (ITU)".
Although my gut feeling is that if the deal happens, Mauritius would probably ask to exceptionally reserve `IO` as well. Still, I'm not sure if I'd risk using a `.io` domain since it's not guaranteed.
The owners of `queer.af` thought that AF only meant “as f*ck”, without realizing that AF also happens to the be the ISO 3166 code for a country controlled by the Taliban, who didn’t like their domain name [1].
Brits that had `.eu` domains lost their domains due to Brexit [2] (unless they had some other EEA ties).
And if the Chagos deal goes ahead [3] and the British Indian Ocean Territory ceases to exist, then all `.io` domains might disappear too (although considering that `.su`/Soviet Union domains are still a thing, they probably would have stayed around).
You can try looking at this manga posted by a Japanese person that was detained for marijuana possession https://xcancel.com/kime_neko/status/1634511023167381504. It's in Japanese, but you can use a machine translator and/or look at the drawings.
The facilities and food look slightly better (maybe because it's a detention centre in Tokyo), but it mostly matches. Although the mangaka seemed to have a much more positive outlook on it, probably because they could read all the Japanese books they wanted and speak to their cellmates in Japanese.
Not for the ones you buy in Japan, since those are legal.
But, it's not unheard of to get randomly stopped by the police and searched, especially in touristy areas like train stations. Unless you're a Japanese citizen, you have to show ID, and although the searches are optional, most people agree to them.
For customs, usually a few people from each plane are searched.
Anecdotally, if you're a tourist, they're usually looking for medicine that was legal outside of Japan, but illegal within Japan, with small amounts leading to being detained for 23 days (like in this blog post). And if they decide to prosecute you, you'd probably get a suspended sentence (so no prison time), but you'd get deported and a temporary ban from coming back to Japan.
You can still easily buy it here, but the over-the-counter pills are always mixed with other ingredients to make it more difficult to convert them into amphetamines.
E.g. Contac 600 Plus can be found in basically all drug stores and it has 120mg of Pseudoephedrine, 100mg Caffeine, 8mg Chlorpheniramine, and 0.4mg of Belladonna Extract. It sounds like it'll actually be illegal to import into Japan, since 120/(120 + 100 + 8 + 0.4) is over 10%, but I've previously just walked into a drug store and bought a packet.
But essentially, somebody else sent her a package with something illegal in it that she didn't ask for. The police took her passport for a few months and searched her house. After a few months, she got her passport returned to her, she left Japan temporarily, but when she came back, they arrested her "to ensure [she] wouldn't flee while they finished the investigation".
She also mentioned it was "the most normal type of thing you can think of"; it might have been something like pseudoephedrine/Sudafed. That's a common over-the-counter drug in other countries but it's very illegal here in Japan (unless it's under 10%, or you buy it from Japan)!
Edit: Importing pseudoephedrine above 10% concentrations is illegal, but you can legally buy some higher concentrations over-the-counter while in Japan.
At least in Japan on iOS, they have their own app, and it’s great.
You can find a seat first, then order directly from your seat, for delivery to your seat (helpful since some McDonald’s in Japan are really busy, and are very vertical, so you might need to climb up some two/three floors to find a seat!).
You can even order McDelivery and they’ll deliver McDonald’s to your house on McDonald’s branded mopeds.
It’s also been pretty fast, even on a slow internet connection.
The only two problems I’ve had with it are:
- Although the menu and the rest of the app is translated to English, sometimes coupons are only in Japanese, and not translated to English (I’m guessing these might be store-specific) (although it’s easy enough to translate that using your phone’s translator)
- I’ve had Apple Pay occasionally be down and fail to work, which forced me to redo my whole order, then realize that Apple Pay is still down, then do my entire order again with a different payment method. Although it’s only happened twice a few months ago, so it could be something that they’ve already fixed (or I’m quite unlucky).
Edit: Forgot to add, but no issues like what basch seems to experience with their country’s McDonald’s app. The Japanese one always gives me a sorted list/map view of my closest McDonald’s to pick from, with any favourites marked at the too.
The new Alder Lake CPUs apparently breaks a bunch of games, since their DRM thinks that the new Intel efficiency-cores are a second PC trying to play on the same license.
Some games will only work if you upgrade to Windows 11, and all games should work if you find a BIOS option and enable it, but only some CPUs support that BIOS option.
And there's also all the other older horror stories of DRM, like the Denuvo DRM adding a huge performance hit on some games. Or not being able to play your offline single-player games at all, since the Denuvo DRM servers have temporarily offline due to a DNS issue.
(Disclaimer, despite all the issues, I do personally prefer PC gaming over console gaming, but I'm biased that I already have a powerful PC for CUDA/C++ programming and development, so I've already spent a bunch of money and time into PCs already).
You just need to install the app on your Android TV/TV box, and if you've got a fast intranet connection, you can stream Steam games from your desktop/laptop PC via your Android TV (it also works on Android tablets/phones, but you'd probably need a high-end WiFi router).
The input latency might hurt for action games, especially since TVs tend to have pretty bad latency already compared to computer monitors. And, loads of Android TVs aren't very powerful; I've seen quite a few struggle with even the Netflix app, so I doubt streaming 4K 60FPS games with low latency will work well.
It's "Exceptionally reserved" "at the request of International Telecommunication Union (ITU)".
Although my gut feeling is that if the deal happens, Mauritius would probably ask to exceptionally reserve `IO` as well. Still, I'm not sure if I'd risk using a `.io` domain since it's not guaranteed.
[1]: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:DG