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Tsunami Satellite Images
JakeisBland writes "Here is a collection of before/after satellite pictures of the devastation in Asia due to the tsunami/earthquake."
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This is simply amazing. I think that every so often Mother Nature decides she needs to show everyone who's boss, a sort of bitchslap to bring the nations of the world together; if only for a little while.
The people of Galle, one of the hard hit areas on the west coast, might take exception to your comment about escaping major damage.
Yes, because every single country east of Europe worships Allah. Get a clue, please.
Bush could have scored some real points if say he'd cancelled his $40 million "I got elected again" party and given the money to the cause.
Current death tolls approaching 130k people.
If you thought 9/11 was big think again, we are talking about FOUR HUNDRED 9/11s here.
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
I've said it before, I'll say it again.
It's a natural disaster. A large one, to be sure, but the Colombia volcano in 1985 killed around 25,000, Mont Pelee in 1902 killed 25,000, and let's not forget the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, which killed between 250,000 and 650,000 people. There's a qualitative difference between something that happened because Mother Nature got titchy, and something that humans planned and carried out.
Different. You can't compare them on the same scale.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
When the appeal was put out, a post was made on a mailing list I frequent which suggested that all those people who missed out on the Dell server offer a few weeks back might want to think about donating that cash to this cause. All in all, I think we collectivly donated more than £10,000 UKP. Come on people, these guys need it and we have it in excess (even the poorest over here can donate something and hardly feel it), currently the UK government has pledged $96million, while the UK public has donated $69million. Yes, the UK public has donated the same amount that the US government has pledged.
USA does not export democracy and freedom. The US does start wars for their own needs (e.g. oil) but not for freedom. And don't start about the US wanting to fight terrorist, if the US really wanted to fight terrorists they should have invaded Saudi Arabia not Iraq. Afterall, in terms of freedom they were on similar levels.
Actually the US has inserted more corrupt dictatorships than they have inserted democratic governments. The dictators were prefered for many years because they were less likely to turn socialist than a democratic country was.
9/11: Terrorists
Iraq: USA
This one: Nature
Speaking as an Indian, a big heartfelt THANKS for all of you who've empathised with the tragedy and have helped the rescue efforts. It's in trying times like these that one's faith in humanity is restored.
Thankfully, in spite of Indian bureacracy being well Indian bureaucracy, rescue and rehabilitation efforts are going on VERY effectively. An enormous number of people in India, be it the government, armed forces, or even the common woman/man is pitching in. Most companies here have setup collection boxes and at the very least, we're donating medicines, soaps, toothbrushes, disinfectants, clothes, utensils, non-perishable food items etc. There's also an army of volunteers who's landed in the disaster struck areas with truckloads of donated stuff and are distributing it to the needy.
Strangely enough, it seems that too many clothes are being donated! A friend of mine is physically helping out with the rescue efforts and he tells me that there's piles and piles of clothes lying around but of little use to anybody. Well, i guess too much help is always better than too little help.
Another thing that amazes me is the resilience of the common man or woman. Here are people living on the edge of poverty, getting hammered everyday with issues like eking out an existence. Perhaps they've scrounged and saved enough to get their daughters married, hidden a few hundred rupees in a hole in the wall. Perhaps they've just bought a shiny new radio or a bicycle. What do they wake up to? A tsunami that takes away their children, their friends, and everything they own. What do they do? Shrug it off eventually and mark it off as karma, god's will, or god's punishment depending on their religion (no, most poor Indians cannot afford the luxuries of athesim or agnosticism). Then, they take it one day at a time and slowly start rebuilding their lives.
You want to see miracles, mental strength, and the answer to life, the universe, and everything? You don't have to look far in times like these.
You sir, Mr.Grandparent poster, are a moron. Why are all the forums on the internet filled with fucking asshats like you? Why do you think it matters whether more people died now or in 2001? Can you not see that regardless of how many people died in which disaster, sympathy and help is required now, as it was required then? Will you fucking grow up and be human?
There is no sense in comparing disasters.
PS. I do not mean to insult you personally, just the idea you are putting forward.
I was reading something earlier about this, and that such a warning system would not be wanted because it could potentially scare off tourists, thus causing financial losses for the areas tourism industry.
Most (all?) of the official New Year celebrations and fireworks have been cancelled. The money will be given to aid helping those who suffered from the tsunami.
At the moment there are more than 200 Finns and over 2000 Swedes missing and most likely all of them are dead. To see things in perspective: Finland has a population of 5.2 million, Sweden around 9 million. Everyone with basic math skills can calculate what that would mean if it had happened for tourists from US.
40,000+ people die in car accidents every year. Thousands are killed in floods every few years. Millions die every year from famine.
Death, and to a lesser extent, death from natural disasters, is pretty common. A lot of death from a natural disaster is less newsworthy than a little death from a terrorist attack.
There's also an information problem - it was a lot easier to get information out of new york on 9/11 than it is to get information out of a devastated remote area in Thailand.
paintball
It's never funny when anybody dies. Period.
WWI: 16-18 million.
WWII: 40 million.
On a single day in the American Civil War, approximately 30,000 men were killed.
Feel free to dispute those figures, they vary from source to source. You'll not escape the orders of magnitude.
That's what war is like in the age of modern machinery. 9/11 was murder, not war.
...or make poor tsunami jokes when there were no pictures that showed the magnitude of the tragedy.
Seeing the BBC report that showed the young coupld silently carrying their two dead children and seeing the picture of the beach covered with debris -- and then realizing the "debris" consisted of human bodies -- brings the point home that real humans suffered a real tragedy halfway across the world.
Damn, I'm getting tears in my eyes just remembering those pictures.
Because if God overrules free will, even once, he's made the entire thing meaningless. If he, even once, says "Hey, humans, I'll save you from the consequences of your collective choices", he's just made free will meaningless, because its no longer free - its free 'to a point'. By giving us free will, God inherently relinquishes both his right and his duty to overrule our actions.
Trying to make a valid philosophical argument by comparing police to God is bunk, man. The police aren't omnipotent, omniscient, and they aren't the ones who have the ability to decide whether or not we get free will. Of course, anyone who stands by is partly culpable. However, if God intervenes, he destroys the idea of free will. The only way to maintain free will is to stay out of it; as such, by rigorously asserting free will, God becomes non-culpable - he has, in essence, said "I will not interfere, because the consequence of interfering once is to mean that I must take responsibility for all of your actions that I allow to occur." It is, in an odd sort of way, similar to the search engine DMCA exemption - software that indexes material is legal and non-culpable, even if it indexes illegal material, except if it ever filters out some undesirable material on basis of copyright or legality, at which point it immediately becomes culpable for all such infringing material found on the service.
This is just one more reason why God is a bunch of crap. Study the origin of ethics and look into hard vs. soft command, and you'll begin to come towards my point of view, which is that ethics in and of themselves point to the non-existence of God via contradiction.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
After seeing this I feel physically revolted.
Every one of those people could well be someone's brother or sister, or parent....or child....
What about the money US privite companies are giving? Goverment is not the only way to send aid! I will put the $$ given by US citizins and companies vs any company....
Sure, but to think that the death, suffering, and later, disease won't be worse than it needs to be due to the lack of generosity of the rich countries would be naïve.
How is planning and crashing a few planes into buildings any more morally reprehensible than the millions who've died of easily- and cheaply-preventable diseases and famine due to the negative effects of planned and exploitative capitalism?
Well we Guatemalans were REAL happy when the CIA strafed our capital with fighter jet and "liberated us from democracy" durring that charming coup they put togeter. This plunged our country into 30 years of civil war and military dictatorship. Next time we'd apreciate it if you could keep your freedom and democracy and just send us the medicine.
1) USGS knew there was an earthquake, but not a tsunami. Plus they *did* make the calls to the appropriate people specified in their operations plan.
2) Had you called a hotel with such a warning they would have called you a kook (or whatever the word for kook is in the various languages) and hung up.
3) Even had it worked, way to go you just saved all the tourists lives but the natives would have still suffered horribly as most of the areas hit were not tourist attractions. I life saced is a life saved and is a noble achievement - but we still would have seen 100K+ dead.
The problem pertaining to the populace not being warned was that the countries hit decieded it was not cost effective to put a warning system in place. Strangely, I have read that such a system can make things worse as people rush to the shore when a warning is sounded to watch the incoming wave.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
that poverty prevented people from:
Building numerous and sturdy roads.
Collecting to form an effective local government to help them prioratize projects and pool reasources.
Hell, I guess God must have magic'd the West industrialized. Because if you've always got to remain poor if you start poor, and by our standards hunter-gatherers are poor, no one can become wealthy without divine intervention.
Maybe it's the handouts that hurt. Maybe it's the poor infrastucture despite continuous habitation by humans for millenia. Maybe it's governments that while democratic, are generally concerned with the perpetuation of oppression of segments of their populations. Maybe their populations are still hobbled by deeply ingrained xenophobia that prevents a strong and deeply rooted national identity. Maybe institutionalized corruption is a massive drag on their government preventing a judicious use of resources. Maybe an over-reliance on handouts, whether from a country across a sea, or a magic guy in the sky, encourage an ask first - do later mentality.
There are a lot of reasons why this was as catastrophic as it was. "Because I bought my Nikes on sale" was at the bottom of the list below "Jesus hates poor children."
Here's a good rule of thumb for you. Where there is serfdom, there is fuedalism. It's that archaic system of familial alliances and bribes, combined with rampant xenophobia and a deep belief in magic that's causing the pain. By helping only after the fact, we practically insure each disaster will be catastrophic, saving just enough people to make the next one a great deal worse.
Good roads, good education, good communications, a good quality of life, and a stable effective local government are what is needed to help save people when there is this kind of devestating event. It's not something that rich nations can just gift unto them. It's something they have to want, believe in, and provide for themselves. It's made up of them. It says something that Japan and Korea each made the switch in decades, and much of the region in question is into their second century of effort.
And if it weren't for capitalism there wouldn't be surplus food or medical supplies to send them. If our economies were like their economies we'd be in a perpetual shortage ourselves.
But apparently that video was shot in a place where the tsunami wave wasn't that severe. According to this MSNBC article, entire towns were completely wiped out in some parts of Indonesia. An Indonesian ambassador says that the death toll in just one Indonesian province could exceed 400,000.
That's just.... unbelievable. This is probably going to be the biggest natural disaster in human history.
It's sad that this type of inward looking nationalistic thinking is the norm these days. When will people realize that we are responsible for all of humanity? Does no one teach social responsability anymore? Let me let you in to a little secret here. The rest of the world *is* under an obligation to help SE Asia. Under a *big* obligation. Why? Because of international treaties? Nope. Because of legislation, or UN decisions? Nope. As humans, we are morally responsable for the welfare and well-being of the rest of the world.
An American life is worth more that Sri Lankian life or any other life in the eyes of the US Government and Media.
Or one-fifth of a Saddam.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
You know, a person who looks at a catastrophy like this and says "hey, here's an opportunity to play politics" probably needs to rethink their lifestyle.
Yes, kids, the USA, bastion of freedom and a shining light of christianity in a world of darkness, is only 1/5 as bad as Saddam Hussein was! Gotta love it when Bushtards hang themselves with their own moral failures.
And Saddam took 15-20 years, where we've only had 2 so far. Give it time.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Hard to imagine that too many people living in tin-roofed cardboard shacks, and worrying about where their next meals is going to come from, are going to have property insurance. Now I understand why they are teaching critical thinking in public schools.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Shhh, hush now. You're spoiling it.
When asked "how many died in Vietnam war", nine out of ten Americans give the ballpark of "60,000". The two, perhaps three million Vietnamese deaths don't simply register.
Of course the USA still refuses to accept responsibility for the continuing tragedy caused by the massive Agent Orange contamination that is still killing and causing birth defects among the Vietnamese population.
More recently the US and UK war machines have scattered hundreds of tons of toxic and carcinogenic depleted uranium (used in hardening projectile shells) across Iraq. Does anyone think these two countries will ever take responsibility of the devastating consequenses affecting the current and future generations of Iraqi civilians?
While I can reason the deaths and injuries caused by the Indian Ocean Tsunami to be part of the cost of our existance on a living planet (I say this knowing that close friends of mine lost many friends and relatives, and my own relatives holidaying in Thailand only barely escaped death thanks to help by quick thinking locals), I find no good excuses for sending massive war machines to foreign countries to kill massive numbers of locals and to poison their lands for generations to come.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
I'm not a huge fan of Bush by any stretch of the imagination (I voted against him in November), but I can't fault the US government's behavior so far. They authorized a small amount of money to begin with, to help with the most urgent needs (sending food, clearing bodies, and so forth), and over the next few weeks and months will continue to increase the commitment as the specific needs of the countries who have been hurt are ascertained.
The world rallied around the US after 9/11, irrespective of past tensions and difficulties, and I don't think anyone here has forgotten that. We'll do everything within our power to help rebuild those countries devastated by the tsunami, just give us time to get through the bureaucracy, and to make sure our money is going to the right place (someone earlier posted about how in India, so many donations of clothing have been recieved that there are piles of stuff no one wants to wear just lying around. Imagine if the US sent over $100 MILLION of unnecessary clothing).
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
As a Christian Libertarian... I half agree with you and halfway don't.
My faith says that yes, we should help our brother in time of need, however my political philosophy says the government shouldn't be the ones to do it.
Legally, internationally, politically we are under NO obligation or responsibility to do such - nor should we be. However since we do have an abundence of wealth, I don't see a problem with the government having am emergency aid fund, or even low interest loans for foreign countries in times of crisis. But this should be used rarely and saved for large scale disasters such as this.
I don't think that the US Gov should dispense money to anyone out there who has a papercut however. The country shouldn't be overly philantropic.
As a Christian, yes I feel obligated to help anyone who needs help when they do - it is just the right thing to do. I would rather give my money to a private fund that I know, respect, and trust to properly distribute my donations. The government is usually the LAST place to trust in terms of spreading goodwill.
Libertas in infinitum
AFTER being chastized by the world, AFTER it became known that Bush's 2nd inaugural party was going to cost $40 million (yes, 2nd party). Raising the amount isn't being done out of true charity for the hundreds of thousands of people who died or for the millions who lost everything, it's being done as damage control. That's whats so sad about it.
Nicely said. But I still contend that our priorities are seriously out of whack when we spend $40 million for a elitist party and pledge (initially) $15 million in aid for what can only be one of the worst disasters ever.
I voted for the W both times. He's been pulling some big boners of late though.
Here, there can be no such reckoning- the size of a listing of the names alone would be staggering. The true character of this disaster lies in the anonymous dead- the people who have not been identified, who will never be identified because everyone they knew and love were killed alongside them. There is no way to convey the true nature of this horror other than to show it, especially to people who have never seen death so shockingly stark. Anything less is abiguity. A mass grave covered over is nothing but a field of turned earth, spilled blood no more than a dark stain.
The pictures I have seen in the papers have been of debris, no more compelling than the debris left by an atlantic hurricane. Only images like this can show the true loss.
Does this mean they should be broadcast carelessly? Emphatically no. Some people, such as children, should be sheltered from things like this, lacking the abiliity to understand anything like this with the experience they have gained thus far. The pictures, however, need to be taken. Records must be made. People need to be given the oppourtunity to see for themselves, otherwise we run the risk of recording tragedy in souless numbers, and remembering nothing.
Oh please, you're comparing apples and automobiles man, not even in the same class. You losing your posh home (by the standards of these people) and car is nothing compared to dying a miserable death from malaria, dysentery or starvation, or lack of potable water.
Not. Even. Fucking. Comparable.
Once again, the rush to post by the Slashdot community has revealed that geeks can be just as irrational as others.
The images presented here are nearly useless for before/after analysis. Here are some of the things that are necessary for proper analysis:
(1) Images for comparison should be taken with the sun in approximately the same position. Changes in shadow and illumination can exaggerate or obscure local effects. A brightly reflecting roof in the before image can appear so dark in the after image that is looks like the building has been destroyed. This is the case in many of these image sets, since they have been obtained up to twelve hours apart. Compare the shadows to see this effect.
(2) Ideally, satellite images for comparison shall be obtained from approximately the same angle. Many of these are not, with the result that walls exposed by the lower angle of the before image and shining brightly in the sun appear to be missing entirely in the after image. In fact, they are missing, but not because of destruction; these walls are simply covered by roof overhangs. Their absence does make the difference between before and after seem more extreme, however.
(3) Satellite images for comparison should ideally be cropped identically. These images are cropped in such a way that a casual comparison between them would suggest that entire coastal areas have been inundated when, in fact, they are not. In most cases, the coastlines remain, but because of the cropping it looks like they are under water.
(4) Georeferencing is not essential, but it is highly desireable. The absence of latitute, longitude or scale markers on these images makes them unfit for serious analysis. At the very least, Slashdotters should perform their own georeferencing with a GIS program before commenting, lest they be mislead.
Naturally, no one will read this post since it was the result of sober reflection rather than a foaming, irrational outburst written within minutes of the appearance of the article.
They look nice. I didn't credit "my work" because I did it in two minutes, hence the mis-alignment. Also, would I be allowed to credit modified versions of these images without permission from the copyright holder? Or are the original images public domain?
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Privacy has nothing to do with it. CNN, CBS, FoxNews would film their own mothers being raped if it meant better ratings.
They're afraid of press-corps blacklisting by the Whitehouse, for circumventing 'unofficial' policy.
I am of the believe that the truth can only make you stronger. As horrific as it is for me to sit looking at this picture, I still cannot imagine how painful and terrible it would be to experience this in person.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"