Disorderly conduct charges would actually be the most appropriate response, IMO.
A teenager went overboard. Way overboard. We don't want the FBI involved, but what was done here does sound like it crossed the line into the range of crying "FIRE" in a crowded theatre, or of going into the opponent's stands at a football game and repeatedly disparaging their star player and refusing to leave.
I think "subjection" might be more reflective of the point of view you are expressing.
At least until humans can advance to the point that sexual identity is not nearly universely considered a close equivalent of identity in most social situations.
Isn't donating to something like this always going to be something of a gamble?
Yeah, they're going to lose for a while.
Hopefully, not too many casual donors will be upset that their investment in the future (as opposed to in stocks, bonds, etc.) doesn't turn into a fountain of gold for one and all by tomorrow afternoon.
(If you want an investment in something I can guarantee will give you 10x profit tomorrow, I have some money market stuff and bundled loans for you.)
This isn't an investment, it's a donation, non-profit encouragement for a horse that no one wants to let into the race.
Specifics, please. Instructions, what they should do and don't, or what instructions are missing and why they are required in a non-broken implementation. Etc.
Otherwise, how am I to know that you aren't just another x86 inboi mad because there is another potential competitor?
Username? taken/not taken, and I assume they pre-registered the 1 and two character names? Reasonable.
e-mail address? Hmm. Takes a@b.c, so that's all good. (I'll send them an apology later.)
First name, last name? Ai I is not valid. Yu Li is not valid. Woops. Numbers not valid. Eeeeeeh, well, no, that's a woops, too. Three letters and up on the "real" names are valid. Not good, but proceeding to next screen.
Position. (They need this?) Acronyms must be at least two letters, apparently. Not a huge woops, but not really useful. City name must be three or more letters. Woops. State can be empty, but at least three letters if not empty. That's not wise, either. Country is from a list. erk. Position, city, and country all required. Woops. They seem to be collecting personal information for some reason.
Job status not required. That's sensible.
Projects. Source forge projects not accepted, but empty is okay. OK. Where did I hear about this? social networks has facebook but no slashdot. Click other and you get a page to itself to type in the other. "/." is not valid, but it takes it anyway.
Dev experience, all hardware. Not entirely unreasonable, but definitely missing a bet. (Drivers?) Blank seems to be okay. But then it goes to vendor and tools and went let me proceed until I type something. Type "erk" in each and proceed.
Additional info -- other expertise areas.
Something is missing. Okay, I fixed the e-mail address to one that I own. Nope, still something missing.
Okay, with that many errors in the sign-up process, I'll attribute the sign-up requirements to poorly de-bugged policy instead of maliciousness, at least until I find junk-mail that I can trace to them in my in box.
Conclusion, trying to be free but not really knowing how.
I mean, sure, we have MIPS and ARM that are close to open and free (and some others), and SPARC is almost close to open and free. And there seems to be some sort of camp that thinks x86 is teh language of teh gods.
But what's wrong with a cpu design that is open from the bottom up?
(I mean, I guess it's open, they mention the GPL all over, but I have to log in to look at the design. I should go register and log in, if I can, to see if the design is worthwhile. I note they talk about the harvard split extending to the MMU and cache systems, which ought to be a good thing, but I don't notice such care taken towards the stack, which is something I'd like to see, but, then again, I know some well-knonw people have thought that was a blind alley. Guess I'll go see if I can get a login id.)
That would be a great pre-emptory move to prevent the next round of negotiations between the record label and the electronics company on the use of the trademark.
Maybe. On the other hand, it could induce some serious internal squabbling about artistic expression.
There were and are a whole lot of people guessing. That's a big part of the problem here, too many people guessing based on not enough information.
Yeah, other people were worried about cracks and leaks. However, most of the worriers were also screaming about how this was going to be worse than Chernobyl, a comparison that only gets in the way.
You do understand why that comparison just gets in the way?
Get your professor to get you in contact with someone who can talk to the people in charge up there, to see if they could use your software, or to see if they could let you go up to take samples and analyze it.
Those guys are busy, of course, so it may take a while to get a moment with someone who can make that kind of decision, but it may be worth the effort if it can help them shorten their analysis turn-around time.
Remember, though, that if they let you go in, you're likely to need to carry a backpack with extra food and clothes and maybe even sleeping bag and tent. And you'll need to pack your tools in, as much as possible. They need all the supplies they can get, so people who go in to help need to be as prepared to take care of themselves.
Oh, good hiking boots, too, because there will be a lot of places you won't be able to get a car or bicycle through, and the trains probably aren't going to be able to take you all the way in.
Part of the problem was multiple sources of information. A lot of that information was coming from people who knew abou things that could go wrong, and were willing to guess about, what was happening before we had enough facts to know which of the scenarios were close to what was really happening in there.
And, as far as wild optimism goes, a lot of the "facts" circulating were (and are still) "wildly" pessimistic. Doomsday scenarios that seem to assume these reactors were the same type as the one at Chernobyl, and tirades about management that seem to assume that the same extremism is inducing coverups. Sometimes it's fallen walls and such keeping you from getting to information, not incompetent management.
They put some temporary measures in place on agricultural products that were a wee bit early. Because of the leak, some of those measures will end up being necessary. Later.
The leak was theoretical. Now it is known to be real. But it still isn't poisoning the entire food chain for the whole hemisphere like certain alarmists are saying.
The radiation level in the ocean is going to be a local problem, and they are struggling to fix it and keep it as local as possible.
They need more radiation hardened robots capable of working submersed. You have any of those? Or concrete that hardens in moving water tainted with radioactive acid? And they need tracers to find other possible leaks, but I think they have those.
For what it's worth, and maybe you were aware of it already, but I was talking to a guy at church yesterday who is a member of the Japanese SDF, but was not one of those who went up to the Tohoko area to help out.
We were talking about how, if I wanted to go up to help, I'd have to pack in and pack out like a scout going on a long-term campout. Bedding, tent, clothes, food, being ready to hike from the nearest operating train station to wherever you're going to try to help. Plans and contacts, if you expect to be able to do any good.
The SDF here sent more than half their staff, and the rest want to go, but somebody has to stay behind to mind the base. It looks like it will be a month or so before they can start scheduling shifts in and out, because of the time it takes to figure out where to help and how once you get in there. Also, manpower seems to be less of a problem than supplies and logistics for the time being.
They do have need of certain kinds of specialists. If you were one of those, that would be especialy frustrating to have your flight cancelled.
If you get up there and need help with the Japanese, I can try to help by e-mail.
Sorry, but that is not reality. We wish it were so, the movies we see tell is it's that way, but the real world is different.
That's what bugs me about...
Well, let me tell you what my wife pointed out to me in the newspaper yesterday.
There are breakwaters and bulkheads in the ocean around most of Japan, specifically to take the force out of tsunami. Some are relatively small, giant toy jacks one or two meters across. Others are huge blocks, in the range of ten meters tall.
If you're thinking of an American football gridiron, you're thinking ten long paces is not so big, but stand that on end and it's about three and a half stories up.
So we have areas with these ten meter breakwater blocks sunk under the surface and lined up in dashed walls, to slow tsunami down. This tsunami bowled a bunch of those walls over. Does that give you a picture of the scale of things yet?
There are several towns that have been practically wiped off the face of the earth. I'm not sure how it turned out, but there were some towns that lost their town halls and the buildings with the backup records and enough of the people that they were/are worried whether they would even even know who was missing. That's part of the reason they have more than a thousand bodies that they can't identify.
The generators they needed were too heavy to lift in by the helicopters that were available. They eventually got the right generators in, but they had to find the equipment to move them with. If you're looking for heavy equipment after a quake like that, you're looking at unburying cranes and stuff from the wreckage, cleaning it up, inspecting it, and standing it back up before you can use it, or at having it trucked in from a hundred kilometers away, over roads that, in the damaged zones, are blocked by landslides (mountainslides), holes, and in some cases fault seams ripped a meter or more wide/deep into the earth.
Does that help you understand what is going on here? the logistics of what you're demanding that management must be able to have done?
About the only thing that they could have done ten years ago to start preparing for this kind of tsunami would have been to have started rebuilding and de-comissioning the reactors, using designs that the anti-nuclear lobby has been adamant in preventing them from testing. Or tell everyone to move out of Tokyo and de-commisioning the reactors without replacing them. (And what do they do for power where they move?)
Actually, moving people out of Tokyo is a great idea, but if you think moving trucks over broken roads is hard, try getting bosses of IT start-ups who are desparate for customers to leave the best market they know of. This kind of politicis is intractable, without some sort of evidence. Well, we have the evidence now, and it's still not going to happen in just a few months. And there's going to be a lot of what will just be shifting the problem, companies moving to Osaka or Kyoto or other population centers instead of realizing that they can telecommute from places like the middle of Tottori or Awaji Island.
Woops. What's going to happen to Awaji if we have a tsunami of this scale hit this area?
Actually, they do have a lot of the processes going to get people and companies to move out of Tokyo, and they do have a lot of the processes going to change over to so-called renewable sources of energy, but it takes time, and they have to keep fighting with social and economic pressures from companies that are being squeezed by the economy and trying desparately to make enough money to make payroll.
I'm not even scratching the surface of the problems that you want management to solve with a snap of their fingers.
We suppose that God could do that, but even God apparently does not. Usually. (Or you could say that this tsunami was God trying to get us to get a move on it, if you are inclined to think that way.)
So, do you still think it's worth making yourself angry about all this?
I think there are better ways to help solve the problems.
Fix the management issues how? You are volunteering?
Do you want to see another disaster? One that could have been avoided with the appropriate management decisions? (... we can always say in hindsight.) One that is leaving behind a huge mess to clean up? That has also caused evacuations and has taken lives?
A little explanation. Check the links at the bottom of that page for more, because it wasn't just Sendai.
(I assume you will find the Japanese no problem to read?)
Oh. And if you are having a hard time finding the latest information on the nuclear power plants, look here. The IAEA also has some information, although you might find it rather cryptic.
It's easy to go around telling everyone what should have been done after the fact, pointing out which experts should have been listened to and which should have been ignored. But do you have a good idea, now, what should be done? Do you really think you could have done things any better than they were? Is coal or diesel better fuel for generating electricity?
Should everyone just quit using electricity entirely?
I'll cut you a little slack if you've been trucking relief supplies or helping sift through the mud and the wreckage for bodies all day and need to blow off some steam.
Otherwise, go find yourself something useful to do.
And if you insist on knowing facts, go back and check the latest articles from your sources. If translation is so not-a-problem, then read them in the Japanese like I do. Asahi News, Yomiuri, Nikkei, Sankei, Mainichi. (Watch out for the Japanese equivalent of the yellow press, the "sports news".)
I lived through the Kobe earthquake. I was out on the edge, and I had to work, no time to go in to try to help clean up. I know how long the cleanup took, I know about the traffic getting in and out, I know about railroads that had to be cleaned up and inspected, I know about whole city blocks that were flattened, if not by the quake, then by the fires that came later. My wife and I were going to meet in Sannomiya that morning, and by the time we had planned to meet, the (huge) department store we had planned to meet at was rubble on the ground. All five stories of it, and most of the block it was on and the blocks around it.
The quake up north was two orders of magnitude worse and followed by tsunami. We were spared the tsunami down here. But it was still two weeks before people could even begin to move in and out of Kobe and several other cities around here. A trip that normally takes less than an hour by car during those two week took at least seven hours, even for emergency and relief vehicles.
You can be disgusted with it all if you want to.
Perhaps I'm feeling guilty because I have the time, but I don't have the train fare to get up there to help this time. Maybe that's why I'm willing to cut the TEPCO employees and management some slack. But they are working in very difficult conditions.
I have a suggestion. If you want so much to help out, call your old lab up and see if they can arrange a shipment of dosimeters, which you can volunteer to pay for. I can guarantee they'll need them, if you can figure out a way to get them there.
Remember that they may not have staff and time to get the English translation perfect, also.
Have you ever been through even a 7+ earthquake? Do you understand that a fifteen meter tsunami is not just a five-plus story wave that crashes down and then rolls back? Can you consider the incredibly non-ideal conditions these guys are working under before you decide you have to find fault and start arm-chair quartierbacking?
(Hmm. What would an arm-chair quarterback be in rugby or soccer terms?)
Facts? How on earth are they supposed to release facts they don't have?
Why don't they have the facts? Well, the facts after an earthquake and tsunami like that tend to get buried under a lot of rubble. It takes time to dig them out, like it takes time to dig up extra dosimeters from a diferent location or check the ones that you can find to be sure they work, and so on. Tools that have to be cleaned up and fixed before you can use them, if at all. Roads that can't be travelled, or if they can be travelled, having to share them with bumper-to-bumper traffic of other people on important business trying to get supplies in and hurt people out, and it does't end at midnight or even at sunrise.
I don't think the gainsayers have any idea of the scale of what happened up there, and I'd appreciate it if you guys who have never lived through a 7+ earthquake would just shut up and get out of the way if you can't help.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. This is one of the reasons we should turn our backs on the people who want to sell us tech like Facebook.
Disorderly conduct charges would actually be the most appropriate response, IMO.
A teenager went overboard. Way overboard. We don't want the FBI involved, but what was done here does sound like it crossed the line into the range of crying "FIRE" in a crowded theatre, or of going into the opponent's stands at a football game and repeatedly disparaging their star player and refusing to leave.
I think "subjection" might be more reflective of the point of view you are expressing.
At least until humans can advance to the point that sexual identity is not nearly universely considered a close equivalent of identity in most social situations.
Isn't donating to something like this always going to be something of a gamble?
Yeah, they're going to lose for a while.
Hopefully, not too many casual donors will be upset that their investment in the future (as opposed to in stocks, bonds, etc.) doesn't turn into a fountain of gold for one and all by tomorrow afternoon.
(If you want an investment in something I can guarantee will give you 10x profit tomorrow, I have some money market stuff and bundled loans for you.)
This isn't an investment, it's a donation, non-profit encouragement for a horse that no one wants to let into the race.
Did you check wikipedia, or are you just saying that the chips that have been put together so far don't count for some reason?
(There have been some non-FPGA, unless I'm mis-reading something.)
Specifics, please. Instructions, what they should do and don't, or what instructions are missing and why they are required in a non-broken implementation. Etc.
Otherwise, how am I to know that you aren't just another x86 inboi mad because there is another potential competitor?
Hmm. Verifiers on all fields.
Username? taken/not taken, and I assume they pre-registered the 1 and two character names? Reasonable.
e-mail address? Hmm. Takes a@b.c, so that's all good. (I'll send them an apology later.)
First name, last name? Ai I is not valid. Yu Li is not valid. Woops.
Numbers not valid. Eeeeeeh, well, no, that's a woops, too.
Three letters and up on the "real" names are valid. Not good, but proceeding to next screen.
Position. (They need this?) Acronyms must be at least two letters, apparently. Not a huge woops, but not really useful.
City name must be three or more letters. Woops. State can be empty, but at least three letters if not empty. That's not wise, either.
Country is from a list. erk.
Position, city, and country all required. Woops. They seem to be collecting personal information for some reason.
Job status not required. That's sensible.
Projects. Source forge projects not accepted, but empty is okay. OK.
Where did I hear about this? social networks has facebook but no slashdot.
Click other and you get a page to itself to type in the other. "/." is not valid, but it takes it anyway.
Dev experience, all hardware. Not entirely unreasonable, but definitely missing a bet. (Drivers?)
Blank seems to be okay.
But then it goes to vendor and tools and went let me proceed until I type something.
Type "erk" in each and proceed.
Additional info -- other expertise areas.
Something is missing. Okay, I fixed the e-mail address to one that I own. Nope, still something missing.
Okay, with that many errors in the sign-up process, I'll attribute the sign-up requirements to poorly de-bugged policy instead of maliciousness, at least until I find junk-mail that I can trace to them in my in box.
Conclusion, trying to be free but not really knowing how.
I mean, sure, we have MIPS and ARM that are close to open and free (and some others), and SPARC is almost close to open and free. And there seems to be some sort of camp that thinks x86 is teh language of teh gods.
But what's wrong with a cpu design that is open from the bottom up?
(I mean, I guess it's open, they mention the GPL all over, but I have to log in to look at the design. I should go register and log in, if I can, to see if the design is worthwhile. I note they talk about the harvard split extending to the MMU and cache systems, which ought to be a good thing, but I don't notice such care taken towards the stack, which is something I'd like to see, but, then again, I know some well-knonw people have thought that was a blind alley. Guess I'll go see if I can get a login id.)
I mean, seriously.
This is just another example of the natural human tendency to try to solve problems by throwing money at them.
I think I'd rather see a different course tried.
Hmm. Apple could own EMI (which I understand is the parent company of the company that at least distributes Apple label.).
Sony owns Sony.
Google could buy Warner.
Who is left for Microsoft and Oracle to buy?
Sounds like some real fun in the works.
That would be a great pre-emptory move to prevent the next round of negotiations between the record label and the electronics company on the use of the trademark.
Maybe. On the other hand, it could induce some serious internal squabbling about artistic expression.
Neither busting them up through the courts nor buying them out is going to solve the underlying problems.
Everything I've seen so far from their foundations looks to be both self-serving and more likely to contribute to the real problems.
One thing we have got to quit doing is trying to just throw money at every problem.
(Giving time always works better.)
Google sites is half-way there.
Let the new acts promote themselves on Google's infrastructure.
There were and are a whole lot of people guessing. That's a big part of the problem here, too many people guessing based on not enough information.
Yeah, other people were worried about cracks and leaks. However, most of the worriers were also screaming about how this was going to be worse than Chernobyl, a comparison that only gets in the way.
You do understand why that comparison just gets in the way?
Get your professor to get you in contact with someone who can talk to the people in charge up there, to see if they could use your software, or to see if they could let you go up to take samples and analyze it.
Those guys are busy, of course, so it may take a while to get a moment with someone who can make that kind of decision, but it may be worth the effort if it can help them shorten their analysis turn-around time.
Remember, though, that if they let you go in, you're likely to need to carry a backpack with extra food and clothes and maybe even sleeping bag and tent. And you'll need to pack your tools in, as much as possible. They need all the supplies they can get, so people who go in to help need to be as prepared to take care of themselves.
Oh, good hiking boots, too, because there will be a lot of places you won't be able to get a car or bicycle through, and the trains probably aren't going to be able to take you all the way in.
Part of the problem was multiple sources of information. A lot of that information was coming from people who knew abou things that could go wrong, and were willing to guess about, what was happening before we had enough facts to know which of the scenarios were close to what was really happening in there.
And, as far as wild optimism goes, a lot of the "facts" circulating were (and are still) "wildly" pessimistic. Doomsday scenarios that seem to assume these reactors were the same type as the one at Chernobyl, and tirades about management that seem to assume that the same extremism is inducing coverups. Sometimes it's fallen walls and such keeping you from getting to information, not incompetent management.
They put some temporary measures in place on agricultural products that were a wee bit early. Because of the leak, some of those measures will end up being necessary. Later.
The leak was theoretical. Now it is known to be real. But it still isn't poisoning the entire food chain for the whole hemisphere like certain alarmists are saying.
The radiation level in the ocean is going to be a local problem, and they are struggling to fix it and keep it as local as possible.
They need more radiation hardened robots capable of working submersed. You have any of those? Or concrete that hardens in moving water tainted with radioactive acid? And they need tracers to find other possible leaks, but I think they have those.
For what it's worth, and maybe you were aware of it already, but I was talking to a guy at church yesterday who is a member of the Japanese SDF, but was not one of those who went up to the Tohoko area to help out.
We were talking about how, if I wanted to go up to help, I'd have to pack in and pack out like a scout going on a long-term campout. Bedding, tent, clothes, food, being ready to hike from the nearest operating train station to wherever you're going to try to help. Plans and contacts, if you expect to be able to do any good.
The SDF here sent more than half their staff, and the rest want to go, but somebody has to stay behind to mind the base. It looks like it will be a month or so before they can start scheduling shifts in and out, because of the time it takes to figure out where to help and how once you get in there. Also, manpower seems to be less of a problem than supplies and logistics for the time being.
They do have need of certain kinds of specialists. If you were one of those, that would be especialy frustrating to have your flight cancelled.
If you get up there and need help with the Japanese, I can try to help by e-mail.
Sorry, but that is not reality. We wish it were so, the movies we see tell is it's that way, but the real world is different.
That's what bugs me about ...
Well, let me tell you what my wife pointed out to me in the newspaper yesterday.
There are breakwaters and bulkheads in the ocean around most of Japan, specifically to take the force out of tsunami. Some are relatively small, giant toy jacks one or two meters across. Others are huge blocks, in the range of ten meters tall.
If you're thinking of an American football gridiron, you're thinking ten long paces is not so big, but stand that on end and it's about three and a half stories up.
So we have areas with these ten meter breakwater blocks sunk under the surface and lined up in dashed walls, to slow tsunami down. This tsunami bowled a bunch of those walls over. Does that give you a picture of the scale of things yet?
There are several towns that have been practically wiped off the face of the earth. I'm not sure how it turned out, but there were some towns that lost their town halls and the buildings with the backup records and enough of the people that they were/are worried whether they would even even know who was missing. That's part of the reason they have more than a thousand bodies that they can't identify.
The generators they needed were too heavy to lift in by the helicopters that were available. They eventually got the right generators in, but they had to find the equipment to move them with. If you're looking for heavy equipment after a quake like that, you're looking at unburying cranes and stuff from the wreckage, cleaning it up, inspecting it, and standing it back up before you can use it, or at having it trucked in from a hundred kilometers away, over roads that, in the damaged zones, are blocked by landslides (mountainslides), holes, and in some cases fault seams ripped a meter or more wide/deep into the earth.
Does that help you understand what is going on here? the logistics of what you're demanding that management must be able to have done?
About the only thing that they could have done ten years ago to start preparing for this kind of tsunami would have been to have started rebuilding and de-comissioning the reactors, using designs that the anti-nuclear lobby has been adamant in preventing them from testing. Or tell everyone to move out of Tokyo and de-commisioning the reactors without replacing them. (And what do they do for power where they move?)
Actually, moving people out of Tokyo is a great idea, but if you think moving trucks over broken roads is hard, try getting bosses of IT start-ups who are desparate for customers to leave the best market they know of. This kind of politicis is intractable, without some sort of evidence. Well, we have the evidence now, and it's still not going to happen in just a few months. And there's going to be a lot of what will just be shifting the problem, companies moving to Osaka or Kyoto or other population centers instead of realizing that they can telecommute from places like the middle of Tottori or Awaji Island.
Woops. What's going to happen to Awaji if we have a tsunami of this scale hit this area?
Actually, they do have a lot of the processes going to get people and companies to move out of Tokyo, and they do have a lot of the processes going to change over to so-called renewable sources of energy, but it takes time, and they have to keep fighting with social and economic pressures from companies that are being squeezed by the economy and trying desparately to make enough money to make payroll.
I'm not even scratching the surface of the problems that you want management to solve with a snap of their fingers.
We suppose that God could do that, but even God apparently does not. Usually. (Or you could say that this tsunami was God trying to get us to get a move on it, if you are inclined to think that way.)
So, do you still think it's worth making yourself angry about all this?
I think there are better ways to help solve the problems.
Fix the management issues how? You are volunteering?
Do you want to see another disaster? One that could have been avoided with the appropriate management decisions? (... we can always say in hindsight.) One that is leaving behind a huge mess to clean up? That has also caused evacuations and has taken lives?
Here.
A little explanation. Check the links at the bottom of that page for more, because it wasn't just Sendai.
(I assume you will find the Japanese no problem to read?)
Oh. And if you are having a hard time finding the latest information on the nuclear power plants, look here. The IAEA also has some information, although you might find it rather cryptic.
You have lots of sock puppets today?
It's easy to go around telling everyone what should have been done after the fact, pointing out which experts should have been listened to and which should have been ignored. But do you have a good idea, now, what should be done? Do you really think you could have done things any better than they were? Is coal or diesel better fuel for generating electricity?
Should everyone just quit using electricity entirely?
I'll cut you a little slack if you've been trucking relief supplies or helping sift through the mud and the wreckage for bodies all day and need to blow off some steam.
Otherwise, go find yourself something useful to do.
And if you insist on knowing facts, go back and check the latest articles from your sources. If translation is so not-a-problem, then read them in the Japanese like I do. Asahi News, Yomiuri, Nikkei, Sankei, Mainichi. (Watch out for the Japanese equivalent of the yellow press, the "sports news".)
You're not asking, but I'll tell you.
I lived through the Kobe earthquake. I was out on the edge, and I had to work, no time to go in to try to help clean up. I know how long the cleanup took, I know about the traffic getting in and out, I know about railroads that had to be cleaned up and inspected, I know about whole city blocks that were flattened, if not by the quake, then by the fires that came later. My wife and I were going to meet in Sannomiya that morning, and by the time we had planned to meet, the (huge) department store we had planned to meet at was rubble on the ground. All five stories of it, and most of the block it was on and the blocks around it.
The quake up north was two orders of magnitude worse and followed by tsunami. We were spared the tsunami down here. But it was still two weeks before people could even begin to move in and out of Kobe and several other cities around here. A trip that normally takes less than an hour by car during those two week took at least seven hours, even for emergency and relief vehicles.
You can be disgusted with it all if you want to.
Perhaps I'm feeling guilty because I have the time, but I don't have the train fare to get up there to help this time. Maybe that's why I'm willing to cut the TEPCO employees and management some slack. But they are working in very difficult conditions.
I have a suggestion. If you want so much to help out, call your old lab up and see if they can arrange a shipment of dosimeters, which you can volunteer to pay for. I can guarantee they'll need them, if you can figure out a way to get them there.
Go back and read the later articles, anyway.
Remember that they may not have staff and time to get the English translation perfect, also.
Have you ever been through even a 7+ earthquake? Do you understand that a fifteen meter tsunami is not just a five-plus story wave that crashes down and then rolls back? Can you consider the incredibly non-ideal conditions these guys are working under before you decide you have to find fault and start arm-chair quartierbacking?
(Hmm. What would an arm-chair quarterback be in rugby or soccer terms?)
Facts? How on earth are they supposed to release facts they don't have?
Why don't they have the facts? Well, the facts after an earthquake and tsunami like that tend to get buried under a lot of rubble. It takes time to dig them out, like it takes time to dig up extra dosimeters from a diferent location or check the ones that you can find to be sure they work, and so on. Tools that have to be cleaned up and fixed before you can use them, if at all. Roads that can't be travelled, or if they can be travelled, having to share them with bumper-to-bumper traffic of other people on important business trying to get supplies in and hurt people out, and it does't end at midnight or even at sunrise.
I don't think the gainsayers have any idea of the scale of what happened up there, and I'd appreciate it if you guys who have never lived through a 7+ earthquake would just shut up and get out of the way if you can't help.