Any movement of mass on (or in) the Earth results in a change in the moment of inertia, and therefore in the location of the Earth's rotation axis and rotation rate.
This is not news, and hasn't been for decades. I recall in the 1970s seeing work that demonstrated a shift of the rotation pole consequent on (IIRC) the 1964 Alaska earthquake.
Both positive failures (Mr Diego, we thing you are Sr Domingo, and here is your execution)
and negative failures (Snr Diego-the-ceramic-salesman, you and your truck of ($excuses$) are welcome, and since you have a US-DEA iris, we'll give you these informers names too. May I swallow?
will happen.
Has your society attempted to understand why one person thinks that they are better than (and more valuable than) AnyRandomclient, who is surveilled.
Oh, obviously time is important. People aren't important, but that is obvious.
Who is best?
Fucked if I know ; what is this "Visual Studio" thing of which you speak? Does it have any competitors that will only allow me to work in one direction, or can I just do my job without caring about what people are going to do with it 3 decades from now. After all, they'll have my source code, won't they? Including my bad jokes and my explicit lack of knowledge derived from the bridge collapse of 2049.
Oh, sorry ; like a doctor, you plan to bury your mistakes.
Small-scale fuckwits.
I don't expect to survive for any significant period, but I'm a geologist and for me "significant" ~= 100000 years.
If I wanted to make a significant impact, I'd be looking at genetically engineering Hom.Sap.
Tip of the hat for working in a reference to Pi day. You and I obviously think in adjacent sectors.
The Boy Scout... sad tale :
cave well known to Uncle Tom Cobbley (and all and all, if you know the "Widdicombe Fayre" song) ;
family including a ScoutMaster with his "ticket" for taking Scouts caving come up for a walk the weekend before a caving club (club President for that year was also UK's Chief Scout ; coincidence) rigs up a mechanised "bosun's chair" to get the general public into the system ;
ScoutMaster (Dad, or Uncle, I can't remember) tells the youngsters (early teens, not sure of the details) to be £!"%^%T$"^£"%%£^^ careful around the hole because it's lethally deep.
Then accounts become a bit confused (understandably)... "watch out for holes in the floor"... "I'll be careful"... explore... tunnel at the side of main drop... explore... candle... splat.
I don't remember the names involved, but it seems to have been a bit of an intra-family clusterfuck with one side of the conversation thinking "he's understood the warning" and the other side thinking "he'd not let me do it if it was really dangerous". Absolutely classic error of understanding (assuming that the reported speech actually happened - memories are fallible, particularly under stress. I'm just watching a TV programme on the Hudson airplane-boat - remarkably clear memories there, but they're bolstered by recording devices.)
We made cold-blooded jokes about it - you do - in the cold hours "on the whistle" as we guided tourists in and out of the hole. It's either "gallows humour" or "foxhole religion" (rockfall from the crowd on surface becomes artillery bombardment 360ft below ; unattended dogs have been observed to splash on impact), but you talk like that. But every one of us has had that horrible feeling as you're walking along what you think will be a reasonably level floor, and your foot just keeps on going down. For 10cm further than you expected.
Poor kid did have time to get through an "Oh Shit", and well into a "Gawd 'elp us" (UK Scouts have to swear some oath to God, so presumably are believers of some sort) before he impacted. Very terminally.
The safety procedures that your Boss drones on and on at you about... apply on a lovely sunny day out walking with your family. Gravity doesn't turn off on nice days.
It takes nearly a minute to fall from this height.And despite what you may have heard,you're likely to stay conscious all the way down.Thoughts like this keep me warm at night.
From 337ft/ 103m? It takes a little over 4 seconds.
Still long enough to get to the end of "Oh Shit!"
(We had to do the relevant calculations for a 360 ft drop and a Boy Scout with a candle a few years ago.)
Again, from my experience I would guess it was the worker himself who was side-stepping the rules. (I hate to sound like I'm blaming the victim, though...)
Can't rule that scenario out from the information available. But you are nonetheless "blaming the victim". Which is an all too common management tactic. But yes, it does happen.
My first full-time employer asked me at interview if I was afraid of heights, because maintenance work high in drilling derricks was a necessary task (it wouldn't have affected my being hired, but they like to know beforehand so they can schedule around it) ; my reply was "I'm a mountaineer and a caver ; working over a 300ft drop is nothing new to me; heights scare seven colours (and three distinct smells) of shit out of me. So, when I work at height, you can bet MY bottom dollar that I am going to be firmly attached at several distinct points, with my swing paths in the event of a fall planned out, my self-rescue plan worked out and my harness in good condition and properly attached." I am paranoid about heights ; I know they are trying to kill me. (And every one of my trainees there got taken up the derrick by me to be shown how to do it properly, and to let them find out if they could do it for their own personal confidence. I only had to "talk down" one of them, with a "confidence rope" on them which I'd secreted inside my toolbag without telling them.)
I can think of several different perfectly plausible failure scenarios
-harness not done up properly (some of them can be damned uncomfortable, or depressingly easy to assemble and adjust wrongly)
-lanyard attached to strong point on tower but the other end attached to a weak point (tool carrier) on the harness
-lanyard strongly attached to harness but attached to something on the tower that broke when the fall happened
-lanyard attached to a strong point on the tower, but strong point was damaged during last launch and hasn't been inspected since. Strong point failed.
-lanyard fails
-harness fails
-person fails (heart attack because of the fall-arrest shock loads)
-fall-arrest system works properly, but IP strangled by tool-bag suspension cord
-And I haven't even got into the hazards of being stuck hanging in a harness for an extended period.
Work at height is hazardous, inherently. Which is why all JRAs (Job Risk Assessments, in my industry's jargon) that involve work at height require an assessment of "can the work at height be eliminated (work platform, scaffolding...)?"
Having said all that, many deaths and injuries resulting from work at height are down to management "fix it, now!" pressure coupled with inadequate training of the IP or inadequate fall-arrest equipment. I'd expect NASA to have well-thought through policies ; whether they're followed in practice... is a different question.
I was at a worksite safety meeting a few weeks ago where the "Safety Officer" made a comment about "rules like this are written in blood". Which is very true. Depressingly true.
Chin straps aren't adequate ; there's new systems coming out (because of people being injured by falling hard-hats, I assume ; possibly equipment damage) with the hard hat attached to the harness by something more robust than a chin strap. Horses for courses.
Also, hard hats are designed to take (your country's details may vary, slightly) to protect the worker from something relatively small dropped from a relatively small height vertically above the IP. But in many, many "fall from height" injuries where fall-protection systems (lanyards etc) have operated, the IP actually receives injury by smacking their head sideways into a structure, with injury to neck, temple, ear, etc, rather than the crown of the head.
Different companies have different regulations, but in general in a fall-protection system, the risks of lateral impact to the head have to be accounted for and controlled. Which rules out simple hard hats in favour of something more like a mountaineer's crash helmet.
I know ; it's picky. But it can make a difference of a person's speech, their life, or in the order of (GBP)£50 for a mountaineering helmet versus (GBP)£10 for a hard hat.
On a scale of peculiarity stretching from "totally normal" to "rather strange", you're decidedly weird.
However, your desire is eminently achievable, and Slashdot is one of the better places to advertise for it. If your meaning of "Laplander" extends to cover people from the boreal parts of Finland, then there's likely to be a fair few qualified readers. And even if they're not exactly what you want, you're well on the way an assistant in just "2 degrees of separation".
You're not a squirrel are you?
Will you travel to the Laplander, or do you want the Laplander to travel to you?
What arrangements do you have in mind to make sure that the Laplander gets away without being charged with murder? (You do imply that you want to die in the process of being emasculated.)
There's a lot of detail to work out on your planned death. But I'm sure there are people here who'd help you elaborate.
a battery system (...) complicates matters (...). Additionally, they're ugly and are not allowed by a lot of HOAs or city ordinances.
While the specifics of American local housing policies (HOAs being one class of these, I guess) are unimportant, as someone who is reluctantly in the market for moving locations I'll have to remember to keep my eyes peeled for such restrictions. I know that the UK is not the "Land of the Free", and that I've never heard of any such restrictions in Britain, but I'll have to make sure to check for this sort of restriction and rule out apartment blocks/ houses/ streets/ districts if they are present.
If you don't smash people (those who promote these rules) in the face with a cricket bat, then they're just not going to learn. It's only once they've learned their lesson that you can move on to breaking their knees for punishment.
I was still using a 5¼ floppy well into the '90s, and recently had to re-build a unit with one, to search some "archived" data (yes, I know, which is why the "archiver" was asking me to help him out of a bind). And 14"/640x480 monitors are still functional, if inconveniently small. It makes good sense to continue using them where they are still appropriate, until they die.
Case in point : the development monkeys recently tested a product release on a 1280x1024 (or thereabouts) screen and passed it for release. On site, we "users" discovered that a critical dialog box was nearly impossible to use on the 640x480 laptop screen used for that server. Lesson : be strict that your testing suite really is run on the minimum specification machine for that system, which will normally not be a machine in the development monkey's office.
Someone would almost certainly get charged with obstruction of justice.
IFF (if and only if) that person is subject to US jurisdiction.
I don't know anything about the degree of distribution of Twitter's network (never used it, and I still don't understand it's purpose), but if a suitably authenticated administrator operating on Twitter's database were to log in to a suitable Twitter server outside tyhe US and delete the data from there, then there's damned-all that the GOTUS can do about it. They can pressurise Twitter-corp to take employment punishments against him (or her), but they're talking about foreign corporations and different country's employment law and are impotent. But fundamentally, there's damned-all they can do about it.
This sort of spat is a strong incentive to US-based "cloud" services to place their administration services outside the US so that there is plausible deniability when the data demands are not complied with.
Unless, of course, the GOTUS actively wants such services to be sited (and taxed) outside the US.
The bastards whose power-mongering has caused the attack will be the first to retreat to the safety they've reserved for themselves.
I've long applied the same sort of logic to the question of where to put high-grade radioactive waste. The engineering problems of managing the waste can be managed, IF and ONLY IF the politicians have incentive to continue paying an appropriate amount of attention to the problem. The only way that could possibly work is if the high-level "dump" is sited under the Palace of Westminster, so that the politicians are the very first people to die of radiation poisoning if they let it leak.
I had an old schoolfriend - moderately bright but completely sociopathic - who now works at the MoD.
Lucky you - you can choose your friends, and you can choose to dump them. One of my stupid bastard close relatives has gone and signed up and is soon due off to fight Bush's War on the Afghanistan front. And even if he comes back in instalments and carrying twenty Taliban scalps, I still won't be able to get away from the fact that the stupid bastard is a relative.
Some sympathy, as my wife appears to have a number of symptoms for these syndromes too. It's not fun. And yes, she needs consistency in her wake-sleep cycle too.
But as someone who has to work irregular and unpredictable 24x7 cover, and often to get by on 3-4 hours of sleep per day in several sessions, my sympathy is limited. Your condition is going to put you at an economic disadvantage unless you find some way to manage it.
If you're that sensitive to the DST shift, then move yourself to whatever cycle you like and stick there. And if that means doing 2 hours of (paying) work at home some times of the year before going to external work, and at other times of the year doing 1 hour of home work before going out to do external work, then just do it.
The cost of SAD lamps with a full spectrum is falling rapidly, and their electrical consumption is negligible. So if it's that much of a problem for you to adhere to the DST system, don't participate in the DST system.
Alternatively, move to a tropical country (if you can stand the heat ; I'll take 50degC+ for pay, but won't pretend it's a pleasure), where seasonal day-length variations are minimal. Or is your condition not bad enough to prompt you to move?
You missed out the multiple major collapses that many cathedrals (and software projects) suffered during construction, the fact that many cathedrals (and software projects) are in a state of near-continuous reconstruction in line with changing fashions in woad-rubbing (OK, that may not be the case in countries that only have a few centuries of cathedral building ; but the time for re-design will come).
Oh, in the early periods when the foundations of many software projects (and cathedrals) were laid down, the theoretical understanding of how to build foundations were severely or totally lacking, resulting in bodged-together lash-up unstable piles of masonry/ code.
But that's just crazy talk. We humans have an impeccable track record in regards to keeping things like this contained. What could possibly go wrong?;-)
Your cynicism is reasonably well-founded.
I would guess it would depend on how they will produce the enzyme(s). If it's going to be created in a lab, then there's probably not much to worry about (at least in regards to it "escaping"). If they are going to engineer a fungus, bacteria, or some other life form to produce it then it has the potential to be a little more problematic if it makes it into the wild.
Yeees, it would have that potential, if you didn't engineer in appropriate restrictions. Such as, designing the system so that it requires available tri-valent molybdenum, in an oxygen-free environment, and temperatures of 45-55degC. Which would make it very difficult for the system to exist without active maintenance.
Additionally, "cellulose" covers a wide range of compounds. So you might engineer the system to require sequential anaerobic processing by one set of bugs (to change the cellulose to one more-standardised feedstock), followed by aerobic processing with different bugs, under different conditions, to yield your fuel.
Your concerns are certainly not groundless, but they are engineerable-out. For example, the death toll on the roads could be massively reduced by making it a capital offence to design or manufacture parts for an IC engine with a power/weight ratio greater than 10 horsepower/tonne. But such an engineering solution might encounter social push-back. Which is where it needs concerned people (I think you volunteered earlier, when you posted) to get involved in the process.
There is a certain degree of irony in the situation, I agree. (laughs out loud)
I'm a bit perplexed about what sort of "coolant" could be needed that might be delivered in significant (i.e., useful) quantities by plane. Which makes me rather dubious that some reporters (or politicians) have got the wrong end of a comment.
IF (and for me, it is an IF) the Japanese have needed to move any equipment or material to the site, then this is a major planning failure. Really major. And it will have international implications, because many other nuclear plants around the world will have similar underlying problems.
But, touching wood, there don't appear to have been significant radiation leakages. (I write as my wife, who was 100km downwind of Chernobyl, is nagging me to go to the bloody gym. The gym is elsewhere in the most naturally radioactive city in this country. Radiation paranoiacs, please take note and STFU.)
Slashdot Mirror
No, seriously. I did.
Any movement of mass on (or in) the Earth results in a change in the moment of inertia, and therefore in the location of the Earth's rotation axis and rotation rate.
This is not news, and hasn't been for decades. I recall in the 1970s seeing work that demonstrated a shift of the rotation pole consequent on (IIRC) the 1964 Alaska earthquake.
Bullshit.
... you dumbfucks!
(Mr Diego, we thing you are Sr Domingo, and here is your execution)
and negative failures
(Snr Diego-the-ceramic-salesman, you and your truck of ($excuses$) are welcome, and since you have a US-DEA iris, we'll give you these informers names too. May I swallow?
will happen.
Has your society attempted to understand why one person thinks that they are better than (and more valuable than) AnyRandomclient, who is surveilled.
Oh, obviously time is important. People aren't important, but that is obvious. Who is best?
[self: GLUG]
Who is valuable ? ... Big question.
--
Marvin (with the pain in all the diodes down the left-hand side).
But my wife still won't believe you.
Will it be more virus-prone than Firefox 1.0 on Windowz X? Possibly, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Fucked if I know ; what is this "Visual Studio" thing of which you speak? Does it have any competitors that will only allow me to work in one direction, or can I just do my job without caring about what people are going to do with it 3 decades from now. After all, they'll have my source code, won't they? Including my bad jokes and my explicit lack of knowledge derived from the bridge collapse of 2049.
Oh, sorry ; like a doctor, you plan to bury your mistakes.
Small-scale fuckwits.
I don't expect to survive for any significant period, but I'm a geologist and for me "significant" ~= 100000 years.
If I wanted to make a significant impact, I'd be looking at genetically engineering Hom.Sap.
Again.
No.
He wants to make files on everyone, citizen or non-citizen, who could potentially pose a threat.
That isn't, of course, restricted to people who visit the United States.
Oh, sorry, have I already included everyone who has been born? Better square-off the database by making allowance for every possible interaction too.
The Boy Scout ... sad tale :
I don't remember the names involved, but it seems to have been a bit of an intra-family clusterfuck with one side of the conversation thinking "he's understood the warning" and the other side thinking "he'd not let me do it if it was really dangerous". Absolutely classic error of understanding (assuming that the reported speech actually happened - memories are fallible, particularly under stress. I'm just watching a TV programme on the Hudson airplane-boat - remarkably clear memories there, but they're bolstered by recording devices.)
We made cold-blooded jokes about it - you do - in the cold hours "on the whistle" as we guided tourists in and out of the hole. It's either "gallows humour" or "foxhole religion" (rockfall from the crowd on surface becomes artillery bombardment 360ft below ; unattended dogs have been observed to splash on impact), but you talk like that. But every one of us has had that horrible feeling as you're walking along what you think will be a reasonably level floor, and your foot just keeps on going down. For 10cm further than you expected.
Poor kid did have time to get through an "Oh Shit", and well into a "Gawd 'elp us" (UK Scouts have to swear some oath to God, so presumably are believers of some sort) before he impacted. Very terminally.
The safety procedures that your Boss drones on and on at you about ... apply on a lovely sunny day out walking with your family. Gravity doesn't turn off on nice days.
From 337ft/ 103m? It takes a little over 4 seconds.
Still long enough to get to the end of "Oh Shit!"
(We had to do the relevant calculations for a 360 ft drop and a Boy Scout with a candle a few years ago.)
Can't rule that scenario out from the information available. But you are nonetheless "blaming the victim". Which is an all too common management tactic. But yes, it does happen.
My first full-time employer asked me at interview if I was afraid of heights, because maintenance work high in drilling derricks was a necessary task (it wouldn't have affected my being hired, but they like to know beforehand so they can schedule around it) ; my reply was "I'm a mountaineer and a caver ; working over a 300ft drop is nothing new to me; heights scare seven colours (and three distinct smells) of shit out of me. So, when I work at height, you can bet MY bottom dollar that I am going to be firmly attached at several distinct points, with my swing paths in the event of a fall planned out, my self-rescue plan worked out and my harness in good condition and properly attached." I am paranoid about heights ; I know they are trying to kill me.
(And every one of my trainees there got taken up the derrick by me to be shown how to do it properly, and to let them find out if they could do it for their own personal confidence. I only had to "talk down" one of them, with a "confidence rope" on them which I'd secreted inside my toolbag without telling them.)
I can think of several different perfectly plausible failure scenarios
Work at height is hazardous, inherently. Which is why all JRAs (Job Risk Assessments, in my industry's jargon) that involve work at height require an assessment of "can the work at height be eliminated (work platform, scaffolding ...)?"
Having said all that, many deaths and injuries resulting from work at height are down to management "fix it, now!" pressure coupled with inadequate training of the IP or inadequate fall-arrest equipment. I'd expect NASA to have well-thought through policies ; whether they're followed in practice ... is a different question.
I was at a worksite safety meeting a few weeks ago where the "Safety Officer" made a comment about "rules like this are written in blood". Which is very true. Depressingly true.
What?
The Russians and Chinese have stopped their manned launch capabilities. And the Indians have stopped working in that direction?
Cite, please.
Also, hard hats are designed to take (your country's details may vary, slightly) to protect the worker from something relatively small dropped from a relatively small height vertically above the IP. But in many, many "fall from height" injuries where fall-protection systems (lanyards etc) have operated, the IP actually receives injury by smacking their head sideways into a structure, with injury to neck, temple, ear, etc, rather than the crown of the head.
Different companies have different regulations, but in general in a fall-protection system, the risks of lateral impact to the head have to be accounted for and controlled. Which rules out simple hard hats in favour of something more like a mountaineer's crash helmet.
I know ; it's picky. But it can make a difference of a person's speech, their life, or in the order of (GBP)£50 for a mountaineering helmet versus (GBP)£10 for a hard hat.
That sounds howlingly funny. In a not very funny manner. Trying to get a copy (legitimately)!
However, your desire is eminently achievable, and Slashdot is one of the better places to advertise for it. If your meaning of "Laplander" extends to cover people from the boreal parts of Finland, then there's likely to be a fair few qualified readers. And even if they're not exactly what you want, you're well on the way an assistant in just "2 degrees of separation".
You're not a squirrel are you?
Will you travel to the Laplander, or do you want the Laplander to travel to you?
What arrangements do you have in mind to make sure that the Laplander gets away without being charged with murder? (You do imply that you want to die in the process of being emasculated.)
There's a lot of detail to work out on your planned death. But I'm sure there are people here who'd help you elaborate.
While the specifics of American local housing policies (HOAs being one class of these, I guess) are unimportant, as someone who is reluctantly in the market for moving locations I'll have to remember to keep my eyes peeled for such restrictions. I know that the UK is not the "Land of the Free", and that I've never heard of any such restrictions in Britain, but I'll have to make sure to check for this sort of restriction and rule out apartment blocks/ houses/ streets/ districts if they are present.
If you don't smash people (those who promote these rules) in the face with a cricket bat, then they're just not going to learn. It's only once they've learned their lesson that you can move on to breaking their knees for punishment.
Impressive. Hat tipped in your direction, Sir.
Case in point : the development monkeys recently tested a product release on a 1280x1024 (or thereabouts) screen and passed it for release. On site, we "users" discovered that a critical dialog box was nearly impossible to use on the 640x480 laptop screen used for that server.
Lesson : be strict that your testing suite really is run on the minimum specification machine for that system, which will normally not be a machine in the development monkey's office.
IFF (if and only if) that person is subject to US jurisdiction.
I don't know anything about the degree of distribution of Twitter's network (never used it, and I still don't understand it's purpose), but if a suitably authenticated administrator operating on Twitter's database were to log in to a suitable Twitter server outside tyhe US and delete the data from there, then there's damned-all that the GOTUS can do about it. They can pressurise Twitter-corp to take employment punishments against him (or her), but they're talking about foreign corporations and different country's employment law and are impotent. But fundamentally, there's damned-all they can do about it.
This sort of spat is a strong incentive to US-based "cloud" services to place their administration services outside the US so that there is plausible deniability when the data demands are not complied with.
Unless, of course, the GOTUS actively wants such services to be sited (and taxed) outside the US.
I've long applied the same sort of logic to the question of where to put high-grade radioactive waste. The engineering problems of managing the waste can be managed, IF and ONLY IF the politicians have incentive to continue paying an appropriate amount of attention to the problem. The only way that could possibly work is if the high-level "dump" is sited under the Palace of Westminster, so that the politicians are the very first people to die of radiation poisoning if they let it leak.
Lucky you - you can choose your friends, and you can choose to dump them. One of my stupid bastard close relatives has gone and signed up and is soon due off to fight Bush's War on the Afghanistan front. And even if he comes back in instalments and carrying twenty Taliban scalps, I still won't be able to get away from the fact that the stupid bastard is a relative.
Some sympathy, as my wife appears to have a number of symptoms for these syndromes too. It's not fun. And yes, she needs consistency in her wake-sleep cycle too.
But as someone who has to work irregular and unpredictable 24x7 cover, and often to get by on 3-4 hours of sleep per day in several sessions, my sympathy is limited. Your condition is going to put you at an economic disadvantage unless you find some way to manage it.
If you're that sensitive to the DST shift, then move yourself to whatever cycle you like and stick there. And if that means doing 2 hours of (paying) work at home some times of the year before going to external work, and at other times of the year doing 1 hour of home work before going out to do external work, then just do it.
The cost of SAD lamps with a full spectrum is falling rapidly, and their electrical consumption is negligible. So if it's that much of a problem for you to adhere to the DST system, don't participate in the DST system.
Alternatively, move to a tropical country (if you can stand the heat ; I'll take 50degC+ for pay, but won't pretend it's a pleasure), where seasonal day-length variations are minimal. Or is your condition not bad enough to prompt you to move?
Oh, in the early periods when the foundations of many software projects (and cathedrals) were laid down, the theoretical understanding of how to build foundations were severely or totally lacking, resulting in bodged-together lash-up unstable piles of masonry/ code.
See your "ha, ha" and raise you a "but serious".
Your cynicism is reasonably well-founded.
Yeees, it would have that potential, if you didn't engineer in appropriate restrictions. Such as, designing the system so that it requires available tri-valent molybdenum, in an oxygen-free environment, and temperatures of 45-55degC. Which would make it very difficult for the system to exist without active maintenance.
Additionally, "cellulose" covers a wide range of compounds. So you might engineer the system to require sequential anaerobic processing by one set of bugs (to change the cellulose to one more-standardised feedstock), followed by aerobic processing with different bugs, under different conditions, to yield your fuel.
Your concerns are certainly not groundless, but they are engineerable-out. For example, the death toll on the roads could be massively reduced by making it a capital offence to design or manufacture parts for an IC engine with a power/weight ratio greater than 10 horsepower/tonne. But such an engineering solution might encounter social push-back. Which is where it needs concerned people (I think you volunteered earlier, when you posted) to get involved in the process.
I'm a bit perplexed about what sort of "coolant" could be needed that might be delivered in significant (i.e., useful) quantities by plane. Which makes me rather dubious that some reporters (or politicians) have got the wrong end of a comment.
IF (and for me, it is an IF) the Japanese have needed to move any equipment or material to the site, then this is a major planning failure. Really major. And it will have international implications, because many other nuclear plants around the world will have similar underlying problems.
But, touching wood, there don't appear to have been significant radiation leakages. (I write as my wife, who was 100km downwind of Chernobyl, is nagging me to go to the bloody gym. The gym is elsewhere in the most naturally radioactive city in this country. Radiation paranoiacs, please take note and STFU.)