Indeed - if Motorola and Samsung encourage the community to develop long-lasting software for their device, you won't need to buy a new Samsung or Motorola device to upgrade in a year or two. It ruins their revenue stream.
For all the people who like to crow about Apple's "upgrade to the new magical version every year," approach, my original iPhone lasted until I replaced it with an iPhone 4, and would still work, but I wanted the newest iOS features, additional power, better display, and better storage capacity of the iPhone 4, so I upgraded. I expect I'll keep the iPhone 4 for another year or two at least, unless there's a *really* compelling upgrade, or a much-better competing device. I'm still using a Macbook Pro bought in early 2006, and the only upgrade I'm considering for it at this point is a SSD drive, because the drive is the biggest bottleneck in the system at this point. The devices last, and Apple continues to support them for some time with new releases of the OS and software. Apple is also making some money by selling you apps, music, and movies to help finance the longer-term support of your devices.
Motorola, Samsung, and HTC don't want to spend any more time and effort supporting your already-purchased devices than they have to, because once you've bought it, they don't get any more money from you until you buy a replacement.
Then you haven't been reading Slashdot much. Every time someone makes a comment about Android being fragmented, they get jumped on by a half a dozen True Believers who loudly and crudely remind us that "Android isn't fragmented, that's just bullshit FUD being spread by Apple fanbois who are scared that Android is beating their pet product."
Call it by whatever name you want, the tone here on Slashdot has been: 1) There is no fragmentation, that's just FUD; OR 2) It's not fragmentation, it's diversity & variety, and that makes for a healthy ecosystem!
But now that Google is trying to "control fragmentation", the tone seems to have changed to "Oh what a great thing, this will really prevent many problems for Android developers and users." Google is addressing a "problem" that, according to the Android fans, either did not exist or was not a problem, but was, in fact, the hallmark of a healthy device ecosystem.
Either way, reading the reversal of opinion here is rather breathtaking.
So the answer is, in summary, "Those companies can't beat Apple at their own game, because Apple has a reputation for high quality products, and continue to largely meet those consumer expectations, while their competitors have tarnished reputations due to low quality products, crappy dependability, and unreliable workmanship?"
I'm having trouble connecting that explanation with the theory that Apple's business plan has been, for years, the selling of shoddy & inferior products in a shiny box to clueless rubes.
Then your habits must differ than mine; you must spend a lot less time on forums and the like.
Indeed, my habits very well may be different than yours, we are, after all, different people. Slashdot is pretty much my only vice in terms of forums; I read plenty of other sites, but rarely comment or participate in the discussion. But, the GP poster asked for "what are the use cases," and I'm sharing mine. It's trivially obvious that if you often need to do lots of typing, a touchscreen tablet may not be the right device for you; however, it should also be noted that you can pair a bluetooth keyboard, or get a keyboard dock, for an iPad, and have a full keyboard to work with if you wish. I wouldn't bother with this, because as you rightly suggest, keyboard + touchscreen tablet is basically... a netbook.
In addition, I code on my netbook on the bus ride to and from work and the mall, and one can't code on an iPad due to Apple's policy.
A fair criticism; you can certainly write code on an iPad (text editors do exist), but you can't compile or test it without a "host" computer to tether it to. But, as already noted, your use cases are not mine. I don't have a need to code during a commute, so I don't mention that as one of my use cases. As above, it's trivially obvious to determine that if coding during a commute is something you need to do, a touchscreen tablet may not be the device for you.
That's why I carry a lighter, 10" laptop. A lot of your arguments are arguments for a netbook just as much as they are arguments for a locked-down tablet.
They're not "arguments for" a tablet, or against netbooks, or against laptops. GP poster asked for what use cases people have for touchscreen tablets. I'm sharing the usage scenarios I've found to be particularly tablet-friendly in the 9 months-or-so that I've owned an iPad; this is not intended to be an exhaustive listing of all pros and cons of all devices, simply a list of "ways I find the iPad to be as useful as, if not more useful than, my laptop or other computers." I own a laptop; I own a desktop; I use those for "real work," and I quite like them. But when I'm doing casual personal-time stuff, I find that the iPad is what I more often reach for, because it's usually more convenient, faster, and doesn't tempt me to go sit at my desk, where I'll invariably feel the need to "just check this one other thing" before I finish what I came to the computer to do.
Many years ago, I had a... Rio PMP300 music player... forget the name of the maker - Diamond something or other? I thought it was pretty goddamned cool, and loved that I could carry around a bunch of songs in my pocket, rather than a 5 pound pack of CDs. That music player was hollow-feeling cheap plastic, and used a serial connection to transfer songs. At some point along the way, that player died. When I started shopping around for a replacement, the 4G iPods had just been released. I went into a Best Buy to look at one, and ended up walking out with one. It had a 40GB disk, which was large enough to hold my entire music collection with room to spare, and it felt solid, well-built, and unlikely to break or crack like the PMP300 did, and it worked very well with my Windows machine at home.
Fast forward a year or so, and my desktop Windows machine which had been chugging along slowly for about 6 years finally went toes-up. I was interested in finding a smaller, quieter system to replace it, which would give me some more room in my then-fairly-cramped home office space. I first looked at going the "build-your-own" route, but then realized it'd cost me a lot of time and hassle that I didn't care to spend building my own. Just for kicks, I went into the nearest Apple store to check out the Mac Minis, which had recently flipped to Intel technology, figuring maybe I could install & run Windows or Linux on the thing, since I'd heard from all the good folks at Slashdot how much of a toy the Macs were. I left the store that night without one, and then went back 3 days later after doing some more research and bought one.
Another year down the road, my Sprint PCS Treo running Windows Mobile was driving me absolutely batshit insane because it was such a piece of unmitigated garbage. Shoddy construction, horrible software, a pain in the ass to keep anything synchronized... and they released the iPhone. Being a sensible technology user, I said "My god, I'd never buy a first generation phone from a manufacturer that's never built a fucking phone before," but there was still a lot of buzz - I couldn't avoid hearing about them. So I went into the Apple store a few weeks after the iPhone was released, and played around with one there, and said, "My god, if my Treo worked like this, I'd sleep with the fucking thing in my hand." A couple weeks later, I cancelled my Sprint contract, moved to AT&T, (service for both in my area is rather spotty, so I didn't really lose anything by moving to AT&T, and I did gain a better phone), and have been happily using my iPhone since. (I upgraded to an iPhone 4 from my original iPhone at the end of last year.)
In each instance, Apple offered me a product that was a significant improvement over the device I already had, at a reasonable price. Their devices have also (in my experience) been well-made, durable, and pleasant to use. There's no "fanaticism" to it, it's simply rational choice. I run Windows 7 under VMWare Fusion on my Mac at home, though my actual NEED for a windows machine is rapidly becoming a "gaming only" sort of thing, and even for that, there's fewer and fewer games which I want to play which are Windows-only, or that I can't get a console version of if I *really* want to play. I also occasionally spin up a Fedora or Ubuntu VM just to see what's new. Am I a "loyal Apple customer"? Sure, as long as they continue to produce good products which satisfy my needs, at a reasonable price point. But I guess that's pretty much what constitutes loyalty to any brand, isn't it?
How many of the Apple faithful would you estimate go out and buy something "simply because it's Apple"? Let's put some numbers on it to frame the discussion - percentages, if you like, and completely wild-ass guesses are certainly welcome, though citing actual market research would certainly help your argument more. For their success to be largely on the backs of credulous rubes who buy the latest thing from Apple simply because it's from Apple, your estimate would have to be that a chunk of their customers, probably much larger than 50%, simply buy their stuff without stopping to think about it, or considering whether or not it's a good value. That's a pretty extraordinary claim, and one which you really need to provide some evidence to support.
Also, let's dig deeper. You say that there's no "magic formula" to popularity, but it's clear that Apple is doing things differently from their competitors, and you furthermore suggest that Apple enjoys a popularity that their competitors do not. Isn't it then reasonable to hypothesize that some subset of the things Apple is doing differently from their competitors are the reasons for their popularity? Let's talk about what they're doing right that none of their competitors seem to be doing - what do you think could be the difference that helps explain their popularity?
People by technically inferior, more expensive items from Apple. The iPad is slightly different because they price it very competitively.
Apple products, on a point-by-point comparison, have been largely price-equivalent with similarly-featured models from competitors since the switch to Intel. There may be a difference of $100 or so one way or another, but there is no longer such a vast disparity that the general claim of "Apple being overpriced" is remotely true.
What *is* true is that Apple does not offer the endless customizability and build-to-order options that you can get with Dell, or HP, or Lenovo - yes, you can customize a computer that will do what "many (even most) people need" for much lower price; the result will, however, be a much lower-powered computer. If you want something that punches at the same weight, in terms of specs, you'll spend more or less what you'd spend on an Apple product. And let's not forget that:
1) Apple's computers don't come pre-loaded with a bunch of unremovable crapware that artificially lowers the price of the device by subsidizing part of your purchase; 2) Apple's computers come with Mac OS X, which could represent a sizable chunk of value if you're the type of person looking for a UNIX desktop with an attractive, well-built UI, a large set of standard APIs, and a fairly good ecosystem of compatible software. Like it or not, Microsoft Office isn't well known for how well it runs on Linux, and while Office may be overkill for some, it is supported on the Mac, and for people looking to use their home system to get some work done... it's an option that Linux simply doesn't offer.
do beat the crap out of Apple *in market share* across all different markets --including music players and phones-
Wait, what? Pray tell, which manufacturer is beating Apple in *market share* in the music player market?
Also, please enlighten us: which which manufacturers - other than RIM, who follow a similar model to Apple, in controlling both their own hardware & software - are beating Apple in *market share* in the smartphone market? When considering your answer, bear in mind that "Android" is not a manufacturer, it's a platform used by MANY manufacturers. Here's some pretty pictures to help you formulate your answer.
Sure, they'll be benevolent, right up until you refuse to let them access some aspect of your personal data to tailor your 24x7 in-home ad display in your own "best interests."
Does the iPad do anything I couldn't do with my laptop? Nope. Here's what it does differently: it allows me to take the computer to where I'm most comfortable, rather than me having to go cloister myself in my little office space. There's very few emails that I need to bang out more than a few sentences in response to; there's very few web pages which I need to do anything but read. The convenience of being able to access a computer anywhere, rather than having to go from wherever I happen to be to the computer in order to access anything is a surprisingly convenient use case. And frankly, sitting on the couch with a laptop is a literal pain in the neck if done for more than a few minutes at a time.
It's also a great computer for traveling on personal time - if I'm traveling for work, yeah, I need the laptop; if I'm just heading to New York for the weekend, the iPad is great: compact, lightweight, doesn't add much bulk to the bag, and works great for looking up phone numbers, addresses, train information, ratings & reviews; it also makes a decent in-room entertainment system with Netflix, the Kindle app, and some of my music library loaded on it, and you can always find new stuff through the itunes store. Yes, an iPhone would do many of the same things too, but the difference in screen size really makes a difference for a lot of uses. The iPhone screen size is "good enough to get the job done," whereas the iPad's larger screen is "good for the job," full stop. Again, all things I could do with a laptop, but about 4 pounds lighter, and takes up far less bag space - iPad, charging cable/brick, small point & shoot camera, and a couple changes of clothes fit easily in a small bag for the weekend. Not so much with a 5 pound, 15" laptop.
It's willfully ignorant to care more about the actual things you'd use a device for than you do about the "raw power" it has?
Pro tip for the people who failed their marketing classes: "Now you can video chat with your kid who's in college 2,000 miles away," is a FAR more powerful marketing message than "this device has 57,000 bieberhertzes (BHz), and a bajillion flippabits!" 57 kBHz sounds like a lot; so does a bajillion flippabits. But I don't know what that's going to let me *do* with the device, just that it has "a large number of fancy sounding things."
Most people don't select a car based on the horsepower and torque and braking distance. Gearheads care about horsepower and torque and compression ratios and optimal air intake rates, maximum RPMs and top speeds; the 99.5% of the rest of the car-buying market wants to know how many people the car will seat, what the gas mileage is, whether it looks nice, and if it comes in a color they like. Bonus points if it's got an entertainment system for the kids in the back.
It's my belief that this is the crucial difference in marketing, and the reason why Apple infuriates so many geeks: they refuse to cater to the small "gearhead" market with their devices, and instead focus on showing the much larger segment that doesn't understand all the jargony terms, "here's what you can do with this device, and we think you're really going to be impressed with what you see." In an industry that for years has marketed to people using the jargony terms that only the gearheads care about, it annoys a lot of little tin gods who, if they're really honest about how they feel, firmly believe that computers should only be used by people with advanced engineering or computer science degrees. Apple isn't interested in preserving somebody else's little fiefdom, and it rankles that they're so good at introducing devices like this to the mass market.
Right, I know that's what this stupid meme perpetuates. What I'm asking is, if the competitors' products are so superior, what's preventing them from marketing their products like Apple does and enjoying success beyond even Apple's profits?
None of these competitors are exactly new to the mobile industry. Microsoft, RIM, HP, Motorola, Samsung - they've been doing it at least as long as Apple. So... where's their products, and where's their marketing? Why don't they have legions of devoted fans like Apple does?
And HP, Motorola, Samsung, RIM, Microsoft, Nokia, HTC... these are fly-by-night upstarts, new to the industry?
The question is, what's preventing other manufacturers from achieving the same thing, especially if they have a better product? It can take a while to build a brand's perception, but none of the companies competing with Apple are exactly newcomers on the scene. They've had plenty of time to build their own reputations and user bases, but they've failed to do so - in some cases, they've failed to do so in a spectacular fashion.
There's clearly something missing in their execution that goes beyond the lack of a marketing tagline.
No, I'm asking what's preventing other companies from inspiring a loyal following. How has Apple done it? From the people perpetuating this meme, it's 100% marketing that inspires this devotion.
Since it's not that the products are *actually good*, and that people *actually like them,* then any company should be able to inspire this following by putting together a great marketing campaign and doing the same sorts of things Apple does.
So why doesn't anybody else do it?
As far as "most people aren't out there comparing specs and reading reviews," that may be so. But if people aren't doing that, then why in hell would anybody think they could successfully sell a product by listing a bunch of technical specs, if a couple non-marketing geeks on Slashdot realize that this isn't what's prompting people to buy? Or is there some sort of special brand of magical marketing that ONLY Apple is capable of? If so, what makes them so uncommonly special at marketing themselves? Or is it that Apple is the only company that will "lower" itself to do marketing to its customers? (If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd love to sell you.)
Maybe they could... you know... build a product that inspires the devotion that Apple's products do? This "it's just garbage that's marketed well to a bunch of cultists" meme doesn't explain the millions of units sold, doesn't explain the repeat customers, and doesn't explain their consistently high customer satisfaction ratings.
And if it is just garbage, then why don't HP and Motorola hire a better marketing team and beat Apple at their own game? There's nothing that's inherently "Apple" about producing good advertising and marketing campaigns - there are hundreds of memorable ads and millions of useful products that are produced every year - it's not like you can't find an advertising company willing to help you build a campaign.
After all, if "Garbage + Good Marketing = huge sales," imagine how much more money they can make if they were to hit the magical "Good product + Good marketing = ??? PROFITS" point.
Your elaborate explanation of why to NOT use seawater is weak
You're an idiot. I pointed out the numerous technical downsides to using seawater, and suggested that, if they expected to be able to reconnect cooling systems to backup generators in a timely fashion, it would have been sensible for them to avoid injecting seawater for a few hours. Not that they shouldn't "ever have used seawater."
every minute those rods are under water, they continue to cool, which means normalized pressure
No, it doesn't mean "normalized pressure". Pressure ONLY levels off if your pumps and heat exchangers are working, allowing the steam to condense back into water to be reused for cooling. Until the electricity is turned back on, and until those pumps and heat exchangers are operational again, the pressure inside the containment vessel will continue to build, requiring regular venting to keep the pressure from building too high (pV=nrT, remember?). And that's why the whole "seawater" thing is risky - clog those heat exchangers and pumps with salt and sediment deposits, and you run a very real risk of having an inoperational cooling system again - with the whole "melting down" risk right back where you started from.
But you actually thought that these reactors simply needed to have some water splashed on them to finish cooling them down, didn't you?
It's clear to me now that you're simply trolling. Have fun with that.
People make bad calls that need to be exposed and made part of the record. The facts point to unnecessary delay. Sorry, but those are the available facts. We'll know more as the months proceed.
Well, I guess you've already told us the WHY, all we need is the person who should hang for it then, right? I've asked you repeatedly to share these "facts" of yours with us, and you've neglected to do so. What "facts" point to unnecessary delay? Are you an emergency management expert? Nuclear engineer? Do you have some back-channel way of contacting the Japanese government on the ground at Fukushima to get a more accurate picture than the rest of us have? Why are you concluding that the delay was "unnecessary", and likely caused by "bad calls" that someone will need to be strung up for?
As the expert with all the facts about this situation, would you please tell us what the expected maximum response and readiness times are for these sorts of disasters, so that we may compare them with the 36 hours it took TEPCO to begin doing this? After all, if you're able to conclude that the delays were the unnecessary result of bad decisions based on the bare minimum of facts available so far, you must also know how long something like this would take to construct, with no unnecessary delays under ideal circumstances?
I'm sure your narrative is remarkably comforting to you - TEPCO is Nero, fiddling while Rome burns - but you haven't offered a shred of evidence or fact to support that conclusion. I'm forced to conclude that you're simply irritated by having to back-pedal so much from your original statement, and simply engaging in a little recreational trolling to make yourself feel better.
So we agree that your characterization of "DAYS LATE" is incorrect. That's progress.
You offer the suggestion that they were physically unable to pump water, and then discount it as being less likely than "somebody trying to protect a billion dollar investment" repeatedly, throughout your responses. You have repeatedly suggested that the only reason things became as bad as they are is because of someone's greed interfering with their willingness to engage last-ditch measures to keep things cool. There are several other possible explanations:
1) They worked on the seawater solution as quickly as possible, but they simply weren't able to have a reliable delivery system in place until ~36 hours into the incident, at which point damage had already been caused. 36 hours is not a lot of time to rig a delivery system capable of transporting, filtering, mixing, and delivering 50-100 gallons of water per minute in the aftermath of an earthquake and a tsunami.
2) The use of seawater to keep it cool can cause other risks and issues with cooling down the road, averting an immediate crisis, but creating the risk of other crises in the next few weeks and months that may be just as serious as the initial meltdown risk. Salts are corrosive, and can clog and degrade the effectiveness of the cooling system. So now you've got a weakened reactor containment vessel and low-efficacy cooling system that could result in a struggle to cool the core for the next several months until it's safe for disassembly, along with the risks of leaks, ruptures, overheating, and explosions from god-only-knows-what inside the system that got injected alongside the seawater.
i've not said anything remotely suggesting "that the entire decision making structure at TEPCO is evil" far from it.
Oh no? Let's review your comments: -- "It was many days LATE, obviously to protect that significant investment." -- "It's likely that the decision makers put their bets on restoring the normal cooling system before red-lining beyond protecting the investment." -- "the most likely reason for that I can see is to avoid throwing billions of dollars down the drain. the funny thing is that if they had done that and cooled everything down by now, that person(s) would be on the blocks for destroying a billion dollar investment needlessly!" -- "did the fact that resorting to sea water would cost them billions of dollars delay the decision? from what i can see it did"
Now, if you want to backpedal and say "of course it's unlikely that's the cause, and other causes are probably far more likely," then great, we're fully in agreement. But you seem unwilling to accept any possible explanation other than "management is evil and cared only about their investment." That notion would make a pretty standard John Grisham novel, but given the circumstances on the ground, I think it's probably the most unlikely explanation available.
Do you buy 'grocery insurance'? Or 'fuel insurance'?
If the price of groceries and fuel were as variable and volatile as the cost of health care, yes, we probably would buy "insurance" to help pay for them.
Imagine you've been spending $50 a week on ramen and the occasional fruits & vegetables. Then one week you suddenly learn that if you don't start eating $1000-a-steak filet mignon, washed down with a $10,000-a-bottle wine, you'll die. Same thing applies to health insurance: maybe you only use a $20 bottle of tylenol most months. But then you find out you have cancer, and need $500,000 in surgery & cancer treatments over the next 6 months or you're going to die.
Thus, insurance is a priority for people who wish to have the peace of mind of knowing that, in the words of Chris Rock, "at least if you got some coverage, you'll die on a mattress."
The platform requires devs do actually make two separate versions
Just to clarify, for the people who will say "What, they make you buy two copies of the same app?!?!?!1111!!!" You can embed the UI information for both iPad and iPhone apps into a single application bundle, so that the same app will display the properly-optimized UI for whatever screen size it's running on. Other apps are designed exclusively for the iPad and can't be loaded on the iPhone, and some apps only have an iPhone-sized UI, and so look like shit when pixel-doubled on the iPad - even if they could make the elements smooth instead of jagged and pixelated, they still are *immense* on the iPad compared to the UI elements you're used to, and look like giant-sized toy versions of themselves.
Yes, it's amazing how easy it is to find ways to insinuate that they're nothing-but-evil when that's the preordained conclusion you're trying to support. TEPCO iz a big evul core-pirate-shun, after all, LOL.
Do you have the least inkling as to WHY the use of seawater is a last ditch effort? I'll help, you can play along at home:
1) The salt in the seawater corrodes the metal of the containment vessel. The containment vessel which must withstand high temperature and high heat for a span of NO LESS THAN MONTHS still before the reactor can be adequately cooled down for disassembly, and fuel rods extracted for reprocessing or disposal.
2) It leaves deposits in cooling systems, which can seriously degrade efficiency of heat exchangers and break down pumps. These cooling systems which must continue operating properly for a span of NO LESS THAN MONTHS still before the reactor can be adequately cooled down for disassembly, and fuel rods extracted for reprocessing or disposal.
3) It introduces god-only-knows-what other reactive & corrosive materials into a fucking nuclear reactor's core. Can you tell me every chemical that they can expect to find in the thousands of gallons of typical coastal Japanese seawater they'll use that might react badly with fuel rods, control rods, containment vessel or cooling system? And can you tell us how those materials will behave under high heat, high pressure, and when subjected to ionizing radiation? I sure can't, and I bet you can't either.
The decay heat from these reactors must be contained & cooled for months, perhaps years, before the reactors can be broken down safely. If you've weakened the containment vessel and compromised the cooling system, and perhaps introduced materials corrosive to the control and/or fuel rods... wouldn't you consider that a fairly extreme and risky measure? Instead of avoiding disaster, you've simply kicked the can down the road, hoping that you'll have time to undo the mess you've made once you've gotten the immediate situation under control. That makes this a last ditch effort: they are doing it to avert immediate crisis, knowing they may face other crises in the near future as a result of this decision.
If they were using seawater within 36 hours of the incident, they clearly had people working on putting that capability in place some time before they began pumping it. This means, set up the pumps, pipes, hoses, and everything else required to pull seawater from the ocean, probably pass it through at least a *rough* filtration to prevent sediment and sea creatures from being injected, boronate the water, and then pump it into a reactor core which is overheating, emitting larger-than-normal amounts of radiation, and running at significantly higher pressure than is normal. And they have to be able to deliver that seawater/boron mix at somewhere above 50-75 gallons per minute once everything's in place to keep the water levels from continuing to drop inside the core. And if that sounds like a job of only a couple hours, consider doing it in the dark, with minimal emergency power after one of the worst earthquakes & tsunamis in recorded history, knowing that a spark in the wrong place might blow you up by igniting Hydrogen that's been released, and all the while knowing that you are standing within a couple hundred yards of a nuclear reactor that might be actively melting down.
I'm honestly not sure which is the cause & which is the effect here - your unrealistic expectations for how quickly things should happen in a scenario like this, or your desire to demonstrate how evil the decision-makers at TEPCO are. Either way, all you're demonstrating is that you have very little grasp of the actual problems being faced by the people trying to cool these reactors down.
1. it is immaterial exactly how many hours or days of delay. the point is the delay allowed overheating.
It is entirely material. If they had started pumping seawater the moment after the generators went offline, 36 hours earlier than the point that they did, can you support your suggestion that there would have been no overheating, no explosions, and no damage to the fuel rods & containment vessels? It is also entirely material to know what steps, exactly, they did take after the generators went offline, and what the decision making process was. Since neither of those things are clear - and probably won't be clear for months, or years - your statements of "fact" are - in fact - nothing but speculation and opinion.
You have assumed the following: 1) They waited longer than they needed to, and could have had seawater prepared & flowing in in less time than they did; 2) That the delay in pumping in seawater is the ONLY reason that things overheated and caused damage; 3) There would have been no damage to the reactors if they had started pumping it as soon as it was possible to do so;
These assumptions lead you to the conclusion that the entire decision making structure at TEPCO is evil, and that they care about nothing except salvaging their reactors, while overlooking the simple fact that if they make the entire area uninhabitable because they play loose & fast with safety, they're going to have an awful hard time monetizing those reactors, since they won't be able to operate them, or sell the power to anybody, since nobody will rebuild power lines through a fallout zone for years.
I can imagine quite a few reasons why it might have taken them 36 hours to begin pumping seawater into the reactor cores, none of which require the entire TEPCO organization, from lowly engineer to CEO, to be irredeemably evil. Why is it so hard for you to do that?
Saturday 12 March: [...] 2020 [JST]: Tepco begins pumping seawater, mixed with the element boron, into unit 1's reactor. Boron is used as a shield in nuclear reactors, as it controls the nuclear reaction.
I'm sorry you have trouble with reading comprehension yourself, as it's plainly evident that the injection of seawater into at least one of the reactors was started less than 36 hours after the tsunami hit - unless you're dimwitted enough to think that the Japanese engineers thought they'd do the trick by hosing down the exterior of the containment building's walls with some seawater. Incidentally - the BBC timeline also details many of the steps that were taken to try and restore power and keep things under control in the intervening 36 hours.
mechanics have never been mentioned as a reason for the delay,
You're the only one asserting that there was any unreasonable delay at all. Why should the Japanese feel they have to justify or explain the steps they've taken to J. Random, Esq., on Slashdot? Frankly, I'd much rather see them focus their efforts on controlling the situation - there will be years for them to write their memoirs and explain all of the minute-by-minute decisions and issues *after* they've done what they can to prevent and control a nuclear disaster.
Let's review your original post, now, in light of all we've learned:
except they WEREN'T quick to pump the seawater. It was many days LATE, obviously to protect that significant investment.
36 hours is quick when your entire infrastructure has been demolished by a 10 meter wall of water and a 9.0 magnitude earthquake. Even if it were humanly possible they could have started pumping seawater sooner, it certainly isn't "many days LATE." For the math whizzes, 36 hours is not even 2 full days - this means that in order to have not been "many days LATE," they would have had to start pumping boronated seawater into operational nuclear reactors *days before* the earthquake & tsunami ever hit.
You don't appear to have any particular credentials that would qualify you as an expert in nuclear emergency response, but you feel well qualified to second guess the decisions being made by TEPCO - the context, and information feeding into which you have no way of knowing. You've read a couple newspaper articles and watched a few Youtube videos, and decided that the Japanese were somehow irresponsible, or that TEPCO is some evil conglomerate that would choose to render hundreds of square kilometers of coastal Japan uninhabitable for centuries, rather than risk damaging their precious reactors with some seawater. Except the justification you use for your opinion - namely that they waited "DAYS" to begin injecting seawater - is demonstrably false, and it's self-evident that bad assumptions make for bad conclusions.
and your suggestion that they used the seawater as soon as necessary is also incorrect. obviously. whether days or hours late, they turned to that last resort after the fuel rods were well exposed and beginning to melt.
And you're quite sure that they had the capability to begin injecting seawater the very moment that they decided it was necessary?
In the HOURS following a devastating earthquake and tsunami, when communications and electricity were out, monitoring systems were offline, and chain of command were still likely struggling simply to make sense of the situation at all, and understand what the extent of the damage was? Do you know how long it takes to put the pumps and seawater delivery mechanisms in place? Do you know how long it took them to get generators to the plant in order to begin that pumping? Do you know how quickly the water boils off, versus how fast they were able to pump the water in in this emergency? Do you realize that cooling a near-meltdown nuclear reactor doesn't simply involve someone standing there with a garden hose? And of course, you're sure they had large stores of boronated seawater just hanging around, I'm sure it took no time to prepare enough of the mixture to begin injecting it?
No, of course not. Because you're such an expert on earthquakes, tsunamis, and nuclear accidents - I mean, I have to assume that you've got some technical basis for these arguments other than PHB syndrome, which says that anything you don't understand must be simple - that you've already determined that it's because TEPCO simply was hoping to save their investment, and didn't give a shit about how many people died as a result, and that's the ONLY possible explanation for why they had to struggle to keep the reactors from melting down. And of course, given the fact that they're struggling to avert a meltdown, it's only reasonable to expect that they should also waste a bunch of time explaining the technical problems they're having to some random armchair quarterback on the internet, to avoid a public relations black eye... right?
And, B-T-W, they were injecting seawater into parts of some of the reactors by ~8 pm on March 12. That's *Saturday* - the day after the quake, less than 36 hours after the quake itself, 34-35 hours after the tsunami actually came in and did all the damage, and in the midst of numerous fairly powerful aftershocks. Only counting aftershocks of magnitude 6 or greater, there were 15 of them on Friday after the large quake, and 10 of them on Saturday - all in the same area as the original magnitude 9 quake.
Government regulations. When these regulations are rolled back, you get:
That's a pretty huge assumption you're making with no proof offered. MANY (MOST) industries don't see this antitrust & anti-monopoly activity, because despite all your claims to the contrary, monopolies are not "inevitable natural consequences" in most industries. Monopolies become more of a risk when there are high capital investment barriers to entry for new players in the market, or when the Government, through regulation, GRANTS a business a monopoly status in a market.
Government regulations are certainly desirable to prevent people from *abusing* a controlling status in an industry, but they certainly do not prevent monopolies from forming, and if they don't do that, then the argument that monopolies are "inevitable" seems to lack any proof whatsoever. If they are inevitable, and government regulations can't prevent them from occurring, then every industry should have a monopoly player by now. That's demonstrably not the case.
They're typically being driven out by chain stores.
"chain" =/= "monopoly". Starbucks isn't a monopoly simply because they took over the local mom & pop coffee shop. Chains do sometimes drive out individual stores because chains have the economies of scale to offer cheaper prices. I pay less for a gallon of milk at a chain store than I do from a mom & pop grocery, or a convenience store - how is this harming the consumer through 'price fixing' or 'abuse of monopoly status'? (Hint: It isn't, because neither of those things are occurring.)
While chains may ruin the unique charm of your neighborhood, they do not constitute monopolies, or trust violations, or anything else. If you want to patronize a locally-owned coffee shop because you like its unique charm, you're welcome to start one, or find one, and get a bunch of like-minded customers together to patronize it. Lots of small hole-in-the-wall places exist for this very reason, and will probably continue to exist indefinitely, even though chains also exist in their industry. Some people like local character & personalized service, and are willing to pay more for it.
No, I'm afraid that your fear of inevitable monopolies is rather overblown. It is a risk, and it is desirable to have regulations to prevent the abuse of dominant market positions; it is also nowhere near as inevitable or common for a monopoly to arise as you're suggesting.
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Indeed - if Motorola and Samsung encourage the community to develop long-lasting software for their device, you won't need to buy a new Samsung or Motorola device to upgrade in a year or two. It ruins their revenue stream.
For all the people who like to crow about Apple's "upgrade to the new magical version every year," approach, my original iPhone lasted until I replaced it with an iPhone 4, and would still work, but I wanted the newest iOS features, additional power, better display, and better storage capacity of the iPhone 4, so I upgraded. I expect I'll keep the iPhone 4 for another year or two at least, unless there's a *really* compelling upgrade, or a much-better competing device. I'm still using a Macbook Pro bought in early 2006, and the only upgrade I'm considering for it at this point is a SSD drive, because the drive is the biggest bottleneck in the system at this point. The devices last, and Apple continues to support them for some time with new releases of the OS and software. Apple is also making some money by selling you apps, music, and movies to help finance the longer-term support of your devices.
Motorola, Samsung, and HTC don't want to spend any more time and effort supporting your already-purchased devices than they have to, because once you've bought it, they don't get any more money from you until you buy a replacement.
Then you haven't been reading Slashdot much. Every time someone makes a comment about Android being fragmented, they get jumped on by a half a dozen True Believers who loudly and crudely remind us that "Android isn't fragmented, that's just bullshit FUD being spread by Apple fanbois who are scared that Android is beating their pet product."
Call it by whatever name you want, the tone here on Slashdot has been:
1) There is no fragmentation, that's just FUD;
OR
2) It's not fragmentation, it's diversity & variety, and that makes for a healthy ecosystem!
But now that Google is trying to "control fragmentation", the tone seems to have changed to "Oh what a great thing, this will really prevent many problems for Android developers and users." Google is addressing a "problem" that, according to the Android fans, either did not exist or was not a problem, but was, in fact, the hallmark of a healthy device ecosystem.
Either way, reading the reversal of opinion here is rather breathtaking.
So the answer is, in summary, "Those companies can't beat Apple at their own game, because Apple has a reputation for high quality products, and continue to largely meet those consumer expectations, while their competitors have tarnished reputations due to low quality products, crappy dependability, and unreliable workmanship?"
I'm having trouble connecting that explanation with the theory that Apple's business plan has been, for years, the selling of shoddy & inferior products in a shiny box to clueless rubes.
Indeed, my habits very well may be different than yours, we are, after all, different people. Slashdot is pretty much my only vice in terms of forums; I read plenty of other sites, but rarely comment or participate in the discussion. But, the GP poster asked for "what are the use cases," and I'm sharing mine. It's trivially obvious that if you often need to do lots of typing, a touchscreen tablet may not be the right device for you; however, it should also be noted that you can pair a bluetooth keyboard, or get a keyboard dock, for an iPad, and have a full keyboard to work with if you wish. I wouldn't bother with this, because as you rightly suggest, keyboard + touchscreen tablet is basically... a netbook.
A fair criticism; you can certainly write code on an iPad (text editors do exist), but you can't compile or test it without a "host" computer to tether it to. But, as already noted, your use cases are not mine. I don't have a need to code during a commute, so I don't mention that as one of my use cases. As above, it's trivially obvious to determine that if coding during a commute is something you need to do, a touchscreen tablet may not be the device for you.
They're not "arguments for" a tablet, or against netbooks, or against laptops. GP poster asked for what use cases people have for touchscreen tablets. I'm sharing the usage scenarios I've found to be particularly tablet-friendly in the 9 months-or-so that I've owned an iPad; this is not intended to be an exhaustive listing of all pros and cons of all devices, simply a list of "ways I find the iPad to be as useful as, if not more useful than, my laptop or other computers." I own a laptop; I own a desktop; I use those for "real work," and I quite like them. But when I'm doing casual personal-time stuff, I find that the iPad is what I more often reach for, because it's usually more convenient, faster, and doesn't tempt me to go sit at my desk, where I'll invariably feel the need to "just check this one other thing" before I finish what I came to the computer to do.
Here's my journey to Apple user:
Many years ago, I had a... Rio PMP300 music player... forget the name of the maker - Diamond something or other? I thought it was pretty goddamned cool, and loved that I could carry around a bunch of songs in my pocket, rather than a 5 pound pack of CDs. That music player was hollow-feeling cheap plastic, and used a serial connection to transfer songs. At some point along the way, that player died. When I started shopping around for a replacement, the 4G iPods had just been released. I went into a Best Buy to look at one, and ended up walking out with one. It had a 40GB disk, which was large enough to hold my entire music collection with room to spare, and it felt solid, well-built, and unlikely to break or crack like the PMP300 did, and it worked very well with my Windows machine at home.
Fast forward a year or so, and my desktop Windows machine which had been chugging along slowly for about 6 years finally went toes-up. I was interested in finding a smaller, quieter system to replace it, which would give me some more room in my then-fairly-cramped home office space. I first looked at going the "build-your-own" route, but then realized it'd cost me a lot of time and hassle that I didn't care to spend building my own. Just for kicks, I went into the nearest Apple store to check out the Mac Minis, which had recently flipped to Intel technology, figuring maybe I could install & run Windows or Linux on the thing, since I'd heard from all the good folks at Slashdot how much of a toy the Macs were. I left the store that night without one, and then went back 3 days later after doing some more research and bought one.
Another year down the road, my Sprint PCS Treo running Windows Mobile was driving me absolutely batshit insane because it was such a piece of unmitigated garbage. Shoddy construction, horrible software, a pain in the ass to keep anything synchronized... and they released the iPhone. Being a sensible technology user, I said "My god, I'd never buy a first generation phone from a manufacturer that's never built a fucking phone before," but there was still a lot of buzz - I couldn't avoid hearing about them. So I went into the Apple store a few weeks after the iPhone was released, and played around with one there, and said, "My god, if my Treo worked like this, I'd sleep with the fucking thing in my hand." A couple weeks later, I cancelled my Sprint contract, moved to AT&T, (service for both in my area is rather spotty, so I didn't really lose anything by moving to AT&T, and I did gain a better phone), and have been happily using my iPhone since. (I upgraded to an iPhone 4 from my original iPhone at the end of last year.)
In each instance, Apple offered me a product that was a significant improvement over the device I already had, at a reasonable price. Their devices have also (in my experience) been well-made, durable, and pleasant to use. There's no "fanaticism" to it, it's simply rational choice. I run Windows 7 under VMWare Fusion on my Mac at home, though my actual NEED for a windows machine is rapidly becoming a "gaming only" sort of thing, and even for that, there's fewer and fewer games which I want to play which are Windows-only, or that I can't get a console version of if I *really* want to play. I also occasionally spin up a Fedora or Ubuntu VM just to see what's new. Am I a "loyal Apple customer"? Sure, as long as they continue to produce good products which satisfy my needs, at a reasonable price point. But I guess that's pretty much what constitutes loyalty to any brand, isn't it?
How many of the Apple faithful would you estimate go out and buy something "simply because it's Apple"? Let's put some numbers on it to frame the discussion - percentages, if you like, and completely wild-ass guesses are certainly welcome, though citing actual market research would certainly help your argument more. For their success to be largely on the backs of credulous rubes who buy the latest thing from Apple simply because it's from Apple, your estimate would have to be that a chunk of their customers, probably much larger than 50%, simply buy their stuff without stopping to think about it, or considering whether or not it's a good value. That's a pretty extraordinary claim, and one which you really need to provide some evidence to support.
Also, let's dig deeper. You say that there's no "magic formula" to popularity, but it's clear that Apple is doing things differently from their competitors, and you furthermore suggest that Apple enjoys a popularity that their competitors do not. Isn't it then reasonable to hypothesize that some subset of the things Apple is doing differently from their competitors are the reasons for their popularity? Let's talk about what they're doing right that none of their competitors seem to be doing - what do you think could be the difference that helps explain their popularity?
Apple products, on a point-by-point comparison, have been largely price-equivalent with similarly-featured models from competitors since the switch to Intel. There may be a difference of $100 or so one way or another, but there is no longer such a vast disparity that the general claim of "Apple being overpriced" is remotely true.
What *is* true is that Apple does not offer the endless customizability and build-to-order options that you can get with Dell, or HP, or Lenovo - yes, you can customize a computer that will do what "many (even most) people need" for much lower price; the result will, however, be a much lower-powered computer. If you want something that punches at the same weight, in terms of specs, you'll spend more or less what you'd spend on an Apple product. And let's not forget that:
1) Apple's computers don't come pre-loaded with a bunch of unremovable crapware that artificially lowers the price of the device by subsidizing part of your purchase;
2) Apple's computers come with Mac OS X, which could represent a sizable chunk of value if you're the type of person looking for a UNIX desktop with an attractive, well-built UI, a large set of standard APIs, and a fairly good ecosystem of compatible software. Like it or not, Microsoft Office isn't well known for how well it runs on Linux, and while Office may be overkill for some, it is supported on the Mac, and for people looking to use their home system to get some work done... it's an option that Linux simply doesn't offer.
Wait, what? Pray tell, which manufacturer is beating Apple in *market share* in the music player market?
Also, please enlighten us: which which manufacturers - other than RIM, who follow a similar model to Apple, in controlling both their own hardware & software - are beating Apple in *market share* in the smartphone market? When considering your answer, bear in mind that "Android" is not a manufacturer, it's a platform used by MANY manufacturers. Here's some pretty pictures to help you formulate your answer.
Sure, they'll be benevolent, right up until you refuse to let them access some aspect of your personal data to tailor your 24x7 in-home ad display in your own "best interests."
Does the iPad do anything I couldn't do with my laptop? Nope. Here's what it does differently: it allows me to take the computer to where I'm most comfortable, rather than me having to go cloister myself in my little office space. There's very few emails that I need to bang out more than a few sentences in response to; there's very few web pages which I need to do anything but read. The convenience of being able to access a computer anywhere, rather than having to go from wherever I happen to be to the computer in order to access anything is a surprisingly convenient use case. And frankly, sitting on the couch with a laptop is a literal pain in the neck if done for more than a few minutes at a time.
It's also a great computer for traveling on personal time - if I'm traveling for work, yeah, I need the laptop; if I'm just heading to New York for the weekend, the iPad is great: compact, lightweight, doesn't add much bulk to the bag, and works great for looking up phone numbers, addresses, train information, ratings & reviews; it also makes a decent in-room entertainment system with Netflix, the Kindle app, and some of my music library loaded on it, and you can always find new stuff through the itunes store. Yes, an iPhone would do many of the same things too, but the difference in screen size really makes a difference for a lot of uses. The iPhone screen size is "good enough to get the job done," whereas the iPad's larger screen is "good for the job," full stop. Again, all things I could do with a laptop, but about 4 pounds lighter, and takes up far less bag space - iPad, charging cable/brick, small point & shoot camera, and a couple changes of clothes fit easily in a small bag for the weekend. Not so much with a 5 pound, 15" laptop.
It's willfully ignorant to care more about the actual things you'd use a device for than you do about the "raw power" it has?
Pro tip for the people who failed their marketing classes: "Now you can video chat with your kid who's in college 2,000 miles away," is a FAR more powerful marketing message than "this device has 57,000 bieberhertzes (BHz), and a bajillion flippabits!" 57 kBHz sounds like a lot; so does a bajillion flippabits. But I don't know what that's going to let me *do* with the device, just that it has "a large number of fancy sounding things."
Most people don't select a car based on the horsepower and torque and braking distance. Gearheads care about horsepower and torque and compression ratios and optimal air intake rates, maximum RPMs and top speeds; the 99.5% of the rest of the car-buying market wants to know how many people the car will seat, what the gas mileage is, whether it looks nice, and if it comes in a color they like. Bonus points if it's got an entertainment system for the kids in the back.
It's my belief that this is the crucial difference in marketing, and the reason why Apple infuriates so many geeks: they refuse to cater to the small "gearhead" market with their devices, and instead focus on showing the much larger segment that doesn't understand all the jargony terms, "here's what you can do with this device, and we think you're really going to be impressed with what you see." In an industry that for years has marketed to people using the jargony terms that only the gearheads care about, it annoys a lot of little tin gods who, if they're really honest about how they feel, firmly believe that computers should only be used by people with advanced engineering or computer science degrees. Apple isn't interested in preserving somebody else's little fiefdom, and it rankles that they're so good at introducing devices like this to the mass market.
Right, I know that's what this stupid meme perpetuates. What I'm asking is, if the competitors' products are so superior, what's preventing them from marketing their products like Apple does and enjoying success beyond even Apple's profits?
None of these competitors are exactly new to the mobile industry. Microsoft, RIM, HP, Motorola, Samsung - they've been doing it at least as long as Apple. So... where's their products, and where's their marketing? Why don't they have legions of devoted fans like Apple does?
So the argument is that HP and Motorola are new to the industry, and have had no time to build their own image?
And HP, Motorola, Samsung, RIM, Microsoft, Nokia, HTC... these are fly-by-night upstarts, new to the industry?
The question is, what's preventing other manufacturers from achieving the same thing, especially if they have a better product? It can take a while to build a brand's perception, but none of the companies competing with Apple are exactly newcomers on the scene. They've had plenty of time to build their own reputations and user bases, but they've failed to do so - in some cases, they've failed to do so in a spectacular fashion.
There's clearly something missing in their execution that goes beyond the lack of a marketing tagline.
No, I'm asking what's preventing other companies from inspiring a loyal following. How has Apple done it? From the people perpetuating this meme, it's 100% marketing that inspires this devotion.
Since it's not that the products are *actually good*, and that people *actually like them,* then any company should be able to inspire this following by putting together a great marketing campaign and doing the same sorts of things Apple does.
So why doesn't anybody else do it?
As far as "most people aren't out there comparing specs and reading reviews," that may be so. But if people aren't doing that, then why in hell would anybody think they could successfully sell a product by listing a bunch of technical specs, if a couple non-marketing geeks on Slashdot realize that this isn't what's prompting people to buy? Or is there some sort of special brand of magical marketing that ONLY Apple is capable of? If so, what makes them so uncommonly special at marketing themselves? Or is it that Apple is the only company that will "lower" itself to do marketing to its customers? (If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd love to sell you.)
Maybe they could... you know... build a product that inspires the devotion that Apple's products do? This "it's just garbage that's marketed well to a bunch of cultists" meme doesn't explain the millions of units sold, doesn't explain the repeat customers, and doesn't explain their consistently high customer satisfaction ratings.
And if it is just garbage, then why don't HP and Motorola hire a better marketing team and beat Apple at their own game? There's nothing that's inherently "Apple" about producing good advertising and marketing campaigns - there are hundreds of memorable ads and millions of useful products that are produced every year - it's not like you can't find an advertising company willing to help you build a campaign.
After all, if "Garbage + Good Marketing = huge sales," imagine how much more money they can make if they were to hit the magical "Good product + Good marketing = ??? PROFITS" point.
You're an idiot. I pointed out the numerous technical downsides to using seawater, and suggested that, if they expected to be able to reconnect cooling systems to backup generators in a timely fashion, it would have been sensible for them to avoid injecting seawater for a few hours. Not that they shouldn't "ever have used seawater."
No, it doesn't mean "normalized pressure". Pressure ONLY levels off if your pumps and heat exchangers are working, allowing the steam to condense back into water to be reused for cooling. Until the electricity is turned back on, and until those pumps and heat exchangers are operational again, the pressure inside the containment vessel will continue to build, requiring regular venting to keep the pressure from building too high (pV=nrT, remember?). And that's why the whole "seawater" thing is risky - clog those heat exchangers and pumps with salt and sediment deposits, and you run a very real risk of having an inoperational cooling system again - with the whole "melting down" risk right back where you started from.
But you actually thought that these reactors simply needed to have some water splashed on them to finish cooling them down, didn't you?
It's clear to me now that you're simply trolling. Have fun with that.
Well, I guess you've already told us the WHY, all we need is the person who should hang for it then, right? I've asked you repeatedly to share these "facts" of yours with us, and you've neglected to do so. What "facts" point to unnecessary delay? Are you an emergency management expert? Nuclear engineer? Do you have some back-channel way of contacting the Japanese government on the ground at Fukushima to get a more accurate picture than the rest of us have? Why are you concluding that the delay was "unnecessary", and likely caused by "bad calls" that someone will need to be strung up for?
As the expert with all the facts about this situation, would you please tell us what the expected maximum response and readiness times are for these sorts of disasters, so that we may compare them with the 36 hours it took TEPCO to begin doing this? After all, if you're able to conclude that the delays were the unnecessary result of bad decisions based on the bare minimum of facts available so far, you must also know how long something like this would take to construct, with no unnecessary delays under ideal circumstances?
I'm sure your narrative is remarkably comforting to you - TEPCO is Nero, fiddling while Rome burns - but you haven't offered a shred of evidence or fact to support that conclusion. I'm forced to conclude that you're simply irritated by having to back-pedal so much from your original statement, and simply engaging in a little recreational trolling to make yourself feel better.
So we agree that your characterization of "DAYS LATE" is incorrect. That's progress.
You offer the suggestion that they were physically unable to pump water, and then discount it as being less likely than "somebody trying to protect a billion dollar investment" repeatedly, throughout your responses. You have repeatedly suggested that the only reason things became as bad as they are is because of someone's greed interfering with their willingness to engage last-ditch measures to keep things cool. There are several other possible explanations:
1) They worked on the seawater solution as quickly as possible, but they simply weren't able to have a reliable delivery system in place until ~36 hours into the incident, at which point damage had already been caused. 36 hours is not a lot of time to rig a delivery system capable of transporting, filtering, mixing, and delivering 50-100 gallons of water per minute in the aftermath of an earthquake and a tsunami.
2) The use of seawater to keep it cool can cause other risks and issues with cooling down the road, averting an immediate crisis, but creating the risk of other crises in the next few weeks and months that may be just as serious as the initial meltdown risk. Salts are corrosive, and can clog and degrade the effectiveness of the cooling system. So now you've got a weakened reactor containment vessel and low-efficacy cooling system that could result in a struggle to cool the core for the next several months until it's safe for disassembly, along with the risks of leaks, ruptures, overheating, and explosions from god-only-knows-what inside the system that got injected alongside the seawater.
Oh no? Let's review your comments:
-- "It was many days LATE, obviously to protect that significant investment."
-- "It's likely that the decision makers put their bets on restoring the normal cooling system before red-lining beyond protecting the investment."
-- "the most likely reason for that I can see is to avoid throwing billions of dollars down the drain. the funny thing is that if they had done that and cooled everything down by now, that person(s) would be on the blocks for destroying a billion dollar investment needlessly!"
-- "did the fact that resorting to sea water would cost them billions of dollars delay the decision? from what i can see it did"
Now, if you want to backpedal and say "of course it's unlikely that's the cause, and other causes are probably far more likely," then great, we're fully in agreement. But you seem unwilling to accept any possible explanation other than "management is evil and cared only about their investment." That notion would make a pretty standard John Grisham novel, but given the circumstances on the ground, I think it's probably the most unlikely explanation available.
If the price of groceries and fuel were as variable and volatile as the cost of health care, yes, we probably would buy "insurance" to help pay for them.
Imagine you've been spending $50 a week on ramen and the occasional fruits & vegetables. Then one week you suddenly learn that if you don't start eating $1000-a-steak filet mignon, washed down with a $10,000-a-bottle wine, you'll die. Same thing applies to health insurance: maybe you only use a $20 bottle of tylenol most months. But then you find out you have cancer, and need $500,000 in surgery & cancer treatments over the next 6 months or you're going to die.
Thus, insurance is a priority for people who wish to have the peace of mind of knowing that, in the words of Chris Rock, "at least if you got some coverage, you'll die on a mattress."
Just to clarify, for the people who will say "What, they make you buy two copies of the same app?!?!?!1111!!!" You can embed the UI information for both iPad and iPhone apps into a single application bundle, so that the same app will display the properly-optimized UI for whatever screen size it's running on. Other apps are designed exclusively for the iPad and can't be loaded on the iPhone, and some apps only have an iPhone-sized UI, and so look like shit when pixel-doubled on the iPad - even if they could make the elements smooth instead of jagged and pixelated, they still are *immense* on the iPad compared to the UI elements you're used to, and look like giant-sized toy versions of themselves.
Yes, it's amazing how easy it is to find ways to insinuate that they're nothing-but-evil when that's the preordained conclusion you're trying to support. TEPCO iz a big evul core-pirate-shun, after all, LOL.
Do you have the least inkling as to WHY the use of seawater is a last ditch effort? I'll help, you can play along at home:
1) The salt in the seawater corrodes the metal of the containment vessel. The containment vessel which must withstand high temperature and high heat for a span of NO LESS THAN MONTHS still before the reactor can be adequately cooled down for disassembly, and fuel rods extracted for reprocessing or disposal.
2) It leaves deposits in cooling systems, which can seriously degrade efficiency of heat exchangers and break down pumps. These cooling systems which must continue operating properly for a span of NO LESS THAN MONTHS still before the reactor can be adequately cooled down for disassembly, and fuel rods extracted for reprocessing or disposal.
3) It introduces god-only-knows-what other reactive & corrosive materials into a fucking nuclear reactor's core. Can you tell me every chemical that they can expect to find in the thousands of gallons of typical coastal Japanese seawater they'll use that might react badly with fuel rods, control rods, containment vessel or cooling system? And can you tell us how those materials will behave under high heat, high pressure, and when subjected to ionizing radiation? I sure can't, and I bet you can't either.
The decay heat from these reactors must be contained & cooled for months, perhaps years, before the reactors can be broken down safely. If you've weakened the containment vessel and compromised the cooling system, and perhaps introduced materials corrosive to the control and/or fuel rods... wouldn't you consider that a fairly extreme and risky measure? Instead of avoiding disaster, you've simply kicked the can down the road, hoping that you'll have time to undo the mess you've made once you've gotten the immediate situation under control. That makes this a last ditch effort: they are doing it to avert immediate crisis, knowing they may face other crises in the near future as a result of this decision.
If they were using seawater within 36 hours of the incident, they clearly had people working on putting that capability in place some time before they began pumping it. This means, set up the pumps, pipes, hoses, and everything else required to pull seawater from the ocean, probably pass it through at least a *rough* filtration to prevent sediment and sea creatures from being injected, boronate the water, and then pump it into a reactor core which is overheating, emitting larger-than-normal amounts of radiation, and running at significantly higher pressure than is normal. And they have to be able to deliver that seawater/boron mix at somewhere above 50-75 gallons per minute once everything's in place to keep the water levels from continuing to drop inside the core. And if that sounds like a job of only a couple hours, consider doing it in the dark, with minimal emergency power after one of the worst earthquakes & tsunamis in recorded history, knowing that a spark in the wrong place might blow you up by igniting Hydrogen that's been released, and all the while knowing that you are standing within a couple hundred yards of a nuclear reactor that might be actively melting down.
I'm honestly not sure which is the cause & which is the effect here - your unrealistic expectations for how quickly things should happen in a scenario like this, or your desire to demonstrate how evil the decision-makers at TEPCO are. Either way, all you're demonstrating is that you have very little grasp of the actual problems being faced by the people trying to cool these reactors down.
It is entirely material. If they had started pumping seawater the moment after the generators went offline, 36 hours earlier than the point that they did, can you support your suggestion that there would have been no overheating, no explosions, and no damage to the fuel rods & containment vessels? It is also entirely material to know what steps, exactly, they did take after the generators went offline, and what the decision making process was. Since neither of those things are clear - and probably won't be clear for months, or years - your statements of "fact" are - in fact - nothing but speculation and opinion.
You have assumed the following:
1) They waited longer than they needed to, and could have had seawater prepared & flowing in in less time than they did;
2) That the delay in pumping in seawater is the ONLY reason that things overheated and caused damage;
3) There would have been no damage to the reactors if they had started pumping it as soon as it was possible to do so;
These assumptions lead you to the conclusion that the entire decision making structure at TEPCO is evil, and that they care about nothing except salvaging their reactors, while overlooking the simple fact that if they make the entire area uninhabitable because they play loose & fast with safety, they're going to have an awful hard time monetizing those reactors, since they won't be able to operate them, or sell the power to anybody, since nobody will rebuild power lines through a fallout zone for years.
I can imagine quite a few reasons why it might have taken them 36 hours to begin pumping seawater into the reactor cores, none of which require the entire TEPCO organization, from lowly engineer to CEO, to be irredeemably evil. Why is it so hard for you to do that?
Let's ask the Beeb, shall we?
I'm sorry you have trouble with reading comprehension yourself, as it's plainly evident that the injection of seawater into at least one of the reactors was started less than 36 hours after the tsunami hit - unless you're dimwitted enough to think that the Japanese engineers thought they'd do the trick by hosing down the exterior of the containment building's walls with some seawater. Incidentally - the BBC timeline also details many of the steps that were taken to try and restore power and keep things under control in the intervening 36 hours.
You're the only one asserting that there was any unreasonable delay at all. Why should the Japanese feel they have to justify or explain the steps they've taken to J. Random, Esq., on Slashdot? Frankly, I'd much rather see them focus their efforts on controlling the situation - there will be years for them to write their memoirs and explain all of the minute-by-minute decisions and issues *after* they've done what they can to prevent and control a nuclear disaster.
Let's review your original post, now, in light of all we've learned:
36 hours is quick when your entire infrastructure has been demolished by a 10 meter wall of water and a 9.0 magnitude earthquake. Even if it were humanly possible they could have started pumping seawater sooner, it certainly isn't "many days LATE." For the math whizzes, 36 hours is not even 2 full days - this means that in order to have not been "many days LATE," they would have had to start pumping boronated seawater into operational nuclear reactors *days before* the earthquake & tsunami ever hit.
You don't appear to have any particular credentials that would qualify you as an expert in nuclear emergency response, but you feel well qualified to second guess the decisions being made by TEPCO - the context, and information feeding into which you have no way of knowing. You've read a couple newspaper articles and watched a few Youtube videos, and decided that the Japanese were somehow irresponsible, or that TEPCO is some evil conglomerate that would choose to render hundreds of square kilometers of coastal Japan uninhabitable for centuries, rather than risk damaging their precious reactors with some seawater. Except the justification you use for your opinion - namely that they waited "DAYS" to begin injecting seawater - is demonstrably false, and it's self-evident that bad assumptions make for bad conclusions.
And that is all.
And you're quite sure that they had the capability to begin injecting seawater the very moment that they decided it was necessary?
In the HOURS following a devastating earthquake and tsunami, when communications and electricity were out, monitoring systems were offline, and chain of command were still likely struggling simply to make sense of the situation at all, and understand what the extent of the damage was? Do you know how long it takes to put the pumps and seawater delivery mechanisms in place? Do you know how long it took them to get generators to the plant in order to begin that pumping? Do you know how quickly the water boils off, versus how fast they were able to pump the water in in this emergency? Do you realize that cooling a near-meltdown nuclear reactor doesn't simply involve someone standing there with a garden hose? And of course, you're sure they had large stores of boronated seawater just hanging around, I'm sure it took no time to prepare enough of the mixture to begin injecting it?
No, of course not. Because you're such an expert on earthquakes, tsunamis, and nuclear accidents - I mean, I have to assume that you've got some technical basis for these arguments other than PHB syndrome, which says that anything you don't understand must be simple - that you've already determined that it's because TEPCO simply was hoping to save their investment, and didn't give a shit about how many people died as a result, and that's the ONLY possible explanation for why they had to struggle to keep the reactors from melting down. And of course, given the fact that they're struggling to avert a meltdown, it's only reasonable to expect that they should also waste a bunch of time explaining the technical problems they're having to some random armchair quarterback on the internet, to avoid a public relations black eye... right?
And, B-T-W, they were injecting seawater into parts of some of the reactors by ~8 pm on March 12. That's *Saturday* - the day after the quake, less than 36 hours after the quake itself, 34-35 hours after the tsunami actually came in and did all the damage, and in the midst of numerous fairly powerful aftershocks. Only counting aftershocks of magnitude 6 or greater, there were 15 of them on Friday after the large quake, and 10 of them on Saturday - all in the same area as the original magnitude 9 quake.
That's a pretty huge assumption you're making with no proof offered. MANY (MOST) industries don't see this antitrust & anti-monopoly activity, because despite all your claims to the contrary, monopolies are not "inevitable natural consequences" in most industries. Monopolies become more of a risk when there are high capital investment barriers to entry for new players in the market, or when the Government, through regulation, GRANTS a business a monopoly status in a market.
Government regulations are certainly desirable to prevent people from *abusing* a controlling status in an industry, but they certainly do not prevent monopolies from forming, and if they don't do that, then the argument that monopolies are "inevitable" seems to lack any proof whatsoever. If they are inevitable, and government regulations can't prevent them from occurring, then every industry should have a monopoly player by now. That's demonstrably not the case.
"chain" =/= "monopoly". Starbucks isn't a monopoly simply because they took over the local mom & pop coffee shop. Chains do sometimes drive out individual stores because chains have the economies of scale to offer cheaper prices. I pay less for a gallon of milk at a chain store than I do from a mom & pop grocery, or a convenience store - how is this harming the consumer through 'price fixing' or 'abuse of monopoly status'? (Hint: It isn't, because neither of those things are occurring.)
While chains may ruin the unique charm of your neighborhood, they do not constitute monopolies, or trust violations, or anything else. If you want to patronize a locally-owned coffee shop because you like its unique charm, you're welcome to start one, or find one, and get a bunch of like-minded customers together to patronize it. Lots of small hole-in-the-wall places exist for this very reason, and will probably continue to exist indefinitely, even though chains also exist in their industry. Some people like local character & personalized service, and are willing to pay more for it.
No, I'm afraid that your fear of inevitable monopolies is rather overblown. It is a risk, and it is desirable to have regulations to prevent the abuse of dominant market positions; it is also nowhere near as inevitable or common for a monopoly to arise as you're suggesting.