rtega comments

Is this the hotel they plan to put in the nice park in the center of Kyoto?

Nice, nice. Yesterday we had a story here in Belgium about our news crew in a playground in Fukushima city. They measured the radiation at the playground and in one instance they recorded 70 microsievert. The parents of the children at the school obviously were in shock.

Unfortunately, more of this is to be expected with rising food prices.

Canned coffee, another ridiculous coffee idea.

There's a good reason people build at the coast and not inland. There simply is no safe place inland. Move inland in Japan and you move up hills and mountains. Each year during heavy rain lots of buildings already get swept off the hill. Moving everybody inland is no viable option unless you want them to be swept out to sea in no time.

Experts have been warning for this since the day these reactors were built. And these are not the only reactors in Japan that are not built to withstand these kinds of disasters.

Way to late to apologize. They should get the engineers who decided to build these reactors without the required safety concerns 40 years ago and nail them to the wall. These are the guys who created this problem in the first place. Experts have been warning that something like this could happen for years. Somehow they seem to have thaught that they could play a game with mother nature. You don't.

Sushisake3, admittingly there is no realistic alternative. But that should not stop one from considering the fact that if nuclear fission goes wrong, it goes wrong for 10.000 years. For me that's reason enough to seriously consider not to use this technology and if you do, at least try to prepare against all eventualities. Again, I say, I have been reading for 20 years, and I know that others have been saying this for 40 years, that Japan's nuclear sites are not built to withstand the natural disasters occuring in this country. This is not hindsight. They knew it from the start and probably thought: "oh, whatever, such quakes only happen seldomly, let's save some money..."

Oh, and the guys that were taken away with radiation sickness received doses of 2-6 sievert. They are probably living their last weeks... Good job TEPCO, good job.

sushisake3, maybe not on JT but Greenpeace has been warning for this for over 40 years. Most of Japans nuclear reactors are not built to withstand earthquakes they should be able to withstand. The problem is not necessarily the building of nuclear reactors but rather building them while being optimistic about the strength of earthquakes. That's what they have done here for years and each time one of them gets a direct hit it turns into a mess. Remember the earthquake of 2007?

The difference with chernobyl at this time being that the reactor itself blew up in Chernobyl and radioactivity was litterally blown into the sky unhindered for almost a week. For the time being this hasn't yet happened in Fukushima.

This is probably not the complete picture. Given their age, his wife had dementia and got aggressive. Without the money to have her being taken care of the guy had to keep her at home and finally couldn't bear it.

Sarge: it should have read "there's little to look forward to from an economical point of view."

The advance of other countries at the expense of Europe and the US is probably going to come down all together with the running out of cheap oil. Unless some genius finds some other cheap and easy to mine energy source really quick I think 2011 is going to be a year to really and totally forget.

You people really miss the point here. The special thing about this metronome is that it has, unlike most other metronomes, four visible bolts on the front.

Thanks fishy. Finally someone who manages to say something humane and balanced here!

The funny thing is that all these security measures, introduced after the recent bombing scare, wouldn't have stopped that bombing from happening anyway. Why even bother? It's simply giving people the feeling that something is being done about their security.

Everybody flying regularly knows that all this just doesn't work and wouldn't stop any attacks from happening.

If you want to visit an onsen you absolutely should go to Furusato Onsen at the foot of Sakurajima which has a splendid view of the bay in the rotenburo.

As someone who has been bullied myself I can tell you that changing schools and teachers won't help very much. Having 40 students in one class room doesn't help as well. The most important thing for me was knowing that my parents were behind me and that there was nothing wrong with me. That slowly gave me the confidence to ignore the people who were bullying me. One gets bullied because other students see that they can "touch" you in some way. Some kids are more sensitive than others and so seem to get chosen out. Changing schools ussually doesn't help much as you come into a new situation with people who don't know you. The first thing that kids tend to do at that age is test the new kid out. The result is the same.

The emphasis in bullying is to much on the school. I teach and I can tell you that as a teacher you don't have much influence on the kids that are bullying. The moment you start to protect the person that is being bullied the bullying is in fact starting to get worse.

May I reemphasize that the most important thing that helped me was realizing that nothing was wrong with me. In fact, one of the things that my parents thought me, and I've seen it again and again after that, is that the people who are bullying usually have problems themselves and are using bullying to get a feeling that they have some grip on the world. Most people that I've seen bullying or that have bullied me had parents who split up or other problems at home.

Ok, let's try again: economists are slowly recognizing that the rising oil price was one of the triggering factors of the 2008 almost crash. Oil price suddenly went down when the demand went down because of the economy going down the drain. It went down to about 40$. Now it is at 80$. Remember that we were at 30$ two or three years ago with the exact same demand. When the economies are slowly gathering pace again the demand will grow once again. This suggests that when the economies are up and running as they were before the crash we can get into quite some difficulty if not a total crash.

In my oppinion the entire talk about climate is just disguised talk to prepare the public for the fact that we are using way too much fossil fuel. They can't actually say that out loud or otherwize stock markets might as well crash tomorrow.

Now get one down to Fukuoka too so I can have a decent cup of coffee next summer when I visit my family there. Starbucks s*cks seriously!

sf2k, most people simply don't dare to understand it as the implications are to grave.

Thanks sf2k, you got there earlier than me. Indeed, it's probably never going to recover much. Most probably it's going to go down the drain unless some genius finds some alternate source of cheap energy damn quick. Even the IEA now seems to come to terms with the reality of the end of cheap oil.

Maybe this isn't the entire story. The main problem in Japan is that there aren't enough care houses for the elderly and they are expensive. Most people have to care for their own parents. I don't know if it is the case here, but if anybody in here have ever cared for a dementing parent I can tell that it certainly is enough to push you to the limit of what is humanly acceptable. My parents did it. In the end it got so bad that they were no longer able to sleep because she was waking up all the time. Luckily in Belgium care houses are abundant and she could be taken care of by professionals. Otherwise it would have been a living hell for them. That one year took two years for them to recuperate afterwards.

There's a nice japanese movie about the subject. I don't remember the title but it's about a head of police who kills his dementing wife. He has an impeccable record up to then so nobody understands. The judge hearing the case is also caring for his own dementing father at home. Anybody knows which movie I'm talking about?

Wow, this article has futsuu all over the place! Nice, nice, ...

As with all digital piano's this is most probably just another digital piano simply lacking the large sound body needed to produce any convincing sound. Recently tried my hand at all the digital piano's in a piano shop here and found nothing convincing as usual.

Isn't it funny it's just XP and 2003 that are affected, not windows vista? Basically M$ is saying: change to Vista and you are safe...

Obviously the police didn't record zilch...

I don't understand why he fails to mention "Traffic lights". Japanese cities are really stumped full of traffic lights. So many it actually gets ridiculous. It annoys me more than anything when driving in Japan.

They will definitely find a new format so that one movie fits exactly on one such DVD. We will be at the same point as we were when the standard DVD was first introduced in 1997...

Dunno who invented the iced coffee things but they had rather shoot him.