LinuxCon Japan: OpenRelief launches

Contrary to popular belief, Japan is very conservative to use this kind of technologies for disaster recovery. People tend to just avoid using these in a serious situation. It's partly because of the inefficiency of government red tape, but there's also subtle distrust of machines among people (which might be surprising to you, in the country of automated toilets and creepy humanoids). I guess there's a similar project at some research organizations, but probably none of them are put in practice. In the last year's disaster, we had to import inspector robots for the stricken reactors, because none of those technologies were available at the time (and I doubt that they still aren't). Also, we had a fancy prediction system for spreading of radioactive materials, which the most public didn't even know it existed until months later.