Net Sees Earthquake Damage, Routes Around It 177
davidwr writes "Japanese internet outages mostly healed themselves within hours. While some cables remain out, most computers that lost connectivity have it again. From James Cowie's blog: 'The engineers who built Japan's Internet created a dense web of domestic and international connectivity that is among the richest and most diverse on earth, as befits a critical gateway for global connectivity in and out of East Asia. At this point, it looks like their work may have allowed the Internet to do what it does best: route around catastrophic damage and keep the packets flowing, despite terrible chaos and uncertainty.' Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning."
Reader Spy Handler points out another article about how redundancy and good planning are preventing disaster at Japan's troubled nuclear reactors, despite media-fueled speculation and panic to the contrary.
Re:Redundancy and good planning. (Score:4, Insightful)
These are two characteristics the human race is not known for.
Fixed.
Re:Redundancy and good planning. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Redundancy and good planning. (Score:2, Insightful)
As illustrated by Chernobyl ?
Communism irradiated everyone on the planet, including a number of locals lethally, and produced the largest nuclear disaster in history because ... politicians wanted to save a few bucks in the plant's construction. Malformed children were born because of this communist cost reduction for almost a dozen years.
Additionally, communist leaders did not see fit to warn rescue workers adequately of the dangers of the site. This was not through incompetence, but through malice. Better to kill a few workers and have a cheaper cleanup.
Of course, "communist" is an American word. Russians, or Chinese, use "socialist" for that concept. So do Americans, except that half of them still deny it.
Re:anthropomorphizing (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet doesn't 'see' anything
Routers do. They can see a loss of connectivity and alter their routes accordingly.
why do we need to attribute it to anything beyond simple 'redundancy and good planning'?
A redundant route doesn't do any good without the intelligence (either human or machine) to determine which routes are up and send traffic through them only.
Re:Damage has been done, hello oil and coal... (Score:2, Insightful)
hydro is one of the most environmentally destructive forms of power, with burning forests being worse. It utterly devastates river ecology, floods vast tracts of otherwise useful and fertile land and is currently leading to the extinction of most of the planets major migratory fresh water fish.
Biofuel is one of the most socially destructive forms of power. Just to replace the US motor vehicle transportation costs, you would need to sacrifice nearly 100% of our food producing farmland. Note that the US provides roughly 1/3 of the worlds food supply. This is also not sustainable because of aquifer depletion.
wind is unreliable with bursts capable of damaging power transmission and occasional lulls that cover vast regions at a time.
Conservation is at best a tiny sliver of the issue. 85% of the world is striving to match our standard of living, no amount of conservation by the 15% or so with western standards of living will make up for that growth when it comes.
Nuclear and solar power are our only real options moving forward.
Re:Redundancy and good planning. (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone loves to blame somebody else for problems with America. I do agree that corporate American, and our government, to a large extent are responsible for many of our problems. If faced with a possible meltdown an American company, marketing idiots would decide, "releasing information makes us look bad" and would keep it secret until things had gotten totally out of control. But long before that point, the idiots with business degrees would have decided it was too expensive to do things the right way and would have skimped during construction.
But as I've said, it isn't just the fault of corporations and government. The American people are also at fault. If you haven't been to Japan you don't know what work ethic is. Has anyone seen the footage inside the supermarkets during the earthquake? The first thing store employees did when it was over was make sure the products were secure and started cleaning the place up. In the US, they'd run for the doors and probably wouldn't go back to work. If there was a mess on the floor they'd say it was someone else's responsibility. Japanese are dedicated to their jobs on a level many Americans can't imagine.
How about the people waiting in lines to be able to buy food and supplies? Everyone's respectful, courteous and follows the rules. In America there would have been a mad rush with everyone grabbing what they could. Worse than that, there would be looting.
Too many Americans have this obnoxious sense of self-righteousness and an obsession with being iconoclasts. No sense of pride and no sense of respect or responsibility.
And the thing is that these attributes aren't unique to Japan, although it's definitely much more concentrated there. Travel to South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore or even China and you'll see this. Walk into any convenience store, and there are hundreds of them in any Asian city and the aisles are nearly stocked and the store always clean. I've been to malls where employees were on their hands and knees scrubbing the threshold of an entrance to the mall. I don't recall ever being in a bathroom in a shopping center that wasn't pristine. Good luck seeing that in an American mall.
Employees are almost always courteous and do a consistently good job. They don't need managers breathing down their necks, but they also know that management isn't going to tolerate bullshit. Walk into a supermarket in the States and employees are routinely whining that they've had to work 5 minutes late. Or they're chatting with friends. Or moping. Or simply jerks. Then there are the patrons who don't have a respect for anyone, including employees who do work hard to keep things clean and organized. The problems are everywhere.
I didn't really appreciate any of this until I lived in Asia. And now I find it frustrating to no end; at times I question why I continue to live in the States. The problems exist at every level. But then you can't feel self-righteous if you acknowledge your own part in all this.
Re:Damage has been done, hello oil and coal... (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that even people with reasonably functioning reasoning abilities are being feed believable nonsense from the media. Even if you're a smart guy you will still be able to draw the wrong conclusions under the sheer weight of information sources, who're presenting bogus or twisted information as "fact". Yes, anyone with half a brain who cares to do some research into the advancements and facts around nuclear power should be able to see that many of the risks are wildly exaggerated or just plain false, but you could say this about a lot of other topics. Simply put nobody is able to do the research to create well-informed opinions about everything that's going on in the world. The problem is the credibility lent to the news media of the world, no matter how much of a "critical thinker" one claims to be. News, in the broad sense, is simply not being handled in the right way today and this cascades to a lot of other issues because we're being fed sensationalist and lobbyist information.
In short: the news media worldwide is corrupt. Their function of distilling information truthfully, for the masses to consume, is being twisted either by capitalistic thought or political agenda. Much of the time it is hard to distinguish which is which. No one is truly immune to this.
Ugh (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Redundancy and good planning. (Score:4, Insightful)
That theory looks nice on paper. But let's take a closer look at reality.
Power supply, i.e. having a huge infrastructure of power plants, power lines and all the little tidbits that keep them together, is not something you can start in a mom&pop style. In other words, it's a game for big money and big industry. Or, in yet other words, a game for few. Going into the market comes with a huge financial risk attached.
On the other end, you have the customer who doesn't really care about your power grid or how redundant it is. What he cares about is power. And since power is standardized (by its very nature, since you can only use 110V or 230V, depending on the area you live in, there's no leeway for "fancy power"), the only difference visible to the average customer is price.
Redundancy costs money. Not only a one time investment but recurring costs for maintenance. In other words, you will produce at higher cost.
Hence the only supplyer that will prevail is the cheap one without redundancy and without investment unless absolutely necessary.
Here's a little food for thought for you: Our power supply was state owned until the 90s. No "alternatives". It wasn't exactly more expensive than the "free market" power we get today. But the blackouts were fewer.