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.
Damage has been done, hello oil and coal... (Score:4, Interesting)
Even though the Japanese reactors did their job to contain against a meltdown, it looks like nuclear power progress will be set back another 20-30 years due to the fearmongers pointing to this.
The loss of life can't be ignored. For people that were not affected by loved ones killed by it, the rest of the world will also be feeling this disaster in Japan for generations to come. Especially the fact that the anti-nuke crowd now possesses another "kill point" to keep nuclear power dead. This essentially clinches the fact that our kids and grandkids will still be having their lights powered by coal, and their cars by oil.
Re:Redundancy and good planning. (Score:2, Interesting)
Many aspects are correct (I am living in Japan now for more than a year), but they do also have some negative tendencies;
- The Obajan (miiddle-aged women) can be very rude and pushy in supermarkets and queues.
- The Japanese build shitty houses with poor isolation, requiring a lot of heating in winter and a lot of cooling in summer
- They do not have a sense of style, their houses are full of little trinkets and other shit
- Their telephones are rubbish
- They do not accept any criticism from foreigners
- Their treatment of secretaries is not as good as I had hoped
- They are very good at paperwork, not so good at reducing said paperwork
- They are very good at fixing consequences, not so good at looking at root causes
- Their education is top-notch before university, university itself is a "enter and you may pass"-joke
But overall, my impression is still very positive. They are kind people ready to help and when they say something is done at 14:00, something is done at 14:00.
B.
Re:Damage has been done, hello oil and coal... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wasn't aware that Japan had nuclear reactors, it was a really dumb idea for them to do. In the US the few nuclear reactors we have are designed so that if power is lost to the core the control rods fall into the core and the fuel rods fall out and the reaction stops. The problem is that if a reactor like that suffers and earthquake you can end up in a position where the rods get jammed and the assurance of an automatic shutdown disappears.
From what I've gathered it's a bit of a moot point as these reactors were apparently built upside down such that they have to have constant power to keep the reactor offline.
Note that the Japanese reactors at Fukushima which are currently melting down are a U.S. (General Electric) design [wikipedia.org], and the oldest (1 and 2) were actually built by GE... This design is apparently quite common in the U.S. as well.