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.
What does this have to with the reactors? (Score:1)
Good job as always, /. editors. If you wanted another nuke article, why not just post one? :/
This Was The Whole Point of the Internet (Score:1)
Before it was commercialized, the whole point of the internet was to create a communications system that could survive a nuclear war. Now, for whatever reasons, most countries have singular backbones and connection, and when that one is taken out, the com system designed to survive a nuclear war can disconnect an entire country because of a single boat anchor.
Looks like another thing that Japan took from the US, and maintains it to higher standards.
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Looks like another thing that Japan took from the US, and maintains it to higher standards.
So the first two E's are already done, if I were you I'd watch out for the third sometime soon.
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You mean like it already happened in, say, car industry, computer industry, audio and video industry, ...
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.
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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 provi
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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.
Not necessarily. Only if there is a big dam with a reservoir behind it. Hydro can be done without the dam, and it's just as efficient. It doesn't have the bonus of evening out the annual flow fluctuations, but it solves the flooding and migratory fish issues.
Close to where I grew up there was a small hydroelectric power plant of this type. Some water was diverted into a pipeline a few miles upstream. The pipe roughly followed the bank of the river, and the water gushed back into the river after turning
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You'd have a hard time putting them on the falls itself because it recedes 1' / year. Your little waterwheels would have to be similarly mobile. There are things we can do to reduce that a bit but it's still a barrier to any major permanent undertaking.
Plus, it's kind of a tourist attraction without the waterwheels. The power plants are a fair ways upstream, and because of the tourism aspect they don't run at the full possible capacity to maintain the impressiveness of the falls.
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The niagara falls power system provides a significant portion of Canada's power, and quite a bit on the american side as well. Treaties control the amount of water diverted, but they do make full use of the gravity well. Not with inefficient and awkward water wheels, but with well designed slopes leading to properly coupled turbines.
Also, they divert the water upstream of the falls, and release it downstream, so they've actually got even more gravitational potential to take advantage of.
And all of it is a
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Waterwheel technology has been around for a few thousand years :-)
The additional leat (mill stream leading to the mill from the river) and mill ponds actually provide additional habitat to the fish.
Although in the UK - you need an extraction license to divert the river water down the mill stream, over the wheel and back into the river.
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The problem is that this isn't the case. Those dams aren't there only for the flow fluctuations, more importantly is that a large body of water results in water flowing faster through the turbines. The potential energy is much higher when you have all that pressure behind the dam.
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Expanding on my own post, I recently looked into run-of-the-river small scale hydro but the calculations show that you'll need a fast flowing river to get any serious amount of energy. With wind-power it's easy to scale: make it higher and the blades longer. With hydro-without-a-dam you're stuck with sucking the same amount of energy from a single stream. It works for small scale power generation but it's not something that will contribute beyond that.
For serious large-scale hydro energy without dams, the o
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"wind is unreliable with bursts capable of damaging power transmission and occasional lulls that cover vast regions at a time."
Wind can be used in large offshore chains with high guarantees of predictable amounts of energy. Wind energy can also be used to produce hydrogen (nd hydrogen can in turn be used to produce carbonaceous liquid fuels using CO2 from the air). Wind energy can also be used intermittenlty to crush rock for fertilizer (see remineralize.org). Wind energy can also be used to compress air in
Supporting links on alternatives (Score:2)
Have you looked?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydrides [wikipedia.org]
"Metal hydrides, such as MgH2, NaAlH4, LiAlH4, LiH, LaNi5H6, and TiFeH2, with varying degrees of efficiency, can be used as a storage medium for hydrogen, often reversibly.[8] Some are easy-to-fuel liquids at ambient temperature and pressure, others are solids which could be turned into pellets. These materials have good energy density by volume, although their energy density by weight is
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And what of geothermal energy?
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Geothermal doesn't scale. IIRC, geothermal power per square meter is about 1/10000th of solar power (averaged over the surface of the Earth, ovbiously it's not evenly distributed in practice). Nice in a few areas where it's easy, but no substitute ofr base load. Most "alternative" energy sources trip over the same hurdle: 1TW is a lot of power.
Solar scales very well (and you don't need rare high-efficiency photoelectric cells, just a black pipe and a mirrored trench), but isn't reliable. Until we get a
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Really? It was always the best in SimCity 2000.
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The environmentalists don't like the idea of tidal barrages to harness the power from those 20m tides (and even 10m tides).
Something about salt marsh habitats, wading seabirds and the like.
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This is different. Nuclear energy is a useful tool, the air ships in contrast were already in the process of being replaced at that point. The main reason why they were being used is that planes hadn't yet gotten to the point where they could reliably cross an ocean, let alone with enough passengers to make it worthwhile.
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 co
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Keeping the reactor usable after an earthquake is a much more expensive prospect than merely preventing an uncontrolled reaction leading to too much waste heat. There are several modern fail-safe ideas, from pebble-bed reactors where nuggets of fissile material are encased in a coating with a temperature-sensitive neutron cross-section (so if it gets hot, the reaction is stopped), to simple meltable housings that flood the reactor chamber with a neutron absorber if a temperature threshhol is passed (think
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.
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Only if you cancel funding for next generation nuclear plants that are capable of fully using nuclear fuel instead of having it pass through once and leaving >95% unused. Oh yes, Carter and Reagan did that (much to my disappointment Clinton didn't fix it either).
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They did it because they didn't want people getting the idea of reprocessing the fuel and extracting the plutonium to make bombs, but they completely forgot that the UK, France, Germany and other nuclear power producing countries reprocess their fuels so the technology is out there anyway.
Japan gets its nuclear fuel reprocessed in the UK at Sellafield.
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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 f
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The media has caught on to the fact that people will seek out news sources that confirm their prejudices, and avoid sources that challenge their prejudices.
So media now tells people what they believe. "Teachers to have their ears tickled" and all that.
The media will give us "Disaster at nuclear plant" stories, because, if they don't, viewers will change channel to someone who does. Despite the fact that the big issue in Japan at the moment is getting support to the survivors of the earthquake and tidal wave
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But at the end of the day, you're still left with a boat load of radioactive waste that you have to store somewhere.
"Whether used fuel is reprocessed or not, the volume of high-level waste is modest, - about 3 cubic metres per year of vitrified waste, or 25-30 tonnes of used fuel for a typical large nuclear reactor. The relatively small amount involved allows it to be effectively and economically isolated."
And at least you CAN store the waste, unlike coal and gas...
http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/wast.htm [world-nuclear.org]
anthropomorphizing (Score:3)
Why do we insist on speaking of the internet as some mythical being with the ability to observe, act and heal? It's true that there is a remarkable robustness to the network, as shown in this case, but why do we need to attribute it to anything beyond simple 'redundancy and good planning'? It's a network of electronics and fiber-optics, maintained by people --- infrastructure and connections.
The internet doesn't 'see' anything, and information doesn't 'want' anything.
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Why do we insist on speaking of the internet as some mythical being with the ability to observe, act and heal?
Its sounds nicer and we are just thinking of Skynet and the Matrix. We are simply the worker cells. :)
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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.
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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.
I guess tend to think of the software that makes redundancy act like redundancy as just a component of the redundancy (nobody says they have redundancy to their data just because they installed a second drive---the redundancy comes from the RAID implementation).
But you're right, there needs to be some algorithmic intelligence there. But the language used in the headline here almost suggests some sort of hyper-consciousness to the internet. I think it's a lot more amazing to think of it as a crazy-complex
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I think it's a lot more amazing to think of it as a crazy-complex system of interdependent parts than as some unified being.
Strange, I think of the human brain as a crazy-complex system of interdependent parts. But then again, I do not consider all humans to be intelligent.
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It's anthropomorphizing to say "they see" a loss of connectivity. Routers don't have eyes or cameras. They do have mechanisms to detect the loss of connectivity, though.
"A redundant route doesn't do any good without the intelligence..."
Again, it's anthropomorphizing to attribute a change in routes to "intelligence." Routers aren't intelligent - they blindly follow a well defined set of rules. Order all routes by their de
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It's a modification of a famous quote by John Gilmore [wikipedia.org]: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
Know your Internet heroes. (Everybody recognizes that Zuckerberg twerp, but the net was fostered by people with beards!)
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Its not a matter of considering the net a live entity, but it is a complex mesh of devices, each of which has a specialised function and the sum of those devices makes information flow based on certain decisions.
As large amount of decision making on routing, load-balancing, reflowing and path finding is automated and based on certain stimuli (broken links, bandwidth thresholds, lack of net neutrality, etc.) then the system in question -the internet- exhibits a behaviour which is dependant on those stimuli.
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Because what is being described is an automatic function, carried out autonomously by the infrastructure of the net? We've programmed and built it to react to input in a certain way. In short: in sees damage to its infrastructure, it automatically routes around it and thus it "heals" that damage.
It has the ability to observe, because we've given it ways to receive input. It has the ability to act, because we've programmed it to do so. Being able to 'heal' is a consequence of this instance of acting. It is d
According to AFP (Score:4, Funny)
Network traffic has moved 8 feet to the east.
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Hmmm...lower ping to servers in Japan! Woot!
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>>Network traffic has moved 8 feet to the east.
On a serious note, I wonder what this will do to GPS navigation systems.
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>>Network traffic has moved 8 feet to the east.
On a serious note, I wonder what this will do to GPS navigation systems.
I suspect everything in Japan will be off by 8 feet or so, until new maps can be distributed.
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Network traffic has moved 8 feet to the east.
That was horrible. Funny - but horrible.
"Mostly"? (Score:2)
I don't know about Mostly. Getting to websites outside of Korea has been a very slow and arduous process since the quake hit. It's 3 days in and a good number of sites are still crawling.
How do other countries compare (Score:2)
Does anyone know how other countries compare in this regards? I imagine certain countries have certain clear points of failure.
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I have a little personal experience in Hong Kong, as I live there.
A few years ago there was the Taiwan quake, that basically severed all cables between Hong Kong and Taiwan, and effectively all but cutting us off from the rest of the world. Local and mainland China based sites worked fine; the rest was cut off for a few days. That included e-mail of course. Not really a "single" point of failure as there were multiple cables involved, still "single" enough to fail. Pretty bad. Luckily within a few days eme
It's not just the network architecture (Score:5, Informative)
I have noticed that for things that almost certainly aren't mirrored and require a direct connection to the US the bandwidth is probably 1/10 of what it usually is. While some of that may be due to increased traffic, I cannot help but think given the location of the quake that some of the cables between the US and Japan have been damaged. However services like Facebook and Google are as fast as they ever were. The reason for this is simple, both Google and Facebook have data centers in Japan that are designed to be eventually consistent. Instead of each individual request being routed to the states and back almost all the requests are routed to local data centers with only the updates coming from elsewhere being pushed through the cables. This obviously saves tons of bandwidth and allows for much better communication with the outside world. Now if you'll excuse me I gotta throw out most of my stuff and get the hell out of here. Tata!
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Re:It's not just the network architecture (Score:5, Informative)
News reports say a couple of undersea cables between Japan and China are out, but nothing on the US side. Most of your international bandwidth problems are probably caused by the upsurge in people watching NHK online.
For all of the people who are wondering about this, I am here from the source...
I work for Global Crossing and we own the 20Gbps links that were damaged from the earthquakes and subsequent tsunami. We have ships going out today or tomorrow to lift the cables and repair them. Our reroutes are what are keeping the Internet going. For the companies reading this and who are constantly calling in, no, your connection is not worth more than human life. Reliance Globalcom, Comcast, Syfi...you are the heavy offenders. Please, it is being fixed soon as Japan allows transport in and out of the country. Please be patient and stop being brutish dicks on the phone.
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Certainly the cable from Telia's US backbone to Asia is broken. That one *didn't* change it's route for at least the first several hours.
Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning. (Score:5, Funny)
Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning.
Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning.
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Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning.
Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning.
This redundant redundancy event is brought to you by the department of redundancy department, and is organised by Chaos, Inc.
Reaction to the reactors (Score:2)
I don't watch the more hyperbolic networks but from what I've seen and read so far, all the statements seem to be along the lines that the threat of a dangerous radioactive leak is fairly small. However it ain't what you say it's the way that you say it. The tone of some headlines would make you think the world was about to blow up. Channel 4 News (UK) which is renowned for good quality reporting even succumbed to it in their headlines at the weekend, referring to a "nuclear emergency" which has a nice dram
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It COULD of course also mean that they don't follow the "let's try to save the plant even if there's a chance it blows" approach that I'd expect from our nuke reactor owners. I kinda prefer their "let's play it safe, I mean, we've seen what a nuke can do. Twice." approach.
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The thinking has already mostly been done. The problem is the sheep are too paniced for anyone to manage to build one, at least in the US. When you can build a reactor that is fail-safe* rather than fail-deadly but aren't because "nukes are dangerous!!!!" frankly we as a species deserve what we get, even if it means writing off all higher-order life down the road.
On the flip side, China will probably build them if we don't, though I'm less sure about their real goals of fail-safe given how little they care
Ugh (Score:2, Insightful)
A Clear Explanation about the Lack of Danger (Score:1)
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Shouldn't be worried? Ok, they are not going to explode but to me any release of radioactive material in the atmosphere is something to worry about strongly.
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What he was saying is that you need the temperature and ashes of a "real" fire (and not just a comparably "small" hydrogen explosion) to carry nuclear waste around the world. Chernobyl will not be easily matched without something to burn, preferably something very close to the nuclear fuel.
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A much more insightful analysis can be found here [allthingsnuclear.org].
Another blast at Fukushima reactor (3rd blast) (Score:1)
Report from Tochigi prefecture (Score:3)
We have a customer in Japan operating a data center in Tochigi Prefecture, only about 200 km or so from Sendai. They lost power after the earthquake, and were running off UPS until their data center gensets kicked in, so their servers did not experience any outage immediately after the earthquake. Our people on the scene reported that television and radio were out, and their only source of news was from the Internet: their connectivity seemed almost entirely unaffected. However, their generators only had enough gas for six hours of operation, so we still had to shut everything down before the juice ran out, and there was no power for eight more hours after that... I was surprised that there was no serious network service interruption: no major undersea cables were damaged like what happened after the earthquake in Taiwan in 2006, and their network performance seems just as it normally is: they still seem to be getting their advertised gigabit speed, at least to other sites also in Japan, so it seems that their net backbone was scarcely affected.
We'll have problems maintaining service uptime in the face of the rolling blackouts that they're experiencing, but those are the breaks...
Er, not news? (Score:2)
"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"
Yes, let's hear it for the guys that designed ARPANet...for *specifically* this kind of catastrophic, multi-node failure.
After all, that's precisely the sort of thing the internet was, in fact, designed to cope with. So yes, let's applaud Japan for building a robu
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Tired myth that I'm tired of. (Score:2)
Re:Redundancy and good planning. (Score:4, Informative)
These are two characteristics America is not known for.
That's because both redundancy and planning are properties of Communism. Please make a note of it.
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That's a laugh!
Under Communism there is one system with zero redundancies. That's why our socialist power grid is as fragile as it is: central planning!
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"The bureaucrat on the other hand is only interested in making it as expensive and labour-intensive as possible"
Until we transition our economy to some better balance between subsistence/gift/planned/exchange/theft more appropriate for a high-tech civilization.
See also my comments here:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation [peswiki.com]
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.
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Reliability is certainly a factor for businesses. I suspect that the more market-based your pwoer grid is, the more disparity you would see between commercial (urban) and residential (suburban/rural) service, in terms of reliability.
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One should assume that, but even for businesses reliability becomes less and less a factor. Because their customers in turn don't require it. What their customers want, again, is cheap. And cheap they get.
Cheap means, though, that necessary redundancies get ignored. Simply because redundancy costs money.
Want proof? An ISP should be power dependent, if anything. No power, no internet, no service, no customer satisfaction. But what do their customers want? Cheap internet. Result? No guaranteed uptime and no r
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I don't need to, I have my own
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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
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Chernobyl was the largest nuclear disaster in history? Sorry, I reserve that for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As for irradiating everyone on the planet, would you please give me an accurate list of who've been doing the most nuclear bomb testing since it was invented?
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Chernobyl had a few hundred deaths, some more affected by radiation later down the line, and a small town abandoned to avoid elevated rates of cancer and birth defects.
The bombings claimed a combined total of 150,000 lives (lowest estimates from Wikipedia). I doubt Chernobyl will reach that number of casualties.
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.
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Posted at 4:05 PM
Get back to work.
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See also my comment here that got modded "troll". :-)
"Mother Nature can still really kick ass... (Score:2, Troll)"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2033910&cid=35464554 [slashdot.org]
"Like with Hurricane Katrina where the USA lost a city, this event will be a test of the Japanese character. The good news is, you can see in Japan aspects of what a healthy society looks like (unlike the USA during Katrina or before). Japan prepared a lot for this (good building codes, to begin with). Thei
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The reason you were modded down originally is because you bought hook line and sinker into the racial stereotype about the post Katrina situation in New Orleans. That's why you attracted the more explicit ugliness expressed by the AC's comment to your posting.
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What did I say about race? I talked about US vs. Japanese culture.
Consider: ... One huge bottleneck in the evacuation â" the New Orleans airport. Officials say flights were delayed while screeners and air marsha
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9231926/ns/nightly_news-nbc_news_investigates/ [msn.com]
"Some 200 New Orleans school buses sit underwater in a parking lot, unused. That's enough to have evacuated at least 13,000 people. Why werenâ(TM)t those buses sent street by street to pick up people before the storm?
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Fair enough. I am currently reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" [amazon.com] and it is eye opening in how long the US elites have been playing the divide an conquer games to stay in control.
Unfortunately the racially charged atmosphere in the US makes it easy to misread your originally comment as racially tinged - even if there was no such intend on your part.
Hey, at least you have an idea now why it probably was modded down originally (Disclaimer: I didn't mod it down, but given how I misre
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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 rubbi
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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.
Maybe it's because the focus of Americans isn't the workplace but somewhere else? Maybe this so-called courtesy is simply part of that work ethic. Maybe the Japanese are polite and diligent with their work because if they aren't someone could report them to the boss and they would lose face?
On the other hand, maybe that whining, moping, and chatting American store employee isn't deliberately being a jerk but has simply realized that it's much more likely that if the going gets tough it's not the Company t
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With an unemployment rate pushing double figures in the USA I am not sure you can claim that redundancy is not a property of capitalism!
Re:Redundancy and good planning. (Score:4, Insightful)
These are two characteristics the human race is not known for.
Fixed.
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Re:Redundancy and good planning. (Score:5, Insightful)
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if human ingenuity is unencumbered, then let's rock and roll
FTFY. Not sure what all the nationalistic bullshit was meant to say.. perhaps that the people of other countries somehow are less intelligent, and don't get their jobs done?
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if human ingenuity is unencumbered, then let's rock and roll
FTFY. Not sure what all the nationalistic bullshit was meant to say.. perhaps that the people of other countries somehow are less intelligent, and don't get their jobs done?
Yeah my dad makes the same, um, mistake when communicating. I've yet to train him properly...
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Not sure what all the nationalistic bullshit was meant to say.
Maybe it was there to counter the American specific attack in the OP or something, I don't know....
perhaps that the people of other countries somehow are less intelligent, and don't get their jobs done?
Oh, well, I can think of a few that don't....
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rescuing Chilean miners
Are you referring to Americans as in USA here (rather than Nth+Sth Americans together)? I was under the understanding the rescue was overseen by Chilean government and mining representatives with multiple international governments and companies assisting. Are you claiming the rescue as a success for USA alone? American (USA) ingenuity has provided a lot of things over the years but that seems a very strange example.
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I don't mean to rain on your parade but the whole American space program is the work of German Nazi scientists who developed rockets and were scooped up after the war... But you've got to hand it to them when it comes to business... That's one of their biggest strengths.... Scientist can always be bought and imported...
Robert Goddard [wikipedia.org] was a Nazi?!?