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Net Sees Earthquake Damage, Routes Around It
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.
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.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
These are two characteristics the human race is not known for.
Fixed.
Gone!
Good job as always, /. editors. If you wanted another nuke article, why not just post one? :/
I'd amend that to say two characteristics Corporate America is often not know for; as for America and Americans, they get the job done. From rescuing Chilean miners to landing on the moon, if American ingenuity is unencumbered, then let's rock and roll. I'm not saying America is perfect everyone, but the parent post is a ridiculous marginalization of a people and country unless it was meant in jest - hard to determine on the 'net.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
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.
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.
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!
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
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.
"Net Sees Earthquake Damage"; "[internet] routes around it"; "outages mostly healed themselves"
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.
Network traffic has moved 8 feet to the east.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Does anyone know how other countries compare in this regards? I imagine certain countries have certain clear points of failure.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The network architecture isn't the only reason why we are still able to *mostly* communicate(I live about 60 km north of Tokyo, still no water though they haven't implemented the rolling blackouts....yet...), the advances in distributed systems also have made a huge impact. Simply put the amount of information to is essentially automatically mirrored(it's not really mirrored, but its easier to think of it like that) in Japan has really cut down on the amount of bandwidth necessary to communicate with the outside world.
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!
Monstar L
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?
which is totally what she said
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.
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 was a Nazi?!?
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
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.
"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
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning.
Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning.
Posted at 4:05 PM
Get back to work.
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 dramatically terrifying ring to it, but vague enough to be almost meaningless.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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...
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
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
"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). Their leadership has responded immediately. People are helping each other. News is being posted right away through their advanced social networks. (Many individuals wanted to help with Katrina, and were turned back, and parts of the New Orleans area descended into violence and fear...) You can be sure, as a society, Japan will come through this even stronger and healthier and better prepared for the next event. I wish I could say stuff like that about the USA these days? I don't know, even as I have a lot of faith in US individuals in a crisis. But in the USA, government is painted as the enemy. We don't know what good government would feel like anymore, sadly -- government that is accountable, or plans well, or prioritizes human needs over short-term profits to a few."
Although, with that said, there was stuff in the news about the towns around the nuclear plants not having planned for this specific sort of nuclear incident, so we'll see what future reports say about all that. And no doubt one can point to incidents of corruption in any government.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
My heart sunk when I clicked on the second link ... it lead to a junk engineering article in the Wall Street Journal. Where would I go for an unbiased engineering assessment of "redundancy and good planning"? Technology Review, New Scientist, even Wired ... anywhere but the homepage of Rupert Murdoch's cadre of shills for corporate interests. He makes such brilliant observations as "water doesn't burn." No, it evaportates. Next, it dissociates in the presence of heat and certain catalysts like the zirconium cladding of fuel rods ... and then it EXPLODES.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
There is a very clear, well-written article explaining about why we shouldn't be worried about the Fukushima Reactors. I live about 150km from the plant and have grown tired of the fear-mongering I see in most of the media back home. The article can be found here.
Well, despite optimism about how the Japan officials are handling the failures at the reactors, it seems a 3rd and more serious blast occurred in reactor II less than an hour from now... It seems melting down is ongoing. The issue here is that many things were overlooked, even if we take into account the huge magnitude of the event. For instance, the massive anti-tsunami barriers in Japan coast were no effective at all. Also, it seems many people didn't took the tsunami warning seriously and didn't go to high places. That is one explanation for the probably serious death toll. More problems for engineers tackle in the next few years... Google aggregation of news about the 3rd blast in this link: http://www.google.com/#q=3rd+blast+fukushima&hl=en&prmd=ivnsu&source=univ&tbs=nws:1&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=W7N-TfbJIMGEOorbzesK&sqi=2&ved=0CDIQqAI&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=9856b7f95556a9fa
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...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
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....
... Power would be sold on the open market and if it couldn't be transported reliably, then both buyers and suppliers would lose. We would all have an interest in reliability. ...
Someone hasn't watched the Enron movie.
Yes, yes... GLORIOUS NIPPON IS PERFECT!
Let's ignore all the issues one country has, and ignore the good points another has, preferably while painting a very stereotypical picture of both.
+5, Idolizing Fictional Utopia
Feel free to paint more of these pretty pictures. You could start a museum of delusions if you get enough of them.
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.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Disclaimer: I work for a VoIP carrier, I was the the process of an eat-our-own-dogfood trial.
On friday the voice/text network was pretty much unusable, but the 3G data network was pretty much business as usual. Between Skype for sending out international SMS on my iphone (Skype, please get going and add this to the android client) and a SIP VoIP client on my android phone I had no problem notifying all my loved ones that I was safe.
I don't know whether I should feel good that VoIP worked so well or that the conventional telephony systems fared so poorly.
"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 robust network. However I'll save my main praise for the original system architects and planners that set up the internet as it is.
-Styopa
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 that will stand up for him but his little circle (union) of fellow loafers and incidental jerks. I'm neither American nor Japanese, so I'm not sure. But there are two sides to a coin.
Let's hear it for redundancy!
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!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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.
Have you looked?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydrides
"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 often worse than the leading hydrocarbon fuels."
http://web.ead.anl.gov/saltcaverns/uses/compair/index.htm
"Salt caverns or mines have been used to store air under high pressure.
* Compressors use off-peak electricity to fill the cavern with compressed air.
* For peaking demand, the compressed air is withdrawn from the cavern, blended with natural gas, and used to drive a gas turbine to generate electricity.
* CAES Plants of 110 â" 290 MW exist."
http://www.saltcavernstorage.com/caes.html
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2000/alert14 ... This climate-stabilizing initiative would require the installation of 1.5 million wind turbines of 2 megawatts each. Manufacturing such a huge number of wind turbines over the next 11 years sounds intimidating until it is compared with the 70 million automobiles the world produces each year. At $3 million per installed turbine, this would mean investing $4.5 trillion by 2020, or $409 billion per year. This compares with world oil and gas capital expenditures that are projected to reach $1 trillion per year by 2016. 29 Wind turbines can be mass-produced on assembly lines, much as B-24 bombers were in World War II at Fordâ(TM)s massive Willow Run assembly plant in Michigan. Indeed, the idled capacity in the U.S. automobile industry is sufficient to produce all the wind turbines the world needs to reach the Plan B global goal. Not only do the idle plants exist, but there are skilled workers in these communities eager to return to work. The state of Michigan, for example, in the heart of the wind-rich Great Lakes region, has more than its share of idled auto assembly plants. 30"
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2003/update24
http://www.earth-policy.org/books/pb4/PB4ch5_ss2
"Europe is already tapping its off-shore wind. An assessment by the Garrad Hassan wind energy consulting group concluded that if governments aggressively develop their vast off-shore resources, wind could supply all of Europeâ(TM)s residential electricity by 2020. 13
http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2010/08/24/plan-seeks-100-pct-renewable-energy-australia-ten-years
"The report, entitled Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan, "outlines a technically feasible and economically attractive way for Australia to transition to 100 percent renewable energy within ten years." The plan specifies that the 100 percent renewable grid be "based on proven technologies that are already commercially available and that have already been demonstrated in large industries.""
Recent:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-scientists-breakthrough-nanocomposite-high-capacity-hydrogen.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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 marshals were flown in to comply with post-9/11 security requirements, and then further delayed because screening machines werenâ(TM)t working. ..."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9231926/ns/nightly_news-nbc_news_investigates/
"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?
The AC post can be seen as another example of US cultural problems. Shirley Sherrod was forced to resign for making a speech that ironically included mentioning how racism was being created by elite-pushed policies in the USA for centuries to cause poor blacks and poor whites to be at each other's throats to keep them all divided and powerless:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0722/Shirley-Sherrod-debacle-why-Obama-stumbles-on-race
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9NcCa_KjXk
See also:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred-by economic inequity-faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices."
That said, Japanese people can be pretty xenophobic, which is why they are creating a lot of elder care robots instead of importing "guest workers" from other countries like Western Europe or the USA.
http://www.jref.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-7650.html
http://www.globalaging.org/elderrights/world/2004/japaninvention.htm
So, soon Japanese-designed household and nursing robots are going to take a lot more low paid jobs in the USA... A Japanese anime about that complex issue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roujin_Z
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
does that not mean healing was done by humans by setting up new routes? I would expect a self healing net to do it in minutes and perhaps also even much less abrupt.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The internet doesn't heal itself. It's healed by on call engineers who get woken by a phone call at 3am. The automagical healing is human technical support performing heroic emergency fixes 24/7. I sure wish it could all just fix itself ...
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Not been in Chernobyl (yet), I think the area was only recently opened again to the public and declared "safe". I have been to Hiroshima though and one of the things I took away from the museum there is that the effects of that bombing are still not fully understood, have been severely underestimated and understated and that people still die and are born with disabilities because of it.
The reason Chernobyl is still a problem, as I understood it, is because the explosion happened on the ground, while the nukes above Hiroshima and Nagasaki exploded above the ground, allowing the radiation to dissipate rather quickly.
The term the OP used was "nuclear disaster".
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.
Nah, some parts of the world really do know how to plan and make things future-proof. Not my country but some parts...
ics
You mean, the great American ingenuity shown during Katarina aftermath and New Orleans rebuild? Or the other one, shown while building atom reactors directly in high-risk Californian earthquake areas?
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
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.
Learn about Photography Basics.
Fair enough. I am currently reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" 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 misread it I may have had I moderated that day).
The linked article about the nuclear plant problems in Japan is chock full of technical errors and omissions. He skips the primary danger of exposed fuel rods, the danger Japan is facing: thermal damage to the fuel rods themselves, prior to the total meltdown stage, means your steam pressure releases now contain primary radionuclides! He states that the melted fuel rods aren't hot enough to melt steel and concrete, when they most certainly are! (They melted sizeable chunks of the containment vessels at TMI and Chernobyl.) He fails to correctly describe what emergency core cooling systems do and how. He miss-states the actual danger of graphite-moderated reactors: it isn't that graphite is flammable, it's that you're using it as a moderator (as thus, water as some of the neutron absorption) and that makes the system inherently unstable. Once you reach the point of worrying about the graphite burning, you're way past the tremendous explosion/meltdown phase.
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 redundancy. They will probably invest in UPS because it's fairly cheap and a one-time (or rare) investment rather than an ongoing one, but they will certainly not require their power supplier to be resilient because that in turn would make their power needs far more expensive.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.