While I also feel that the author is just being flippant and "rebellious", I have to say that just because something is the best, doesn't mean that it's "beautiful". Solid poo is better than squishy poo or watery poo. That doesn't make my poop beautiful.
Well, hold on now, we fought World War II offensively, but I'd count it as a defensive war. We may have crunched Japan with an oil and steel embargo, but they used military force first.
When the goal is noble (Revolutionary War, World War II), I fully support what our troops are doing for us.
However, we supported the Taliban because it was politically advantageous to us, only to suffer the repercussions of it. Now we've taken out Hussein for financial reasons...It's only a matter of time before we suffer the repercussions of that.
People joining the army know that it could mean their death. What I wish they would remember is that by killing themselves in order to get politicians' friends richer or to get people re-elected, they're just bringing about retribution that, unfortunately, falls on people going to work in New York or going to a club in Bali. You may have taken a job that involves you getting killed, but us civilians would rather that not happen to us, especially for some oil baron to buy a bigger house.
1) Probably in school...or asleep (time differences, you know)
2) A glimmer in grandpa's eye.
3) Playing a video game, probably
4) Worrying that the US was supporting such an extremist group.
5) Watching TV with my girlfriend.
Keep in mind, too, that most connections from Asia to Europe go through America (much more reliable that connecting via India, the Middle East, etc.), so when a US - Europe cable goes down, Asia loses some connectivity to Europe as well.
That's the article about the laying of the FLAG, isn't it? Great article. Read it when I first got my WAN job, and it helped out understanding what these cables are like immensely.
All good questions. The boats are pretty damn big, from the pictures I've seen. They hook two sections of the cable and draw it all the way up onto the ship, performing the work outside of the water (those cables carry pretty big amounts of voltage...wouldn't want to cut them underwater). The US Navy has been working on a submarine (don't know if they built it or not, as I heard about it a long time ago) that would allow work on undersea cables where they lie. The idea was for use in information gathering (in the old days, we called it "spying"). Presumably, though, as with much military technology, it would eventually be used by the private sector for cable repair.
Speaking of which, undersea cables are repaired by hauling them up to the surface and repairing them on boats. The US Navy has put a lot of money developing a cable repair/maintenance submarine that would allow the US to tap undersea cables without being noticed. All that information streaming through the dark sea bed...
No, if you READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE you would know that the second outage was an undersea fault. The first outage is not explicitly explained (while we know it was a TAT-14 problem, it doesn't say if it was in the undersea section, the landing station, or the short surface span before the landing station).
Well, we haven't. As of a few years ago, we still had 3 other cables (6 other routes, as they are all ring topologies). We've just shut off some traffic, leased lines, etc. and forced more connections through the remaining lines, causing latency and connectivity for some people. The AC-1, TAT-12/13, and Gemini lines are up and running fine.
True, but if the initial problem were, for example, a cable cut, it would go to show how built-in redundancy can still go wrong. It takes around 2 weeks to repair an undersea cable fault. More if there's bad weather. I'm not saying that this is the case this time, but it is a possibility.
The sit on the ocean floor. In low water areas, they are cladded in steel, to prevent anchors, etc. from ripping them up. Recent ones are apparently treated to prevent sharks from chewing on them, which was an old problem. Fixing them involves sending out a big ship that hauls up cable from the ocean floor (they have a lot of slack so that this is possible), hanging the cable across the deck, fixing it, and lowering it back into the water.
My guess is that the initial problem may have been an undersea cable. Those generally take 2 or more weeks to fix, and if the weather is really bad, they have to pull the boats back in, delaying things further.
No evidence, of course, but it seems like the most logical reason. Cables like the TAT-14 don't stay unfixed just because someone in management is lazy.
Actually, the eyes are drawn larger because Osamu Tezuka, grandpa of anime, loved and emulated Disney, and because most Japanese animators/manga artists base their drawing style off of other artists, as opposed to drawing from real life (same as in America). The result is a feedback loop with noses getting smaller and smaller and eyes getting bigger and bigger. Expressiveness may have been Disney's reasoning, but for anime now, it's just a fortunate happenstance.
If you can read Japanese, please just buy the manga. The show is very faithful to the comic, but the humour in the comic is largely in the background chatter of people on the street, students in the hall, etc. You also have to know about current fads and fashions to get a lot of the jokes (the G-shock fad, short-lived slang, celebrities, etc.). I remember laughing so hard at the comic that I cried. I watched about two episodes of the cartoon before realizing that I hadn't actually laughed once, and that watching was a waste of my time.
I dunno about your coworkers, but my coworkers (I live in Japan) tend to only go on about the stuff they liked as kids. It's all dreadfully boring & stupid, but then if somebody came up to me and started talking GI Joe or Transformers, I'd probably be happy as a clam. For people from their late 20's to late 30's in Japan, anime is the stuff from their childhood, not all the shojo/tentacle/whathaveyou that gets produced now.
That said, there is good anime, but there are also good books, good movies, and good musicians. That doesn't stop stores from being full of diet books, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Brittney Spears. Any medium is mostly composed of crap. Anime and manga are the same. However, for a country that doesn't have this medium (well, America has cartoons, but not mature cartoons (and by mature I don't mean sex and violence, I just mean aimed at adults)), I can see the draw. It's like if you lived in a country with no movies: you'd think movies were awesome and you'd want movies to be imported. You might even be blinded to the fact that the Pluto Nash you're watching is absolute crap.
I don't know your tastes, so I wouldn't know what to recommend, but stuff that I've liked (which is not necessarily the typical alpha-geek anime/manga selection) is: Silent Service (Chinmoku no kantai) about a Japanese submarine crew which steals their sub, declares independence from Japan, and has a huge huge amount of politics (well done, in that all countries positions are understandable and realistic), Naniwa Kinyudo, about how loan sharks work (written by an ex-lawyer, and very accurate), and Nausicaa (yeah, yeah, I know, typical famous manga dreck, but unlike the horrible anime version, very complex, very long, and very interesting).
There is good stuff out there, that isn't about tentacles, junior high girls, robots, or exploding heads, but as with any medium, the majority is dreck.
Oh, and as a rule of thumb, only take anime/manga recommendations from coworkers who also recommend good movies or good books. A Japanese worker who loved Armaggedon and Speed is going to have equally horrible tastes in anime.
No, the Japanese of today (except those damn right wingers in their f***ing noisy black trucks (yes, I live in Tokyo)) think of the US being on the "good" side, though they aren't too happy about Hiroshima or Nagasaki (and the more educated ones are probably a bit pissed about the Tokyo firebombings). But I think the key is, and Germany might be the same, that the average soldier had no fricking idea what was going on. It was the top that was really pulling the strings (this is true everywhere, but nowadays soldiers not knowing about the bad stuff their country does is voluntary ignorance, while in Japan at the time, the amount of censorship and information limitation meant that they couldn't have known even if they tried). As such, if the game was a stealth game called "Kill Tojo", nobody would really have a problem. As it is now, though, it is "kill my misled and right-intentioned grandpa".
Ok, I'm obviously putting it too extremely, but still, you get my basic point.
Add this to the fact that there are very few FPS in Japan with realistic settings in the first place. Most Japanese gamers aren't as used to killing ANY historical soldiers, German, Japanese, or otherwise, as American gamers are, so the logical jump is probably bigger.
It's known, but among gamer aged folks, it's primarily famous for episodes I & II (very few people under age 25 or so knew of Star Wars until Episode I came out), so there's no emotional bond to the movie. For example, I can't really imagine many people getting excited about KOTOR because it's Star Wars. It wouldn't turn them off, either. It would probably be received as just a neutral movie tie-in game, like Harry Potter or Charlie's Angels.
Horribly. There is a very very noticable stigma applied to PC games: they are for dorks. Perhaps its because the machine is more expensive, perhaps its because you have to know how to install software and maintain software to play, perhaps...I'm not really sure, but I can say that, unlike America, here in Japan, PC games are for dorks, consoles are for normal people. (By the way, I'm not agreeing in the least. Just stating the national view) On the upside, things are changing, and the image of PC gamers is improving, but slowly.
Slashdot Mirror
Benevolent oligarchy?
Just a guess.
While I also feel that the author is just being flippant and "rebellious", I have to say that just because something is the best, doesn't mean that it's "beautiful". Solid poo is better than squishy poo or watery poo. That doesn't make my poop beautiful.
Ok, I guess now I'm being flippant ^_^
Well, hold on now, we fought World War II offensively, but I'd count it as a defensive war. We may have crunched Japan with an oil and steel embargo, but they used military force first.
When the goal is noble (Revolutionary War, World War II), I fully support what our troops are doing for us.
However, we supported the Taliban because it was politically advantageous to us, only to suffer the repercussions of it. Now we've taken out Hussein for financial reasons...It's only a matter of time before we suffer the repercussions of that.
People joining the army know that it could mean their death. What I wish they would remember is that by killing themselves in order to get politicians' friends richer or to get people re-elected, they're just bringing about retribution that, unfortunately, falls on people going to work in New York or going to a club in Bali. You may have taken a job that involves you getting killed, but us civilians would rather that not happen to us, especially for some oil baron to buy a bigger house.
1) Probably in school...or asleep (time differences, you know)
2) A glimmer in grandpa's eye.
3) Playing a video game, probably
4) Worrying that the US was supporting such an extremist group.
5) Watching TV with my girlfriend.
Keep in mind, too, that most connections from Asia to Europe go through America (much more reliable that connecting via India, the Middle East, etc.), so when a US - Europe cable goes down, Asia loses some connectivity to Europe as well.
Agreed, then.
That's the article about the laying of the FLAG, isn't it? Great article. Read it when I first got my WAN job, and it helped out understanding what these cables are like immensely.
All good questions. The boats are pretty damn big, from the pictures I've seen. They hook two sections of the cable and draw it all the way up onto the ship, performing the work outside of the water (those cables carry pretty big amounts of voltage...wouldn't want to cut them underwater). The US Navy has been working on a submarine (don't know if they built it or not, as I heard about it a long time ago) that would allow work on undersea cables where they lie. The idea was for use in information gathering (in the old days, we called it "spying"). Presumably, though, as with much military technology, it would eventually be used by the private sector for cable repair.
D'oh!! Shoulda previewed. I meant to say "an undersea cable cut" (as opposed to a landing station equipment failure, beach cable, or the like)
Speaking of which, undersea cables are repaired by hauling them up to the surface and repairing them on boats. The US Navy has put a lot of money developing a cable repair/maintenance submarine that would allow the US to tap undersea cables without being noticed. All that information streaming through the dark sea bed...
No, if you READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE you would know that the second outage was an undersea fault. The first outage is not explicitly explained (while we know it was a TAT-14 problem, it doesn't say if it was in the undersea section, the landing station, or the short surface span before the landing station).
Well, we haven't. As of a few years ago, we still had 3 other cables (6 other routes, as they are all ring topologies). We've just shut off some traffic, leased lines, etc. and forced more connections through the remaining lines, causing latency and connectivity for some people. The AC-1, TAT-12/13, and Gemini lines are up and running fine.
Because they're amazingly expensive. The TAT-14 cost 1.5 billion dollars to build.
Taking into account redundancy, that's 8 cables. There may be more, as my cable map is a few years old.
True, but if the initial problem were, for example, a cable cut, it would go to show how built-in redundancy can still go wrong. It takes around 2 weeks to repair an undersea cable fault. More if there's bad weather. I'm not saying that this is the case this time, but it is a possibility.
The sit on the ocean floor. In low water areas, they are cladded in steel, to prevent anchors, etc. from ripping them up. Recent ones are apparently treated to prevent sharks from chewing on them, which was an old problem. Fixing them involves sending out a big ship that hauls up cable from the ocean floor (they have a lot of slack so that this is possible), hanging the cable across the deck, fixing it, and lowering it back into the water.
Yes, I'm a WAN administrator, why do you ask?
My guess is that the initial problem may have been an undersea cable. Those generally take 2 or more weeks to fix, and if the weather is really bad, they have to pull the boats back in, delaying things further.
No evidence, of course, but it seems like the most logical reason. Cables like the TAT-14 don't stay unfixed just because someone in management is lazy.
Actually, the eyes are drawn larger because Osamu Tezuka, grandpa of anime, loved and emulated Disney, and because most Japanese animators/manga artists base their drawing style off of other artists, as opposed to drawing from real life (same as in America). The result is a feedback loop with noses getting smaller and smaller and eyes getting bigger and bigger. Expressiveness may have been Disney's reasoning, but for anime now, it's just a fortunate happenstance.
Urg. GTO.
If you can read Japanese, please just buy the manga. The show is very faithful to the comic, but the humour in the comic is largely in the background chatter of people on the street, students in the hall, etc. You also have to know about current fads and fashions to get a lot of the jokes (the G-shock fad, short-lived slang, celebrities, etc.). I remember laughing so hard at the comic that I cried. I watched about two episodes of the cartoon before realizing that I hadn't actually laughed once, and that watching was a waste of my time.
I dunno about your coworkers, but my coworkers (I live in Japan) tend to only go on about the stuff they liked as kids. It's all dreadfully boring & stupid, but then if somebody came up to me and started talking GI Joe or Transformers, I'd probably be happy as a clam. For people from their late 20's to late 30's in Japan, anime is the stuff from their childhood, not all the shojo/tentacle/whathaveyou that gets produced now.
That said, there is good anime, but there are also good books, good movies, and good musicians. That doesn't stop stores from being full of diet books, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Brittney Spears. Any medium is mostly composed of crap. Anime and manga are the same. However, for a country that doesn't have this medium (well, America has cartoons, but not mature cartoons (and by mature I don't mean sex and violence, I just mean aimed at adults)), I can see the draw. It's like if you lived in a country with no movies: you'd think movies were awesome and you'd want movies to be imported. You might even be blinded to the fact that the Pluto Nash you're watching is absolute crap.
I don't know your tastes, so I wouldn't know what to recommend, but stuff that I've liked (which is not necessarily the typical alpha-geek anime/manga selection) is: Silent Service (Chinmoku no kantai) about a Japanese submarine crew which steals their sub, declares independence from Japan, and has a huge huge amount of politics (well done, in that all countries positions are understandable and realistic), Naniwa Kinyudo, about how loan sharks work (written by an ex-lawyer, and very accurate), and Nausicaa (yeah, yeah, I know, typical famous manga dreck, but unlike the horrible anime version, very complex, very long, and very interesting).
There is good stuff out there, that isn't about tentacles, junior high girls, robots, or exploding heads, but as with any medium, the majority is dreck.
Oh, and as a rule of thumb, only take anime/manga recommendations from coworkers who also recommend good movies or good books. A Japanese worker who loved Armaggedon and Speed is going to have equally horrible tastes in anime.
Geeze, the trolls are just crawling out of the woodwork today...
I believe the next post will probably be along the lines of "YHBT. HAND."
No, the Japanese of today (except those damn right wingers in their f***ing noisy black trucks (yes, I live in Tokyo)) think of the US being on the "good" side, though they aren't too happy about Hiroshima or Nagasaki (and the more educated ones are probably a bit pissed about the Tokyo firebombings). But I think the key is, and Germany might be the same, that the average soldier had no fricking idea what was going on. It was the top that was really pulling the strings (this is true everywhere, but nowadays soldiers not knowing about the bad stuff their country does is voluntary ignorance, while in Japan at the time, the amount of censorship and information limitation meant that they couldn't have known even if they tried). As such, if the game was a stealth game called "Kill Tojo", nobody would really have a problem. As it is now, though, it is "kill my misled and right-intentioned grandpa".
Ok, I'm obviously putting it too extremely, but still, you get my basic point.
Add this to the fact that there are very few FPS in Japan with realistic settings in the first place. Most Japanese gamers aren't as used to killing ANY historical soldiers, German, Japanese, or otherwise, as American gamers are, so the logical jump is probably bigger.
It's known, but among gamer aged folks, it's primarily famous for episodes I & II (very few people under age 25 or so knew of Star Wars until Episode I came out), so there's no emotional bond to the movie. For example, I can't really imagine many people getting excited about KOTOR because it's Star Wars. It wouldn't turn them off, either. It would probably be received as just a neutral movie tie-in game, like Harry Potter or Charlie's Angels.
Horribly. There is a very very noticable stigma applied to PC games: they are for dorks. Perhaps its because the machine is more expensive, perhaps its because you have to know how to install software and maintain software to play, perhaps...I'm not really sure, but I can say that, unlike America, here in Japan, PC games are for dorks, consoles are for normal people. (By the way, I'm not agreeing in the least. Just stating the national view) On the upside, things are changing, and the image of PC gamers is improving, but slowly.