“Google will join with five other companies to invest in a 10,000 km trans-Pacific submarine cable to carry data to and from Asia.”

Google said it would join with five other telecom companies — Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and SingTel — to invest $300 million in the construction of a 10,000 km submarine cable.

The high-speed fiber optic trans-Pacific cable, called Unity, will have a capacity of up to 7.68 Tbps and will run between the United States and Japan, about 6,200 miles. It is planned to accommodate demand for trans-Pacific bandwidth, which has grown at a rate of 63.7% annually between 2002 and 2007 and is expected to double biannually from 2008 through 2013, according to TeleGeography, a telecommunications consultancy.

… What Google gets is bandwidth at cost, said Stephan Beckert, director of research for TeleGeography, in an e-mail. Google, along with Comcast, is one of the few companies that have opted to purchase and light long-haul dark fiber, he said. It is the first non-telecom company to take an active role in submarine cable ownership.

- Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek: Link.

More details from SingTel

Using state-of-the-art Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology, it will support up to 960 Gbits per second per fibre-optic pair with a maximum of eight fibre pairs. By having a higher fibre count, it is able to offer more capacity at lower unit costs. Unity will have a potential design capacity of 7.68 Tbits per second, making it one of the highest capacity cables of its kind. This data rate is equivalent to more than seven million Internet users simultaneously having real-time access to a 1 Mb file.

NEC Corporation and Tyco Telecommunications have been jointly awarded the contract to implement this project.

- SingTel press release: Link.

“A capsule toy that contains a self-assembly model of a capsule toy machine, complete with tiny capsule toys ready to vend.”

Japan is clearly a nation that worships shopping, a nation that has taken the retail experience to its bosom and raised in its honour a frenzy of poured concrete and burnished chrome, a hypermarket for saints. You can wander into a Japanese department store and lose an entire day, without even scraping the surface of the mall it’s embedded in. My personal nemesis is Yodabashi Camera: a department store that has a clothing and houseware department embedded in it where most such shops would feature an electronics boutique department. Half of the sixth floor of its Yokohama branch is given over to capsule toy vending machines, where for 200 yen (about 80 pence) you can turn the knob and acquire a tennis ball sized bundle of mysterious plasticky goodness with a model kit of some complexity within. My favourite … is a capsule toy that contains a self-assembly model of a capsule toy machine, complete with tiny capsule toys ready to vend. Even the toys teach recursion …

- Charles Stross: link.

Via Boing Boing.

Beginning around the fourteenth century, samurai were expected to be cultured and literate, and the ancient saying “Bun Bu Ryo Do” (lit. literary arts, military arts, both ways) or “The pen and the sword in accord,” was an ideal to which many aspired.

Samurai @ Wikipedia

See also Jade Warrior

“Tokyo Rose (Iva Ikuko Toguri), a Japanese American … was abandoned by the U.S. government and forced by the Japanese government to become a radio propaganda DJ. All the while Toguri remained a loyal American patriot.”

Toguri became adept at sabotaging her own broadcasts. Though employed to broadcast pro-Japanese propaganda, Toguri’s outspoken support of the Allies off-mic (while cleverly concealing it within her message and delivery on-air) resulted in numerous arguments, fisticuffs, and sometimes daily 3 am harassments thanks to the Kempeitai Thought Police. She helped keep American soldiers alive (at mortal personal risk) with food, medicine, clothing, and hope during her almost daily visits to their cells.

As an American unwilling to denounce her citizenship, Toguri was not to be trusted by the Japanese, and as an American woman of Japanese extraction broadcasting for the Japanese, she was considered a traitor in her own country.

[Link]

Via Boing Boing.