While there are various subtleties, externalities, and subsidies to consider, it is usually a fairly safe bet that a large expensive object, if produced by anything resembling a contemporary global supply chain, will have a substantial environmental footprint. Exactly how large can be more difficult; but between transport costs and hydrocarbon chemical feedstocks, price and size are a reasonably good proxy measurement.
Looks like a typo in GP: Verizon offers Novatel's "MiFi" device. It's a small, battery powered, embedded device with a cell modem and a wifi access point. Connects to the cell provider's network, distributes the sweet, sweet, internet to one or more nearby wifi-equipped devices.
The most common(and probably most effective) backpedaling strategy is "Don't".
Just stop saying what you were saying before, scrub it from visible locations where possible, then begin emitting the new party line. Most people have sufficiently short memories, or high enough tolerance for absurd contradictions, that they won't bat an eye. The people who don't fit in this category will never be satisfied, so why bother worrying about them?
That would certainly make it trickier, since the standard beam-safety gear wouldn't do.
On the other hand, since the pirates know that the emitter is on the target ship, I would be interested to know if they could simply use glasses that are virtually opaque across the visible spectrum(which would largely blind them; but it isn't hard to steer a small motor launch or operate a firearm without being able to see your hands) and just steer toward the only point of light that they can still see until they are close enough to put a bullet and/or RPG into your pricey emitter device...
It would certainly be an inconvenience, substantially more than a single-frequency setup or nothing; but a potentially surmountable one.
While it would be considerably less profitable for BAE Systems, I'd personally consider something much lower tech: Most of these cargo ships are pretty big and have walls extending a bit above the deck to keep crew and cargo from slipping overboard in unpleasant weather(sometimes a direct extension of the steel hull, sometimes just a separate safety barrier). One could, fairly swiftly and cheaply, hang concertina wire segments along the outside of the ship. Your basic 3 coil concertina wire barrier would be rather discouraging, when it is 20+ feet above your head and you need to climb through it. For extra discouragement, breakaway mountings that allow crew members sheltering behind the ship's walls to drop a segment or segments that the pirates have latched on to onto the pirates, and boat, that have latched on, could be used.
If you are standing in a skiff, trying to climb a rope or ladder up the side of a ship, having a weighty tangle of razor wire fall onto you and your boat would really ruin, and potentially end, your day...
Hey, fair is fair: if those dirty pirate scum had just waited to become major multinational corporations before they hit bittorrent, they would have been fine. But nooo, they just had to go downloading first...
Oh, I don't think that NVIDIA would be any better off if they tried to break into the fab business(or even that they would survive the attempt). My point was just that, due to their superior fab prowess, Intel can afford(except during those periods where their architecture guys have really dropped the ball, as in much of the P4 period) either to beat any other x86 vendor on price without losing money or to occupy the high-margin areas. AMD, for their part, has ATI's superior GPU designs and, now that they have a fully integrated part, has scored a substantial series of design wins in the "cheap; but better than Atom and smaller/cooler/lower power than low-end Core2 derivative + low end discrete GPU" market.
I just don't see any good niches for a VIA + NVIDIA x86 part. On the workstation/compute end, even if you don't need serious x86 power(which is the only place you could consider a VIA design), Intel could sell you a low-end Core2 derivative capable of doing housekeeping tasks for a couple of firebreathing GPUs or Tesla cards for nearly nothing. If they won't, AMD would be equally happy to move a CPU and chipset. On the laptop/STB/power constrained side, AMD already has a fully baked x86+decent GPU and Intel already has a cheaper x86+lousy GPU.
I can only imagine that NVIDIA has concluded that, without any fab abilities of their own, playing #3 in the x86 market would be a cruel, low-margin game(assuming they even managed to make a profit at it). You already have Intel, whose GPUs are anemic; but who has the best core designs and superb in-house fabs. Then you have AMD, whose cores and (formerly in house) fab capabilities lag those of Intel; but whose GPUs are approximately equal, on average, with NVIDIA's, and whose CPUs kick the hell out of Via's.
There just isn't a pleasant niche to be had there: among customers who don't care about GPU performance, intel can afford to practically give away their low end x86s, because of superior fab prowess. Among customers who do care about GPU performance, AMD has ATI GPUs of varying power coupled with CPUs that don't suck.
Microsoft is actually in a tougher position than "oxymoron" would suggest: They have an existing(and quite profitable/lock-in generating) business in server OS licences, Exchange and SQL licences, and CALs. Unlike many of their "cloud" competitors, who are either carving new ground or just making it really easy to buy VPS services from them without a call to sales, almost every MS Cloud success is an MS server loss.
Since Microsoft offers roughly the same things as "cloud" services that you can buy from them in boxes(yes, Azure may well be architecturally different than the shrinkwrap stuff; but MS cloud and MS boxed software are basically just two ways of getting Exchange, Sharepoint, MSSQL, and.NET/IIIS).
That is the real challenge facing their cloud people. They can't just sit back and do nothing, lest they eventually be eaten by dirt-cheap linux boxes, managed in chunks of 10,000 by specialized providers, dishing up web services for incrementally more than the cost of electricity and bandwidth. On the other hand, the better they do, the more formerly lucrative MS accounts just stop buying pricey server products and CALs and start buying cheap MS cloud services...
Perhaps I'm being excessively cynical here; but(were I planning such a mission), I'd be inclined to quietly build such environmental monitoring hardware as I could into the comms gear: If things really go to shit, the radio would "malfunction", rather than broadcast Our Hero's last gasping, choking, moments... One might also(again quietly) equip the crew with a 'contingency autojector', consisting of your basic Epi-pen style automatic syringe unit, loaded with a cocktail of enough opiates to make a trip through the iron maiden a pleasure and some sort of fairly fast-acting toxin.
Beats the hell out of suffocation or starvation and is modestly nicer than freezing to death.
"So, your resume looks quite strong, and medical says that you are cleared for prolonged periods of weightlessness and are highly resistant to disorientation and nausea. Very promising."
"Thank you, I have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission!"
"Just one thing, before I answer any questions you might have: Purely out of curiosity, do you have any sort of latent trauma in your background that might be triggered in a fairly easy-to-do-the-special-effects-for sort of way where you, hypothetically, trapped on a derelict vessel steeped in the ultimate evil of a dimension as alien to the laws of physics as it is repulsive to the idea of a loving God?"
Not that the planners would let him; but any "middle aged to retired man" who consumes a martian launch spot is suffering from a different flavor of selfishness.
Unless the costs come down by a fair few factors of ten, there is no case to be made for sending any but the healthiest, expected-to-last-longest, specimens...
I suspect that that time will come, if not at the employer level, earlier in the game(fertility clinics, the best schools, etc.) However, unless these guys represent a considerable leap over the usual state of cheap genetics testing, they won't be bringing GATTACA with them just yet.
There are certain genetic diagnoses that we have nailed down well enough, and which tell us things we would not otherwise be able to determine(in oncology, for example, we have learned a great deal about the assorted subtypes and variants of cancers that used to be identified simply by location of origin and rough size. Some types of tumor mutations respond well to certain drugs, others to others, others not well at all, that sort of thing); but most of the really good tests are either of highly niche interest("Doc, one of my parents had Huntington's disease, I won't know until the symptoms start to show at ~40; but I need to know whether I can start a family now...") or patented and expensive and thus not included in low-cost broad assays.
While the fact that "Gene sequencing through the mail" is no longer a literal fraud; but a simple mail order service, is pretty impressive, the results it provides tend to be a welter of cut-and-paste about genetic factors that are either relatively poorly researched and not well known, or which work in concert with dozens or hundreds of others("schizophrenia gene" anybody?). The remainder will be a bunch of generic good advice(eat right, exercise, and get regular sleep) dressed up in inferences that barely reach statistical significance about your personal response to such inputs...
While, as I said, I have no doubt that we'll be doing genetic eugenics on an informal basis as soon or sooner than we actually have the knowledge to do so; but this isn't it. A family/applicant life history would tend to be much more informative(that, of course, is something that private insurers already take, some amount of applicant life history is something that interviewers already seek to determine, and people have been gossiping and making/breaking marriages based on speculation about various families' perceived risk factors for centuries)...
What kind of market is there for dodgy EMC gear? I always got the impression that EMC were the chaps you talked to if you didn't mind paying too much; but really wanted to have the vendor breathing down your neck for the duration of the (expensive) support agreement. Are there companies that shell out for that, and then start buying replacement parts on Ebay? Or, like Cisco, is there an active market of people trying to put together certification study kits on the relative cheap?
You are in luck: Cocaine is a schedule 2 substance, legally available by prescription, whose primary medical purpose is anesthesia in nasal, ophthalmic, and other facial surgery.
Not as commonly used now(mostly replaced by synthetic alkaloids of various flavors with similar effects); but the legal status remains.
You can't exactly walk into a pharmacy and expect to walk out with a 30 day supply; but a fair amount of stuff whose "street" form has been thoroughly demonized is actually schedule II or below in its more respectable medical guise: Cocaine, opium, amphetamines, methylphenidates, methamphetamine, PCP, etc.
Given the relative rarity of hijackings(compared to the scale of shipping through the area) and the comparatively low ransoms(precise amounts are rarely available; but such reports as exist seem to top out under $5million) and the fact that none of the naval underwriters seem disturbed enough to be doing anything other than bumping rates a touch; it would appear that the answer is "Not very much, on average."
While the pirate attacks really push the "They are attacking Us" buttons, and the outcomes are occasionally really bad for unlucky crew members, none of the responses from shippers, insurers, or countries involved suggest that they are a serious economic nuisance. Where the costs really that high, ships would either be skipping the Suez entirely and going round the horn(at which point Egypt would probably flip out and let the seas run red) or every ship passing through the area would be taking on a bunch of somewhat sinister "contractors" at the start of the danger zone and unloading them again before they reached port...
I'm fairly sure that banks choose to advertise their places of business, rather than having them helpfully outed by the local government...
Further, while retail establishments, banking and otherwise, are made as public as possible for obvious reasons, it is quite common for actors in a wide variety of legitimate industries to be somewhat cagey about the locations and precise purposes of their various "back office" facilities. Keeps security costs lower, provides less information to competitors, and so forth. Most of this stuff isn't truly "secret"(in the sense that it is nothing a PI or decent reporter couldn't dig up with a bit of work); but there are tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of industrial parks and office complexes around the country, often gated and typically deliberately understated, quietly doing assorted stuff, under the (small) placards of various corporations that may or may not be under some other umbrella entirely. In addition to static facilities, things like shipments of cash, high-value consumer or industrial goods, hazardous chemicals, and pharmaceuticals are quite commonly done quietly. Again, not secret; but the local government sure doesn't "accidentally" reveal the time and route that the next shipment of medical opiates is going to be taking into the local oncology hospice...
Obviously, this isn't the end of the world; but conflating retail and backend operations is pretty misleading.
More to the point, laser power levels are rather tricky because anything on the low end can be blocked with relatively cheap optical safety hardware which(while it probably isn't currently available at Arms 'r Us' Mogadishu branch it is quite easily and legitimately available for not much money) and anything on the high end, high enough to avoid such cheap and simple countermeasures, will blind unprotected human targets in moments. Given the, no doubt excellent, quality of care for burn victims and the blind in the area, that may actually be less humane than a bullet to something vital.
Since dealing with pirates is not considered "war", the fact that using weapons designed for blinding is a war crime probably won't be an issue(in the same way that cops can use chemical weapons, even though soldiers can't); but any laser powerful enough to discourage all but serious n00b pirates is really not a nice device. Blinding, burns, the whole deal. If you are willing to blind and burn, you might as well skip the pricey, unproven wiz-bang shit and just use lethal weapons.
So, 1.5 million a pop(not counting the necessary radar, integration, staffing, and maintenance), per turret(larger ships would almost certainly need more than one, to prevent attacks on their blind spots), to deal with a problem that affects under 1% of the ships passing through that area?
I'm fairly sure that that sound I hear in the distance is the actuaries at Lloyds laughing through their stiff upper lips...
Luckily, active-duty Navy SEALs are approximately representative of the sniping ability of your average nautical rentacop, so there should be no difficulties with applying this scheme more broadly...
I agree that Google is likely harvesting delicious data from those android handsets that it has a useful degree of control over.
My point was merely that, in order to swiftly establish a broad presence among carriers and phone manufacturers, they licensed everything except their store and a few of their applications sufficiently liberally that it is entirely possible(and does, in some quarters, appear to be happening) for something that is, architecturally, and "android device" to be released with zero Google branding, somebody else's app store, and search and map features feeding location data to some other entity entirely. Their only way of controlling this is by deploying a variety of "carrots": license to use Google applications, ability to brand in certain ways, possibility of being Google's special flagship device buddy, etc. These are not trivial advantages, at least as long as Google can keep improving them at a sufficiently rapid pace; but they cannot stop anyone from building android devices that are completely disconnected from them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fairly sure that a rabble of serfs having their every detail picked over and monetized is way better for shareholder value...
While there are various subtleties, externalities, and subsidies to consider, it is usually a fairly safe bet that a large expensive object, if produced by anything resembling a contemporary global supply chain, will have a substantial environmental footprint. Exactly how large can be more difficult; but between transport costs and hydrocarbon chemical feedstocks, price and size are a reasonably good proxy measurement.
Enormously rich person buys large object, news at 10?
Looks like a typo in GP: Verizon offers Novatel's "MiFi" device. It's a small, battery powered, embedded device with a cell modem and a wifi access point. Connects to the cell provider's network, distributes the sweet, sweet, internet to one or more nearby wifi-equipped devices.
The most common(and probably most effective) backpedaling strategy is "Don't".
Just stop saying what you were saying before, scrub it from visible locations where possible, then begin emitting the new party line. Most people have sufficiently short memories, or high enough tolerance for absurd contradictions, that they won't bat an eye. The people who don't fit in this category will never be satisfied, so why bother worrying about them?
That would certainly make it trickier, since the standard beam-safety gear wouldn't do.
On the other hand, since the pirates know that the emitter is on the target ship, I would be interested to know if they could simply use glasses that are virtually opaque across the visible spectrum(which would largely blind them; but it isn't hard to steer a small motor launch or operate a firearm without being able to see your hands) and just steer toward the only point of light that they can still see until they are close enough to put a bullet and/or RPG into your pricey emitter device...
It would certainly be an inconvenience, substantially more than a single-frequency setup or nothing; but a potentially surmountable one.
While it would be considerably less profitable for BAE Systems, I'd personally consider something much lower tech: Most of these cargo ships are pretty big and have walls extending a bit above the deck to keep crew and cargo from slipping overboard in unpleasant weather(sometimes a direct extension of the steel hull, sometimes just a separate safety barrier). One could, fairly swiftly and cheaply, hang concertina wire segments along the outside of the ship. Your basic 3 coil concertina wire barrier would be rather discouraging, when it is 20+ feet above your head and you need to climb through it. For extra discouragement, breakaway mountings that allow crew members sheltering behind the ship's walls to drop a segment or segments that the pirates have latched on to onto the pirates, and boat, that have latched on, could be used.
If you are standing in a skiff, trying to climb a rope or ladder up the side of a ship, having a weighty tangle of razor wire fall onto you and your boat would really ruin, and potentially end, your day...
Hey, fair is fair: if those dirty pirate scum had just waited to become major multinational corporations before they hit bittorrent, they would have been fine. But nooo, they just had to go downloading first...
Oh, I don't think that NVIDIA would be any better off if they tried to break into the fab business(or even that they would survive the attempt). My point was just that, due to their superior fab prowess, Intel can afford(except during those periods where their architecture guys have really dropped the ball, as in much of the P4 period) either to beat any other x86 vendor on price without losing money or to occupy the high-margin areas. AMD, for their part, has ATI's superior GPU designs and, now that they have a fully integrated part, has scored a substantial series of design wins in the "cheap; but better than Atom and smaller/cooler/lower power than low-end Core2 derivative + low end discrete GPU" market.
I just don't see any good niches for a VIA + NVIDIA x86 part. On the workstation/compute end, even if you don't need serious x86 power(which is the only place you could consider a VIA design), Intel could sell you a low-end Core2 derivative capable of doing housekeeping tasks for a couple of firebreathing GPUs or Tesla cards for nearly nothing. If they won't, AMD would be equally happy to move a CPU and chipset. On the laptop/STB/power constrained side, AMD already has a fully baked x86+decent GPU and Intel already has a cheaper x86+lousy GPU.
See Microsoft patent application number: 20080125102
I can only imagine that NVIDIA has concluded that, without any fab abilities of their own, playing #3 in the x86 market would be a cruel, low-margin game(assuming they even managed to make a profit at it). You already have Intel, whose GPUs are anemic; but who has the best core designs and superb in-house fabs. Then you have AMD, whose cores and (formerly in house) fab capabilities lag those of Intel; but whose GPUs are approximately equal, on average, with NVIDIA's, and whose CPUs kick the hell out of Via's.
There just isn't a pleasant niche to be had there: among customers who don't care about GPU performance, intel can afford to practically give away their low end x86s, because of superior fab prowess. Among customers who do care about GPU performance, AMD has ATI GPUs of varying power coupled with CPUs that don't suck.
That Windows Genuine Advantage isn't going to validate itself....
Microsoft is actually in a tougher position than "oxymoron" would suggest: They have an existing(and quite profitable/lock-in generating) business in server OS licences, Exchange and SQL licences, and CALs. Unlike many of their "cloud" competitors, who are either carving new ground or just making it really easy to buy VPS services from them without a call to sales, almost every MS Cloud success is an MS server loss.
.NET/IIIS).
Since Microsoft offers roughly the same things as "cloud" services that you can buy from them in boxes(yes, Azure may well be architecturally different than the shrinkwrap stuff; but MS cloud and MS boxed software are basically just two ways of getting Exchange, Sharepoint, MSSQL, and
That is the real challenge facing their cloud people. They can't just sit back and do nothing, lest they eventually be eaten by dirt-cheap linux boxes, managed in chunks of 10,000 by specialized providers, dishing up web services for incrementally more than the cost of electricity and bandwidth. On the other hand, the better they do, the more formerly lucrative MS accounts just stop buying pricey server products and CALs and start buying cheap MS cloud services...
Perhaps I'm being excessively cynical here; but(were I planning such a mission), I'd be inclined to quietly build such environmental monitoring hardware as I could into the comms gear: If things really go to shit, the radio would "malfunction", rather than broadcast Our Hero's last gasping, choking, moments... One might also(again quietly) equip the crew with a 'contingency autojector', consisting of your basic Epi-pen style automatic syringe unit, loaded with a cocktail of enough opiates to make a trip through the iron maiden a pleasure and some sort of fairly fast-acting toxin.
Beats the hell out of suffocation or starvation and is modestly nicer than freezing to death.
(Interview room)
"So, your resume looks quite strong, and medical says that you are cleared for prolonged periods of weightlessness and are highly resistant to disorientation and nausea. Very promising."
"Thank you, I have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission!"
"Just one thing, before I answer any questions you might have: Purely out of curiosity, do you have any sort of latent trauma in your background that might be triggered in a fairly easy-to-do-the-special-effects-for sort of way where you, hypothetically, trapped on a derelict vessel steeped in the ultimate evil of a dimension as alien to the laws of physics as it is repulsive to the idea of a loving God?"
"Umm... What?"
Not that the planners would let him; but any "middle aged to retired man" who consumes a martian launch spot is suffering from a different flavor of selfishness.
Unless the costs come down by a fair few factors of ten, there is no case to be made for sending any but the healthiest, expected-to-last-longest, specimens...
I suspect that that time will come, if not at the employer level, earlier in the game(fertility clinics, the best schools, etc.) However, unless these guys represent a considerable leap over the usual state of cheap genetics testing, they won't be bringing GATTACA with them just yet.
There are certain genetic diagnoses that we have nailed down well enough, and which tell us things we would not otherwise be able to determine(in oncology, for example, we have learned a great deal about the assorted subtypes and variants of cancers that used to be identified simply by location of origin and rough size. Some types of tumor mutations respond well to certain drugs, others to others, others not well at all, that sort of thing); but most of the really good tests are either of highly niche interest("Doc, one of my parents had Huntington's disease, I won't know until the symptoms start to show at ~40; but I need to know whether I can start a family now...") or patented and expensive and thus not included in low-cost broad assays.
While the fact that "Gene sequencing through the mail" is no longer a literal fraud; but a simple mail order service, is pretty impressive, the results it provides tend to be a welter of cut-and-paste about genetic factors that are either relatively poorly researched and not well known, or which work in concert with dozens or hundreds of others("schizophrenia gene" anybody?). The remainder will be a bunch of generic good advice(eat right, exercise, and get regular sleep) dressed up in inferences that barely reach statistical significance about your personal response to such inputs...
While, as I said, I have no doubt that we'll be doing genetic eugenics on an informal basis as soon or sooner than we actually have the knowledge to do so; but this isn't it. A family/applicant life history would tend to be much more informative(that, of course, is something that private insurers already take, some amount of applicant life history is something that interviewers already seek to determine, and people have been gossiping and making/breaking marriages based on speculation about various families' perceived risk factors for centuries)...
What kind of market is there for dodgy EMC gear? I always got the impression that EMC were the chaps you talked to if you didn't mind paying too much; but really wanted to have the vendor breathing down your neck for the duration of the (expensive) support agreement. Are there companies that shell out for that, and then start buying replacement parts on Ebay? Or, like Cisco, is there an active market of people trying to put together certification study kits on the relative cheap?
I can't decide whether the outfit you describe is more likely to be on a federal watch list or a federal supplier list...
You are in luck: Cocaine is a schedule 2 substance, legally available by prescription, whose primary medical purpose is anesthesia in nasal, ophthalmic, and other facial surgery.
Not as commonly used now(mostly replaced by synthetic alkaloids of various flavors with similar effects); but the legal status remains.
You can't exactly walk into a pharmacy and expect to walk out with a 30 day supply; but a fair amount of stuff whose "street" form has been thoroughly demonized is actually schedule II or below in its more respectable medical guise: Cocaine, opium, amphetamines, methylphenidates, methamphetamine, PCP, etc.
Given the relative rarity of hijackings(compared to the scale of shipping through the area) and the comparatively low ransoms(precise amounts are rarely available; but such reports as exist seem to top out under $5million) and the fact that none of the naval underwriters seem disturbed enough to be doing anything other than bumping rates a touch; it would appear that the answer is "Not very much, on average."
While the pirate attacks really push the "They are attacking Us" buttons, and the outcomes are occasionally really bad for unlucky crew members, none of the responses from shippers, insurers, or countries involved suggest that they are a serious economic nuisance. Where the costs really that high, ships would either be skipping the Suez entirely and going round the horn(at which point Egypt would probably flip out and let the seas run red) or every ship passing through the area would be taking on a bunch of somewhat sinister "contractors" at the start of the danger zone and unloading them again before they reached port...
I'm fairly sure that banks choose to advertise their places of business, rather than having them helpfully outed by the local government...
Further, while retail establishments, banking and otherwise, are made as public as possible for obvious reasons, it is quite common for actors in a wide variety of legitimate industries to be somewhat cagey about the locations and precise purposes of their various "back office" facilities. Keeps security costs lower, provides less information to competitors, and so forth. Most of this stuff isn't truly "secret"(in the sense that it is nothing a PI or decent reporter couldn't dig up with a bit of work); but there are tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of industrial parks and office complexes around the country, often gated and typically deliberately understated, quietly doing assorted stuff, under the (small) placards of various corporations that may or may not be under some other umbrella entirely. In addition to static facilities, things like shipments of cash, high-value consumer or industrial goods, hazardous chemicals, and pharmaceuticals are quite commonly done quietly. Again, not secret; but the local government sure doesn't "accidentally" reveal the time and route that the next shipment of medical opiates is going to be taking into the local oncology hospice...
Obviously, this isn't the end of the world; but conflating retail and backend operations is pretty misleading.
More to the point, laser power levels are rather tricky because anything on the low end can be blocked with relatively cheap optical safety hardware which(while it probably isn't currently available at Arms 'r Us' Mogadishu branch it is quite easily and legitimately available for not much money) and anything on the high end, high enough to avoid such cheap and simple countermeasures, will blind unprotected human targets in moments. Given the, no doubt excellent, quality of care for burn victims and the blind in the area, that may actually be less humane than a bullet to something vital.
Since dealing with pirates is not considered "war", the fact that using weapons designed for blinding is a war crime probably won't be an issue(in the same way that cops can use chemical weapons, even though soldiers can't); but any laser powerful enough to discourage all but serious n00b pirates is really not a nice device. Blinding, burns, the whole deal. If you are willing to blind and burn, you might as well skip the pricey, unproven wiz-bang shit and just use lethal weapons.
So, 1.5 million a pop(not counting the necessary radar, integration, staffing, and maintenance), per turret(larger ships would almost certainly need more than one, to prevent attacks on their blind spots), to deal with a problem that affects under 1% of the ships passing through that area?
I'm fairly sure that that sound I hear in the distance is the actuaries at Lloyds laughing through their stiff upper lips...
Luckily, active-duty Navy SEALs are approximately representative of the sniping ability of your average nautical rentacop, so there should be no difficulties with applying this scheme more broadly...
I agree that Google is likely harvesting delicious data from those android handsets that it has a useful degree of control over.
My point was merely that, in order to swiftly establish a broad presence among carriers and phone manufacturers, they licensed everything except their store and a few of their applications sufficiently liberally that it is entirely possible(and does, in some quarters, appear to be happening) for something that is, architecturally, and "android device" to be released with zero Google branding, somebody else's app store, and search and map features feeding location data to some other entity entirely. Their only way of controlling this is by deploying a variety of "carrots": license to use Google applications, ability to brand in certain ways, possibility of being Google's special flagship device buddy, etc. These are not trivial advantages, at least as long as Google can keep improving them at a sufficiently rapid pace; but they cannot stop anyone from building android devices that are completely disconnected from them.