As I pointed out above, if passing the minimal sanity and seriousness validation of acquiring a developer account is too much of a hurdle for you, well then no you actually should not be playing with the grownup toys, kid. The C64 is, indeed, right up your alley in that case, and I eagerly encourage you to use one instead of an iPhone for either forever or until you can come up with $99, whichever comes first.... and actually, you wouldn't have to come up with the $99 yourself for that matter, if you could convince even one of the 60,000 or so registered developers to date to sign you up for one of the 100 spots on their developer device list.
So if you can't make any friends, and you can't come up with $99... nope, I'm just not finding any sympathy left over, loser-boy. Go play with Android or something.
They forgot to include FREEDOM. You were free on the C64, no one could stop you from making applications, running them and distributing them freely to friends,
And for $0.99 apiece 100 of you and your friends can chip in for a developer account which gives you all that F-F-FREEEEEDDDOOOMMMM.
If passing the minimal sanity and seriousness validation of acquiring a developer account is too much of a hurdle for you, well then no you actually should not be playing with the grownup toys, kid. Back to F-F-FRREEEDDOOOMMMM whiny git land with you!
Care to explain why the UI is better than all other phones, using evidence,
Sure thing. A good UI is one that chicks dig. (If you didn't understand that already, my condolences on your lack of social life.) The female percentage of the non-iPhone personal smartphone market bounces around between 6%-8%. The iPhone, on the other hand, has a female buyer percentage encroaching upon 30%.
If you build a treehouse on your property, and some clumsy-ass neighborhood kid falls out of it, or falls climbing up to it, you can get your butt sued off. Whether you charged the kid admission or merely allowed it or didn't have a clue the kid was around at all makes not a lick of difference. Depending on your exact locality, even if you have a big fence with NO TRESPASSING signs around the tree, you can *still* be liable because you didn't make it completely impossible to get at the tree.
Yes, this is insane. Any legal system which requires Good Samaritan laws to prevent abuse of itself has quite clearly gone badly wrong.
But as long as that's the insane way the world is, there's no apparent reason that use of your code should be any more privileged to avoid the insanity than use of your physicial property is.
please be aware that the Communism bugaboo was supported by the government largely to keep the domestic populace in check.
Well, I know people who lost family members either directly to the regime or while escaping from the regime in Lithuania, Poland and Czechosolvakia in the 1950s and the 1960s who would strongly disagree with that statement...
Actually, I was more just mocking the self-righteous leftie view that THEIR censorship is uptight and evil, while OUR censorship is noble and justified.
Everyone's in favour of some level of censorship, after all. Or, if you claim you're not, how about an app that displayed pictures of children being raped? You cool with that up there on the store? Thought not. (Or, my congratulations if you are, very consistent principles indeed, but that makes you decidedly non-mainstream...)
It's really, really sad that in this country refraining from degrading women to objectified targets of men's lust, validating rape and violence against them, is a thing that automatically makes you a conservative
See? Keep going, friend, every stereotypical liberal piety like yours has a conservative counterpart.
This conservative mindset... seem content to have all their censored for their own good
Indeed.
OK, let's put "The Greatest Nigger Jokes of All Time.app" up on the store and see how cool liberals are with it.
Oh, wait, the liberal mindset "like to live in a bubble where the real world does not enter" and "seem content to have all their censored for their own good" too?
The only thing I fear in his philosophy is his interest in reducing population growth... and I think that the problem will solve itself as more and more of the world moves into a middle class type existence.
Oh, that problem's solved. Matter of fact, in 100 years the world will probably wish it had that problem again.
I believe the current midrange UN prediction is for a world population peak just barely breaking 9 billion in the 2055 time frame.
But if you curve fit the last ten years, and special case China for the impact of the one child policy kicking in which is in clear sight, there's a distinct possibility that the peak will be reached before 2040 and we'll never break eight billion.
Stories are already beginning to pop up here and there about the impact of aging and depopulation in places like Germany and Japan that are leading the rush to senility, and you're going to be seeing a *lot* more of them in the coming decades.
There isn't any current history of temperature trends on Venus.
However, there are of Mars, Jupiter, Triton, Neptune, and Pluto.
As the most mind-boggling coincidence EVAR, all five show global warming over the last 30 years that correlate with the rising temperature trends on Earth in that period.
Since that's too much to give any credit to as being purely a mind-boggling coincidence, the ONLY POSSIBLE EXPLANATION is that our evil CO2-emitting ways are completely 100% responsible not only for our own planet warming a smidgen (until 1998, anyhow) but EVERY OTHER MEASURED PLANET IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM AS WELL.
It's just amazing how trivial human actions are the only allowable explanation for universal phenomena, isn't it? Why, we should have a name for that. We could call it 'religion', perhaps.
Regarding the change to Guantanamo, that was actually very, very significant. Why? Because there are no more enemy combatants. You're either a prisoner of war subject to the Geneva Conventions, or you're a common prisoner subject to US Laws.
Oh, that's significant alright.
Now we've just completely eliminated any motivation for people to abide by the Geneva Conventions, if they're going to get all the benefits of abiding by them without having to show any regard for the laws of war themselves.
Yes, that's change alright, but it's not change anyone sane believes in.
Your story, however, reminds me of the Motorola V710 I bought from Verizon about 4-5 years ago. It had bluetooth, but they locked it down so tight
Yeah, not only did I get sucked in by the specs like I imagine you did, I got it from Telus up in Canada and never found hacked firmware that would work here.
I was so damn bitter about that I vowed to never buy a smartphone again...... ooh! Apple! Shiny!
The local tile & carpet store doesn't have 90% of the market share, yet...... yet it sells fungible at point of use goods with no associated network effect, so it has no relevance to a developer-consumer ecosystem.
This idea that you need to dominate a market to success is a myth.
It's a myth only unless you actually do need to dominate the market.
A particularly striking example of need for 100% dominance would be the power transmission Tesla wars. What non-dominating technology has success in the power transmission market? Hmmm, let me look around... why, "none at all" is what I see. Funny, that, looks like what you call "a myth" is actually a pretty perfect description of reality.
Whilst the operating system-developer-consumer market isn't up to the 100% need for dominance of the power transmission market, it's a hell of a lot closer than a carpet store.
Now, granted, 6 years is a good bit shorter, 15 years to be exact, than the 1977-1998 warming that's got everyone so excited.
So my question to you would be, exactly how many years of declining temperatures vs. rising CO2 does that graph of the last six years have to extend to before you'll admit your modelling assumptions are fundamentally flawed; the 1977-1998 warming was due to non-anthropogenic forces, and CO2 emissions have no measurable impact on climate? 10 years? 15 years? What?
Other than going vai analog, how? (Serious question).
1. Look at the lower right corner of the iTunes window.
2. Click "Burn Disc".
3. You're done.
When the horrible awful DRM that the whiners here get their panties in a twist about can be defeated by making a backup CD of it directly from within iTunes... and there's a button right in your face so all you have you do is move your mouse to it and click once... it's really really hard for anyone sensible to see where there's any kind of problem.
And, as others have pointed out, that's only if you buy DRM'd tracks in the first place. Apple happily sells "iTunes Plus" DRM-free tracks from whichever labels let them.
Do you have any actual evidence to back up your beliefs? Everything I've read about piracy both in the South China Sea and Somalia indicates that pirates flee like little bunny rabbits the instant they hear the report of a firearm without even getting close enough to size up how serious the opposition actually is. If you have some counterevidence from actual engagements, I'd be most interested to pursue it.
As for the mechanics of your Elmer Fudd meets Cutty Sark scenerio, who do you think is going to be shooting these rifles? Your typical merchant marine crew? Some peasant out of the Philippines who has done nothing but cook his entire life? A Greek diesel mechanic? They don't hire trigger men to run these ships.
That I can speak to with some confidence, from my time training novice hunters to go after grizzlies here in B.C., which although grizzlies don't have firearms is still an activity with non-negligible risk. Give me four days with this "peasant out of the Philippines" you speak of and I'll have him or her in fine form to defend their ship, I'm quite certain.
This isn't to say that getting whacked with a 3000 ft/sec 180gr slug isn't going to do damage inside of 300 yards, but you'll get your hat handed to you even by Somali thugs with AKs.
I guess we'll just have to disagree, then. I think that having bullets flying anywhere near the assault vessel is going to keep the vast majority of pirates from daring to come anywhere near RPG/AK-47 range in the first place, and if they do close to that range, from a cargo ship platform even half a dozen crewmen with hunting rifles, never mind the 15-20 that would actually be available on the larger ships, are going to have enough of a cover and accuracy advantage to turn into fish bait any of these typical pirate gangs long before their weaponry is anything approaching a serious worry. And you're not worried about the whole gang in any case, because I'll pretty much guarantee you that once two or three are hit the rest are going to be turning their guns on their own captain if he's not already heading out of range as lickety-spit as his little dinghy can go.
If you have any real life action reports to contradict this, I'll cheerfully concede that I am actually not able to put myself properly into the mindset of a Somali pirate crew. But absent any facts to the contrary, I'll maintain that I understand their psychology, and you don't, so you're pretty much completely missing the point here. It's like saying that a.22 pistol fired out your window is not going to win an engagement against the burglar attempting to jimmy that window armed with a Mac-10. No, it won't, but 99.999999% of the time it'll make him hotfoot it to a gunless house a couple blocks away where there's no resistance, so comparing householder vs. burglar armament as if they were having a tac match is stupid when the measure of success is not winning the fight, it's deterring the fight.. Same principle here.
that's a terrible platform for a maritime engagement. Aimed fire at ranges very likely to be 300m+
You miss that pirates actually board these vessels. By the time they're within docking range, a.300 Win Mag round is going to go straight through whatever makeshift plating they might have bolted on their little speedboats with no trouble whatsoever. And if they're not deterred by that, trying to storm the metal superstructure off the unprotected deck with even a couple of snipers picking at you from its protection is going to be... well, a tactical situation *I* sure wouldn't get into voluntarily.
from a moving platform on open water
These things are bigger than cruise ships, and boarding actions will only take place in calmish conditions. You can consider them a stable platform for engagement purposes.
The ideal option is a couple of twin.50 cal machine guns... The Javelin would be a nice option
But serious weaponry is just plain not in the cards for cargo ships. There is an outside chance that you can get the ports of the world to agree that personal weaponry of the moose/bear hunting type which can be bonded/confiscated whilst docked is something they can tolerate, as that kind of rifle is legal without undue complication in pretty much every nation. And I think that would be sufficient to deter virtually all piracy.
Keep in mind, we're not trying to actually win an engagement here, as these are pirates not zealots. We're just trying to convince the pirates to go look for a different target. That means we don't need to sink them, we don't need to kill them -- or even come particularly close -- we only need to convince them that either
a) They'll have to damage the ship so badly to subdue us that they won't be able to salvage enough cargo to make it profitable, or
b) There's enough of a chance of getting killed trying to board that our ship/cargo isn't worth their personal risk.
Even a handful of large caliber hunting rifles in even semi-competent hands is quite enough to make that case convincingly enough that virtually all pirates won't even think about closing to boarding distance, I confidently predict.
It's funny, the shit has been hitting the fan for innocent civilians in Somalia but it only gets real attention (and demand for NATO intervention) when it starts to affect our trade ships
Just exactly what does it take to meet your threshold for "real attention", since apparently a multiple Academy Award winning Ridley Scott motion picture doesn't do it?
If that oil tanker had a few RPGs and people that knew how to use them, there wouldn't be a problem.
No, RPGs aren't an appropriate defense weapon. 500m is the propulsion limit and the limit of hand held accuracy is more like 50m.
All you need is a handful of hunting rifles of polar bear hunting capability, I suggest my preferred caliber the.300 Win Mag aka 7.62 × 67 mm. Half a dozen of those on deck and you are effectively safe from anything short of an actual warship.
And are you equally wondrous about why when suit was filed to gain access to President-elect Obama's birth certificate to verify his status as a natural born citizen, his response was to set a battery of lawyers on challenging -- successfully --the standing of the plaintiff to bring suit, rather than just produce the damn thing as Presidential candidate McCain's response was when the same question came up regarding his Panamanian birth?
I'm a Cocoa (specifically iPhone by preference these days) contract programmer who's quite open to the idea of working on an open source project, as virtually all my contractees insist on keeping my involvement secret which is very annoying indeed. It would actually be rather nice to have a freely available example of my coding skills to point people at.
Not nice enough to work for free, mind you, but if the project's halfway interesting I'd consider something in the range of $50/hr probably which is about half of what a decent Cocoa programmer is going to cost you at the going rate these days.
If that's in discussion range email me, alex at alexcurylo dot com.
For some reason the U.S. has the most expensive and the least efficient health care system of all developed nations.
That reason is the U.S. legal system. Estimates vary widely, go Google the arguments yourself, but commonly agreed ranges seem to be that around 12%-16% of medical expenditure is directly consumed by costs of litigation and insurance to protect against its effects, while somewhere between 10%-25% is wasted on redundant consultations, unnecessary testing, and general CYA twaddle to reduce the likelihood of a malpractice conviction. (That one is necessarily a much wider range because people can reasonably differ on what is actually "unnecessary"... but compared to treatment of similar illnesses in socialized systems, it's a lot closer to the 25% mark.)
So basically, if you changed nothing but limited physician liability and ability of patients to sue to the levels which are allowable under socialized systems -- which is "slim", where it is not actually "none" -- overnight the expense would plummet and efficiency skyrocket.
However, if you propose to any USian that they should have no more right to sue their doctor than a Canadian has to sue their government, or a Brit has to sue the NHS, etc., you are just not going to get very far, dude.
And without that reform, U.S. health care is simply on a fundamentally different cost basis than anywhere else. There's lots of other little (and some not so little!) details to work over, but all together none of them come close to the U.S. culture of litigation as the real fundamental problem here.
Slashdot Mirror
As I pointed out above, if passing the minimal sanity and seriousness validation of acquiring a developer account is too much of a hurdle for you, well then no you actually should not be playing with the grownup toys, kid. The C64 is, indeed, right up your alley in that case, and I eagerly encourage you to use one instead of an iPhone for either forever or until you can come up with $99, whichever comes first. ... and actually, you wouldn't have to come up with the $99 yourself for that matter, if you could convince even one of the 60,000 or so registered developers to date to sign you up for one of the 100 spots on their developer device list.
So if you can't make any friends, and you can't come up with $99 ... nope, I'm just not finding any sympathy left over, loser-boy. Go play with Android or something.
They forgot to include FREEDOM. You were free on the C64, no one could stop you from making applications, running them and distributing them freely to friends,
And for $0.99 apiece 100 of you and your friends can chip in for a developer account which gives you all that F-F-FREEEEEDDDOOOMMMM.
If passing the minimal sanity and seriousness validation of acquiring a developer account is too much of a hurdle for you, well then no you actually should not be playing with the grownup toys, kid. Back to F-F-FRREEEDDOOOMMMM whiny git land with you!
Care to explain why the UI is better than all other phones, using evidence,
Sure thing. A good UI is one that chicks dig. (If you didn't understand that already, my condolences on your lack of social life.) The female percentage of the non-iPhone personal smartphone market bounces around between 6%-8%. The iPhone, on the other hand, has a female buyer percentage encroaching upon 30%.
QED.
If you build a treehouse on your property, and some clumsy-ass neighborhood kid falls out of it, or falls climbing up to it, you can get your butt sued off. Whether you charged the kid admission or merely allowed it or didn't have a clue the kid was around at all makes not a lick of difference. Depending on your exact locality, even if you have a big fence with NO TRESPASSING signs around the tree, you can *still* be liable because you didn't make it completely impossible to get at the tree.
Yes, this is insane. Any legal system which requires Good Samaritan laws to prevent abuse of itself has quite clearly gone badly wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law
But as long as that's the insane way the world is, there's no apparent reason that use of your code should be any more privileged to avoid the insanity than use of your physicial property is.
please be aware that the Communism bugaboo was supported by the government largely to keep the domestic populace in check.
Well, I know people who lost family members either directly to the regime or while escaping from the regime in Lithuania, Poland and Czechosolvakia in the 1950s and the 1960s who would strongly disagree with that statement...
Actually, I was more just mocking the self-righteous leftie view that THEIR censorship is uptight and evil, while OUR censorship is noble and justified.
Everyone's in favour of some level of censorship, after all. Or, if you claim you're not, how about an app that displayed pictures of children being raped? You cool with that up there on the store? Thought not. (Or, my congratulations if you are, very consistent principles indeed, but that makes you decidedly non-mainstream...)
It's really, really sad that in this country refraining from degrading women to objectified targets of men's lust, validating rape and violence against them, is a thing that automatically makes you a conservative
See? Keep going, friend, every stereotypical liberal piety like yours has a conservative counterpart.
This conservative mindset ... seem content to have all their censored for their own good
Indeed.
OK, let's put "The Greatest Nigger Jokes of All Time.app" up on the store and see how cool liberals are with it.
Oh, wait, the liberal mindset "like to live in a bubble where the real world does not enter" and "seem content to have all their censored for their own good" too?
Funny, that...
The only thing I fear in his philosophy is his interest in reducing population growth ... and I think that the problem will solve itself as more and more of the world moves into a middle class type existence.
Oh, that problem's solved. Matter of fact, in 100 years the world will probably wish it had that problem again.
I believe the current midrange UN prediction is for a world population peak just barely breaking 9 billion in the 2055 time frame.
But if you curve fit the last ten years, and special case China for the impact of the one child policy kicking in which is in clear sight, there's a distinct possibility that the peak will be reached before 2040 and we'll never break eight billion.
Stories are already beginning to pop up here and there about the impact of aging and depopulation in places like Germany and Japan that are leading the rush to senility, and you're going to be seeing a *lot* more of them in the coming decades.
There isn't any current history of temperature trends on Venus.
However, there are of Mars, Jupiter, Triton, Neptune, and Pluto.
As the most mind-boggling coincidence EVAR, all five show global warming over the last 30 years that correlate with the rising temperature trends on Earth in that period.
Since that's too much to give any credit to as being purely a mind-boggling coincidence, the ONLY POSSIBLE EXPLANATION is that our evil CO2-emitting ways are completely 100% responsible not only for our own planet warming a smidgen (until 1998, anyhow) but EVERY OTHER MEASURED PLANET IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM AS WELL.
It's just amazing how trivial human actions are the only allowable explanation for universal phenomena, isn't it? Why, we should have a name for that. We could call it 'religion', perhaps.
In other words the French are rude
Oh, you have no idea.
Being Canadian, I was forced to take French in high school, so I can read it fluently and converse somewhat.
However, my "French" has a strong Québecois accent. On the French I-spit-upon-you scale, that makes you more of a target than even Algerians.
By day 3 of my first visit to France I decided I'd get along with the natives much better pretending to not speak a word of French.
Regarding the change to Guantanamo, that was actually very, very significant. Why? Because there are no more enemy combatants. You're either a prisoner of war subject to the Geneva Conventions, or you're a common prisoner subject to US Laws.
Oh, that's significant alright.
Now we've just completely eliminated any motivation for people to abide by the Geneva Conventions, if they're going to get all the benefits of abiding by them without having to show any regard for the laws of war themselves.
Yes, that's change alright, but it's not change anyone sane believes in.
Your story, however, reminds me of the Motorola V710 I bought from Verizon about 4-5 years ago. It had bluetooth, but they locked it down so tight
Yeah, not only did I get sucked in by the specs like I imagine you did, I got it from Telus up in Canada and never found hacked firmware that would work here.
I was so damn bitter about that I vowed to never buy a smartphone again ... ... ooh! Apple! Shiny!
The local tile & carpet store doesn't have 90% of the market share, yet... ... yet it sells fungible at point of use goods with no associated network effect, so it has no relevance to a developer-consumer ecosystem.
This idea that you need to dominate a market to success is a myth.
It's a myth only unless you actually do need to dominate the market.
A particularly striking example of need for 100% dominance would be the power transmission Tesla wars. What non-dominating technology has success in the power transmission market? Hmmm, let me look around ... why, "none at all" is what I see. Funny, that, looks like what you call "a myth" is actually a pretty perfect description of reality.
Whilst the operating system-developer-consumer market isn't up to the 100% need for dominance of the power transmission market, it's a hell of a lot closer than a carpet store.
And if someone could find compelling evidence that indicated global warming wasn't happening,
Well, yeah, that would be called "the facts".
Indeed, over the past decade, those same facts would support the hypothesis that increased CO2 cools the planet.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/2002-2008TempsvsCO2.jpg
Now, granted, 6 years is a good bit shorter, 15 years to be exact, than the 1977-1998 warming that's got everyone so excited.
So my question to you would be, exactly how many years of declining temperatures vs. rising CO2 does that graph of the last six years have to extend to before you'll admit your modelling assumptions are fundamentally flawed; the 1977-1998 warming was due to non-anthropogenic forces, and CO2 emissions have no measurable impact on climate? 10 years? 15 years? What?
Other than going vai analog, how? (Serious question).
1. Look at the lower right corner of the iTunes window.
2. Click "Burn Disc".
3. You're done.
When the horrible awful DRM that the whiners here get their panties in a twist about can be defeated by making a backup CD of it directly from within iTunes ... and there's a button right in your face so all you have you do is move your mouse to it and click once ... it's really really hard for anyone sensible to see where there's any kind of problem.
And, as others have pointed out, that's only if you buy DRM'd tracks in the first place. Apple happily sells "iTunes Plus" DRM-free tracks from whichever labels let them.
Do you have any actual evidence to back up your beliefs? Everything I've read about piracy both in the South China Sea and Somalia indicates that pirates flee like little bunny rabbits the instant they hear the report of a firearm without even getting close enough to size up how serious the opposition actually is. If you have some counterevidence from actual engagements, I'd be most interested to pursue it.
As for the mechanics of your Elmer Fudd meets Cutty Sark scenerio, who do you think is going to be shooting these rifles? Your typical merchant marine crew? Some peasant out of the Philippines who has done nothing but cook his entire life? A Greek diesel mechanic? They don't hire trigger men to run these ships.
That I can speak to with some confidence, from my time training novice hunters to go after grizzlies here in B.C., which although grizzlies don't have firearms is still an activity with non-negligible risk. Give me four days with this "peasant out of the Philippines" you speak of and I'll have him or her in fine form to defend their ship, I'm quite certain.
This isn't to say that getting whacked with a 3000 ft/sec 180gr slug isn't going to do damage inside of 300 yards, but you'll get your hat handed to you even by Somali thugs with AKs.
I guess we'll just have to disagree, then. I think that having bullets flying anywhere near the assault vessel is going to keep the vast majority of pirates from daring to come anywhere near RPG/AK-47 range in the first place, and if they do close to that range, from a cargo ship platform even half a dozen crewmen with hunting rifles, never mind the 15-20 that would actually be available on the larger ships, are going to have enough of a cover and accuracy advantage to turn into fish bait any of these typical pirate gangs long before their weaponry is anything approaching a serious worry. And you're not worried about the whole gang in any case, because I'll pretty much guarantee you that once two or three are hit the rest are going to be turning their guns on their own captain if he's not already heading out of range as lickety-spit as his little dinghy can go.
If you have any real life action reports to contradict this, I'll cheerfully concede that I am actually not able to put myself properly into the mindset of a Somali pirate crew. But absent any facts to the contrary, I'll maintain that I understand their psychology, and you don't, so you're pretty much completely missing the point here. It's like saying that a .22 pistol fired out your window is not going to win an engagement against the burglar attempting to jimmy that window armed with a Mac-10. No, it won't, but 99.999999% of the time it'll make him hotfoot it to a gunless house a couple blocks away where there's no resistance, so comparing householder vs. burglar armament as if they were having a tac match is stupid when the measure of success is not winning the fight, it's deterring the fight.. Same principle here.
that's a terrible platform for a maritime engagement. Aimed fire at ranges very likely to be 300m+
You miss that pirates actually board these vessels. By the time they're within docking range, a .300 Win Mag round is going to go straight through whatever makeshift plating they might have bolted on their little speedboats with no trouble whatsoever. And if they're not deterred by that, trying to storm the metal superstructure off the unprotected deck with even a couple of snipers picking at you from its protection is going to be ... well, a tactical situation *I* sure wouldn't get into voluntarily.
from a moving platform on open water
These things are bigger than cruise ships, and boarding actions will only take place in calmish conditions. You can consider them a stable platform for engagement purposes.
The ideal option is a couple of twin .50 cal machine guns ... The Javelin would be a nice option
But serious weaponry is just plain not in the cards for cargo ships. There is an outside chance that you can get the ports of the world to agree that personal weaponry of the moose/bear hunting type which can be bonded/confiscated whilst docked is something they can tolerate, as that kind of rifle is legal without undue complication in pretty much every nation. And I think that would be sufficient to deter virtually all piracy.
Keep in mind, we're not trying to actually win an engagement here, as these are pirates not zealots. We're just trying to convince the pirates to go look for a different target. That means we don't need to sink them, we don't need to kill them -- or even come particularly close -- we only need to convince them that either
a) They'll have to damage the ship so badly to subdue us that they won't be able to salvage enough cargo to make it profitable, or
b) There's enough of a chance of getting killed trying to board that our ship/cargo isn't worth their personal risk.
Even a handful of large caliber hunting rifles in even semi-competent hands is quite enough to make that case convincingly enough that virtually all pirates won't even think about closing to boarding distance, I confidently predict.
It's funny, the shit has been hitting the fan for innocent civilians in Somalia but it only gets real attention (and demand for NATO intervention) when it starts to affect our trade ships
Uh, dude...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hawk_Down_(book)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hawk_Down_(film)
For crying out loud, there's VIDEO GAMES about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Force:_Black_Hawk_Down
Just exactly what does it take to meet your threshold for "real attention", since apparently a multiple Academy Award winning Ridley Scott motion picture doesn't do it?
If that oil tanker had a few RPGs and people that knew how to use them, there wouldn't be a problem.
No, RPGs aren't an appropriate defense weapon. 500m is the propulsion limit and the limit of hand held accuracy is more like 50m.
All you need is a handful of hunting rifles of polar bear hunting capability, I suggest my preferred caliber the .300 Win Mag aka 7.62 × 67 mm. Half a dozen of those on deck and you are effectively safe from anything short of an actual warship.
And are you equally wondrous about why when suit was filed to gain access to President-elect Obama's birth certificate to verify his status as a natural born citizen, his response was to set a battery of lawyers on challenging -- successfully --the standing of the plaintiff to bring suit, rather than just produce the damn thing as Presidential candidate McCain's response was when the same question came up regarding his Panamanian birth?
Just wonderin' ...
Yep, here in Vancouver there's a few Japanese restaurants that serve horse sashimi. It's pretty much like sweet lamb, I'd say.
I'm a Cocoa (specifically iPhone by preference these days) contract programmer who's quite open to the idea of working on an open source project, as virtually all my contractees insist on keeping my involvement secret which is very annoying indeed. It would actually be rather nice to have a freely available example of my coding skills to point people at.
Not nice enough to work for free, mind you, but if the project's halfway interesting I'd consider something in the range of $50/hr probably which is about half of what a decent Cocoa programmer is going to cost you at the going rate these days.
If that's in discussion range email me, alex at alexcurylo dot com.
For some reason the U.S. has the most expensive and the least efficient health care system of all developed nations.
That reason is the U.S. legal system. Estimates vary widely, go Google the arguments yourself, but commonly agreed ranges seem to be that around 12%-16% of medical expenditure is directly consumed by costs of litigation and insurance to protect against its effects, while somewhere between 10%-25% is wasted on redundant consultations, unnecessary testing, and general CYA twaddle to reduce the likelihood of a malpractice conviction. (That one is necessarily a much wider range because people can reasonably differ on what is actually "unnecessary" ... but compared to treatment of similar illnesses in socialized systems, it's a lot closer to the 25% mark.)
So basically, if you changed nothing but limited physician liability and ability of patients to sue to the levels which are allowable under socialized systems -- which is "slim", where it is not actually "none" -- overnight the expense would plummet and efficiency skyrocket.
However, if you propose to any USian that they should have no more right to sue their doctor than a Canadian has to sue their government, or a Brit has to sue the NHS, etc., you are just not going to get very far, dude.
And without that reform, U.S. health care is simply on a fundamentally different cost basis than anywhere else. There's lots of other little (and some not so little!) details to work over, but all together none of them come close to the U.S. culture of litigation as the real fundamental problem here.