Now maybe we'll see the final release of E17 before the 22nd century. Who knows, it may even come out before Duke Nukem Forever.
I'm sure the first thing Rasterman will do with this new funding is begin a complete rewrite of e from scratch. So once Mitsubishi starts sponsoring Duke Nukem, it'll be a tight race.
This patent is a moot point anyway, because it falls under my patent for a system where a user authenticates his identity by means of a unique user identifier and a secret password, before the system allows him access.
You must be an American. We seem to be the only people on Earth who aren't building nuclear plants as fast as we can. For us (Americans) to get more nuclear plants, we don't need subsidies, we need to remove the government created hurdles to building and operating a new plant. We haven't had a new plant go up, since a valve got stuck at Three Mile Island (releasing slightly more radiation than I got at the dentist this afternoon), because the red tape reduces any chance of profitability.
There are multiple companies in the US that have been trying to build new plants for a few years now, but I think they gave all their bribe money...I mean campaign donations...to the Republicans, not the Democrats, so they're more likely to see increased taxation and stifling regulation, while the government throws money at the wind & solar guys.
With more (private sector) money invested into nuclear research, the cost per joule could easily drop to the range of oil and coal. Solar will probably be that cheap in the next decade or two as well, but nuclear won't be dependent on variables like weather, time of year, time of day, location, etc.
For their measurement of "pollution" they talk about CO2 emissions and [anthropomorphic] global warming.
After mathematicians showed the hockey graph was bogus, scientists who contributed to the IPCC report claimed their work was distorted by the politicians, EPA scientists reported that the EPA was suppressing any dissenting opinion, a growing number of scientists in relevant fields have publicly stated that they were pressured into supporting the theory, and...oh yeah...the earth cooled over the last decade in complete defiance of what the global warming alarmists' models predicted, why do people still worry about CO2? There are plenty of real toxins out there, with real scientific proof behind them, polluting the world. Isn't it time we worried about them instead?
True libertarians do not believe in Adam Smith's philosophy. At most it's a baby step in the right direction.
We follow the philosophy of people like von Mises or Murray Rothbard: every individual has a right to his life, liberty, and everything derived from it (e.g. his income and property) and as long as he does not interfere with the rights of others, he should be free to act in his own self interest.
The modern corporate state is anathema to this view. We are Jeffersonians, and the ruling elite (of both major parties--which most libertarians don't consider to be any different) are Hamiltonians. We have these mega-corps, because the politicians and bureaucrats are in the pockets of big business, and no matter how campaign financing gets reformed, they always will be, as long as they have the power to write and enforce laws. The regulations in place to "protect the consumers" are designed by the big companies to eliminate the competition. Why does Wal-Mart want to increase minimum wage? Because they believe in a glorious society where everyone is wealthy? Or because they can afford it, while the mom-n-pops that they haven't yet killed off, who are barely scraping by, can't afford it?
Big, bloated, inefficient government leads to big, bloated, inefficient corps, with no real innovation or market competition.
I don't know a single true libertarian who has any issue with open source; ESR is well known as a libertarian. Many of us do have issues with RMS and his line of thinking. In addition to being an admitted socialist, he has implied, if not outright stated, that he would like to use force to make all software free as in speech. Libertarianism says that the owners of software should decide how to release it, and the market (i.e. we, the customers) should decide with our dollars whether to support them or not.
Libertarians oppose "net neutrality" because there's nothing neutral about it. It's some group forcing what it thinks is right onto others. If Commcast wants to start charging you more every time you request a page from Google, let them. Do you think people will be more loyal to Commcast and stop using Google, or more loyal to Google and ditch Commcast? If you live someplace where you're stuck with a single cable company or phone company due to a government granted monopoly (more regulation screwing the customers for the benefit of a corp) or a very rural residence, then you might get screwed. But as technology advances (and regulations disappear), we'll have dozens of choices for net access, and the marketplace will act to reduce prices, as it does in all other fields.
The other, and more insidious, downside to "net neutrality" is where it will lead. Governments never shrink willingly, they only grow. The income tax, which was never supposed to exceed 1% or affect anyone other than a few hundred super-rich, now takes a third of the average American's earnings. Interstate commerce, which at one point meant goods shipped across state lines for sale in another state, now includes customers at a restaurant (they could be from out of state, after all), ducks (the do migrate across state lines), and even marijuana grown in California and sold in California to residents of California (the sale of local grown goods reduces the need for imports, affecting interstate commerce). Does anyone honestly expect the Feds not to follow up net neutrality with a powergrab for more? Federal online sales tax anyone? Federal licensing for "broadcasting" a website or blog? Federal control of what you can say on a blog about politics? Federal regulations on encryption, requiring a backdoor, so they can monitor everything? And how about, complete government control over the entire internet? It is an "essential service" like roads, or health care, much too important to be left to the whim of the free market. Sounds lovely, doesn't it?
Most so called libertarian think tanks, like Cato, have been corrupted by the corporatists (i.e. Republi-crats) and shill for big business. Even the Libertarian Party (capital-L is the party, lowercase-l is the philosophy) has started to turn into a beltway insider group.
I use tarballs. I have Macs and Linux boxes, and I occasionally need to share with windows users, so I use Fat32 as my flash drive FS. But when switching files between two of my boxes, or another Unix-like box, I use tar jcvf foo.tbz <files>, then tar jxvf foo.tbz on the other side. It works great. I suppose now that I have a 32gb flash drive, I could drop the j and avoid the slight time delay of the compression, but it's an old habit.
Well Hot or Not is mainly about breasts and not about fashion. This is what might differ.
They're both about rating the visual aesthetics of a person. If a Hot-or-Not chick has a mullet and 'stache, she's going to get dinged no matter how top heavy she is.
This is close enough that the site that was created a decade ago, without any input from Microsoft, should count as prior art.
Hell, Miss America or every fashion magazine ever printed could be claimed as prior art. They look at images of people and rate the appearance. Just because MS uses computers to connect the people involved doesn't make it special.
There's also the "non-obvious" requirement for a patent. This is blatantly obvious.
That would be almost as lame as Apple patenting LCD technology and saying it's "new" because everybody else was using it on TVs and computer displays, but they're using it on phones and portable music players.
Now if MS created an algorithm for the computer to do the rating, that would be the level of innovation the patent system was intended for.
that means the active triangular zones are SMALLER than normal keys occupying the same overall keyboard area, making it even HARDER to type accurately
There's an easy solution to that:
Make the visual deadspace around the key part of the input for that key, in say a rectangular shape.</sarcasm>
Really what he's trying to patent is the idea of putting more space between two things to avoid accidentally hitting the wrong one, which should make it a nominee for the "duh!" patent of the year. The shape of the key is irrelevant; he could do exactly the same thing with a circle or a square. The problem is the touchscreen is very small, so spacing the keys farther apart makes them even tinier than on current products. My iPhone keys are already a small fraction of the size of my thumbprint, so it's already guessing that when I simultaneously touch e r t f, that I mean r, so with smaller keys, it's still going to have to guess that I meant r instead of 'no input'.
There is no freakin' way you're going to be able to assemble the crew of a merchant ship and give them a couple weeks of weapons training.
Most US flagged ships have a primarily US crew, especially in the critical roles. I never suggested giving every guy on the boat a firearm, just the ones with the training. Eventually having anti-pirate certification would become a premium skill that would make a crewman more valuable.
These guys are picked up all over the world, from places like Pakistan, Greece, or the Philippines. They have no training in anything, and mostly likely they don't all even speak the same language.
If they have no training in anything, how are they going to be useful on a ship? And if they can't speak the same language, how are they going to do their jobs properly?
Try to avoid the ridiculous exaggerations in the future.
What's more, the crewmembers have no incentive to actually resist - it makes it much more likely that they'll be killed, and the crew is hardly ever targeted for kidnapping (there's no money in it) - it's mostly the comparatively well-off officers who are nabbed.
You're right, nobody has ever risked his life for the promise of financial gain. Shipping companies would never be able to convince sailors to fight back (saving the shipping company money) by offering them financial incentives.
You're making my head spin. Navy SEALs practice for freakin' years trying make sniper shots at sea... on a rolling, pitching ship, your random deckhand is not going to have a prayer of making a shot like that.
Firstly, no, they do not. They spend years learning a multitude of skills, including shooting from ship to ship. Secondly, there's a difference between making coordinated kills in a sneak attack and firing a high powered rifle at boat full of pirates. One moderately skilled guy with a good semi-auto.308 could kill or wound enough pirates at 500 yards to destroy their morale and make them flee. Or a.50BMG mounted on the railing could fire enough rounds into the oncoming boat to wound or kill most of the crew and sink the boat. Again it's all about making your ship a costlier target than the undefended ship behind you.
And "modern detection equipment"? Like what, a pirate detector? All those ships have are very basic search radars, and if you sent out the security force every time you got a contact, you'd literally never do anything else. Radar can't tell you if a contact is a pirate, just that there's a boat out there.
Sophisticated radar, long range cameras, satellite photography, remote control aircraft with cameras. Is that modern enough for you? Once the costs of piracy are high enough, spending money on this stuff becomes the cheaper alternative.
Here's a simple set of rules:
Is there another boat nearby? If so, determine its heading.
Is the boat on a possible intercept course? If so, consider it a possible threat and send out the RC drone (or call for satellite recon).
Does the boat answer a hail? Is it a local coast guard or other legitimate contact? If not, consider it a more serious threat.
Is the boat manned by armed thugs? If so, give them a verbal warning.
Are they still coming? If so, fire a warning shot.
Are they still coming? If so, open fire.
They don't have to muster the full crew just because they spot a boat. They can have the recon and communications guys handle the contact beyond 1000 yards, have the marksmen handle the contact between 500 and 1000 yards, and begin a full muster if a contact gets within 500 yards.
And in coastal regions like this there are a shitload of boats out there.
I don't know where your "this" is, but most shipping either takes place in open seas with no other boats for miles, or in a coastal area with security. There are a few areas, like the Red Sea or the ocean around Indonesia & Malaysia that are unsafe and close to land, which are really the only regions to worry about. Maybe you're too lazy to pay more attention in a high risk area, but most people are not.
Why not shotguns? I assume most anti-pirate shooting is at close range, and you don't need to be too accurate to hit your target.
That would work. I suggested the SMG due to its faster rate of fire, higher capacity, quicker reloads, and lower recoil, but it's really a matter of choice.
If you're defending yourself from only one or two intruders at less that 50 feet, it's hard to do better than a semi-auto 12-gauge with 00-buckshot.
This really has to be the cheapest, most effective method - so there must be some, likely political, reason that it's not being used.
You are correct. Having armed crews on a commercial vessel violates international law.
Training and storage are simple: adequate training takes a few days, and the weapons can be stored in a ship's magazine (most of these ships have solid steel walls and doors, which are quite secure), which only the senior officers have access to.
Why would you give a poorly trained sailor a gun, when it takes a few hours to train him to use it? I have fired less than 200 rounds from my AR-15 (the semi-auto version of the M-16) and I can make a head shot at 300 yards under stress (with optics), or a torso shot at 100 yards under stress (with iron sights).
A one or two week training course in weapon skills and combat tactics (which are at least as important as the weapon skills), would give the sailors a huge advantage over the untrained pirates.
Typical M-16 magazines hold 30 rounds. A trained user should be able to get at least five kills from that magazine, and reloading takes only a few seconds. After the first or second death, the pirates would probably flee.
Small arms are far more effective than the mad-scientist weapons mentioned, because they are much cheaper, far more reliable, easier to use, and have a deterrence factor: pirates will avoid ships they think involve a high risk of death, and dead (or wounded and captured) pirates don't get to raid again. Also, unlike the fixed position water cannons and sound cannons, small arms can be used more easily once the pirates have boarded. If the water cannon was a better weapon than a rifle, then military ships and land units (which, unlike commercial ships, do not have legal restrictions on what weapons they employ) would use them instead of rifles.
My suggestion would be having a few designated marksmen (the best shooters on the ship) with a semi-auto.308 with a good scope for long range engagements. If they can hit one or two pirates before they board, the pirates will probably turn around. The rest of the firearms-trained crew should have something like UMP-45 submachine guns, which are a much better choice in close quarters. Of course all of these weapons should be locked up (unless they have an armed patrol), until a threat is discovered. With modern detection equipment, they should have plenty of time to muster and equip themselves.
Note: M-16s, like most modern firearms, use magazines not clips. A clip is a device that grips the back of the rounds and leaves most of the round exposed. A magazine is an enclosed box with a spring at the bottom for self feeding.
While were at it, lets ban airplanes because terrorists have used them before...and cell phones...terrorists love cell phones...ooh! and encryption.
Sure all of these technologies are used for millions of benign or helpful reasons for every malignant use, but banning things is so much easier, and more fun!
Also, it will help spur the economy, because the would be terrorists will have to buy cameras to take pictures of their targets.
Because that would be expensive. There are too many ships going through the Red Sea or other hot spots to organize small enough convoys that don't end up leaving ships waiting for days for an escort. And imagine the traffic jams you'd see at the Suez and Panama Canals when that convoy showed up.
If you want a military solution, a better option would be to park a carrier or two in each hot spot, and give each merchant ship contact information for the carrier(s) in an area, so they can call in a strafing run on any small, well armed boats that get too close (like pirate 911).
A better solution still would be to remove the international legal restrictions against carrying small arms (e.g. battle rifles) and fixed armaments (e.g. fixed machine guns and light artillery) on a merchant ship. A few years ago, a Cruise Ship used a sonic weapon to fend off a pirate attack off Somalia. Imagine if instead of a non-lethal sonic cannon, they had unleashed a few rounds from a 30mm Cannon modified to fire at sea-based attackers. It would have stopped that attack and prevented those pirates (and that boat) from mounting any future attacks.
If the president hijacks Air Force One and plows it into the White House, then I'm not gonna vote for him in the next election. Just sayin'.
I would! A Bush corpse in the White House would have done the one good thing the living Bush did (not renewing the Assault Weapon(sic) Ban), and none of the bad stuff (everything else).
If I remember the chronology that I read in the back of The Return of the King 20 odd years ago correctly...I believe she was a dozen centuries (or more) older than he.
And for my on-topic comment: Yay! gun rights! Now if we could just get Vermont style concealed carry laws (i.e. no restrictions) and licensing laws (i.e. no licensing or registration) nationwide, that would be awesome.
And if you live in any part of the USA that isn't Arizona, then you are currently on [ECMPAH]DT. Those of us here in AZ are the only one using Standard Time right now. We use MST 365 (and occasionally 366) days a year.
The Nigerian Patent Minister recently asked for my help in transferring a large sum of money to the US. I'm sure that if I ask him to, he can make this trouble go away. He has offered a very generous reward for my assistance. I'll ask...
Ooh...now it seems he wants to buy the car I'm selling, and he offered me $500 over what I listed it for (it's probably one of the money transfer expenses I had to wire him $5000 to cover), all I have to do is send the $2000 difference from the cashier's check he already had printed out in my name (what an fortuitous coincidence) to his friend.
I'm sure with our budding business relationship he'll help the OLPC project out.
By true monopoly, I meant one that can do anything with the market, because it has complete control.
I understand that Goober had a de facto monopoly of the gasoline market in Mayberry, because the market could not bear two gas stations. However, if Goober tripled his prices one day, he couldn't stop competitors from opening up cheaper stations.
Who'd have thought you could learn economics from Nick at Nite?
A company with a "government granted" monopoly abused it. Shocking!
Incidentally, any true monopoly must be government granted. Without the government's force to keep competition away, it's merely a really effective competitor in an open market, like Wal-Mart.
A monopoly, whether government owned (e.g. the US Post Office) or government granted (e.g. AT&T and the Baby Bells in the US, before cellphones, cable company phone service, etc.), is not required to innovate and improve to retain customers, like a free-market business is. Because of this they will tend to deliver a lower quality product at a higher price.
"Public" (i.e. government-monopoly) school will never be good at teaching the advanced students. Most government schools meet the minimum standards, because that's all they're required to do. There is rarely an economic incentive to do better.
There are a few exceptions. In SC when I was in high school, the schools got $400 extra for each student in an AP class, so, with all other things being equal, schools were motivated to teach AP classes, and get the students to take them (and do well, since the schools looked bad, if their scores were low).
In general though, without the incentives, innovation, and risks that a profit-motivated free market would bring to schooling, American schools will continue to suck. But at least we have good high school football teams (schools have a strong motivation to have good sports teams...they bring in more money, and boasting rights).
Austrian Economic theory (founded by Ludwig von Mises) explains why government-monopoly services (education, the postal system, social security, etc.) fail to provide a quality product at a competitive price.
If you want to improve American education, then vote for Ron Paul. Not only will he get the Feds out of local education, but he's also the most pro-internet freedom candidate since...well...ever!
Slashdot Mirror
Now maybe we'll see the final release of E17 before the 22nd century. Who knows, it may even come out before Duke Nukem Forever.
I'm sure the first thing Rasterman will do with this new funding is begin a complete rewrite of e from scratch. So once Mitsubishi starts sponsoring Duke Nukem, it'll be a tight race.
This patent is a moot point anyway, because it falls under my patent for a system where a user authenticates his identity by means of a unique user identifier and a secret password, before the system allows him access.
You must be an American. We seem to be the only people on Earth who aren't building nuclear plants as fast as we can. For us (Americans) to get more nuclear plants, we don't need subsidies, we need to remove the government created hurdles to building and operating a new plant. We haven't had a new plant go up, since a valve got stuck at Three Mile Island (releasing slightly more radiation than I got at the dentist this afternoon), because the red tape reduces any chance of profitability.
There are multiple companies in the US that have been trying to build new plants for a few years now, but I think they gave all their bribe money...I mean campaign donations...to the Republicans, not the Democrats, so they're more likely to see increased taxation and stifling regulation, while the government throws money at the wind & solar guys.
With more (private sector) money invested into nuclear research, the cost per joule could easily drop to the range of oil and coal. Solar will probably be that cheap in the next decade or two as well, but nuclear won't be dependent on variables like weather, time of year, time of day, location, etc.
For their measurement of "pollution" they talk about CO2 emissions and [anthropomorphic] global warming.
After mathematicians showed the hockey graph was bogus, scientists who contributed to the IPCC report claimed their work was distorted by the politicians, EPA scientists reported that the EPA was suppressing any dissenting opinion, a growing number of scientists in relevant fields have publicly stated that they were pressured into supporting the theory, and...oh yeah...the earth cooled over the last decade in complete defiance of what the global warming alarmists' models predicted, why do people still worry about CO2? There are plenty of real toxins out there, with real scientific proof behind them, polluting the world. Isn't it time we worried about them instead?
True libertarians do not believe in Adam Smith's philosophy. At most it's a baby step in the right direction.
We follow the philosophy of people like von Mises or Murray Rothbard: every individual has a right to his life, liberty, and everything derived from it (e.g. his income and property) and as long as he does not interfere with the rights of others, he should be free to act in his own self interest.
The modern corporate state is anathema to this view. We are Jeffersonians, and the ruling elite (of both major parties--which most libertarians don't consider to be any different) are Hamiltonians. We have these mega-corps, because the politicians and bureaucrats are in the pockets of big business, and no matter how campaign financing gets reformed, they always will be, as long as they have the power to write and enforce laws. The regulations in place to "protect the consumers" are designed by the big companies to eliminate the competition. Why does Wal-Mart want to increase minimum wage? Because they believe in a glorious society where everyone is wealthy? Or because they can afford it, while the mom-n-pops that they haven't yet killed off, who are barely scraping by, can't afford it?
Big, bloated, inefficient government leads to big, bloated, inefficient corps, with no real innovation or market competition.
I don't know a single true libertarian who has any issue with open source; ESR is well known as a libertarian. Many of us do have issues with RMS and his line of thinking. In addition to being an admitted socialist, he has implied, if not outright stated, that he would like to use force to make all software free as in speech. Libertarianism says that the owners of software should decide how to release it, and the market (i.e. we, the customers) should decide with our dollars whether to support them or not.
Libertarians oppose "net neutrality" because there's nothing neutral about it. It's some group forcing what it thinks is right onto others. If Commcast wants to start charging you more every time you request a page from Google, let them. Do you think people will be more loyal to Commcast and stop using Google, or more loyal to Google and ditch Commcast? If you live someplace where you're stuck with a single cable company or phone company due to a government granted monopoly (more regulation screwing the customers for the benefit of a corp) or a very rural residence, then you might get screwed. But as technology advances (and regulations disappear), we'll have dozens of choices for net access, and the marketplace will act to reduce prices, as it does in all other fields.
The other, and more insidious, downside to "net neutrality" is where it will lead. Governments never shrink willingly, they only grow. The income tax, which was never supposed to exceed 1% or affect anyone other than a few hundred super-rich, now takes a third of the average American's earnings. Interstate commerce, which at one point meant goods shipped across state lines for sale in another state, now includes customers at a restaurant (they could be from out of state, after all), ducks (the do migrate across state lines), and even marijuana grown in California and sold in California to residents of California (the sale of local grown goods reduces the need for imports, affecting interstate commerce). Does anyone honestly expect the Feds not to follow up net neutrality with a powergrab for more? Federal online sales tax anyone? Federal licensing for "broadcasting" a website or blog? Federal control of what you can say on a blog about politics? Federal regulations on encryption, requiring a backdoor, so they can monitor everything? And how about, complete government control over the entire internet? It is an "essential service" like roads, or health care, much too important to be left to the whim of the free market. Sounds lovely, doesn't it?
Most so called libertarian think tanks, like Cato, have been corrupted by the corporatists (i.e. Republi-crats) and shill for big business. Even the Libertarian Party (capital-L is the party, lowercase-l is the philosophy) has started to turn into a beltway insider group.
I use tarballs. I have Macs and Linux boxes, and I occasionally need to share with windows users, so I use Fat32 as my flash drive FS. But when switching files between two of my boxes, or another Unix-like box, I use tar jcvf foo.tbz <files>, then tar jxvf foo.tbz on the other side. It works great. I suppose now that I have a 32gb flash drive, I could drop the j and avoid the slight time delay of the compression, but it's an old habit.
Well Hot or Not is mainly about breasts and not about fashion. This is what might differ.
They're both about rating the visual aesthetics of a person. If a Hot-or-Not chick has a mullet and 'stache, she's going to get dinged no matter how top heavy she is.
This is close enough that the site that was created a decade ago, without any input from Microsoft, should count as prior art.
Hell, Miss America or every fashion magazine ever printed could be claimed as prior art. They look at images of people and rate the appearance. Just because MS uses computers to connect the people involved doesn't make it special.
There's also the "non-obvious" requirement for a patent. This is blatantly obvious.
That would be almost as lame as Apple patenting LCD technology and saying it's "new" because everybody else was using it on TVs and computer displays, but they're using it on phones and portable music players.
Now if MS created an algorithm for the computer to do the rating, that would be the level of innovation the patent system was intended for.
that means the active triangular zones are SMALLER than normal keys occupying the same overall keyboard area, making it even HARDER to type accurately
There's an easy solution to that: Make the visual deadspace around the key part of the input for that key, in say a rectangular shape.</sarcasm>
Really what he's trying to patent is the idea of putting more space between two things to avoid accidentally hitting the wrong one, which should make it a nominee for the "duh!" patent of the year. The shape of the key is irrelevant; he could do exactly the same thing with a circle or a square. The problem is the touchscreen is very small, so spacing the keys farther apart makes them even tinier than on current products. My iPhone keys are already a small fraction of the size of my thumbprint, so it's already guessing that when I simultaneously touch e r t f, that I mean r, so with smaller keys, it's still going to have to guess that I meant r instead of 'no input'.
There is no freakin' way you're going to be able to assemble the crew of a merchant ship and give them a couple weeks of weapons training.
.308 could kill or wound enough pirates at 500 yards to destroy their morale and make them flee. Or a .50BMG mounted on the railing could fire enough rounds into the oncoming boat to wound or kill most of the crew and sink the boat. Again it's all about making your ship a costlier target than the undefended ship behind you.
Most US flagged ships have a primarily US crew, especially in the critical roles. I never suggested giving every guy on the boat a firearm, just the ones with the training. Eventually having anti-pirate certification would become a premium skill that would make a crewman more valuable.
These guys are picked up all over the world, from places like Pakistan, Greece, or the Philippines. They have no training in anything, and mostly likely they don't all even speak the same language.
If they have no training in anything, how are they going to be useful on a ship? And if they can't speak the same language, how are they going to do their jobs properly?
Try to avoid the ridiculous exaggerations in the future.
What's more, the crewmembers have no incentive to actually resist - it makes it much more likely that they'll be killed, and the crew is hardly ever targeted for kidnapping (there's no money in it) - it's mostly the comparatively well-off officers who are nabbed.
You're right, nobody has ever risked his life for the promise of financial gain. Shipping companies would never be able to convince sailors to fight back (saving the shipping company money) by offering them financial incentives.
You're making my head spin. Navy SEALs practice for freakin' years trying make sniper shots at sea... on a rolling, pitching ship, your random deckhand is not going to have a prayer of making a shot like that.
Firstly, no, they do not. They spend years learning a multitude of skills, including shooting from ship to ship. Secondly, there's a difference between making coordinated kills in a sneak attack and firing a high powered rifle at boat full of pirates. One moderately skilled guy with a good semi-auto
And "modern detection equipment"? Like what, a pirate detector? All those ships have are very basic search radars, and if you sent out the security force every time you got a contact, you'd literally never do anything else. Radar can't tell you if a contact is a pirate, just that there's a boat out there.
Sophisticated radar, long range cameras, satellite photography, remote control aircraft with cameras. Is that modern enough for you? Once the costs of piracy are high enough, spending money on this stuff becomes the cheaper alternative.
Here's a simple set of rules:
Is there another boat nearby? If so, determine its heading.
Is the boat on a possible intercept course? If so, consider it a possible threat and send out the RC drone (or call for satellite recon).
Does the boat answer a hail? Is it a local coast guard or other legitimate contact? If not, consider it a more serious threat.
Is the boat manned by armed thugs? If so, give them a verbal warning.
Are they still coming? If so, fire a warning shot.
Are they still coming? If so, open fire.
They don't have to muster the full crew just because they spot a boat. They can have the recon and communications guys handle the contact beyond 1000 yards, have the marksmen handle the contact between 500 and 1000 yards, and begin a full muster if a contact gets within 500 yards.
And in coastal regions like this there are a shitload of boats out there.
I don't know where your "this" is, but most shipping either takes place in open seas with no other boats for miles, or in a coastal area with security. There are a few areas, like the Red Sea or the ocean around Indonesia & Malaysia that are unsafe and close to land, which are really the only regions to worry about. Maybe you're too lazy to pay more attention in a high risk area, but most people are not.
Why not shotguns? I assume most anti-pirate shooting is at close range, and you don't need to be too accurate to hit your target.
That would work. I suggested the SMG due to its faster rate of fire, higher capacity, quicker reloads, and lower recoil, but it's really a matter of choice.
If you're defending yourself from only one or two intruders at less that 50 feet, it's hard to do better than a semi-auto 12-gauge with 00-buckshot.
You are correct. Having armed crews on a commercial vessel violates international law.
Training and storage are simple: adequate training takes a few days, and the weapons can be stored in a ship's magazine (most of these ships have solid steel walls and doors, which are quite secure), which only the senior officers have access to.
Why would you give a poorly trained sailor a gun, when it takes a few hours to train him to use it? I have fired less than 200 rounds from my AR-15 (the semi-auto version of the M-16) and I can make a head shot at 300 yards under stress (with optics), or a torso shot at 100 yards under stress (with iron sights).
A one or two week training course in weapon skills and combat tactics (which are at least as important as the weapon skills), would give the sailors a huge advantage over the untrained pirates.
Typical M-16 magazines hold 30 rounds. A trained user should be able to get at least five kills from that magazine, and reloading takes only a few seconds. After the first or second death, the pirates would probably flee.
Small arms are far more effective than the mad-scientist weapons mentioned, because they are much cheaper, far more reliable, easier to use, and have a deterrence factor: pirates will avoid ships they think involve a high risk of death, and dead (or wounded and captured) pirates don't get to raid again. Also, unlike the fixed position water cannons and sound cannons, small arms can be used more easily once the pirates have boarded. If the water cannon was a better weapon than a rifle, then military ships and land units (which, unlike commercial ships, do not have legal restrictions on what weapons they employ) would use them instead of rifles.
My suggestion would be having a few designated marksmen (the best shooters on the ship) with a semi-auto .308 with a good scope for long range engagements. If they can hit one or two pirates before they board, the pirates will probably turn around. The rest of the firearms-trained crew should have something like UMP-45 submachine guns, which are a much better choice in close quarters. Of course all of these weapons should be locked up (unless they have an armed patrol), until a threat is discovered. With modern detection equipment, they should have plenty of time to muster and equip themselves.
Note: M-16s, like most modern firearms, use magazines not clips. A clip is a device that grips the back of the rounds and leaves most of the round exposed. A magazine is an enclosed box with a spring at the bottom for self feeding.
You could always stuff a pair of socks in its underwear. That's what I do to feel manlier. ;)
While were at it, lets ban airplanes because terrorists have used them before...and cell phones...terrorists love cell phones...ooh! and encryption.
Sure all of these technologies are used for millions of benign or helpful reasons for every malignant use, but banning things is so much easier, and more fun!
Also, it will help spur the economy, because the would be terrorists will have to buy cameras to take pictures of their targets.
Because that would be expensive. There are too many ships going through the Red Sea or other hot spots to organize small enough convoys that don't end up leaving ships waiting for days for an escort. And imagine the traffic jams you'd see at the Suez and Panama Canals when that convoy showed up.
If you want a military solution, a better option would be to park a carrier or two in each hot spot, and give each merchant ship contact information for the carrier(s) in an area, so they can call in a strafing run on any small, well armed boats that get too close (like pirate 911).
A better solution still would be to remove the international legal restrictions against carrying small arms (e.g. battle rifles) and fixed armaments (e.g. fixed machine guns and light artillery) on a merchant ship. A few years ago, a Cruise Ship used a sonic weapon to fend off a pirate attack off Somalia. Imagine if instead of a non-lethal sonic cannon, they had unleashed a few rounds from a 30mm Cannon modified to fire at sea-based attackers. It would have stopped that attack and prevented those pirates (and that boat) from mounting any future attacks.
I would! A Bush corpse in the White House would have done the one good thing the living Bush did (not renewing the Assault Weapon(sic) Ban), and none of the bad stuff (everything else).
If I remember the chronology that I read in the back of The Return of the King 20 odd years ago correctly...I believe she was a dozen centuries (or more) older than he.
And for my on-topic comment: Yay! gun rights!
Now if we could just get Vermont style concealed carry laws (i.e. no restrictions) and licensing laws (i.e. no licensing or registration) nationwide, that would be awesome.
And if you live in any part of the USA that isn't Arizona, then you are currently on [ECMPAH]DT. Those of us here in AZ are the only one using Standard Time right now. We use MST 365 (and occasionally 366) days a year.
The light in the power button: when it's on you're frustrated.
The Nigerian Patent Minister recently asked for my help in transferring a large sum of money to the US. I'm sure that if I ask him to, he can make this trouble go away. He has offered a very generous reward for my assistance. I'll ask...
Ooh...now it seems he wants to buy the car I'm selling, and he offered me $500 over what I listed it for (it's probably one of the money transfer expenses I had to wire him $5000 to cover), all I have to do is send the $2000 difference from the cashier's check he already had printed out in my name (what an fortuitous coincidence) to his friend.
I'm sure with our budding business relationship he'll help the OLPC project out.
I understand that Goober had a de facto monopoly of the gasoline market in Mayberry, because the market could not bear two gas stations. However, if Goober tripled his prices one day, he couldn't stop competitors from opening up cheaper stations.
Who'd have thought you could learn economics from Nick at Nite?
Intelligence and Logic.
Socialism (including left-liberalism and neo-conservatism) is based on ignorance and/or emotion.
Do you think their tech support call volume will pick up dramatically around 6-7pm?
I went out to watch the sunset, and when I came back, the network was down.
A company with a "government granted" monopoly abused it. Shocking!
Incidentally, any true monopoly must be government granted. Without the government's force to keep competition away, it's merely a really effective competitor in an open market, like Wal-Mart.
A monopoly, whether government owned (e.g. the US Post Office) or government granted (e.g. AT&T and the Baby Bells in the US, before cellphones, cable company phone service, etc.), is not required to innovate and improve to retain customers, like a free-market business is. Because of this they will tend to deliver a lower quality product at a higher price.
"Public" (i.e. government-monopoly) school will never be good at teaching the advanced students. Most government schools meet the minimum standards, because that's all they're required to do. There is rarely an economic incentive to do better.
There are a few exceptions. In SC when I was in high school, the schools got $400 extra for each student in an AP class, so, with all other things being equal, schools were motivated to teach AP classes, and get the students to take them (and do well, since the schools looked bad, if their scores were low).
In general though, without the incentives, innovation, and risks that a profit-motivated free market would bring to schooling, American schools will continue to suck. But at least we have good high school football teams (schools have a strong motivation to have good sports teams...they bring in more money, and boasting rights).
Austrian Economic theory (founded by Ludwig von Mises) explains why government-monopoly services (education, the postal system, social security, etc.) fail to provide a quality product at a competitive price.
If you want to improve American education, then vote for Ron Paul. Not only will he get the Feds out of local education, but he's also the most pro-internet freedom candidate since...well...ever!