That being said, I would love to be on the first ship equipped with anti-piracy non-lethal technologies.
I wouldn't want to be near such a ship. The pirates aren't limiting themselves to 'non-lethal technologies'. What are you going to do when they respond to your water cannon with an RPG? Sending people armed with 'non-lethal weapons' up against those armed with lethal ones seems pretty stupid to me.
I doubt the USA would allow Chinese container ships with cannons, and sailors well-armed with lethal weapons to enter US ports.
They don't need cannons. Rifles and pistols would probably suffice. And why would the USA care if Chinese container ships had small arms aboard ship, as long as those small arms didn't come ashore? A rifle in a weapons locker aboard ship isn't a threat to anyone.
But what is causing piracy is extreme poverty and a shattered Somalia. Before reaching for the gun think how this situation can be changed.
The last time we tried to intervene in that situation it didn't end so well. If the Somalis want change I'd say that it's up to them to provide it. You can't impose freedom or change on a population that isn't willing to accept it.
When we shot the pirates, the pirates vowed to start targeting and killing Americans to strike back
Yeah, so? Starving teenage thugs with AK-47s vs. non-starving Americans inclined to fight for their freedom and whom have the best military in the world backing them up. Which side would you lay odds on? It also occurs to me that this problem might not have gotten this bad if shipping companies hadn't set the precedent that they were willing to pay ransom in the first place. Maybe we should have killed the first bunch of thugs that tried this and nipped the problem in the bud?
Hosing them down might piss them off, but it prevents an intentional loss of life
Until they use their AK-47s to shoot back at the poor sap running the firehose.....
From what I gather, the big problem is pirates are able to sneak up on big ass boats in tiny little zodiacs that captains ignore as blips on their radar. So by the time you know you're under pirate attack, there are already pirates aboard your ship.
That's where the rifles and pistols come into play. Maybe it's just my American attitude talking but I'd rather go down fighting than become someones hostage. We Americans have a history of being tortured and/or murdered when captured and aren't inclined to let ourselves fall into captivity without a fight.
Besides, maybe if you changed the risk-reward calculation less people would be inclined to go into piracy to begin with?
All the testosterone and gung-ho aside, how about not giving them a reason to pirate? It seems that nobody here realizes that the Somali pirates are doing what they do because other nations illegal fishing (worth an estimated 300 million) in the region have depleted [freerepublic.com] their fish stocks while the UN turned a blind eye. To add insult to injury, there's been some toxic waste dumping off the coast.
That little bit of rationalization only goes so far. The fishing issue is why some people (fisherman who lost their livelihoods) turned to piracy but it's largely driven by a profit motive now. They've realized that they can extort money out of shipowners and have no reason to stop doing so as long as the reward is greater than the risk.
are doing what they do because they system has failed them and they see piracy as the most feasible method to force change.
How is piracy going to force charge in Solomia when the warlords that have ruined that country are the ones sheltering the pirates and taking a cut of the money they steal?
Yes lets debate between lethal and non lethal firearms instead of addressing the actual causes of the problem. Like an ineffective government and global inequality
Oh give me a fucking break. "Global inequality" doesn't give you the right to start holding human beings hostage for ransom money.
Actually Mythbusters tried this and concluded that ammo "cooking off" isn't as dangerous as you might think. When a cartridge that isn't contained within a chamber ignites there's nothing to contain the pressure and accelerate the bullet down a barrel -- so the bullet and cartridge usually wind up just flying away from each other a short distance.
That's not to safe it's completely safe -- if you were close enough to it you could get a decent bruise or burn -- but it's not as deadly as you might think it is.
I think the poster's point was that the sailors using the weapons weren't actually trained military folk
So what? The pirates aren't exactly "trained military folk" either. They are a bunch of scared teenagers with AK-47s and RPGs. I'd be willing to bet that your average rural American probably has more firearms experience than they do.
The only reason they can take over these ships so easily is because modern merchant ships are highly automated (a supertanker is larger than an aircraft carrier but has a crew numbering the dozens vs thousands for the carrier) and the crews are unarmed. Mount a few.50 caliber machine guns to the side of the ship to use on these speedboats to keep them from getting close enough to board and arm the crew with rifles and pistols on the off chance that they manage to board anyway. What's so complicated about this?
what to do with the weapons in whatever random port the ship ends up at where weapons aren't welcome.
Lock them up in the ship's safe and don't take them ashore? Seems like a simple solution to me. How much danger to a port can a handful of merchantmen with rifles pose anyway?
and nothing the government provides or does is any good.
One could make the counter argument that we wouldn't have this duopoly situation to begin with if Government wasn't so involved in the marketplace. In most parts of the US I can't legally start my own cable or telephone company without signing a franchise agreement with the local government. Said agreements are virtually always exclusive and serve the purpose of shutting out competition.
Mind telling me what possible public interest is served by prohibiting me from rolling out my own cable service if I've got the capital and the wherewithal to do so?
I feel like I'm watching someone's Cyberpunk or Shadowrun campaign come together as megacorps take control of governments... It's all sickening...
Maybe this will change when people start thinking that it's better to shrink Government than try to manage it? If Government didn't think it had the power to regulate internet service and grant monopolies (franchise agreements) then there wouldn't be any point in TWC spending money to lobby the Government, would there?
I also remember when everyone thought that the highest download speed you could get over a telephone wire was the 56kbps modems of yesteryear because that was the limit of copper phone wire.
Nobody ever thought that was the limit of copper phone wire. It was known as early as the 60s that the physical layer was capable of transmitting higher frequencies than those used for plain old telephone service. The limitation came because of the fact that modems operated over POTS, which was limited to 64k of bandwidth per voice channel.
Umm, why is it a job for the Air Force, as opposed to the Navy, Army or some other Governmental agency? Offensive cyber-warfare may be a role for the air force, as in blowing up the computers of our adversaries by dropping bombs on them.....
Yeah but how many sharks did he kill before he got eaten? Statistically speaking that last shark got pretty lucky.
Of course it was killed by a.30-06 shortly thereafter. Probably would have been in the best interest of the shark to stick to eating seals;) They don't have opposable thumbs and aren't nearly as dangerous. Guess it would have been a pretty lousy movie if all the shark did was eat seals though......
You'll want to shake his hand right up to the point where his botnet of compromised machines manages to brute-force your bank account login and password and steals all your money.
Then you'd procede to nad-kicking.
The only person I'd want to nad-kick in that scenario would be the moron IT person at my bank who didn't have his system configured to lock my account after X number of failed logon attempts.....
I'd wager that if you're a shark, the "chewing on your leg" part would still be cool.
Depends on which human you are going after. Humans are known for being pretty dangerous pray, probably the most dangerous in the animal kingdom when you get right down to it. I'd imagine that if you are a shark and you run into Quint it's going to totally ruin your day;)
That's why articles like TFA and the article you just posted p1ss off/. It's all about not jumping to conclusions because of a single headline.
Hey, I agree. I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it. Just posted it to point out the fact that there may well be a chemical component to video gaming. I'm not qualified to judge whether or not that makes them physically addictive though.
Who's to say what other activities can trigger dopamine release? In what quantities?
Most of our network cards use intel chipsets. What OS are you using? I've never been able to fully saturate gigabit or even 100mbit ethernet under Windows. Even when using simple protocols like FTP it usually tops out at 80-90% of network capacity. Using more complicated ones (SMB/windows file sharing comes to mind) will reduce it even further. Transfers between two Linux machines are another matter. I've been able to saturate 100mbit networks easily using a variety of protocols and achieve the aforementioned 950 Mbit/s transfer.
I just fished through all of my cacti graphs and found a sustained (25 minutes) period of 980 Mbit/s data transfer between two of my switches. The link between them is regular Cat5e with a run of about 60 yards. So I'm not sure that you can attribute your issues to the physical layer, although anything is possible.
At any rate the point I was making is that there is a definite chemical mechanism involved in nicotine addiction or similar, whereas video games are just an enjoyable passtime.
Actually some studies have said that playing video games releases dopamine into the body. So there may very well be a 'chemical mechanism' involved in video games. Whether or not that makes them physically "addictive" is another matter of course.
Umm, I've reached 950 Mbit/s on Cat5e before. Fairly long (70-80 yards) runs of it too. Are you sure you aren't running into a limitation of your hardware? I've seen a lot of PCs with crummy NICs or slow PCI buses that can't reach full gigabit speeds no matter how good the cabling is.
I mean at some point doesn't it become impossible to move electrons or modulate data any faster?
Nah, at that point you just place the whole ethernet infrastructure within a subspace field, modulate the deflector dish a little bit and you'll be off and running.
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That being said, I would love to be on the first ship equipped with anti-piracy non-lethal technologies.
I wouldn't want to be near such a ship. The pirates aren't limiting themselves to 'non-lethal technologies'. What are you going to do when they respond to your water cannon with an RPG? Sending people armed with 'non-lethal weapons' up against those armed with lethal ones seems pretty stupid to me.
I doubt the USA would allow Chinese container ships with cannons, and sailors well-armed with lethal weapons to enter US ports.
They don't need cannons. Rifles and pistols would probably suffice. And why would the USA care if Chinese container ships had small arms aboard ship, as long as those small arms didn't come ashore? A rifle in a weapons locker aboard ship isn't a threat to anyone.
But what is causing piracy is extreme poverty and a shattered Somalia. Before reaching for the gun think how this situation can be changed.
The last time we tried to intervene in that situation it didn't end so well. If the Somalis want change I'd say that it's up to them to provide it. You can't impose freedom or change on a population that isn't willing to accept it.
When we shot the pirates, the pirates vowed to start targeting and killing Americans to strike back
Yeah, so? Starving teenage thugs with AK-47s vs. non-starving Americans inclined to fight for their freedom and whom have the best military in the world backing them up. Which side would you lay odds on? It also occurs to me that this problem might not have gotten this bad if shipping companies hadn't set the precedent that they were willing to pay ransom in the first place. Maybe we should have killed the first bunch of thugs that tried this and nipped the problem in the bud?
Hosing them down might piss them off, but it prevents an intentional loss of life
Until they use their AK-47s to shoot back at the poor sap running the firehose.....
From what I gather, the big problem is pirates are able to sneak up on big ass boats in tiny little zodiacs that captains ignore as blips on their radar. So by the time you know you're under pirate attack, there are already pirates aboard your ship.
That's where the rifles and pistols come into play. Maybe it's just my American attitude talking but I'd rather go down fighting than become someones hostage. We Americans have a history of being tortured and/or murdered when captured and aren't inclined to let ourselves fall into captivity without a fight.
Besides, maybe if you changed the risk-reward calculation less people would be inclined to go into piracy to begin with?
All the testosterone and gung-ho aside, how about not giving them a reason to pirate? It seems that nobody here realizes that the Somali pirates are doing what they do because other nations illegal fishing (worth an estimated 300 million) in the region have depleted [freerepublic.com] their fish stocks while the UN turned a blind eye. To add insult to injury, there's been some toxic waste dumping off the coast.
That little bit of rationalization only goes so far. The fishing issue is why some people (fisherman who lost their livelihoods) turned to piracy but it's largely driven by a profit motive now. They've realized that they can extort money out of shipowners and have no reason to stop doing so as long as the reward is greater than the risk.
are doing what they do because they system has failed them and they see piracy as the most feasible method to force change.
How is piracy going to force charge in Solomia when the warlords that have ruined that country are the ones sheltering the pirates and taking a cut of the money they steal?
Yes lets debate between lethal and non lethal firearms instead of addressing the actual causes of the problem. Like an ineffective government and global inequality
Oh give me a fucking break. "Global inequality" doesn't give you the right to start holding human beings hostage for ransom money.
Guns and ammo are dangerous in a fire
Actually Mythbusters tried this and concluded that ammo "cooking off" isn't as dangerous as you might think. When a cartridge that isn't contained within a chamber ignites there's nothing to contain the pressure and accelerate the bullet down a barrel -- so the bullet and cartridge usually wind up just flying away from each other a short distance.
That's not to safe it's completely safe -- if you were close enough to it you could get a decent bruise or burn -- but it's not as deadly as you might think it is.
preferably something more long the lines of this [wikipedia.org].
The pirates have anti-ship missiles that we didn't know about? ;)
I think the poster's point was that the sailors using the weapons weren't actually trained military folk
So what? The pirates aren't exactly "trained military folk" either. They are a bunch of scared teenagers with AK-47s and RPGs. I'd be willing to bet that your average rural American probably has more firearms experience than they do.
The only reason they can take over these ships so easily is because modern merchant ships are highly automated (a supertanker is larger than an aircraft carrier but has a crew numbering the dozens vs thousands for the carrier) and the crews are unarmed. Mount a few .50 caliber machine guns to the side of the ship to use on these speedboats to keep them from getting close enough to board and arm the crew with rifles and pistols on the off chance that they manage to board anyway. What's so complicated about this?
what to do with the weapons in whatever random port the ship ends up at where weapons aren't welcome.
Lock them up in the ship's safe and don't take them ashore? Seems like a simple solution to me. How much danger to a port can a handful of merchantmen with rifles pose anyway?
and nothing the government provides or does is any good.
One could make the counter argument that we wouldn't have this duopoly situation to begin with if Government wasn't so involved in the marketplace. In most parts of the US I can't legally start my own cable or telephone company without signing a franchise agreement with the local government. Said agreements are virtually always exclusive and serve the purpose of shutting out competition.
Mind telling me what possible public interest is served by prohibiting me from rolling out my own cable service if I've got the capital and the wherewithal to do so?
I feel like I'm watching someone's Cyberpunk or Shadowrun campaign come together as megacorps take control of governments... It's all sickening...
Maybe this will change when people start thinking that it's better to shrink Government than try to manage it? If Government didn't think it had the power to regulate internet service and grant monopolies (franchise agreements) then there wouldn't be any point in TWC spending money to lobby the Government, would there?
I also remember when everyone thought that the highest download speed you could get over a telephone wire was the 56kbps modems of yesteryear because that was the limit of copper phone wire.
Nobody ever thought that was the limit of copper phone wire. It was known as early as the 60s that the physical layer was capable of transmitting higher frequencies than those used for plain old telephone service. The limitation came because of the fact that modems operated over POTS, which was limited to 64k of bandwidth per voice channel.
Everyone knows seals are terrible shots with rifles.
Yeah but they are pretty deadly with handguns ;)
I would watch that movie over anything starring Kevin Costner or Ben Affleck any day!!
What if we could feed them to sharks?
Umm, why is it a job for the Air Force, as opposed to the Navy, Army or some other Governmental agency? Offensive cyber-warfare may be a role for the air force, as in blowing up the computers of our adversaries by dropping bombs on them.....
Yeah but how many sharks did he kill before he got eaten? Statistically speaking that last shark got pretty lucky.
Of course it was killed by a .30-06 shortly thereafter. Probably would have been in the best interest of the shark to stick to eating seals ;) They don't have opposable thumbs and aren't nearly as dangerous. Guess it would have been a pretty lousy movie if all the shark did was eat seals though......
You'll want to shake his hand right up to the point where his botnet of compromised machines manages to brute-force your bank account login and password and steals all your money.
Then you'd procede to nad-kicking.
The only person I'd want to nad-kick in that scenario would be the moron IT person at my bank who didn't have his system configured to lock my account after X number of failed logon attempts.....
I'd wager that if you're a shark, the "chewing on your leg" part would still be cool.
Depends on which human you are going after. Humans are known for being pretty dangerous pray, probably the most dangerous in the animal kingdom when you get right down to it. I'd imagine that if you are a shark and you run into Quint it's going to totally ruin your day ;)
That's why articles like TFA and the article you just posted p1ss off /. It's all about not jumping to conclusions because of a single headline.
Hey, I agree. I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it. Just posted it to point out the fact that there may well be a chemical component to video gaming. I'm not qualified to judge whether or not that makes them physically addictive though.
Who's to say what other activities can trigger dopamine release? In what quantities?
Lots of things. Sex and eating come to mind.
Most of our network cards use intel chipsets. What OS are you using? I've never been able to fully saturate gigabit or even 100mbit ethernet under Windows. Even when using simple protocols like FTP it usually tops out at 80-90% of network capacity. Using more complicated ones (SMB/windows file sharing comes to mind) will reduce it even further. Transfers between two Linux machines are another matter. I've been able to saturate 100mbit networks easily using a variety of protocols and achieve the aforementioned 950 Mbit/s transfer.
I just fished through all of my cacti graphs and found a sustained (25 minutes) period of 980 Mbit/s data transfer between two of my switches. The link between them is regular Cat5e with a run of about 60 yards. So I'm not sure that you can attribute your issues to the physical layer, although anything is possible.
At any rate the point I was making is that there is a definite chemical mechanism involved in nicotine addiction or similar, whereas video games are just an enjoyable passtime.
Actually some studies have said that playing video games releases dopamine into the body. So there may very well be a 'chemical mechanism' involved in video games. Whether or not that makes them physically "addictive" is another matter of course.
Umm, I've reached 950 Mbit/s on Cat5e before. Fairly long (70-80 yards) runs of it too. Are you sure you aren't running into a limitation of your hardware? I've seen a lot of PCs with crummy NICs or slow PCI buses that can't reach full gigabit speeds no matter how good the cabling is.
I mean at some point doesn't it become impossible to move electrons or modulate data any faster?
Nah, at that point you just place the whole ethernet infrastructure within a subspace field, modulate the deflector dish a little bit and you'll be off and running.
;)