What you linked to does not support your claim. In fact, it 100% validates the explanation which I wrote. Thanks for linking to though, I was too lazy to dig up the proof.
The post refers to an int called __intel_cpu_indicator that intel used as a bitfield. The user "Eponymous Cowboy" demonstrates that he sets certain bits in the int and that causes the code to use the version of memcpy() hand-coded for a Pentium 4.
If you read Intel's patent filing here they break out the bitfield at the time of filing:
The compiler then generates multiple assembly code processor tests corresponding to the dispatch construct, step 390 . These multiple tests access an intel_cpu_indicator variable to identify the processor type. According to one embodiment of the present invention, the intel_cpu_indicator is a bit vector which encodes the processor type. The bit vectors and their corresponding processor types according to one embodiment of the present invention are illustrated in Table II below. Alternate embodiments can include a lesser or greater number of bits. TABLE II Bit Vector Processor Type 00000000000000000000000000000001 generic 00000000000000000000000000000010 Pentium® processor 00000000000000000000000000000100 Pentium® Pro processor 00000000000000000000000000001000 Pentium® processor with MMX(TM) technology 00000000000000000000000000010000 Pentium® II processor 00000000000000000000000000100000 Pentium® III processor
Good reporting is very valuable. But the older the reporting is, the more it is diluted by other sources who may only do 90% as good a job - that's still plenty good enough for most people - or may even do better than 100% because they used the original reporting as a source for their own content thus incorporating it plus new material too.
It was Seth Godin who pointed out that anyone seriously involved in marketing (as opposed to someone bulk-emailing thousands of people trying to sucker a precious two or three) would absolutely hate hate hate to alienate individuals by annoying them with unwanted messages
And yet almost universally doing business with a web-based company will get you signed up for their spam list under the guise of a "prior business relationship." They don't ask you if you want their crapmail, they just sign you up automatically. Maybe, if you are lucky, somewhere in their account settings (if they have 'accounts') is a place you can uncheck to turn off the crapmail. Until they reset their database and start sending it again.
The "prior business relationship" justification is just bullshit. If I want their crapmail I will explicitly request it. Otherwise they can fuck off.
Its gotten so bad now that I almost always use mailinator type addresses for online purchases. All I need is the usually instantaneous receipt via email and then I don't want to hear from them again unless there is a fuck-up with order fulfilment or delivery, which I can usually check on myself using the info on the receipt.
Yeah, that's precisely the shorted-sighted thinking that kills most of these ventures. The NY Times tried to do that, they found it didn't work and stopped doing it. You keep your old articles under lock and key, people will pirate them. Other sources will produce roughly similar articles for free - as you yourself wrote. Except for certain niche applications, the value is not in the content itself.
I didn't see full details in the linked AP article, but these schemes almost always get it backwards.
Content is ubiquitous. They need to look at charging for something other than content. For example, charge for timeliness. In other words, put up a paywall that only surrounds the latest week or two of articles. And I don't mean AP reprints, I mean timely local news coverage and opinion that isn't available anywhere else. Let people who want that information as soon as it is available pay a premium, but eventually migrate it all out to the free world. That way you build up an portfolio of work that is both useful to people do research on the net and gives a very good idea of what people will get for their subscription money.
They might even take it a step further and sell a subscription tier that does include hardcopy delivery in addition to electronic, like the WSJ and Consumer Reports do.
The Linux Weekly News works like that - you want this week's news this week - that requires a subscription, but if you want last week's news or last year's news, that's free.
All I see in your response, and your original post, is firepower. That's only a short term solution and does not necessarily lead to a resolution.
You say my "Iraq troll-fu is weak" - yet your response is exactly the problem we had with Iraq. No matter how much "heat" was brought to bear, the situation just got worse. It was only when the surge was implemented, which, despite the name, was less about simply putting more boots on the ground and more about a wholesale policy change towards developing community relations.
Consider this very Iraq like scenario - we start shooting pirates and sinking their attack skiffs. Pirates figure that out. Pirates decide to start mining the shipping lanes instead and thus are able to hijack boats without even getting near them. Sink one boat and now they can sell "protection" - for the same price as their ransoms, maybe even more, they offer to sell information about where the mines are. Plant new ones every couple of weeks to make up for any that are cleared and their job gets even more lucrative with less risk than it is today. Even if mining turns out not to be practical, I'm sure that a few desperate men over there can come up with plenty of other ways to extort money out of those ships - a skiff loaded with explosives, throttle locked and the wheel tied straight aimed at a big tanker maybe, the improvised torpedo.
You claim that I'm "chest beating". I'm simply tired of those that will justify any action no matter how horrific.
I see no justification here, except perhaps the guns, guns. guns brigade, just looking to justify feel-good retribution instead of functional problem solving. I already posted this once:
"Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories." --Sun Tzu
the intel compiler disables a lot of optimizations if code built on it doesn't detect a cpuid that it recognizes
Fixed that for you.
When that story broke years ago, Intel's compiler group didn't test with or target AMD chips or most others like cyrix. They also didn't use the bits that are meant for a processor to claim specific capabilities (like SSE, SSE2, MMX, etc). It was purely cpuid driven because Intel knew that some chips (like their own) had bugs in their implementations of SSE, etc so checking cpuid allowed them to work around those kinds of bugs.
So, if you took code compiled back then and ran it on an AMD chip, it defaulted to the slow but sure to work mode. If you were to take that same compiled binary from back then and run it on a brand spanking new Intel chip today like the Core I7, chances are it would also default to a slow-but-sure mode.
My point has never changed from my original post - there are motivations other than pure criminality at work here.
You on the other hand just keep piling on the bullshit - you are arguing with someone else when you write stupid shit like, "Go ahead and think they do this for some idealistic view of the world." I said that their options for putting food on the table have been reduced to this and you think that's idealism?
Because a handful of unique counter-examples in a sea of billions of examples isn't the way words are defined and used by the majority.
. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why you placed the once-off restriction, or the software restriction, other than to make my job much harder.
Not more difficult, more honest. I've seen a million debates than run into weasely examples. I wanted to make sure the weasel steps were skipped and you used concrete counter examples. I guess it didn't work...
there are plenty of examples of software that isn't free software that is distributed for free. Sure, people make small money off advertising, but mostly that covers the cost of distribution.
Free-as-in-beer software - distribution is essentially unlimited. No copyright needed for that, unless you want to restrict money-making resales which is the only characteristic that any significant number of free-as-in-beer software tends to have.
Also there are once-off examples (as you seem to know, since you restricted it),
Nope, not aware of any, but if there are a few it doesn't help your position anyway because they're in the noise, not "plenty."
and there are other works which nowadays fall under the catch-all creative commons licenses.
That's close, but still not really "same-ol', same-ol'" the CC licenses being inspired by the idea of copyleft to begin with, they are just as "novel and unintended" as the GPL itself.
My point is that money-making is not the only established use of copyrights. We trade control for creation, and there are other ways to benefit from control than money.
Nah, not really feeling it. Sure, the copyleft movement is an example of what you are talking about, but this whole thread started when you denied that copyleft was a novel and unintended use of the copyright, so you can't really count it.
Come back in a hundred years when copyleft ideals are truly widespread and then you would probably be safe in claiming that the copyright law it uses (if it even still exists in the same form) is about control of distribution and not just about making money.
they could have made the crew steer the ship into one of their ports/beaches and then offloaded all the food to people waiting on shore.
That's unlikely. I've seen videos of much smaller ships that have been captured by somali pirates and unloaded and even those aren't able to be beached without significant risk to the vessel and the people unloading it, the few ports that are still operational aren't held by the same groups so are effectively unavailable.
A cash ransom is far less risky and far more effective than stealing random cargoes.
I've been both poor and homeless, and didn't steal rob murder or ransom. The only people who turn to crime are criminals.
Poor and homeless, especially with no one shooting at you, in the first world is practically upper middle class in a country like somalia.
It's funny how you keep coming up with brand new rationalizations each time the last one is shot down, but seem to be constitutionally unable to accept that crime does not exist in a vacuum, that people have motivations and simply "being a criminal" is rarely the root cause.
Usually it is. Its often called "aggressive driving" - laws about it are rarely enforced because its a lot easier to write tickets for speeders that trigger a radar gun to beep above a certain threshold than it is to actively monitor driver behaviour.
I don't see anything in your post to support your original claim that they aren't starving. In fact, best as I can tell, you are reinforcing that claim, even if the causes are broader than just fishery depletion, the end result is the same - desperate people making desperate acts and not just simple greed in action.
Why didn't their leaders figure that out and diversify? Oh, that's right, they were too busy becoming "rich and powerful" and overthrowing one another.
Be careful with tghat accusation. Lots of black kettles there. The most recent being the US's covert and overt attacks on the ICU just as it looked like they might actually put together a functioning government.
Actual results currently are: Get shot to death by SEAL team snipers. Yeah, great plan of action.
If you can't even conceive of what life is like in another country, I can see how you would think they are just kicking back in their mcmansions and playing nintendo.
Live life in poverty and famine with a decent chance of getting killed in a fire-fight with some warlord or take a similar chance of getting killed by the biggest warlord on the planet but if you do survive you are no longer poor, nor starving and hundreds in your community are indebted to you.
Yeah, right. All the money is going to food. Oh, and to help support a second wife. Maybe even a third.
Don't be so naive. These guys have a lot more than just their immediate family depending on their results. And I'm sure they live large with the money they do get. But so did the hunter who brought home the big kill.
And half a millions dollars? The average ransom is $2m.
That just serves to prove my point even further - $2M buys a hell of a lot more food and supplies than could ever be hauled off in a couple of speedboats.
You seem to be defending the point of view that these people have no other motivation than greed, that they are just bad people and their living conditions are not desperate at all. If that's true, then why did somali piracy just become a significant issue in the last decade? Did these people just suddenly "turn bad" and before that they were all just singing kumbaya?
If you aren't willing to examine the root cause of the problem, you'll never solve the problem.
"Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories." --Sun Tzu
You sure got some big angry balls there. You seem to be very proud of them.
What you don't consider is the result of your position. You think you can cow these people into submission. Humans don't work like that - look at yourself and your chest beating. You don't think they've got chest beaters with big angry balls too? You think because you've got big guns that they aren't going to figure out a way to fight back that negates the value of your big guns? Did you not learn anything in Iraq?
Yep, he did read it, and I read it too. It doesn't change the fact that if this were the reason for it they would be attacking fishing vessels and waste dump barges instead of capturing valuable container ships and ransoming the crew and cargo for massive profit.
So, just why do you think there are any fishing vessels to attack? If the waters have been depleted and poisoned, who is going to fish there now? And what benefit is there to attacking the waste barges? They have nothing of value, you can't eat garbage and you can't ransom it for shit. The fish are already gone, maybe they'll come back in a few decades if the place gets cleaned up, but what are you going to do in the meantime?
This is equivalent of saying "My neighbor keeps stealing my TV, so I kidnap the children of all the other neighbors EXCEPT his and sell them back so I can buy myself a yacht."
No, this is the equivalent of running out of options and taking the route with the highest return for the least risk.
Its really easy to sit back and ignore the conditions that lead up to a situation, demonize the other guys and ignore root cause because it satisfies your own tribalistic tendencies. But that approach never actually fixes problems, it just makes more.
If the pirates were really starving, they'd hold these ships hostage and ask for UN attention, or supplies dropped,
Right, people in one of the most shit upon countries in the world are going to expect anything from the UN. The organization that is practically run by the same country that overthrew the most serious attempt to bring law and order to the country in the last 20 years?
or they'd just take as much cargo as they could and leave. Because really, you can't eat paper money. You still need to exchange it for food, and again, the thing with money is you can trade it for a lot more than just food.
The thing with money is that you can trade it for a lot more food than you could ever haul off as cargo in a handful of speed boats.
Sure they are going to use the ransoms for other things too, but then their former income from fishing their waters, when it was still feasible, was used for a lot more than just food too.
Consider this very obvious fact - somali piracy wasn't a serious problem until this decade. Yet the political conditions in somalia have been fucked up for around two decades, if not three -- the Blackhawk Down incident occurred in 1993, and things started to fall apart in the late 70s. What changed? Fishery poisoning and depletion is the obvious one. You got a better explanation?
If they were only doing it to put food on their table, then when they hijack ships carrying food, such as the Maersk Alabama was, then they would have taken the food.
Do you actually believe the BS that you type?
Do you actually believe the BS that you type?
Each group of pirates have a couple of small speedboats - in the case of the Maersk Alabama they had a single skiff. How much food do you think is going to fit on that one boat versus how much food can you buy with a ransom of half a million dollars?
Clearly the pirates are not angels, but so far all of the flaming responses to the GP's point that desperate conditions breed desperate men seem to be rooted in knee-jerk ideology built on ridiculously one-sided analyses like yours.
They claim to care about the over-fishing, the illegal dumping and so forth, but it boils down to greed. Especially when you see that it is not fishing vessels that are hit, but supply tankers with big fat cargos worth millions.
Why do you think that responding to running out of fish means people must only attack fishing vessels? If the water is over-fished and poisoned why would there even be any fishing vessels around anymore to attack?
Your argument is akin to saying that if a man was really starving, he would only steal groceries and not steal money to spend on groceries. Its a really blatant mental short-circuit. It suggests that you can't rebutt the GP's original point, but you are so emotionally vested in your current perspective that you have to make up a bogus argument that you can easily knock down in order to avoid considering a broader perspective. I believe that's a form of cognitive dissonance.
Oh spare us the BS. The pirates aren't hijacking fishing vessels or garbage barges to police their waters.
Spare us the BS. That's not even close to what he said. If that's really what you heard in your head when you read the GP's post you've got some seriously out of whack filters.
Apparently they perform more or less efficiently depending on how well you are able to "concentrate". TFA notes that lawyers and others in jobs that require a lot of multitasking can't control the ball nearly as well. Single minded types, (e.g. copy editors and IT) tend to do it rather well. I imagine ADHD is a problem for it.
It also seems to really help if you think in Russian while you concentrate.
Slashdot Mirror
I had to go digging for the drivers and apps for my tablet for XP and vista. they did not magicanny install and work without effort.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
In fact, I don't know what that word means.
What you linked to does not support your claim.
In fact, it 100% validates the explanation which I wrote.
Thanks for linking to though, I was too lazy to dig up the proof.
The post refers to an int called __intel_cpu_indicator that intel used as a bitfield. The user "Eponymous Cowboy" demonstrates that he sets certain bits in the int and that causes the code to use the version of memcpy() hand-coded for a Pentium 4.
If you read Intel's patent filing here they break out the bitfield at the time of filing:
The compiler then generates multiple assembly code processor tests corresponding to the dispatch construct, step 390 . These multiple tests access an intel_cpu_indicator variable to identify the processor type. According to one embodiment of the present invention, the intel_cpu_indicator is a bit vector which encodes the processor type. The bit vectors and their corresponding processor types according to one embodiment of the present invention are illustrated in Table II below. Alternate embodiments can include a lesser or greater number of bits.
TABLE II
Bit Vector Processor Type
00000000000000000000000000000001 generic
00000000000000000000000000000010 Pentium® processor
00000000000000000000000000000100 Pentium® Pro processor
00000000000000000000000000001000 Pentium® processor with MMX(TM) technology
00000000000000000000000000010000 Pentium® II processor
00000000000000000000000000100000 Pentium® III processor
Good reporting is very valuable. But the older the reporting is, the more it is diluted by other sources who may only do 90% as good a job - that's still plenty good enough for most people - or may even do better than 100% because they used the original reporting as a source for their own content thus incorporating it plus new material too.
It was Seth Godin who pointed out that anyone seriously involved in marketing (as opposed to someone bulk-emailing thousands of people trying to sucker a precious two or three) would absolutely hate hate hate to alienate individuals by annoying them with unwanted messages
And yet almost universally doing business with a web-based company will get you signed up for their spam list under the guise of a "prior business relationship." They don't ask you if you want their crapmail, they just sign you up automatically. Maybe, if you are lucky, somewhere in their account settings (if they have 'accounts') is a place you can uncheck to turn off the crapmail. Until they reset their database and start sending it again.
The "prior business relationship" justification is just bullshit. If I want their crapmail I will explicitly request it. Otherwise they can fuck off.
Its gotten so bad now that I almost always use mailinator type addresses for online purchases. All I need is the usually instantaneous receipt via email and then I don't want to hear from them again unless there is a fuck-up with order fulfilment or delivery, which I can usually check on myself using the info on the receipt.
Only old people and spammers use email.
Yeah, that's precisely the shorted-sighted thinking that kills most of these ventures. The NY Times tried to do that, they found it didn't work and stopped doing it. You keep your old articles under lock and key, people will pirate them. Other sources will produce roughly similar articles for free - as you yourself wrote. Except for certain niche applications, the value is not in the content itself.
I didn't see full details in the linked AP article, but these schemes almost always get it backwards.
Content is ubiquitous. They need to look at charging for something other than content. For example, charge for timeliness. In other words, put up a paywall that only surrounds the latest week or two of articles. And I don't mean AP reprints, I mean timely local news coverage and opinion that isn't available anywhere else. Let people who want that information as soon as it is available pay a premium, but eventually migrate it all out to the free world. That way you build up an portfolio of work that is both useful to people do research on the net and gives a very good idea of what people will get for their subscription money.
They might even take it a step further and sell a subscription tier that does include hardcopy delivery in addition to electronic, like the WSJ and Consumer Reports do.
The Linux Weekly News works like that - you want this week's news this week - that requires a subscription, but if you want last week's news or last year's news, that's free.
All I see in your response, and your original post, is firepower. That's only a short term solution and does not necessarily lead to a resolution.
You say my "Iraq troll-fu is weak" - yet your response is exactly the problem we had with Iraq. No matter how much "heat" was brought to bear, the situation just got worse. It was only when the surge was implemented, which, despite the name, was less about simply putting more boots on the ground and more about a wholesale policy change towards developing community relations.
Consider this very Iraq like scenario - we start shooting pirates and sinking their attack skiffs. Pirates figure that out. Pirates decide to start mining the shipping lanes instead and thus are able to hijack boats without even getting near them. Sink one boat and now they can sell "protection" - for the same price as their ransoms, maybe even more, they offer to sell information about where the mines are. Plant new ones every couple of weeks to make up for any that are cleared and their job gets even more lucrative with less risk than it is today. Even if mining turns out not to be practical, I'm sure that a few desperate men over there can come up with plenty of other ways to extort money out of those ships - a skiff loaded with explosives, throttle locked and the wheel tied straight aimed at a big tanker maybe, the improvised torpedo.
You claim that I'm "chest beating". I'm simply tired of those that will justify any action no matter how horrific.
I see no justification here, except perhaps the guns, guns. guns brigade, just looking to justify feel-good retribution instead of functional problem solving. I already posted this once:
"Know thy self, know thy enemy.
A thousand battles, a thousand victories."
--Sun Tzu
the intel compiler disables a lot of optimizations if code built on it doesn't detect a cpuid that it recognizes
Fixed that for you.
When that story broke years ago, Intel's compiler group didn't test with or target AMD chips or most others like cyrix. They also didn't use the bits that are meant for a processor to claim specific capabilities (like SSE, SSE2, MMX, etc). It was purely cpuid driven because Intel knew that some chips (like their own) had bugs in their implementations of SSE, etc so checking cpuid allowed them to work around those kinds of bugs.
So, if you took code compiled back then and ran it on an AMD chip, it defaulted to the slow but sure to work mode. If you were to take that same compiled binary from back then and run it on a brand spanking new Intel chip today like the Core I7, chances are it would also default to a slow-but-sure mode.
My point has never changed from my original post - there are motivations other than pure criminality at work here.
You on the other hand just keep piling on the bullshit - you are arguing with someone else when you write stupid shit like, "Go ahead and think they do this for some idealistic view of the world." I said that their options for putting food on the table have been reduced to this and you think that's idealism?
Don't forget once-offs! Why aren't they allowed?
Because a handful of unique counter-examples in a sea of billions of examples isn't the way words are defined and used by the majority.
. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why you placed the once-off restriction, or the software restriction, other than to make my job much harder.
Not more difficult, more honest. I've seen a million debates than run into weasely examples. I wanted to make sure the weasel steps were skipped and you used concrete counter examples. I guess it didn't work...
there are plenty of examples of software that isn't free software that is distributed for free. Sure, people make small money off advertising, but mostly that covers the cost of distribution.
Free-as-in-beer software - distribution is essentially unlimited. No copyright needed for that, unless you want to restrict money-making resales which is the only characteristic that any significant number of free-as-in-beer software tends to have.
Also there are once-off examples (as you seem to know, since you restricted it),
Nope, not aware of any, but if there are a few it doesn't help your position anyway because they're in the noise, not "plenty."
and there are other works which nowadays fall under the catch-all creative commons licenses.
That's close, but still not really "same-ol', same-ol'" the CC licenses being inspired by the idea of copyleft to begin with, they
are just as "novel and unintended" as the GPL itself.
My point is that money-making is not the only established use of copyrights. We trade control for creation, and there are other ways to benefit from control than money.
Nah, not really feeling it. Sure, the copyleft movement is an example of what you are talking about, but this whole thread started when you denied that copyleft was a novel and unintended use of the copyright, so you can't really count it.
Come back in a hundred years when copyleft ideals are truly widespread and then you would probably be safe in claiming that the copyright law it uses (if it even still exists in the same form) is about control of distribution and not just about making money.
they could have made the crew steer the ship into one of their ports/beaches and then offloaded all the food to people waiting on shore.
That's unlikely. I've seen videos of much smaller ships that have been captured by somali pirates and unloaded and even those aren't able to be beached without significant risk to the vessel and the people unloading it, the few ports that are still operational aren't held by the same groups so are effectively unavailable.
A cash ransom is far less risky and far more effective than stealing random cargoes.
I've been both poor and homeless, and didn't steal rob murder or ransom. The only people who turn to crime are criminals.
Poor and homeless, especially with no one shooting at you, in the first world is practically upper middle class in a country like somalia.
It's funny how you keep coming up with brand new rationalizations each time the last one is shot down, but seem to be constitutionally unable to accept that crime does not exist in a vacuum, that people have motivations and simply "being a criminal" is rarely the root cause.
Usually it is. Its often called "aggressive driving" - laws about it are rarely enforced because its a lot easier to write tickets for speeders that trigger a radar gun to beep above a certain threshold than it is to actively monitor driver behaviour.
I don't see anything in your post to support your original claim that they aren't starving. In fact, best as I can tell, you are reinforcing that claim, even if the causes are broader than just fishery depletion, the end result is the same - desperate people making desperate acts and not just simple greed in action.
Why didn't their leaders figure that out and diversify? Oh, that's right, they were too busy becoming "rich and powerful" and overthrowing one another.
Be careful with tghat accusation. Lots of black kettles there. The most recent being the US's covert and overt attacks on the ICU just as it looked like they might actually put together a functioning government.
Actual results currently are: Get shot to death by SEAL team snipers. Yeah, great plan of action.
If you can't even conceive of what life is like in another country, I can see how you would think they are just kicking back in their mcmansions and playing nintendo.
Live life in poverty and famine with a decent chance of getting killed in a fire-fight with some warlord or take a similar chance of getting killed by the biggest warlord on the planet but if you do survive you are no longer poor, nor starving and hundreds in your community are indebted to you.
yeah, I'd take the mcmansions too.
Yeah, right. All the money is going to food. Oh, and to help support a second wife. Maybe even a third.
Don't be so naive. These guys have a lot more than just their immediate family depending on their results. And I'm sure they live large with the money they do get. But so did the hunter who brought home the big kill.
And half a millions dollars? The average ransom is $2m.
That just serves to prove my point even further - $2M buys a hell of a lot more food and supplies than could ever be hauled off in a couple of speedboats.
You seem to be defending the point of view that these people have no other motivation than greed, that they are just bad people and their living conditions are not desperate at all. If that's true, then why did somali piracy just become a significant issue in the last decade? Did these people just suddenly "turn bad" and before that they were all just singing kumbaya?
If you aren't willing to examine the root cause of the problem, you'll never solve the problem.
"Know thy self, know thy enemy.
A thousand battles, a thousand victories."
--Sun Tzu
Might, might, might versus actual results.
You are supremely unrealistic.
You sure got some big angry balls there. You seem to be very proud of them.
What you don't consider is the result of your position. You think you can cow these people into submission.
Humans don't work like that - look at yourself and your chest beating. You don't think they've got chest beaters with big angry balls too? You think because you've got big guns that they aren't going to figure out a way to fight back that negates the value of your big guns? Did you not learn anything in Iraq?
Yep, he did read it, and I read it too. It doesn't change the fact that if this were the reason for it they would be attacking fishing vessels and waste dump barges instead of capturing valuable container ships and ransoming the crew and cargo for massive profit.
So, just why do you think there are any fishing vessels to attack? If the waters have been depleted and poisoned, who is going to fish there now? And what benefit is there to attacking the waste barges? They have nothing of value, you can't eat garbage and you can't ransom it for shit. The fish are already gone, maybe they'll come back in a few decades if the place gets cleaned up, but what are you going to do in the meantime?
This is equivalent of saying "My neighbor keeps stealing my TV, so I kidnap the children of all the other neighbors EXCEPT his and sell them back so I can buy myself a yacht."
No, this is the equivalent of running out of options and taking the route with the highest return for the least risk.
Its really easy to sit back and ignore the conditions that lead up to a situation, demonize the other guys and ignore root cause because it satisfies your own tribalistic tendencies. But that approach never actually fixes problems, it just makes more.
If the pirates were really starving, they'd hold these ships hostage and ask for UN attention, or supplies dropped,
Right, people in one of the most shit upon countries in the world are going to expect anything from the UN. The organization that is practically run by the same country that overthrew the most serious attempt to bring law and order to the country in the last 20 years?
or they'd just take as much cargo as they could and leave. Because really, you can't eat paper money. You still need to exchange it for food, and again, the thing with money is you can trade it for a lot more than just food.
The thing with money is that you can trade it for a lot more food than you could ever haul off as cargo in a handful of speed boats.
Sure they are going to use the ransoms for other things too, but then their former income from fishing their waters, when it was still feasible, was used for a lot more than just food too.
Consider this very obvious fact - somali piracy wasn't a serious problem until this decade. Yet the political conditions in somalia have been fucked up for around two decades, if not three -- the Blackhawk Down incident occurred in 1993, and things started to fall apart in the late 70s. What changed? Fishery poisoning and depletion is the obvious one. You got a better explanation?
If they were only doing it to put food on their table, then when they hijack ships carrying food, such as the Maersk Alabama was, then they would have taken the food.
Do you actually believe the BS that you type?
Do you actually believe the BS that you type?
Each group of pirates have a couple of small speedboats - in the case of the Maersk Alabama they had a single skiff. How much food do you think is going to fit on that one boat versus how much food can you buy with a ransom of half a million dollars?
Clearly the pirates are not angels, but so far all of the flaming responses to the GP's point that desperate conditions breed desperate men seem to be rooted in knee-jerk ideology built on ridiculously one-sided analyses like yours.
Did you read this part?
"The only difference between us and them is that they do it to put food on their table."
In what language does "put food on their table" mean "hijack fishing vessels or garbage barges to police their waters?"
They claim to care about the over-fishing, the illegal dumping and so forth, but it boils down to greed. Especially when you see that it is not fishing vessels that are hit, but supply tankers with big fat cargos worth millions.
Why do you think that responding to running out of fish means people must only attack fishing vessels? If the water is over-fished and poisoned why would there even be any fishing vessels around anymore to attack?
Your argument is akin to saying that if a man was really starving, he would only steal groceries and not steal money to spend on groceries. Its a really blatant mental short-circuit. It suggests that you can't rebutt the GP's original point, but you are so emotionally vested in your current perspective that you have to make up a bogus argument that you can easily knock down in order to avoid considering a broader perspective. I believe that's a form of cognitive dissonance.
Oh spare us the BS. The pirates aren't hijacking fishing vessels or garbage barges to police their waters.
Spare us the BS. That's not even close to what he said. If that's really what you heard in your head when you read the GP's post you've got some seriously out of whack filters.
Apparently they perform more or less efficiently depending on how well you are able to "concentrate". TFA notes that lawyers and others in jobs that require a lot of multitasking can't control the ball nearly as well. Single minded types, (e.g. copy editors and IT) tend to do it rather well. I imagine ADHD is a problem for it.
It also seems to really help if you think in Russian while you concentrate.