Yes, it probably does have a melting point. However, this amorphous alloy's melting point is apparently below room temperature. Similarly, glass (the regular transparent stuff) is technically a liquid at room temperature. Its viscosity is high enough that visible sag doesn't occur within a window's (for example) typical life span. As glass is heated, its viscosity progressively decreases until it flows and can be formed as one would expect of a liquid. Same deal with this alloy.
I would blame it on the control system and the engineering of the vehicle. I don't think the number of rotors is a big issue... each cluster of 4 props could be operated in unison, making the control system see it as a quad-copter. Smaller electric multi-rotor aircraft run into the same stability limitations to a lesser degree, but it can be compensated for with an appropriate set of PID variables. The issue is the mass of the rotating assembly vs. the torque available to accelerate it. Electric motors have gobs of torque, so it's not as big an issue. Internal combustion engines have 3 methods of boosting torque. Increase piston stroke (the length of the crankshaft throw, increasing leverage), increase piston bore (the diameter of the piston, which increases surface area on which the expanding air/fuel mixture presses) - both of which increase the displacement and overall size & weight of the engine - and finally, increase the pressure of the expanding air/fuel mixture by increasing the compression ratio of the engine and/or moving to forced induction. All of those options have tradeoffs in terms of weight, reliability, mechanical complexity and cost. The best solution would probably be to use an engine tuned to operate at a specific RPM and move to variable-pitch props. Rather than change the speed of the props and face the associated acceleration lag, simply increase or decrease the pitch of the prop to achieve the desired level of thrust.
In which case, the only option is to not buy the spyware-infested product. Since the spyware is secret, there's no way to tell which disks are infected and which are not. The only safe alternative is to avoid buying any official content what so ever. The industry will drive any previously paying customers that give two s**** about their privacy to turn to the "piracy" avenue of acquiring content. The contortions the industry goes through to reach out and nail their own coffin shut are quite impressive.
Correct. As an example, the displays used in the e-ink magazine cover that Esquire released in 2008 were quite flexible. The cover as a whole was pretty rigid, but that was more due to the controller/battery PCB. This is the first flexible pixel-matrix type display I've seen, but claiming it's the first flexible e-ink display ever is hype.
I've driven my 20-year-old sub-compact FWD Honda through deeper water than that. Mud and water are fluids. Fluids conform and thus can be pushed out of the way. I would be more concerned about tire ruts and the resulting high ground between them. You know... The kind of thing that the differential housing of a solid-axle truck or SUV could hit.
Maybe if the containment vessels and/or cooling systems were intact. But then if that were the case, this wouldn't be such a significant nuclear disaster since all the radioisotopes and such would still be contained on-site.
My '06 Mac Pro (with 7300GT and 8800GT cards, each driving one display) started acting up after the 10.6.8 update. It would start up and run fine, but performance would drag down after an hour or so, accompanied by various graphical and refresh glitches. After poking around a bit, I found that an error message regarding the NVidia driver was getting written to the system log file every time something on the 7300GT's portion of the desktop was updated. If anything animated was put on that display, the system would grind to a halt and pinwheel. My solution was to move both displays to the 8800 and remove the 7300 from the system. While it's possible the card itself failed during or shortly after the 10.6.8 update, I suspect Apple pushed a driver update with 10.6.8 to make sure it worked properly before the big jump to Lion (10.7). This suspected update is less than stable on the 7300's 5 year old graphics architecture. Maybe they dropped the 7300 off their list of compatible hardware, or maybe they rushed the update and didn't take the time to fully test it. If the latter, the MacBook problem could be another hardware combination they missed.
I can tell you do not like corporations (whatever 'the industry' is that does all these bad things)
It's a phenomenon that results from the very definition of a capitalist economy. Businesses are created and motivated by the opportunity for profit. Profit is the business's revenue less their expenses. If a business can reduce their expenses, their profit increases. If protecting the public has an expense tied to it (as it generally does), not protecting the public will increase profits. The same is true of protecting workers. While free market forces would presumably push away workers and consumers if conditions were bad enough, a great deal of injury and injustice would be wrought before those reactionary forces could take effect. The only way to be proactive is to force businesses to maintain a certain level of respect for their workers and the public in general via environmental and safety regulations.
the annoying thing with Netflix is that it seems they wait for the DVDs to be available (regardless of anything else) before they make the streams available.
That's most likely a result of contracting with the media companies. The studios do their best to manipulate the market for maximum profit (as any soulless corporate entity would). That means movies on the big screen first and TV shows air with commercials. After that it's DVD sales, followed by rentals, and finally streaming service taking up the rear.
Admittedly, the roundabouts around here are all single-lane affairs. I agree with your sentiment (and the sister post above) that multi-lane roundabouts are a problem. The only situation I can think of where multiple lanes could be useful is if traffic is significantly backed up on one of the exits. Such a situation could stop all traffic around a single-lane circle, whereas drivers could use a multi-lane circle's inner lane to pass such backups. During normal flow, there's neither time nor reason to safely use that inner lane. That actually leads to another problem topic: Lane use. Although driver's-ed teaches that the left lane is for passing and slower traffic should keep right, many drivers treat the left lane (as well as the middle, if present) as the travel lanes and the right as acceleration/deceleration lanes. This mentality, when applied to traffic circles, is potentially dangerous as it greatly increases the opportunity for side-swipe accidents. Perhaps the inner lane should be separated as a shoulder by a solid line? The idea being to indicate it's use for passing stopped traffic, similar to passing left-turning vehicles by using the right shoulder.
Roundabouts [...] induce confusion and fear in many drivers
While that becomes more understandable as the roundabout's complexity increases, I think that's largely an irrational fear. The single-lane roundabouts I'm familiar with in north-east Maryland are perfectly navigable with minimal stress and danger if you simply understand the meaning of a yield sign. As you approach the sign, look to your left where oncoming traffic would be coming from. If entering the circle would result in a collision, don't do it. Otherwise, proceed around the circle to the road you want to travel on. Simple. I suspect the dissenters are a vocal few that oppose anything they perceive as a change or different; abnormal. Make roundabouts a common feature and those individuals will adjust.
Which sound reasonable, but assumes that both parties' demands are equally extreme. If one party's demands embody a fair and ideal solution, while the other's are off-the-deep-end bat-shit-crazy, meeting mid-way is going to result in a less than ideal solution, skewed in favor of the extremist party. Simply meeting in the middle would result in an arms race of making the most absurd and extreme demands.
The article made it sound like he was going to get his girlfriend out of the room at one point, but the police tried to use that as an opportunity to storm in. In response, he fired a couple of shots and retreated (with his girlfriend) back to the room. The question is whether those shots were directed at the police, or were just warning shots over their heads. Either way, the police are going to charge him with firing on them afterwards. I suspect they were warning shots. If he had actually fired at them, I seriously doubt he would still be alive. Or maybe that was the idea, but the officers misaimed when the perp "shot himself in the chest".
Or possibly a ducted fan... It really depends on the construction of the device. If the outlet is smaller than the rotor's swept area, that suggests compression of the air is involved and it would be a jet. If there's no compression, it would be a rotary wing with a cowling (possibly to reduce wing tip vortices), known as a ducted fan. Disclaimer: I am not an aeronautical engineer.
Your local shack doesn't carry components? Is it in a mall or other high-rent area where space is expensive? It's not nearly as apparent as it once was, but the local store here has a limited selection of components. Rather than a wall of pegs filled with components on cards as in days of old (the early 90s for me), they're now condensed down to a chest of compartmented drawers.
My main complaint is selection. When I go on Mouser or Digikey, 9 times out of 10 I end up with 50+ nearly identical components matching my search criteria. When I go to radio shack, I find one or two components (if I'm lucky) that share some general characteristic with what I'm looking for, but not enough so to be workable. Just today I went in there wishfully looking for test leads to hook up to the BNC jacks on my new function generator. They had 5 different flavors of twist-on and 2 flavors of compression connectors for coax, a handful of adapters and a couple of Ts. It all seemed to be geared toward making cables or hooking them up to existing products. I seem to recall seeing a BNC to banana/binding post adapter there at some point in the past, but no such luck now. I ended up leaving with a set of push-release speaker terminals which I'm now working on mounting to my breadboard's backing plate along side a pair of BNC sockets I scrounged off some old attachmate cards. It's for the better I guess... Radio Shack probably would have charged me 5x the price that I found online.
You know... The huge one with the gravity well that holds the solar system together? What do they call that thing again? Oh yeah... Sol.
Seriously though, photovoltaics have hit and are now past grid parity. First Solar is already in the process of constructing a 2,000 megawatt solar farm in China, which is expected to produce power CHEAPER THAN COAL. This is without subsidies, tax credits or other financial BS. Another 1,700 megawatts of contracted capacity is scattered around the US, to be online by 2017.
I don't see how ferrying fusion fuel back from the moon could be cost effective compared to solar, even if it's done by automated harvesters.
And what's this thing about "the engine is only suited for hybrid-electric vehicles, but that's okay. "... what does THAT mean?
Most likely it means that the engine has terrible spin up/down times and/or is inefficient at doing them.
I would lean toward the design having a very narrow efficient operating range. They talk about the engine using shockwaves or something in its normal operation, so I wouldn't be too surprised if traditional throttling and/or variations in operating speed disrupted that process. Throttling would lower the density of the air, altering the speed of sound and thus the speed of the shock waves. The speed of the engine could be critical to the time it takes a shockwave to travel the length of its respective chamber, but I'm really just guessing at the engine's operating process.
We already have aeroplanes which can fly themselves
Airplanes rarely come closer than a few miles distance from any other solid objects, except during takeoff and landing. Roadways are a winding gauntlet of potential collisions; some stationary, some moving. In many cases, these collisions must be avoided with clearances of a few feet. Failing to manage these potential collisions could mean anything from scratched paint to the car and its occupants being shredded and strewn across the landscape.
It is also works with a variety of keyboards and headphones.
I've actually been surprised by the number of things it works seamlessly with. Not just headphones, but I plugged in a portable USB microphone/instrument preamp and it recognized and made it available as a stereo audio source and also an output via the preamp's monitor connection. As for keyboards, computer keyboards yeah, but it also recognizes and powers USB MIDI (piano) keyboards. The synth software available on the iPad is a bit limited compared to what's available on a laptop or desktop system, but it's still fun to play with.
I've found that the current wave of LED bulbs are filling in those gaps. CFLs still have a big price advantage, but LEDs provide instant full-on light, some models are dimmable and the relative compactness of the emitters allows for more packaging options. A few months ago, we replaced the pair par-20 halogen bulbs in our stovetop hood with LED units. There's just no practical way to fit a fluorescent bulb, reflector and electronics package in that form factor and get any respectable light output. LEDs on the other hand work great.
I've found that unless you have nice clean power, CFLs don't last any longer than regular bulbs.
Stop buying the very cheapest CFLs you can find, and that won't happen. To make those bulbs as cheap as they are, the manufacturers cut corners. Personally, I've had bad experiences with CFLs made by Feit electric. Some have just stopped working. Some have stopped working accompanied by crackling, popping and smoke. Some stopped working accompanied by crackling, popping and a broken fluorescent tube (and associated mercury vapor release into the room). Sticking to well known manufacturers like GE and Phillips, and using the bulbs in ventilated fixtures (heat buildup takes its toll on the electronics) should greatly improve their longevity.
>What advantage does using L/100km convey? Volume-per-distance (L/100km) decreases as fuel consumption decreases, where as distance-per-volume (MPG) increases as fuel consumption decreases. In that case, volume-per-distance sounds more logical as it's a direct relationship. If you come at the question from the other angle, comparing efficiency rather than consumption, distance-per-volume (MPG) makes more sense since it increases as efficiency increases.
>Do you seriously think a USA ship in waters near Somalia has travelled all that distance in order to pirate a few ragtag Somalian skiffs?
I'm not talking about skiffs. 1) Pirates manage to board and take over a freighter with its approved weaponry. 2) Pirates offload cargo. (Profit) 3) Pirates (with additional crew) use freighter to attack new freighter. 4) Pirates leave old freighter adrift at sea. 5) Goto 2 Of course, that assumes there are no anti-piracy measures built into these freighters that prevent it being operated without the captain's say so. Entirely possible, but such measures could make things very unpleasant for the captain.
> To a pirate, it doesn't serve any purpose to risk sinking a ship before it can be plundered.
Right, but non-military vessels generally are not built to withstand firefights. If it becomes commonplace for freighters to carry weapons of any substantial lethality, the only pirates attacking these freighters will either be suicidal or prepared for a firefight.
>And when the other boat is full of people with no manifest, and is out in the middle of the ocean with a boat overflowing with unemployed men loaded to the teeth with RPGs and AK47s, it is pretty safe to assume they weren't crab fishing.
If they're halfway competent about it, it will be TWO boats, HALF overflowing with "unemployed men loaded to the teeth with RPGs and AK47s" by the time the authorities arrive.:)
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Yes, it probably does have a melting point. However, this amorphous alloy's melting point is apparently below room temperature.
Similarly, glass (the regular transparent stuff) is technically a liquid at room temperature. Its viscosity is high enough that visible sag doesn't occur within a window's (for example) typical life span. As glass is heated, its viscosity progressively decreases until it flows and can be formed as one would expect of a liquid.
Same deal with this alloy.
I would blame it on the control system and the engineering of the vehicle. I don't think the number of rotors is a big issue... each cluster of 4 props could be operated in unison, making the control system see it as a quad-copter.
Smaller electric multi-rotor aircraft run into the same stability limitations to a lesser degree, but it can be compensated for with an appropriate set of PID variables. The issue is the mass of the rotating assembly vs. the torque available to accelerate it. Electric motors have gobs of torque, so it's not as big an issue.
Internal combustion engines have 3 methods of boosting torque. Increase piston stroke (the length of the crankshaft throw, increasing leverage), increase piston bore (the diameter of the piston, which increases surface area on which the expanding air/fuel mixture presses) - both of which increase the displacement and overall size & weight of the engine - and finally, increase the pressure of the expanding air/fuel mixture by increasing the compression ratio of the engine and/or moving to forced induction. All of those options have tradeoffs in terms of weight, reliability, mechanical complexity and cost.
The best solution would probably be to use an engine tuned to operate at a specific RPM and move to variable-pitch props. Rather than change the speed of the props and face the associated acceleration lag, simply increase or decrease the pitch of the prop to achieve the desired level of thrust.
In which case, the only option is to not buy the spyware-infested product. Since the spyware is secret, there's no way to tell which disks are infected and which are not. The only safe alternative is to avoid buying any official content what so ever. The industry will drive any previously paying customers that give two s**** about their privacy to turn to the "piracy" avenue of acquiring content.
The contortions the industry goes through to reach out and nail their own coffin shut are quite impressive.
Correct. As an example, the displays used in the e-ink magazine cover that Esquire released in 2008 were quite flexible. The cover as a whole was pretty rigid, but that was more due to the controller/battery PCB.
This is the first flexible pixel-matrix type display I've seen, but claiming it's the first flexible e-ink display ever is hype.
I've driven my 20-year-old sub-compact FWD Honda through deeper water than that. Mud and water are fluids. Fluids conform and thus can be pushed out of the way. I would be more concerned about tire ruts and the resulting high ground between them. You know... The kind of thing that the differential housing of a solid-axle truck or SUV could hit.
Maybe if the containment vessels and/or cooling systems were intact. But then if that were the case, this wouldn't be such a significant nuclear disaster since all the radioisotopes and such would still be contained on-site.
My '06 Mac Pro (with 7300GT and 8800GT cards, each driving one display) started acting up after the 10.6.8 update. It would start up and run fine, but performance would drag down after an hour or so, accompanied by various graphical and refresh glitches. After poking around a bit, I found that an error message regarding the NVidia driver was getting written to the system log file every time something on the 7300GT's portion of the desktop was updated. If anything animated was put on that display, the system would grind to a halt and pinwheel.
My solution was to move both displays to the 8800 and remove the 7300 from the system. While it's possible the card itself failed during or shortly after the 10.6.8 update, I suspect Apple pushed a driver update with 10.6.8 to make sure it worked properly before the big jump to Lion (10.7). This suspected update is less than stable on the 7300's 5 year old graphics architecture. Maybe they dropped the 7300 off their list of compatible hardware, or maybe they rushed the update and didn't take the time to fully test it. If the latter, the MacBook problem could be another hardware combination they missed.
I can tell you do not like corporations (whatever 'the industry' is that does all these bad things)
It's a phenomenon that results from the very definition of a capitalist economy. Businesses are created and motivated by the opportunity for profit. Profit is the business's revenue less their expenses. If a business can reduce their expenses, their profit increases. If protecting the public has an expense tied to it (as it generally does), not protecting the public will increase profits. The same is true of protecting workers. While free market forces would presumably push away workers and consumers if conditions were bad enough, a great deal of injury and injustice would be wrought before those reactionary forces could take effect. The only way to be proactive is to force businesses to maintain a certain level of respect for their workers and the public in general via environmental and safety regulations.
the annoying thing with Netflix is that it seems they wait for the DVDs to be available (regardless of anything else) before they make the streams available.
That's most likely a result of contracting with the media companies. The studios do their best to manipulate the market for maximum profit (as any soulless corporate entity would). That means movies on the big screen first and TV shows air with commercials. After that it's DVD sales, followed by rentals, and finally streaming service taking up the rear.
Admittedly, the roundabouts around here are all single-lane affairs. I agree with your sentiment (and the sister post above) that multi-lane roundabouts are a problem. The only situation I can think of where multiple lanes could be useful is if traffic is significantly backed up on one of the exits. Such a situation could stop all traffic around a single-lane circle, whereas drivers could use a multi-lane circle's inner lane to pass such backups. During normal flow, there's neither time nor reason to safely use that inner lane.
That actually leads to another problem topic: Lane use. Although driver's-ed teaches that the left lane is for passing and slower traffic should keep right, many drivers treat the left lane (as well as the middle, if present) as the travel lanes and the right as acceleration/deceleration lanes. This mentality, when applied to traffic circles, is potentially dangerous as it greatly increases the opportunity for side-swipe accidents. Perhaps the inner lane should be separated as a shoulder by a solid line? The idea being to indicate it's use for passing stopped traffic, similar to passing left-turning vehicles by using the right shoulder.
Roundabouts [...] induce confusion and fear in many drivers
While that becomes more understandable as the roundabout's complexity increases, I think that's largely an irrational fear. The single-lane roundabouts I'm familiar with in north-east Maryland are perfectly navigable with minimal stress and danger if you simply understand the meaning of a yield sign. As you approach the sign, look to your left where oncoming traffic would be coming from. If entering the circle would result in a collision, don't do it. Otherwise, proceed around the circle to the road you want to travel on. Simple.
I suspect the dissenters are a vocal few that oppose anything they perceive as a change or different; abnormal. Make roundabouts a common feature and those individuals will adjust.
Georgetown, DE has a circle at its center that apparently dates back to the same time period.
Which sound reasonable, but assumes that both parties' demands are equally extreme. If one party's demands embody a fair and ideal solution, while the other's are off-the-deep-end bat-shit-crazy, meeting mid-way is going to result in a less than ideal solution, skewed in favor of the extremist party. Simply meeting in the middle would result in an arms race of making the most absurd and extreme demands.
The article made it sound like he was going to get his girlfriend out of the room at one point, but the police tried to use that as an opportunity to storm in. In response, he fired a couple of shots and retreated (with his girlfriend) back to the room. The question is whether those shots were directed at the police, or were just warning shots over their heads. Either way, the police are going to charge him with firing on them afterwards.
I suspect they were warning shots. If he had actually fired at them, I seriously doubt he would still be alive. Or maybe that was the idea, but the officers misaimed when the perp "shot himself in the chest".
Or possibly a ducted fan... It really depends on the construction of the device. If the outlet is smaller than the rotor's swept area, that suggests compression of the air is involved and it would be a jet. If there's no compression, it would be a rotary wing with a cowling (possibly to reduce wing tip vortices), known as a ducted fan. Disclaimer: I am not an aeronautical engineer.
Your local shack doesn't carry components? Is it in a mall or other high-rent area where space is expensive?
It's not nearly as apparent as it once was, but the local store here has a limited selection of components. Rather than a wall of pegs filled with components on cards as in days of old (the early 90s for me), they're now condensed down to a chest of compartmented drawers.
My main complaint is selection. When I go on Mouser or Digikey, 9 times out of 10 I end up with 50+ nearly identical components matching my search criteria. When I go to radio shack, I find one or two components (if I'm lucky) that share some general characteristic with what I'm looking for, but not enough so to be workable.
Just today I went in there wishfully looking for test leads to hook up to the BNC jacks on my new function generator. They had 5 different flavors of twist-on and 2 flavors of compression connectors for coax, a handful of adapters and a couple of Ts. It all seemed to be geared toward making cables or hooking them up to existing products. I seem to recall seeing a BNC to banana/binding post adapter there at some point in the past, but no such luck now. I ended up leaving with a set of push-release speaker terminals which I'm now working on mounting to my breadboard's backing plate along side a pair of BNC sockets I scrounged off some old attachmate cards. It's for the better I guess... Radio Shack probably would have charged me 5x the price that I found online.
You know... The huge one with the gravity well that holds the solar system together? What do they call that thing again? Oh yeah... Sol.
Seriously though, photovoltaics have hit and are now past grid parity. First Solar is already in the process of constructing a 2,000 megawatt solar farm in China, which is expected to produce power CHEAPER THAN COAL. This is without subsidies, tax credits or other financial BS. Another 1,700 megawatts of contracted capacity is scattered around the US, to be online by 2017.
I don't see how ferrying fusion fuel back from the moon could be cost effective compared to solar, even if it's done by automated harvesters.
And what's this thing about "the engine is only suited for hybrid-electric vehicles, but that's okay. " ... what does THAT mean?
Most likely it means that the engine has terrible spin up/down times and/or is inefficient at doing them.
I would lean toward the design having a very narrow efficient operating range. They talk about the engine using shockwaves or something in its normal operation, so I wouldn't be too surprised if traditional throttling and/or variations in operating speed disrupted that process. Throttling would lower the density of the air, altering the speed of sound and thus the speed of the shock waves. The speed of the engine could be critical to the time it takes a shockwave to travel the length of its respective chamber, but I'm really just guessing at the engine's operating process.
We already have aeroplanes which can fly themselves
Airplanes rarely come closer than a few miles distance from any other solid objects, except during takeoff and landing. Roadways are a winding gauntlet of potential collisions; some stationary, some moving. In many cases, these collisions must be avoided with clearances of a few feet. Failing to manage these potential collisions could mean anything from scratched paint to the car and its occupants being shredded and strewn across the landscape.
It is also works with a variety of keyboards and headphones.
I've actually been surprised by the number of things it works seamlessly with. Not just headphones, but I plugged in a portable USB microphone/instrument preamp and it recognized and made it available as a stereo audio source and also an output via the preamp's monitor connection. As for keyboards, computer keyboards yeah, but it also recognizes and powers USB MIDI (piano) keyboards. The synth software available on the iPad is a bit limited compared to what's available on a laptop or desktop system, but it's still fun to play with.
I've found that the current wave of LED bulbs are filling in those gaps. CFLs still have a big price advantage, but LEDs provide instant full-on light, some models are dimmable and the relative compactness of the emitters allows for more packaging options. A few months ago, we replaced the pair par-20 halogen bulbs in our stovetop hood with LED units. There's just no practical way to fit a fluorescent bulb, reflector and electronics package in that form factor and get any respectable light output. LEDs on the other hand work great.
I've found that unless you have nice clean power, CFLs don't last any longer than regular bulbs.
Stop buying the very cheapest CFLs you can find, and that won't happen. To make those bulbs as cheap as they are, the manufacturers cut corners. Personally, I've had bad experiences with CFLs made by Feit electric. Some have just stopped working. Some have stopped working accompanied by crackling, popping and smoke. Some stopped working accompanied by crackling, popping and a broken fluorescent tube (and associated mercury vapor release into the room).
Sticking to well known manufacturers like GE and Phillips, and using the bulbs in ventilated fixtures (heat buildup takes its toll on the electronics) should greatly improve their longevity.
>What advantage does using L/100km convey?
Volume-per-distance (L/100km) decreases as fuel consumption decreases, where as distance-per-volume (MPG) increases as fuel consumption decreases. In that case, volume-per-distance sounds more logical as it's a direct relationship.
If you come at the question from the other angle, comparing efficiency rather than consumption, distance-per-volume (MPG) makes more sense since it increases as efficiency increases.
>Do you seriously think a USA ship in waters near Somalia has travelled all that distance in order to pirate a few ragtag Somalian skiffs?
I'm not talking about skiffs.
1) Pirates manage to board and take over a freighter with its approved weaponry.
2) Pirates offload cargo. (Profit)
3) Pirates (with additional crew) use freighter to attack new freighter.
4) Pirates leave old freighter adrift at sea.
5) Goto 2
Of course, that assumes there are no anti-piracy measures built into these freighters that prevent it being operated without the captain's say so. Entirely possible, but such measures could make things very unpleasant for the captain.
> To a pirate, it doesn't serve any purpose to risk sinking a ship before it can be plundered.
Right, but non-military vessels generally are not built to withstand firefights. If it becomes commonplace for freighters to carry weapons of any substantial lethality, the only pirates attacking these freighters will either be suicidal or prepared for a firefight.
>And when the other boat is full of people with no manifest, and is out in the middle of the ocean with a boat overflowing with unemployed men loaded to the teeth with RPGs and AK47s, it is pretty safe to assume they weren't crab fishing.
If they're halfway competent about it, it will be TWO boats, HALF overflowing with "unemployed men loaded to the teeth with RPGs and AK47s" by the time the authorities arrive. :)