"It seems that the general population here at slashdot are assuming that these oil-tankers are full of trained marines that are not allowed to carry guns. It's really not that way. These sailors are just trained seaman that know how to operate a modern ship. They might not even be trained in the use of guns. Pitting them against people with AK-47s is really asking for them to die."

And the "pirates" are fishermen. Do you know what the "training" to operate an AK-47 is? "Move this big lever first. Point. Pull trigger". Aim? no need - the guns are there for intimidation, not effectiveness.

Let me turn your question around: why is it that the population on Slashdot assumes that the pirates are poor, starving fishermen driven to this life, and then they become highly equipped, ruthlessly trained, steely eyed commandos?

You haven't been to china have you

This question seems to be a FAQ and SlashDot. Here is an approximation of what I posted last time. It is/was the actual policy at a Fortune 500 technology company during a time when I was the PHB that had to pay for the 24x7 coverage on a particular server.

For your 40 hrs/week, you get your regular pay. For your time "on the pager", you get 25% of your regular hourly, until such time as it goes off. From the time the pager goes off, until you clear the trouble ticket, you get 100% plus any applicable shift/holiday/overtime premium.

If you can dial in remotely and fix the problem, great for everyone. If not, you must be able to get from wherever you are to the server room in 30 minutes. 100% of the time you are on the pager, you must be in condition to work, ie: sober.

So... does that sound like getting paid 25% for doing nothing? Not to me. You can't get more than a 30 minute drive from the plant -- so no ski trips for you that weekend. Going to a party? Better have cranberry juice. You are getting paid for making yourself available.

My company had a policy that the cost of 24x7 coverage came out of the budget of the PHB demanding it. A very good policy, IMHO. Its too easy to ask for it otherwise, without considering the consequences, both in terms of dollar cost, and in terms of quality of life for the employees that provide the coverage.

I'm prepared to lose my excellent Karma on this issue. To be honest I'm not prepared to lose it over whether Microsoft is better than Linux, or Linux is better than Microsoft:

Research has shown Mount Kilimanjaro has been losing glaciers/snow cap over the last 150 years or so. The reasons for this are micro-climate issues, particularly deforestation around the base on the mountain. Now, will you just shut-up about Mount Kilimanjaro being somehow proof of CO2 based warming hypothesis. It isn't, it never was and it never will be.

Secondly, this whole topic is posted by a Real Climate shill and is nothing more than a propaganda piece to try to limit the damage from the unfolding scandal. The datasets aren't entirely independent as they both take data from the same poorly sited, poor maintained and poorly analysed surface station networks. Moreover, there are big data quality problems with NASA's GISS data. If CRU data agrees with GISS and CRU data has been fixed, I conclude that either GISS data has been fixed too, or that they're both crap.

Here's a brief analysis of data quality issues with GIStemp. Here's information about the poor quality of the surface station network.

They were not maintained because the local government refused to allow the maintenance and construction to take place.

Excellent, I'm glad you voluntered for phase 1 of the population thinning program. Feel free to remove your burden from the earth in any quiet environmentally-concious way you see fit.

Nothing personal, I just think that "great, lets start with you" is an good reply to anyone discussing population thinning :)

Two comments:

1. Comments are there to tell WHY the code is doing what it is doing, not necessarily what the code is doing. I deal with code all the time that has comments that tell me what I can easily learn by reading the code, but they don't tell me why so when it is broken I don't know if it is because there is a subtle problem with the code or that the developer didn't know what they were doing.

2. After literally getting headaches from reading code written by other people I came up with a simple metric: The complexity of the coding solution to a problem is inversely proportional to how well the developer understood the problem they were trying to solve. In other words, someone who understands the problem will have a simpler solution than someone who doesn't understand the problem as well. You can apply this metric to things other than code, too, but it is usually very apparent with software.

Why do you keep copy and pasting stuff you have already said?

My point here was not whether or not you write spyware, it was simply me taking issue with the *way* you go about things. You don't seem to have any respect for people.

I have said a couple of times that my comments to you have not been jokes. I have been quite serious the whole time. The joke was my original post about Windows vulnerabilities, which you then just pasted some offtopic spam in reply. Again, no respect. You could have at least wrote a relevant introduction.

http://www.thorschrock.com/2008/05/19/how-to-respond-when-people-threaten-to-sue-you-on-the-web/

Read that page. Pretend that the APK posts are by someone else. Now ask yourself if his actions look reasonable or sane.

This Thor guy is being perfectly reasonable. He doesn't cave in to your empty threats, and he is trying to be nice about getting the spyware status of your software revoked. Then for no apparent reason you start insulting his character. How do you think acting like a dick is going to make him want to help you? Perhaps you should learn a little patience, and try to treat people as if they aren't all out to get you.

You acted in exactly the same way to me here, in comments I've seen on The Register and in other forums. It is no way to behave if you want people to take you seriously.

The unions are not responsible for all the workplace protections and benefits in place at non-unionized workplaces. In fact, in my time at a large DJIA company, that had union machinists, and non-union workers of other disciplines, it was most definitely the case that the lazy union bastards were taking compensation from the rest of us. They typically went on strike every time their contracts were up, got cushy packages, and then the rest of us got shafted because the company had nothing left after the union bent them over.

Ralph Nader single-handedly has won the American worker as much as all the major unions combined.

UAW workers make more than their southern counterparts, and ... wait for it ... get more in benefits, too. All told, that's a significant bump in total comp, despite the fact that an auto worker is an auto worker. UAW guys aren't any better at what they do than Toyota's guys. What makes your comment even more ridiculous is that it ignores the fact that those non-union counterparts in the South work for companies WHO ARE KICKING GM, FORD, AND CHRYSLER'S ASSES. Why should employees at underperforming companies make even a single dime more (plus more expensive benefits) than their competitors who are beating them soundly in the marketplace?

Finally, please don't ignore the fact that unions make companies less competitive, which indirectly brings down compensation for everyone at those companies. Don't agree with that statement? Please name for me one company who's leading their field, with a significantly unionized workforce, that competes against competitors who aren't unionized?

I'm not happy to see more government interference in the internet, but I think the ISPs have this coming. Spam and online fraud exists because the ISPs choose to tolerate it. If they would do the right thing and get rid of their bad-actor customers, the government wouldn't need to get involved.

Short answer: leverage

A $200K or $300K judgment is essentially a billion dollar judgment. The median household income in the US is 50K, the take home is how much lower? You're never going to pay off a 200K judgment. It's a nonsensical amount of money. There's no leverage since you can't loose what you don't have.

The RIAA suing people is just not a threat. Why do you think they always try for the settle. They know it's all they're going to get. Going to court is very expensive. Winning huge settlements is really bad press, especially since they're never going to see the settlement.

The RIAA/Music Industry may lack innovation but they're not stupid.

Deep pockets pays. The ISPs have a lot to loose. So by shifting the punishment to them you gain leverage. By giving them a 100% iron clad immunity they're going to take it every time. It's basic game theory. Pick your cost: Huge judgment, lots of legal fees, or one customer?

Plus it neatly bypasses due process.

The only real solution to distracted driving is education. Drivers need to understand that as common-place as driving has become, that doesn't make it any less necessary to respect "safe control of the vehicle" as the first and over-riding responsiblity of anyone operating a vehicle.

The problem is, that's a solution that doesn't work. Case in point: every time something related to this subject comes up, we get the mandated number of posts from people who say, "Yeah, some people may not be able to drive while talking on the phone/eating a pizza/doing their taxes, but I'm really good, and I don't have any trouble doing it and staying in complete control of my car." *All* of these morons will hear the education and say, "Yeah, but I'm an exception."

On the other hand, you can get to pretty much anywhere on the planet within 50ms with a cable. (In theory, disregarding delay at routing, and non-direct routes.)
Lets assume that light in a fiber travels at 2x10^8 m/s (light travels slower in fiber than in free space though i'm not sure how much slower offhand), according to wikipedia the earths cicumfrence is about 4x10^7 m, so halfway round the world would be 2x10^7 m.

so to get halfway arround the world would take about 100ms minimum, the round trip time (the mopst common means of measuring latency in the IT field) will be double that figure (e.g. 200ms minium).

Still much better than satelite though, a link via geostationary sattelite will add a minimum of about 400ms to the round trip time and in practice it may be much worse depending on how media access control is handled. Non geostationary satalites can avoid this but they have other problems.

it's only a matter of time before someone registers bánkófámérícá.com or llóydstsb.co.uk for their phishing schemes