Argghhh..stupid no "undo" moderation button. I think the parent poster is right on the spot.

Reference: "Why to sexes" by Vigen A. Geodakian (http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0408006)

The usefulness of many fertile males (with weak a weak Y chromosome) may be that they make the population adapt to changing environments faster. The males are the outlies, and natural selection of those make the population adapt more quickly, even when the males don't help with rearing the offspring.

The Doctor should never be a woman. We have seen how that turns out in the spoof "Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death", where the female Doctor notices the sonic screwdriver has "three settings".
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Curse_of_Fatal_Death
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p18DKN27IZQ

Yes, my point is that you have to bribe so many people that you probably end up paying more in bribes than you save by reporting lower weight.

Regarding the term for the entity responsible for loading containers onto the ship: It is typically the stevedore.
In some harbors the roles are overlapping or mixed. Eg when I worked at the Århus Harbor the company was both terminal operator, responsible for the container yard and the stevedore. The crane operators were employed by the port authority. The tally company was a separate company who worked closely with the Customs, but sometimes Customs made random inspections by themselves. The trucking companies who moved containers to/from port were separate companies typically hired by the line agents. If stuffing/stripping of the containers were done at the harbor that was separate companies for that.

So I think bribing is unlikely to have happened in the incident. It is more likely to be a series of oversights combined with unexpectedly low structural integrity of the ship and perhaps a really bad wave.

True, if the distribution is skewed but still in balance then the captain can only see that the ships sits lower in water than expected. But the shippers and crane operators don't control where in the ship the containers are placed. So they would have bribe bribe the bay planners too. It varies who the bay planners are but for larger ocean crossing ships they are typically employed by the shipping line.

So let's recap: If you want to get overweight containers across the ocean you have to bribe:
    - persons at the terminal operations
    - persons at the stevedore
    - bay planners
    - crane operators
    - the captain
    - customs at the destination port

If the imbalance is so great that it endangers the ship then yes, the captain will order the containers reweighed and reloaded. The owners of the ship will likely agree because a: they risk loosing ship, and b: the cost of reloading the ship will usually get stuck on the container shippers as per contact.

Then they would also have to bribe the captain, because the ship can detect imbalance when adjusting the ballast tanks. And bribe the crane operators at the destination port. And since it is usually country-to-country transport they may have to bribe the customs at the final destination.

> Do they actually use software to place containers?

Yes. It is called bay planning software. For larger ocean-crossing ships the process is largely automated, taking into account weight, container type (normal or reefer), dimensions, rules for dangerous goods, etc. For smaller ships (typically feeder ships) the software also has to take into account at which harbor each container will get off in order to minimize the number lifts (rearranging containers to get them out). The software also has to take into account at which order the containers will arrive at the quay, which depends on on which order they are stacked in the terminal yard, which depends on which order they arrived at the terminal.

It is non-trivial logistics software, and some of the optimization problems are hard.

As far as I know most dialects of Logo are localized or localizable, both keywords and variables. But I don't know its domain (a drawing turtle) is interesting to your daughter.

No, I didn't notice that they didn't measure the L3/L4 overhead. I'm not familiar with the two APIs/tools they used. But if that is the case then it invalidates the majority of the study.

I'm not sure about sensationalism, but the article certainly has a strong bias.

The operators that my employer delivers charging solutions to rarely use the byte counters from the GGSN because they charge he traffic types differently, e.g. "free facebook" while other traffic is charged based on byte counters from the DPI box. It is true that some of the newer GGSNs/ASN-GWs have adequate DPI capabilities so they can classify the traffic with enough granularity and the byte from them can be used.

There is one slightly fishy thing in the study (yes, I read the fine paper). Their test with logging on, go idle, move to radio-inaccessible room, then have server start steaming UDP to the phone (which will be dropped due to inaccessibility). In my experience the SGSN/GGSN quickly signals that the user has gone offline (PDP session termination), and the stream of UDP from the server is blocked at the DPI or the GGSN. Sounds like the operator that the study used has a major bug in its charging setup where PDP session termination doesn't also stop the IPuser association.

I recently bought a Fujitsu Lifebook E751. It has a numeric keypad. The keyboard looks flimsy but doesn't feel that way.
Note: the page on fujitsu.com has a photo of some other model. There may be differences in the various sub-models.

Not exactly a thriller, but I enjoyed Charles Stross' Antibodies