Of course it is cheaper. The shipping companies take out insurance for this situation, and the pirates are careful to keep their demands high enough to make a profit, but low enough that they don't scare the ships away, or force the ships to take a different route or escalate the situation into an armed conflict with the west. It is a straight business decision.

NPR's Planet Money blog did a good podcast a while ago about how the pirating business operates.

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Simon

Probably because although the crews may be 'terrorised', or at least frightened, the crews aren't being brutalised or murdered. How often do you hear of crews being murdered? I've been googling and I can't find any reports of crews being killed. I do find reports of the US Navy and British forces killing pirates though.

These pirates are in this to make money and get the hell out of there. They aren't doing this to brutalise and kill. That is totally counterproductive to their real goals.

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Simon

yep, and that is why Riverbank developed their binding tool SIP. Because SWIG wasn't good enough. That's also why the name SIP was chosen. A sip is a little swig.

I agree with you 100% that games are a soft target. But the obvious 'hard' target which they ignored in this case isn't tobacco, but the television and film industries, aka the media. The reasons are obvious. As a government you don't offend the media industry when it has such powerful control over the airwaves and public opinion.

Actually that rule applies to everyone in the west. Millions of people from all parts of the population spend countless hours of the day parked on the couch, motionless, staring at a box each day. When was the last time you heard anyone suggest in public (or private) that maybe that might not be such a good thing?

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Simon

I don't think that is really the case. I remember being at a Java conference for work once and there being a show of hands. Half of the developers attending were server side (and web), and other client side.

The main reason why Jambi probably didn't catch on, IMHO, is that Swing is standard in Java and is much much more established, regardless of its flaws.

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Simon

PyQt is developed as a commercial product which is available under a closed source license and under the GPL plus the other FOSS licenses that Qt itself used before the recent change to LGPL.

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Simon

http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdebindings/csharp/

The C# support has been steadily worked on for the last few years and should be quite mature by now.

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Simon

...and now without needing a Qt license, I imagine PyQt becomes a much cheaper proposition for most closed source developers.

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Simon