It was working fine this morning, and now it’s not. It’s not that Battle Swarm‘s link is bad, either. I had gone earlier to see if my books were in there*, and the link worked then. How… curious.
*They were not. I have a complicated reaction to that. My books are easily good enough to be stolen, after all.
#commissionearned
Under this model Unity is touting, illegal downloads of games using Unity will cause their developers to lose money directly and you would be stealing from them and you can no longer say to anyone in this world or the next that you had never been told.
When pirates tried to board a merchant vessel off the coast of the Philippines, the crew defended their ship like a castle, throwing boiling oil and water at the invaders. They succeeded in fending off the buccaneers, but this battle highlights the variety of desperate, homebrewed anti-pirate measures that some boat crews must employ to prevent capture—or worse.
Mostly because it’s apparently single-sourced, and single-sourced from a site that also wants to tell you that the Coca-Cola recipe has booze and anti-Islamic messages in it.
Umm. No.
(Via Ace of Spades HQ Headlines)
Moe Lane
PS: No, I’m not quite on-board with shooting pirates on the spot. Catch ’em in the act, gather the evidence, determine if there’s evidence of a capital crime, try them on the spot, shoot the ones found guilty. Keep records of everything, in case somebody asks later.
I think that’s reasonable. After all, it’s piracy.
Reading the first (confused) reports, it looks like the US Navy took the ship once the pirates murdered their four American hostages. Some pirates are actually in custody, apparently: which means that their home base could be theoretically traced back.
I kept quiet about this situation while it was going on, but now that it’s ended in atrocity allow me to be a little cold here: if we want to discourage piracy and murder, there is precisely one way of doing that – and that’s encouraging a healthy fear of the consequences of one’s actions. Dope these guys up, find out where they live, send a punitive expedition. Burn every boat and docking facility. Burn the local leader’s house. Gibbet the surviving pirates in front of the ashes.
And shrug when when the ‘international community’ hypocritically complains.
As I said: cold. But if pirates think that they can murder civilians with impunity, they will murder civilians with impunity. They do murder citizens with impunity, in fact. They won’t stop simply because we ask them to. Tell them to, sure; ask, no.
Moe Lane
UPDATE: AoSHQ has more.
From what I can see of the video game community, this from Penny Arcade looks about right:
It is not a mischaracterization to say that conversations with the hardcore PC community about software theft follow these tenets:
– There is no piracy.
– To the extent that piracy exists, which it doesn’t, it’s your fault.
– If you try to protect your game, we’ll steal it as a matter of principle.It’s like, who wouldn’t want to bend over backward in their service? You need to know it, because nobody else is going to tell you: you guys sound like Goddamned subway vagrants. Of course when you speak exclusively to each other, it all sounds so reasonable. It’ll be reasonable when you all board the bus, and the songs you sing en route to excoriate your enemies will be forceful, but within reason; and when you douse yourself with gasoline and immolate yourself in front of the offices of Infinity Ward, one assumes this will be reasonable also.
We will now pause while the very people who should be reading this and taking it to heart instead write heated comments for semi-automatic spamming; with only the best (read: most unhinged) passed around for delicious private mockery. And, heck, maybe we’ll get a couple of people defending pirating games, too.
Moe Lane
The more, the merrier.
Russia captures Somalia pirates
A Russian warship has seized a pirate vessel with 29 people on board off the Somali coast, Russian news reports say.
Guns and navigation equipment were found during a search of the pirate boat, officials were quoted as saying.
Notably absent from this account – or this one, or this one – is any indication that the pirates were let go afterward. It’s suspected that these were the same pirates that attempted to seize a Russian tanker earlier: Continue reading Russian navy captures Somali pirates.
Step by step – sometimes almost painfully so – the Japanese are getting themselves back into the game:
Japan’s MPs back anti-piracy bill
The lower house of Japan’s parliament has approved a bill to allow the country’s naval ships to take a bigger role in fighting pirates off Somalia.
The bill will mean the navy can escort non-Japanese ships and use weapons for more than just self-defence purposes.
[snip]
Although the bill is likely to be rejected by the upper house, the government can still turn it into law.
Apparently the way that works is that the government, if it wants to, can have the bill reintroduced into the lower house of the Japanese parliament – which would then presumably pass it again. Continue reading Japanese to take more aggressive anti-piratical stance?
As you probably noticed, I’ve been polite in reacting to the administration’s handling of the first wave of Somali piracy. This has been mostly out of pragmatism: like Jonah Goldberg and Ed Morrissey, my interest is in seeing dead or stopped pirates, and my generally low opinion of Democratic Presidents aside when it comes to setting foreign policy, this is actually one time when Obama’s natural instinct for detachment would be fine. The military knows how to handle piracy, particularly when they’re not required to worry about nation building whatever euphemism the administration eventually comes up with to replace ‘nation-building.’ Which they wouldn’t even have to, in this case. I’m even pleased to see the chest-beating bravado from the Online Left: it’s, well, cute – and God knows that their ideology gives so few opportunities to act anything like the ‘primitive’ men that they publicly deride and privately envy.
Besides, I also knew that this was going to happen (via Jammie Wearing Fool): Continue reading Somali Pirates up the ante.
Found here, by Vice Admiral William Gortney. Blackfive sums up the whole thing nicely, I think:
The entire point, of course is to “disincentivize” piracy. That’s a nice way of saying they want to make piracy more painful than fishing. Right now there is no disincentive, or what little there is remains vastly outweighed by the potential rewards. So Somali fishermen have become pirates. The average payoff today is $1.5 million to 2 million a ship. CTF-151’s mission, in reality, is prevent successful hijackings, capture the pirates and help the rest rediscover their love for fishing. When enough head out to hijack a ship and don’t come home, but end up dead or in prison for a long, long time, Gortney figures fishing will start looking a lot better again.
Continue reading A very interesting briefing on counter-piracy operations.
