Piracy (the old fashioned kind)
Fascinating New York Times article (via Non-Hacker News) about Somali pirates grabbing a Ukraine ship carrying grenade launchers and tanks. Pretty much all you can say about that is, wow.
First of all, if you’re shipping tanks through pirate infested waters, wouldn’t it be worth protecting yourself a bit? All you have to do is put one guy in one of the tanks. I don’t know what those pirates are packing in terms of munitions, but I’d be surprised if it trumps a tank.
Also, how are these guys stealing yachts and such? Can’t our military just go get them back? I mean, you can’t hide a freighter. All we have to do is pull up to their ports and find them.
I think that on the off-chance I ever find myself with more money than I know what to do with, I’m going to solve this problem. I’ll take used yachts, equip them with weaponry, or maybe just explosives, remote control them, and sail them right up the coast of Somalia. As soon as the pirates get close, blammo. I wonder how many pirates you need to detonate before the rest decide to make a living off of 419 scams. Might be a lot, given that death probably isn’t much worse than life for a typical Somalian.
