
Birthday party on ship may have led to oil spill in Mauritius - ilamont
https://news.mongabay.com/2020/09/birthday-party-on-ship-may-have-led-to-oil-spill-in-mauritius-panama-regulator-says/
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jtbayly
As terrible as this is, I think a more sympathetic headline would be,
"Mauritius oil spill occurred when tanker captain sought telephone and
internet signal, so that the crew members could communicate with their
families."

Then add the following, and it's even more understandable:

> Some observers say the missteps could be linked to the stress that ship
> crews are under in the upheaval caused by the COVID-19 shutdowns. It has
> become challenging for shipping operators to make crew changes, leading many
> seafarers to be stranded at sea, away from their families for long periods.

No less terrible. Definitely still the wrong move, but I can understand it a
lot better than the original headline, which sounds truly shocking on its own.

~~~
hotsauceror
Taken together with the other claims in the report - ignoring multiple
communications attempts from the Mauritian Coast Guard, and improperly
configuring/using their electronic navigational systems, it's not clear why a
more charitable reading than incompetence and dereliction of duty in a
licensed mariner would be merited.

~~~
bpodgursky
Unless you have personally unexpectedly spent six months on a tanker, cut off
from contact with family and friends, knowing that there's a pandemic which
could be affecting any of them, I think a charitable reading is the
appropriate one.

Some people have harder lives than you, and when not set up for success, make
bad choices.

~~~
withinboredom
I think the personal attack is why you’re being downvoted, but fwiw, I agree
with the first part. From being in Afghanistan, I have first hand experience
of some of the shenanigans some people will go through to make a phone call.

~~~
throwaway0a5e
He's being down-voted because it's a personal attack that could apply to 99%
of people here and people just gotta defend the tribe.

If it had been the lines of "clearly you've never worked for a business that
wrote software" or some other thing that applies to some small minority here
nobody would have thought twice about it.

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xenophonf
Not Wi-Fi, but mobile phone/data. From the article:

 _“[T]he change of course is produced by indications of the captain of the
boat, who gave instructions to approach about 5 miles away from the coast of
Mauritius, looking for a telephone and internet signal, so that the crew
members could communicate with their families,” the AMP said._

~~~
colejohnson66
The WiFi claim kept getting repeated even when it made no sense. WiFi doesn’t
have the signal strength for _miles_ of distance. Not to mention that if the
ship _were_ close enough to shore such that WiFi could reach, it wouldn’t be
so much of a shore, but a very deep cliff.

~~~
withinboredom
It does. I had one when I lived on a sailboat. I’ve been able to get consumer
grade routers to broadcast 3km with line of sight, ddwrt, and no physical
modifications. Somewhere like an ocean (or a desert) you won’t have much, if
any, interference.

~~~
callalex
How many bits per year was your throughput?

~~~
withinboredom
In the case of the router, it was going through a 1mbps satellite uplink, so
it didn’t need to be fast (though it was still fast, at -50db IIRC, it’s the
SNR that matters). In the case of the directional antenna on a boat, I got
regular speeds just tons of dropped packets. I have no idea how far I was from
the routers, but I couldn’t see the houses.

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RadioEnForce
The stupid reason: the celebration of the birthday of one of the crew members.

Like that gender-reveal party...

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bryan0
If this was for a gender-reveal party I would have lost it.

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nickik
Starlink for the rescue.

~~~
x87678r
Is Starlink going to cover oceans where there are just a few boats?

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nickik
It depends on how far you are. With the current system at least 1 Satellite
needs to be close enough to a ground station. So that means from your boat up
to the sky, and from there to land.

It has also been suggested that at strategic locations you could have swimming
ground stations in order to cover a pretty large area.

Eventually however it will cover everything as the satellites will communicate
directly between each other with lasers.

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manicdee
Where "close enough" means that you would need to be within about one-and-a-
half-thousand kilometres of a ground station (using words not numbers because
it's a bit hand-wavy).

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sevencolors
If there's one constant in the entire world, it would be dumb accidents

