Travel Bug: Growing Rebellion on the High Seas
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Websites and online forums have been gathering complaints from dissatisfied cruise ship passengers.
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From afar, the ghostly warships recall a fierce phalanx ready for battle. A closer look, though, shows the rust and rot of ships unfit for duty or even dismantling, a quandary that is costing taxpayers millions of dollars and could cause environmental misery that will cost millions more.
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The winds of change are upon us.
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Danish papers consider anti-terrorism raids in the city of Odense, while the German press discusses the mandate under which the country's navy may operate in Lebanese waters. Elsewhere, Africa is in the spotlight but for different reasons.
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Clifton Seabury requests that the truth be told regarding pollution of inland waters ("Ports are polluters and need subsidies," letter, Feb. 7). After reading his letter, I wonder from where he would seek the truth.
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That it is based in a semblance of reality is one of the most refreshing aspects of Pirates of the Burning Sea, the captivating new online game from Flying Lab Software that opened last week after six years in development.
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The question in your editorial ("The fading of Pearl Harbor," Dec. 7) about what we, the people, would do in case of another attack is not only an excellent one but very troubling. The "train" is coming, no doubt. The crazies are smelling blood.
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The Calayan Rail, Gallirallus calayaensis, discovered by scientists in the northern tip of Babuyan islands in the Philippines archipelago. Photo: Des Allen/AP.
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When environmental protestors boarded a Japanese whaling ship in the Southern Ocean, images of the action quickly flashed on the world&#39;s TV sets, followed by photos from the Japanese ship after the protestors were taken into custody. Getting these images out is crucial if either side is to win the global PR battle, but doing so can be problematic when you&#39;re at sea, thousands of kilometers from the nearest cell phone network or broadband connection.To solve their problems, both sides take advantage of digital video and photo technology to get the footage, then look to the skies and tap into the global satellite communications network run by London-based Inmarsat. The company specializes in providing voice and data services to maritime vessels and other users at sea, or in remote areas that traditional telecommunications networks don&#39;t reach.On Tuesday, as the protestors approached the Japanese whaling vessel &quot;Yushin Maru 2,&quot; a digital video camera was rolling onboard the small inflatable craft sent from the Sea Shepard Conservation Society&#39;s ship, &quot;Steve Irwin.&quot; The camera caught the moment when two of the conservationists jumped aboard, and within seconds the video was speeding back toward the Steve Irwin on the inflatable.Once back onboard, the video was fed into a Macbook Pro laptop and edited into a 13MB MPEG2 clip that was just 12 seconds long, said Jonny Vasic, a spokesman for the society.&quot;One of our big tools in these whale wars is these video and digital still cameras. They really help us expose the bad guys,&quot; said Vasic.The clip was then sent via satellite to the society&#39;s FTP server and made available to the world&#39;s media.The ship&#39;s satellite communications system is a $35,000 &quot;Sailor Fleet 77&quot; unit that was donated to the society last year by Australia&#39;s Bluetongue Brewery. It supports up to 256Kbps&#160;transmission, although actually getting that speed depends on several factors. In calm seas, a gyro-based mount keeps the antenna pointed at the satellite, but in heavy seas, maintaining a reliable signal can be a problem. Keeping the link gets increasingly difficult as the ship goes further south because the satellite appears very low on the horizon.&quot;It&#39;s about 90 percent reliable,&quot; said Vasic.Crew onboard the &quot;Steve Irwin&quot; are also using the satellite link to attempt to send e-mail to the Japanese ship, in addition to marine-band radio calls, in an attempt to secure the release of their two members, who remain aboard the &quot;Yushin Maru 2.&quot;The Institute of Cetacean Research, the Tokyo-based organization that operates the &quot;Yushin Maru 2,&quot; declined to comment on the technology at its disposal, citing security reasons.&quot;I&#39;m sorry to say, you might be Greenpeace posing as a journalist,&quot; said Gabriel Gomez, a spokesman for the group in Tokyo, when contacted by telephone on Thursday.The systems employed by the Japanese group don&#39;t appear as sophisticated. Only a handful of still images from the ship have been released by the group to the media, and they are a relatively low VGA (640 pixels by 480 pixels) resolution. No video has been made available.The satellite communications technology being employed by the two ships is increasingly being used by media, governmental and relief organizations in remote areas. Earlier this month, Cable News Network (CNN) won a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award for its satellite news gathering system based on Inmarsat&#39;s BGAN broadband system. The BGAN system offers a standard IP (Internet Protocol) connection as fast as 492Kbps and is small enough that it can be built into a backpack.
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Travel: Latest expansion plans a serious test of the airline market's resilience to credit crunch and rising oil price
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The scale of devastation wrought by sea surges that killed about 23,000 people on Asia&#39;s shores is starting to emerge. The death toll is still climbing, thousands are missing and millions have been made homeless
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Seagull poo on solar cells is primary tech snag In the Irish Sea off Wales this week, a new kind of robot is taking to the waves. For once, this is not a military kill-droid, nor a securo-pork powered surveillance machine. Instead, we are seeing the debut of the fully-autonomous sailboat, which uses its own software to navigate out at sea. For now the uninhabited windjammers will stay relatively close to home but, next year, their successors will race across the Atlantic.â¦
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An Antarctic honeymoon, an iceberg, and questions about climate change.
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Disagreement regarding passenger data could ground thousands of flights.
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Europe is reeling from the waves, not just because of the ever-rising death toll but because of the growing realization that among the dead could likely be several thousand tourists who had traveled to southern Asia for the holidays.
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Few sane people want to visit a storm-tossed Bering Sea, the sizzling Sahara Desert and Canada's Northwest Territories in January. Experiencing them from a comfortable chair in front of a flat-screen television, however, is all the rage.
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Global warming is threatening travel destinations worldwide. What's more, travelers themselves are contributing to it. Find out what you can do about it.