Just because patches are available does not mean that they have been applied. Legacy applications, specialized hardware, vendor shenanigans, and organizational inertia can be significant impediments to keeping operating systems at current runlevels.
Not unique to the cruise industry. Filipino crews make up a lot of the maritime industry's labor force. Container ships, tankers, offshore drilling, you name it. Some of the best food I've eaten offshore was on vessels with Filipino catering crews.
The cruise ship guys, comparatively, have it good. There are innumerable stories of entire freighter crews being marooned in third world ports by shipowners who didn't want to pay them.
The global shipping industry is, unfortunately, a race to the bottom. Every time that John McCain proposes the repeal of the Jones Act, I cringe with the thought of what it would do to what's left of the American merchant marine.
todo.txt and its accompanying structure [0] / rigor are a good starting point. Keeping the thing in a place that syncs across multiple platforms is an exercise for the reader.
What amazed me was the overlap between serious tournament MtG players and professional poker players. A lot of the mechanics are more transferable than one would initially think.
We had them, for decades. They involved the use of punched cards and a butterfly ballot. The voter could physically inspect the ballot to determine which holes were punched. Sadly, the "hanging chad" of Bush v. Gore (2000) pushed many states into using electronic machines, with predictable results.