I used to read alt.cult-movies so picked up Tetsuo: Iron Man and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (was it called that?) way back.
Awful movies. Overrated "shaky camera", black and white, headache inducing music. Ok, so you want to show him changing into a robot and its a horrible experience, but try and make it watchable (the first one).
Second one was a sub-par action movie...
Ok, so I can see how if you like wierd stuff you might like it. I like weird stuff. I didn't like it.
A bit of "alternative coverage" of one of the things which has been bugging me, from a uk newspaper (ok a "whining pinko liberal one", but we have them over here!)
Five PoWs are mistreated in Iraq and the US cries foul. What about Guantanamo Bay?
Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world, but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, immediately complained that "it is against the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them".
He is, of course, quite right. Article 13 of the third convention, concerning the treatment of prisoners, insists that they "must at all times be protected... against insults and public curiosity". This may number among the less heinous of the possible infringements of the laws of war, but the conventions, ratified by Iraq in 1956, are non-negotiable. If you break them, you should expect to be prosecuted for war crimes.
This being so, Rumsfeld had better watch his back. For this enthusiastic convert to the cause of legal warfare is, as head of the defence department, responsible for a series of crimes sufficient, were he ever to be tried, to put him away for the rest of his natural life.
His prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, where 641 men (nine of whom are British citizens) are held, breaches no fewer than 15 articles of the third convention. The US government broke the first of these (article 13) as soon as the prisoners arrived, by displaying them, just as the Iraqis have done, on television. In this case, however, they were not encouraged to address the cameras. They were kneeling on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, wearing blacked-out goggles and earphones. In breach of article 18, they had been stripped of their own clothes and deprived of their possessions. They were then interned in a penitentiary (against article 22), where they were denied proper mess facilities (26), canteens (28), religious premises (34), opportunities for physical exercise (38), access to the text of the convention (41), freedom to write to their families (70 and 71) and parcels of food and books (72).
They were not "released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities" (118), because, the US authorities say, their interrogation might, one day, reveal interesting information about al-Qaida. Article 17 rules that captives are obliged to give only their name, rank, number and date of birth. No "coercion may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever". In the hope of breaking them, however, the authorities have confined them to solitary cells and subjected them to what is now known as "torture lite": sleep deprivation and constant exposure to bright light. Unsurprisingly, several of the prisoners have sought to kill themselves, by smashing their heads against the walls or trying to slash their wrists with plastic cutlery.
The US government claims that these men are not subject to the Geneva conventions, as they are not "prisoners of war", but "unlawful combatants". The same claim could be made, with rather more justice, by the Iraqis holding the US soldiers who illegally invaded their country. But this redefinition is itself a breach of article 4 of the third convention, under which people detained as suspected members of a militia (the Taliban) or a volunteer corps (al-Qaida) must be regarded as prisoners of war.
Even if there is doubt about how such people should be classified, article 5 insists that they "shall enjoy the protection of the present convention until such time as their status has been determined by
"Personally, I think that hard drive manufacturers aren't standing behind their drives for longer for a few reasons. One is that margins are razor thin."
With my second Maxtor 120 gig drive to go and start "clicking" on me on 4 months, I would say its for "another" reason....
" Nintendo is dying off in the UK; Dixons (major high street retailer; part of the same group as PC World) have effectively stopped selling it, clearing existing stock only. Argos are heavily discounting and are likely to stop selling RSN."
Neither have stated that they are stopping selling the gamecube. They have both discounted the bundles in order to generate sales.
WH Smiths (largest bookshop, sells consoles) in the UK has rarely ever stocked the Xbox. Make of that what you will.
Zeldas got the largest pre-orders for any game. Metroid Prime appears this weekend and will no doubt hit the top of the all format chart.
Some have said the Dixons thing is a disagreement about stock levels of the Gameboy Advance SP. We'll see next week when the SP is in the shops, whether it ends up in Dixons.
Nintendo seems to have second place in europe, but third in the uk. People distort facts one way or the other to backup whatever side they want to claim is losing.
Its all usually because their football team is getting relegated to a lower division, their girlfriend has left them, and they need to fight for something....
Me? I'm going off to pick up two games this weekend. Panzer Dragon and Metroid Prime...
Predictions? Each console will jostle for position 1) worldwide 2) europe 3) uk for the next year. PS2 market share will slowly decline. Sony will release the PS3 just when the rot sets in.
Why are copyright owners tracking down such things which wouldn't get pennies nowadays (they were selling off the old cassettes for 10p long ago).
Only thing I can think of is that some people are realising the value of not so much the games, but the ideas. Things like Sabre Wulf is one of the old Ultimate franchises which can be updated, and its franchises which sell nowadays. A lot of licenses tied up in those games too (I think Ocean owned the franchise for Batman for a long time too), maybe thats what they are trying to protect.
Or maybe they're just going to sell them all back to us again, like nintendos been doing with the GBA.
I suspect the former... I mean, have you played some of those games recently? While they had value at the time, they are not up to par graphics wise to something like the GBA...
One of the great trait of the net is that this sort of stuff never dies. There seems little publishing history out there, one claim says its the "second oldest fantasy roleplaying game"...
Yeah, but interestingly enough its probably possible get a tivo working in ireland, like most of the areas with sky coverage in europe (germany is a classic example, the alternative is everything in german, including CNN).
If you can get a service, and get hold of the ethernet card and hack it in, then localised dialing is possible. Whoops, Ireland has no broadband... (I lived in Cork for a bit, I know...)
Still, seems possible in the rest of europe though, if you can overcome the obstacle of subscribing. Otherwise its the freeview channels...
> If Sun had used KDE, the desktop would tie back to > a German group. Even with the source readily > available, there are plenty of old guys in the > English-speaking world who won't want German > software near their networks. The last thing Sun > needs is Microsoft FUD pushing Solaris as > supporting Euro-Socialist-Anti-American stuff.
Would that be opposed to Euro-Socialist-Anti-American developed in Finland?
>Theyre attitude makes sense: a service population >with 5% cheaters will make 60% of normal gamers shy >away from playing. Many people stopped playing CS >because cheating is so prevalent.
Are you sure you aint got the 5% and the 60% the wrong way around???
Sounds to me as if they've identified one of Suns niches which is quite lucrative, and want it...
Why's Sun so successful there?
1) Hardware stability. Those things are built like german tanks. Good quality disks and memory, none of the cost cutting the mass market demands on their servers.
2) Realtime kernel/scheduling. Hardware timers at nanosecond accuracy.
Ok, the 1st is one of those things which do exist nowadays, but the big PCs makers haven't really identified that niche yet. So you'll probably end up with too much hardware for the stablitity it provides (a web server box for a small telecomms app).
The second is one of those things which bites at the name UnitedLinux. People love the linux kernel, because it is fair scheduling. They don't like the idea that one process can get _all_ the cpu, and its up to the code writer to make sure it doesn't. There are patches to the linux kernel such as rtlinux and rtai which provide this, but across the board?
Strikes me as if united linux would have to be less united than it should be...
I expected to go on there and find Matts coolest comics etc, but they are all editorial ones and not so good ones.
I also hoped he'd managed to stick Life Is Hell online somewhere. Being in the uk, you don't get it distributed over here, like _at all_.
I'll just have to put forward my daily comics browse... www.dilbert.com (of course, but both Luann and Get Fuzzy on there are good ones). www.goats.com is getting too infrequent for me. I love the bizarreness which is www.achewood.com and the www.wigu.com is one of the cutetest, and occasionally _extremely_ dark comics I've read.
Trouble with some modern journalists, is they sometimes research their information before they print it. Otherwise they get sued.
If I hadn't read and dismissed this one from uk.games.video.gamecube three weeks ago, and dismissed it as another bit of unlikely speculation on nintendos "big announcement" (which is more likely a Pokemon game), then I might have believed it.
More importantly the Sony stockholders might have believed it too, and the large corporations.
Ok, so maybe slashdot has the freedom to post an urban legend every so often, but do watch out, it might cost you a lot of money one day...
That, as others have said, is a view of those wanting to be mature (such as the under-18's).
Nintendo games do not fall into the basic PC/Box/PS2 format of being a clone of three major genres:
1) 3d Shoot them up. 2) Resource harvest, build, send them to war. 3) Sword. Orc. Better Sword. Orgre. Better Sword. Dragon.
Even within each genre a slightly original tweak of gameplay as heralded as revolutionary. Miyamoto develops games which are outside this stereotype. So he's stylistic and makes them brightly coloured. They are games for people who _love_ games.
The critics who level the maturity thing at Nintendo are the same type of people who would call themselves critics, based on the facts they go and see all the top blockbuster movies.
When in reality none of the three main PC genres would exist today with their level of innovation. We'd all be debating the latest incarnation of Solitaire or The Sims...
While maybe all your friends saw it, maybe about 1/4 in mines did.
And I'll shock you further now.
I didn't see either the Empire Strikes Back or Return or the Jedi at the cinema. Or on rental. I caught both of them a number of years later when they were shown on terrestrial (or network to the US) television. They were bearable.
Yes, I saw the first Star Wars at the cinema. I was a kid. I enjoyed it. I was a kid.
I grew up after that. While I appreciate for some, life is a nostalgic struggle to recreate the glory days of their childhood.
I did however catch AOTC on divx. Its true. You _can_ polish a turd.
Why the obsession with outer space and the masses of energy expended to get there...
When there's massive amounts of extreme environments unexplorer on our own planet which can turn out such wonders as our potential origins...
A map 100 years ago had vast regions not filled in because they had been unexplored. They are still largely unexplored, but now we have pictures of them from space, and I guess thats enough for the human being, so see them, rather than to have visited them... I'm not just talking deepest africa, deepest oceanic crevices too. We're setting up permanent residence in a vacuum, why not in high pressure?
While perfectly happy to send people with mental ages of three to the chair, he keeps his very special sparing of life to the really good ones...
One of the few (not even sure if there has been more than one), is one Henry Lee Lucas. Yes. Old hang 'em high Bush will toast simpletons no problem, but when it comes to mass murderers (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), he's very merciful...
"On June 27, 1998 Governor George W. Bush spared Henry's life because of overwhelming evidence proving that Henry was not in Texas when "Orange Socks" was murdered. Although Lucas confessed to killing her, work records and a cashed paycheck indicated he was in Florida at the time of the murder. Bush issued the reprieve on the recommendation of the state parole board. "I can only thank them for believing the truth and having guts enough for standing up for what's right," Lucas said from death row."
I know, because I work on the hub technology development.
Its been live for about 6 months, over 1000 customers according to what I've been told.
There has been a large canadian corporation which has been taking tenders for providing access over the US/Canada for over a year now. They just keep asking and then doing nothing.
Whether they are waiting for the technology to be proven or whether they just ran out of money, I don't know, but if they are interested, they are moving like a snail...
But the reality is that it will be probably high costed (relatively) at first. But a lot of the customers are resellers of access, so I believe theres money in getting a terminal and localised isp'ing some customers.
I tend to get them once a week... But why that is, is probably because I hardly ever have time to use them. If its a thread I'm interested in, I would post to it, not moderate it.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to read alt.cult-movies so picked up Tetsuo: Iron Man and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (was it called that?) way back.
Awful movies. Overrated "shaky camera", black and white, headache inducing music. Ok, so you want to show him changing into a robot and its a horrible experience, but try and make it watchable (the first one).
Second one was a sub-par action movie...
Ok, so I can see how if you like wierd stuff you might like it. I like weird stuff. I didn't like it.
" I would encourage you all to buy the CD Set [mandrakestore.com] to support continuing development of this distrobution."
Actually no. People complain that they have to buy a new MS OS every 2 years. With Mandrake, its every three months...
Actually, I think the problem the US had this time is that they _didnt_ surrender...
A bit of "alternative coverage" of one of the things which has been bugging me, from a uk newspaper (ok a "whining pinko liberal one", but we have them over here!)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,9 21 192,00.html
"One rule for them
Five PoWs are mistreated in Iraq and the US cries foul. What about Guantanamo Bay?
Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world, but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, immediately complained that "it is against the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them".
He is, of course, quite right. Article 13 of the third convention, concerning the treatment of prisoners, insists that they "must at all times be protected... against insults and public curiosity". This may number among the less heinous of the possible infringements of the laws of war, but the conventions, ratified by Iraq in 1956, are non-negotiable. If you break them, you should expect to be prosecuted for war crimes.
This being so, Rumsfeld had better watch his back. For this enthusiastic convert to the cause of legal warfare is, as head of the defence department, responsible for a series of crimes sufficient, were he ever to be tried, to put him away for the rest of his natural life.
His prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, where 641 men (nine of whom are British citizens) are held, breaches no fewer than 15 articles of the third convention. The US government broke the first of these (article 13) as soon as the prisoners arrived, by displaying them, just as the Iraqis have done, on television. In this case, however, they were not encouraged to address the cameras. They were kneeling on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, wearing blacked-out goggles and earphones. In breach of article 18, they had been stripped of their own clothes and deprived of their possessions. They were then interned in a penitentiary (against article 22), where they were denied proper mess facilities (26), canteens (28), religious premises (34), opportunities for physical exercise (38), access to the text of the convention (41), freedom to write to their families (70 and 71) and parcels of food and books (72).
They were not "released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities" (118), because, the US authorities say, their interrogation might, one day, reveal interesting information about al-Qaida. Article 17 rules that captives are obliged to give only their name, rank, number and date of birth. No "coercion may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever". In the hope of breaking them, however, the authorities have confined them to solitary cells and subjected them to what is now known as "torture lite": sleep deprivation and constant exposure to bright light. Unsurprisingly, several of the prisoners have sought to kill themselves, by smashing their heads against the walls or trying to slash their wrists with plastic cutlery.
The US government claims that these men are not subject to the Geneva conventions, as they are not "prisoners of war", but "unlawful combatants". The same claim could be made, with rather more justice, by the Iraqis holding the US soldiers who illegally invaded their country. But this redefinition is itself a breach of article 4 of the third convention, under which people detained as suspected members of a militia (the Taliban) or a volunteer corps (al-Qaida) must be regarded as prisoners of war.
Even if there is doubt about how such people should be classified, article 5 insists that they "shall enjoy the protection of the present convention until such time as their status has been determined by
"Personally, I think that hard drive manufacturers aren't standing behind their drives for longer for a few reasons. One is that margins are razor thin."
With my second Maxtor 120 gig drive to go and start "clicking" on me on 4 months, I would say its for "another" reason....
" Nintendo is dying off in the UK; Dixons (major high street retailer; part of the same group as PC World) have effectively stopped selling it, clearing existing stock only. Argos are heavily discounting and are likely to stop selling RSN."
Neither have stated that they are stopping selling the gamecube. They have both discounted the bundles in order to generate sales.
WH Smiths (largest bookshop, sells consoles) in the UK has rarely ever stocked the Xbox. Make of that what you will.
Zeldas got the largest pre-orders for any game. Metroid Prime appears this weekend and will no doubt hit the top of the all format chart.
Some have said the Dixons thing is a disagreement about stock levels of the Gameboy Advance SP. We'll see next week when the SP is in the shops, whether it ends up in Dixons.
Nintendo seems to have second place in europe, but third in the uk. People distort facts one way or the other to backup whatever side they want to claim is losing.
Its all usually because their football team is getting relegated to a lower division, their girlfriend has left them, and they need to fight for something....
Me? I'm going off to pick up two games this weekend. Panzer Dragon and Metroid Prime...
Predictions? Each console will jostle for position 1) worldwide 2) europe 3) uk for the next year. PS2 market share will slowly decline. Sony will release the PS3 just when the rot sets in.
"How about you go out and buy the game? I would imagine no where on earth will it cost more than 35-40 dollars."
Europe. 50 euros. At current exchange rate, that will be about $55 US dollars (as opposed to Canadian or Austrialian dollars).
Please use the word "Earth" when you know what it means.
"A large following of people who resist change?"
A large following of people who resist _constant_ change?
I was wondering this...
Why are copyright owners tracking down such things which wouldn't get pennies nowadays (they were selling off the old cassettes for 10p long ago).
Only thing I can think of is that some people are realising the value of not so much the games, but the ideas. Things like Sabre Wulf is one of the old Ultimate franchises which can be updated, and its franchises which sell nowadays. A lot of licenses tied up in those games too (I think Ocean owned the franchise for Batman for a long time too), maybe thats what they are trying to protect.
Or maybe they're just going to sell them all back to us again, like nintendos been doing with the GBA.
I suspect the former... I mean, have you played some of those games recently? While they had value at the time, they are not up to par graphics wise to something like the GBA...
Well, not sure whether they went out business and came back, but theres:
y /T unnels_and_Trolls/
www.flyingbuffalo.com
Specifically: http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/tandt.htm
One of the great trait of the net is that this sort of stuff never dies. There seems little publishing history out there, one claim says its the "second oldest fantasy roleplaying game"...
Creator homepage:
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Cavern/9921/
Other links:
http://dmoz.org/Games/Roleplaying/Genres/Fantas
So who's going to kick off the Tunnels and Trolls revival thread??
Did I just hear a tumbleweed rolling by?
Yeah, but interestingly enough its probably possible get a tivo working in ireland, like most of the areas with sky coverage in europe (germany is a classic example, the alternative is everything in german, including CNN).
If you can get a service, and get hold of the ethernet card and hack it in, then localised dialing is possible. Whoops, Ireland has no broadband... (I lived in Cork for a bit, I know...)
Still, seems possible in the rest of europe though, if you can overcome the obstacle of subscribing. Otherwise its the freeview channels...
> If Sun had used KDE, the desktop would tie back to
> a German group. Even with the source readily
> available, there are plenty of old guys in the
> English-speaking world who won't want German
> software near their networks. The last thing Sun
> needs is Microsoft FUD pushing Solaris as
> supporting Euro-Socialist-Anti-American stuff.
Would that be opposed to Euro-Socialist-Anti-American developed in Finland?
And since when has European being Anti-American?
>Theyre attitude makes sense: a service population >with 5% cheaters will make 60% of normal gamers shy >away from playing. Many people stopped playing CS >because cheating is so prevalent.
Are you sure you aint got the 5% and the 60% the wrong way around???
Sounds to me as if they've identified one of Suns niches which is quite lucrative, and want it...
Why's Sun so successful there?
1) Hardware stability. Those things are built like german tanks. Good quality disks and memory, none of the cost cutting the mass market demands on their servers.
2) Realtime kernel/scheduling. Hardware timers at nanosecond accuracy.
Ok, the 1st is one of those things which do exist nowadays, but the big PCs makers haven't really identified that niche yet. So you'll probably end up with too much hardware for the stablitity it provides (a web server box for a small telecomms app).
The second is one of those things which bites at the name UnitedLinux. People love the linux kernel, because it is fair scheduling. They don't like the idea that one process can get _all_ the cpu, and its up to the code writer to make sure it doesn't. There are patches to the linux kernel such as rtlinux and rtai which provide this, but across the board?
Strikes me as if united linux would have to be less united than it should be...
I expected to go on there and find Matts coolest comics etc, but they are all editorial ones and not so good ones.
I also hoped he'd managed to stick Life Is Hell online somewhere. Being in the uk, you don't get it distributed over here, like _at all_.
I'll just have to put forward my daily comics browse... www.dilbert.com (of course, but both Luann and Get Fuzzy on there are good ones). www.goats.com is getting too infrequent for me. I love the bizarreness which is www.achewood.com and the www.wigu.com is one of the cutetest, and occasionally _extremely_ dark comics I've read.
As they happen on slashdot.
Trouble with some modern journalists, is they sometimes research their information before they print it. Otherwise they get sued.
If I hadn't read and dismissed this one from uk.games.video.gamecube three weeks ago, and dismissed it as another bit of unlikely speculation on nintendos "big announcement" (which is more likely a Pokemon game), then I might have believed it.
More importantly the Sony stockholders might have believed it too, and the large corporations.
Ok, so maybe slashdot has the freedom to post an urban legend every so often, but do watch out, it might cost you a lot of money one day...
That, as others have said, is a view of those wanting to be mature (such as the under-18's).
Nintendo games do not fall into the basic PC/Box/PS2 format of being a clone of three major genres:
1) 3d Shoot them up.
2) Resource harvest, build, send them to war.
3) Sword. Orc. Better Sword. Orgre. Better Sword. Dragon.
Even within each genre a slightly original tweak of gameplay as heralded as revolutionary.
Miyamoto develops games which are outside this stereotype. So he's stylistic and makes them brightly coloured. They are games for people who _love_ games.
The critics who level the maturity thing at Nintendo are the same type of people who would call themselves critics, based on the facts they go and see all the top blockbuster movies.
When in reality none of the three main PC genres would exist today with their level of innovation. We'd all be debating the latest incarnation of Solitaire or The Sims...
Whoops...
I'm looking forward to their updates to their business plan shortly before next Hurricane hits...
Fair weather net access?
I didn't see it.
While maybe all your friends saw it, maybe about 1/4 in mines did.
And I'll shock you further now.
I didn't see either the Empire Strikes Back or Return or the Jedi at the cinema. Or on rental. I caught both of them a number of years later when they were shown on terrestrial (or network to the US) television. They were bearable.
Yes, I saw the first Star Wars at the cinema. I was a kid. I enjoyed it. I was a kid.
I grew up after that.
While I appreciate for some, life is a nostalgic struggle to recreate the glory days of their childhood.
I did however catch AOTC on divx. Its true. You _can_ polish a turd.
Why the obsession with outer space and the masses of energy expended to get there...
When there's massive amounts of extreme environments unexplorer on our own planet which can turn out such wonders as our potential origins...
A map 100 years ago had vast regions not filled in because they had been unexplored. They are still largely unexplored, but now we have pictures of them from space, and I guess thats enough for the human being, so see them, rather than to have visited them...
I'm not just talking deepest africa, deepest oceanic crevices too. We're setting up permanent residence in a vacuum, why not in high pressure?
While perfectly happy to send people with mental ages of three to the chair, he keeps his very special sparing of life to the really good ones...
One of the few (not even sure if there has been more than one), is one Henry Lee Lucas. Yes. Old hang 'em high Bush will toast simpletons no problem, but when it comes to mass murderers (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), he's very merciful...
"On June 27, 1998 Governor George W. Bush spared Henry's life because of overwhelming evidence proving that Henry was not in Texas when "Orange Socks" was murdered. Although Lucas confessed to killing her, work records and a cashed paycheck indicated he was in Florida at the time of the murder. Bush issued the reprieve on the recommendation of the state parole board. "I can only thank them for believing the truth and having guts enough for standing up for what's right," Lucas said from death row."
http://www.houseofhorrors.com/lucas.htm
I know, because I work on the hub technology development.
Its been live for about 6 months, over 1000 customers according to what I've been told.
There has been a large canadian corporation which has been taking tenders for providing access over the US/Canada for over a year now. They just keep asking and then doing nothing.
Whether they are waiting for the technology to be proven or whether they just ran out of money, I don't know, but if they are interested, they are moving like a snail...
But the reality is that it will be probably high costed (relatively) at first. But a lot of the customers are resellers of access, so I believe theres money in getting a terminal and localised isp'ing some customers.
I tend to get them once a week... But why that is, is probably because I hardly ever have time to use them. If its a thread I'm interested in, I would post to it, not moderate it.
My experience of slot loading pioneers come from the one speed days of scsi cdrs (no cdrw).
It scratched a lot of discs. On reading them. Lost a lot of original games from that.
I guess that would be a good reason to back them up though...