Final Fantasy XIII - X360 (with new trailer, but they zoomed way out so you could barely see it)
The Last Remnant - PC (with really short, but decent looking, trailer)
Shockingly, NeoGAF just went 500 internal sever error... :)
Sony's last chance at making up any significant North American marketshare is gone.
Of course I'd probably more like to see Star Ocean 4, Infinite Undiscovery, or FFXIII on PC than The Last Remnant, but anything is better than nothing (or just FFXI Online)...
WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.
Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.
But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.
Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.
In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.
“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”
A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, said he could not comment on the Guantánamo training chart. “I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,” Colonel Ryder said. “I can tell you that current D.O.D. policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely.”
Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article described “one form of torture” used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods,” sometimes in conditions of “extreme cold.” Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects.
The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.”
The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”
Quote:China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
Published: July 2, 2008
Correction Appended
(Page 2 of 2)
The documents released last month include an e-mail message from two SERE trainers reporting on a trip to Guantánamo from Dec. 29, 2002, to Jan. 4, 2003. Their purpose, the message said, was to present to interrogators “the theory and application of the physical pressures utilized during our training.”
The sessions included “an in-depth class on Biderman’s Principles,” the message said, referring to the chart from Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article. Versions of the same chart, often identified as “Biderman’s Chart of Coercion,” have circulated on anti-cult sites on the Web, where the methods are used to describe how cults control their members.
Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantánamo.
“It saddens me,” said Dr. Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called “thought reform” and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by American interrogators at Guantánamo a “180-degree turn.”
The harshest known interrogation at Guantánamo was that of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a member of Al Qaeda suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Qahtani’s interrogation involved sleep deprivation, stress positions, exposure to cold and other methods also used by the Chinese.
Terror charges against Mr. Qahtani were dropped unexpectedly in May. Officials said the charges could be reinstated later and declined to say whether the decision was influenced by concern about Mr. Qahtani’s treatment.
Mr. Bush has defended the use the interrogation methods, saying they helped provide critical intelligence and prevented new terrorist attacks. But the issue continues to complicate the long-delayed prosecutions now proceeding at Guantánamo.
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Qaeda member accused of playing a major role in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, was charged with murder and other crimes on Monday. In previous hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he confessed to participating in the bombing falsely only because he was tortured.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 3, 2008
An article on Wednesday about coercive interrogation methods taught at Guantánamo Bay that were copied from a 1957 journal article about Chinese techniques misstated the given name of the author of the article. He was Albert D. Biderman, not Alfred.
Results (full post): 3743 male/ 2498 female, thinks the author is male.
Results (just the two long quotes): 2601 male, 1511 female, thinks author is male.
Results (just the new unquoted part at the bottom): 961 male, 849 female, thinks the author is male.
Interesting? I'm not sure, the thesis seems pretty questionable. Sure in some cases gender may seem obvious, but there's no way this would work as well as they suggest... it's going to be wrong quite a bit, I'm sure.
... but not enough to get me to actually play only one game at a time, though. I'm still playing SF Rush (N64) and Batman (NES), like I was a few days ago? I'm so close to the end of Batman... at the final boss...
And as for Rush, for some reason, when I played the first one again a few days ago, something clicked and suddenly I thought "wow, this is one of the best racing games ever made!" I mean, I'd always said that Rush 2049 was the amazing one, and Rush 1 was a distant second... but putting more time into it now makes me maybe question that. Sure it's incredibly frustrating (the whole enemy car pack stays one second apart in a tiny clump, meaning if you make one too many tiny mistakes, it's straight to last place for you!), but it's so, so great... (oh, and I only use the Extreme cars, of course. :))
But anyway, Ico... um, I'm still in the first level, but it is good. Some decent puzzles so far. And that great art, of course... very odd default controls, though. Jump on triangle, drop on X? Those make so much more sense switched... same goes for the shoulder buttons. 'call' to L1, look to R1. Why put both on one side? Stupid. But at least it lets you redefine the controls, unlike far too many games! :)
Quote:For Nintendo, 'Beer' is Too Strong for Wii Owners
July 7, 2008 at 18:08 PDT – Source: Las Vegas Sun
Discuss it in TalkBack!
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Contrasting previous statements about not screening WiiWare content, Nintendo elicited changes in JV Games' upcoming title, including a name change from Frat Party Games – Beer Pong to Frat Party Game
According to the co-founders of JV Games, Nintendo asked them to change the name and some of the content of their upcoming WiiWare title because of one word: "beer." Their game, originally titled Frat Party Games – Beer Pong, was renamed to the more family friendly Frat Party Games – Pong Toss.
This conflicts with some of Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime's statements last year about how "Nintendo will not do any screening of ideas" on WiiWare. JV Games co-founder Vince Valenti recalls how they "had a little discussion with Nintendo and there were some angry parties." The two founders were shocked by Nintendo's reaction. As Valenti puts it, his company's use of the word "beer" was "just like you would hear in any movie or on TV." Co-founder Jag Jaeger said they "wanted to focus on the sport of beer pong, not the alcohol that’s associated with it."
The sport in question is a college drinking game staple and consists of a table with pyramids of cups laid out on each end. These cups are filled with beer and the goal of the game is to throw a ping pong ball into your opponent's cups until they are all gone. Whenever a cup is hit, the opponent has to drink the beer in the cup.
Frat Party Games – Pong Toss still includes almost everything that was in the original build of the game, including using the Wii Remote's motion sensing capabilities to throw the balls, and a crowd that "still says authentic college-ish things like 'Loser,' 'What was that?' and 'I’ve got the munchies.'" The only changes are in the name, the now-empty red plastic cups, and in the new throw power meter, now transformed into a bullet that merely resembles the glass of beer it's replaced.
JV Games hopes to have Frat Party Games – Pong Toss out for WiiWare sometime in July.
Neal Ronaghan, Staff News Writer
Very, very disappointing, Nintendo. Sure, it's a game I'd never dream of buying, but the principle is the thing, and you've just proven that your "our only restriction is no AO titles" rule has more caveats than we knew before. Disappointing.
I feel bad for this guy, Its clear that some enemies of his in the media business have set him up to be publicly humiliated.
Is it anyones business if a man in his 60's has a private sex life? Even if it includes sadomasochist fetishes involving Nazi themed prison guard babes whipping his ass .
The guy shouldn't be punished because his Dad was a Fascist!
According to this, if you do enough comparisons you don't need science any more, or something like that. I'm not really sure how that works. Corrolating facts in new ways is important and it'll speed up the process alot, and further allow a lot of new realizations across multiple disciplines, however that's an "after science" thing. The initial data is still the keystone and gathering that is still the most important thing. No matter how fast we process, it's worthless without the data. It's the old programming maxim, garbage in, garbage out (REALLY old if you check my signature). Speed of analyzing data will certainly increase and that's great. However, we still need to make observations to add data to our pool. We also still need to test new hypothesis for verification. Corrolating data really fast is great and aside from giving us new insights at a rate that very well could change the world, it'll also give rise to new questions faster than ever before, but it will not, by itself, provide answers to those questions. We'll still need to form new testable experiments and gather new data. That's never really going to change.
Wired gets stupid sometimes...
Oh, but there is one last bit of confusion. If you are dealing with frickin' petabytes, you are dealing with numbers so huge that you will find all sorts of crazy patterns which, at smaller scales, really would be meaningful. You'll find coins flipping heads 100000 times in a row at that scale, but that's to be expected. What's needed aside from proper data gathering (the science) is also proper understanding of probability and number theory and good models. One needs good math to know what is a meaningful result at that scale.
This is a big deal, As it will put personal privacy into jeopardy. I do not like the idea of big brother spying on us.
I am not trying to promote or defend piracy, For me that would be uploading a entire movie not just a snippet.
What Viacom wants to do is the internet Equivalent of a random strip search, Just to see what videos you've watched.
Allot of vloggers put up tv documentaries on YT , For the sake of educating and informing the public about important issues, I feel a exception must be made for them, Their content is not just for entertainment purposes, As it can be used by students in school work and even by Teachers and the messages of those documentaries must be shared for the public betterment.
I would hate for my favorite channel 20thcenturywar to be shutdown.I never learned so much about the world wars !
