The Null Device

2005/11/8

A profile of Singapore's executioner, 73-year-old Darshan Singh, who learned the ropes (literally) in the last days of the British Empire and remains in the job because no-one else will do it:

"He tried to train two would-be hangmen to replace him, a Malaysian and a Chinese, both in the prison service," the colleague said. "But when it came to pulling the lever for the real thing, they both froze and could not do it. The Chinese guy, a prison officer, became so distraught he walked out immediately and resigned from the prison service altogether."
On the day before his execution, Mr Singh will lead him to a set of scales close to his death-row cell to weigh him. Mr Singh will use the Official Table of Drops, published by the British Home Office in 1913, to calculate the correct length of rope for the hanging.
Mr Singh joined the British colonial prison service in the mid-1950s after arriving from Malaysia. When the long-established British hangman Mr Seymour retired, Singh, then 27, volunteered for the job. He was attracted by the bonus payment for executions.
Singh holds a world record for single-handedly hanging the most men in one day — 18, in 1963 — and was an accomplished cricketer in his youth, a skill which has, in the past, translated into caning prisoners. He is now retired, but executes convicted prisoners by special arrangement.

His next client is likely to be convicted Australian drug trafficker Van Tuong Nguyen, assuming the last-minute pleas for clemency don't succeed (which they are rather unlikely to). (Aside: why exactly are Amnesty International devoting their resources to campaigning for clemency for him? Aren't there political prisoners, civil-rights campaigners and such being imprisoned and tortured across the world? Everybody knows that Singapore automatically executes anyone caught in possession of more than a few grammes of heroin. Nguyen was caught several orders of magnitude over the limit; which means that he took the calculated risk of smuggling heroin through Singapore. Surely campaigning for clemency for short-sighted opportunists whose luck happened to run out (not to mention heroin traffickers) is not the best use of Amnesty members' dues.)

(via bOING bOING) capital punishment singapore 7

In the aftermath of the KaZaA lawsuit, proprietary Windows file-sharing service Grokster suspends operations. Champagne corks pop across Los Angeles as the RIAA declares November 8 to be known, forevermore, as Victory Against Copyright Terrorism Day.

copyright grokster p2p riaa 0

An article looking at the console games scene in Brazil, where due to a number of factors, old systems killed off as obsolete in McWorld enjoy a new lease of life, and/or a freaky Frankensteinian afterlife:

Not only did Brazil embrace this marvel in video game history, but an increasing number of pirate consoles began appearing with additional features in an effort to beat the abundant competition. To differentiate between the two largest consumer bases, America and Japan, Nintendo had stemmed the import and export of games by employing different cartridge connections between the Famicom (Japanese version with a 60-pin connector) and the NES (American version with 72-pins). Since Brazil had never been properly established on Nintendo's world map, no marketing decision had been made to determine how sales would be controlled. Being stuck in the middle, with an increasing number of legal and illegal NES cartridges being shipped in from across the globe, clone consoles began appearing in Brazil with two connectors to accept either of the formats. On top of that, some pirate cartridge manufacturers began turning out double-ended casings, with 60-pins at one end and 72 on the other! Many of the NES and 2600 clones, still available today, even come with a multitude of games built into the system.
The Master System (Sega's challenge to the NES) and the Mega Drive landed in Brazil about the same time, where the systems were licensed to a local manufacturer. They were already due for replacement across the rest of the world, so Sega wisely allowed their licensee more freedom for internal development than was usually permitted. This has kept cloning and piracy of Sega products to almost nonexistent levels throughout South America. The entire range of Sega consoles are still in manufacture today - the only region in the world where Sega is still selling hardware - while sales of the Playstation 2 and Xbox are noticeable only by their absence.
The article is from a publication known as The Escapist, which uses somewhat annoying stylesheets and JavaScript navigation and requires a rather wide browser window. Though it certainly looks pretty.

(via bOING bOING) atari 2600 brazil nes retrocomputing sega sega master system videogames 0