Spontaneous Monotony

Despite assertions to the contrary in interviews, the Army has issued a grovelling apology, and offered compensation, to the government of Basra- three weeks after British tanks demolished a police station for no valid reason. The original claims (that British soldiers had been handed over to the militia) made no sense either (why demolish a building that you know your people aren’t in) but when the Iraqi Interior Minister revealed that the ‘soldiers’ had not been handed over to anyone the Army press releases descended into farce.

Apparently, the British government has promised to deal with those involved in accordance with the laws of the Coalition Provisional Authority – not, you might notice, those of the democratically-elected Iraqi government.

See Also

• BBC News: UK agrees to pay for Basra damage

Before the enforced closure following implied threats of violence from the copyright cartel and the eXeem debacle, SuprNova.org was the BitTorrent tracker site, bar none. Now, apparently, one of the old admins has been given the source code (in exchange for paying for SuprNova [the new, torrentless site]‘s hosting for three months) and has resurrected it at newnova.org. There aren’t a huge number of torrents, and the search functionality hasn’t been enabled yet, but this could be a significant victory for BitTorrent now that the (official) eDonkey client is no longer in development.

The long-awaited patch for Battlefield 2 has been released, and it makes changes to two of the most complained-about aspects of the game: the TK punish system and chopwhoring.

In terms of TKs, all it does is disable artillery TKs by commanders – so all those idiots who call in artillery where their team is about to go will now be safe from any retribution.

Chopwhoring (where 6 people pile into a Blackhawk, and make short work of capturing every CP on the map) , which is a particular problem on Mashtuur City, has been well and truly nerfed – now only ONE additional person inside a vehicle will give a bonus to the capture-time of a control point (e.g. the machine gunner on a tank) – everyone else has to get out of the vehicle.

This doesn’t present much of a problem to those who use APCs for much the same tactic, since they tend to get out anyway to get a better shot at any lurking antitank soldiers, but it might make playing as MEC on Mashtuur actually fun.