Geek News Roundup for 04/12/09 – The pulled plug edition

I’d like to begin this week’s news roundup on a very cool and very geeky note. Hitoshi Takahashi is a 60-year-old Japanese man with an interesting hobby. He spent the last 11 years building a giant beetle robot (pictured above) in his garage. In fact, this robot named the Kabutom RX-03 is Takahashi’s third such creation as well as his largest. Just the knowledge that the robot can be controlled from the cockpit makes the anime nerd within me scream “Tachikoma.”

In news closer to home, Time Warner’s plan to test internet usage bandwidth caps in certain cities has come to a grinding halt amid public backlash. Time Warner claims the move is temporary as it educates consumers on the plan. The idea of ridiculously low bandwidth caps aren’t dead yet, but this is a much welcome blow to TW and others companies eager to see the plan succeed. On the illegal file sharing front there is doubt that TW is at least happy to see the Swedish courts return a guilty verdict for the founders of the popular bit torrent site, The Pirate Bay. Never mind that site itself is still up and even if it were shut down tomorrow there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other file sharing sites out there.

Unlike Time Warner’s bandwidth caps, Mandalay’s plans to create a live-action Full Metal Panic! movie may be dead in the water. In an interview with MTV Zac Efron noted that he isn’t likely to be involved with the project and that the project isn’t likely to happen. Could last week’s sudden announcement be a coincidence, or does it have anything to do with Dragonball Evolution‘s dismal ticket sales? Either way it’s too early to tell, but if a lot of Hollywood live-action anime adapations are shelved because of DBE’s disappointing profits it wouldn’t be surprising.

The gamers who fear Microsoft’s extended warranty won’t cover the “E74” errors that occur on their Xbox 360s can rest a little easier. Last week MS announced its warranty now covers the errors and will issue refunds to those forced to previously pay out of pocket. While the news is welcome, a console free of crippling hardware failures would be nice to have. Meanwhile, in Japan PS3 and PSP owners can look forward to buying Final Fantasy VII International on PSN for just $14.99. Considering that many RPG fans are still waiting for games like Xenogears to be released domestically, I highly doubt we’ll see FFVII anytime soon. Then again, FFVII has the amazing ability to defy logic, so perhaps it’ll be the one exception. Still, I doubt it. In the meantime, the DSi has already sold 435,000 units in its first week of release. The real question is how long Nintendo will plan to sell the DSi and the DS Lite side by side.

Image courtesy of AltJapan.