One former US soldier says that in the absence of clear guidelines from their superiors, military interrogators looked to TV and movies for ideas on how to get information from prisoners.
For my money, Greg Beato’s piece on TV and movies contributing to police violence is the best there is on this general subject. I quote:
[...]
Just a few items that have caught my eye in the past few days:
Twelve year old boy dies after a tooth abscess spreads to his brain. Not only is the child dead, but his total medical bill wound up at $250,000. Extracting the tooth would have cost $80. One study estimates that 750,000 Americans are living [...]
I thought I was the only person who randomly clicked around on web pages while they read. Turns out, there’s a whole slew of us.
greatfirewallofchina.org uses a server in China to test which Web sites the Chinese government is blocking. rc3.org is available to Chinese users, I’m sure they’re happy about that.
His description of how CIOs responded to his talk:
I’m still musing over an eye-opening experience a few months ago when I spoke at CIO Magazine’s annual conference. You might have expected, as I had, that most Chief Information Officers wanted to know about the latest trends in technology so they could keep ahead [...]
Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise explains why turned down the opportunity to work for the John Edwards campaign:
And aside from the risks to the campaign, I wasn’t sure this arrangement would be healthy for my blog. With this responsibility weighing on my mind, how could I continue to deliver the independent perspective that my [...]
Yesterday I explained my one simple rule for finding good guilds in online games — join guilds with girls. I’d say that the rule works elsewhere as well. Diverse teams make better teams. Today I thought I’d take a stab at explaining why I think that is the case.
When people are surrounded with people [...]
Anil Dash has a good post on why it’s a good idea to explicitly seek out female speakers for tech conferences. I don’t go to many tech conferences, but I have my own point to add on the subject of the value of diversity.
I have been playing online games for many years, and in those [...]
Tonight I watched Rory Kennedy’s new documentary, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. The documentary tells the story of the events leading up to the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and of what actually happened in the prison, and includes interviews with some of the soldiers eventually convicted for abusing prisoners at the prison and some [...]
A jury awarded over $1.5 billion dollars to Alcatel-Lucent in a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft over the MP3 audio format. Microsoft had previously licensed rights to use MP3 from Fraunhofer/Thompson, but the jury ruled that Alcatel-Lucent also holds patents which apply to MP3 and must be paid license fees as well. Needless to [...]