Nothing and Some More

Democracy Now: interview with Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror (excerpt)

What they found time and time again is that electroshock didn't work, and sodium pentathol didn't work, LSD certainly didn't work. You scramble the brain. You got unreliable information. But what did work was the combination of these two rather boring, rather mundane behavioral techniques: sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain.
And in 1963, the C.I.A. codified these results in the so-called KUBARK Counterintelligence Manual. If you just type the word KUBARK into Google, you will get the manual, an actual copy of it, on your computer screen, and you can read the techniques [Read the report]. But if you do, read the footnotes, because that's where the behavioral research is. Now, this produced a distinctively American form of torture, the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in centuries, psychological torture, and it's the one that's with us today, and it's proved to be a very resilient, quite adaptable, and an enormously destructive paradigm.

Wikipedia:KUBARK has some more links.

There is now a SDK for the One Laptop Per Child US$100 laptop (via Hack the Planet).

The SDK is a QEmu image: QEmu for Win32, QEmu for OSX and FreeOSZoo provides ready-to-run images of QEMU virtual computers while you're at testing QEmu.

The spec of the US$100 laptop are on the One Laptop per Child wiki: Hardware specification

Memory: 128MB DRAM, DDR-266
Nonvolatile storage: 512MB (possibly 1GB) NAND SLC type flash memory
Boot ROM: 4MbSPI serial Flash ROM, interfaced via embedded controller

Jim Gettys, the VP Software Engineering, has a blog where he write about the laptop: jg’s ramblings: OPLC Section

A book: Wireless Networking in the Developing World, a practical guide to planning and building low-cost telecommunications infrastructure (via BoingBoing)

The french translation is starting

Helping the needy get nerdy since the beginning of the third millennium. about Free Geek

The concept is simple, really. Hire a handful of staff members, pay them the same hourly figure from the top down, train volunteers to run the business and work solely with donated electronic items to make them reusable or recyclable. In the process, teach volunteers how the business works and how to rebuild computers, allowing them to adopt a computer after 24 hours of volunteer service, giving them on-the-job training, as well as a social outlet. The result of the effort keeps harmful products out of landfills and enables schools and groups who desperately need computers to receive them at no cost. Last, but not least, make it all a democracy so volunteers and employees can participate in the direction of the collective.

Detailled instructions on how to get PyXPCom running, and how to write your first Firefox extension in Python.

The sysadmin song.

Also a new TV show, The IT Crowd (also avail on P2P and Filecloud if you can't find a UK proxy)

Allo IT. [...] Have you tried turned it off and on again ? [...] Are you sure that it's plugged in ?

WashingtonPost FDA Is Urged to Ban Carbon-Monoxide-Treated Meat (via In The Papers)

Picture two steaks on a grocer's shelf, each hermetically sealed in clear plastic wrap. One is bright pink, rimmed with a crescent of pearly white fat. The other is brown, its fat the color of a smoker's teeth.
Which do you reach for?
The meat industry knows the answer, which is why it has quietly begun to spike meat packages with carbon monoxide.The gas, harmless to health at the levels being used, gives meat a bright pink color that lasts weeks.

More, with pictures on bookofjoe: further explorations of the [gassed] meat space

LeMonde: entretien avec Philippe Séguin, président de la Cour des comptes: Le modèle canadien ou anglais est plus efficace que le modèle français non appliqué

Dans vos constats, quelle est la part entre la malversation et la mauvaise gestion ?
La malversation est rare. 98 % de ce que nous pouvons trouver de critiquable relève de la mauvaise gestion, qui peut être sanctionnée aujourd'hui.

Conversations with P. D. James and Ruth Rendell (via La république des livres)

The death of handwriting

Following Web 2.0 and Bubble 2.0, is E-Learning 2.0 For Real?

Electronic simulators :KTechlab is an IDE for microcontrollers and electronics for Linux.VirtualBreadboard is an easy to simulation and modeling tool that can be used in place of a real breadboard for quickly performing experiments and testing out electronic and microcontroller powered 'embedded' applications. Freeware version available. For Win32.

A bit more advanced, quantum physics for dummies: legendary theoretical physicist Hans Bethe delivered three lectures on quantum theory (Wikipedia: Hans Bethe)

Quantum computer solves problem, without running.

"It seems absolutely bizarre that counterfactual computation – using information that is counter to what must have actually happened – could find an answer without running the entire quantum computer.[...] But the nature of quantum interrogation makes this amazing feat possible."
Sometimes called interaction-free measurement, quantum interrogation is a technique that makes use of wave-particle duality (in this case, of photons) to search a region of space without actually entering that region of space.

The article in Nature Quantum information: To compute or not to compute?