The Asus Eee PC is a cute little number and comes in various models. The Wife was looking at them today, and I came across this Popular Science article on hacking them: a simple hack is to increase RAM from 512KB to 2GB, an intermediate hack is to change the OS—go to full Linux or switch to Windows XP or to Mac—and an advanced hack is to add USB ports and a Bluetooth adaptor. Most valuable were these links:

EeeUser.com — news announcements and the like

EeeUser Forums — users trading tips and reviews

Eee PC Wiki — many useful articles and notes

The newest model, which will shortly be available in the US (and has already been released elsewhere) is the Eee PC 900, and here’s a review of it.

ThinkProgress has a good piece:

In his new book, Torture Team, renowned international lawyer Philippe Sands documents the fact that Bush’s torture program was approved at the highest levels of the administration.

Speaking with PBS’s Bill Moyers on Friday, Sands noted that these architects of torture refuse to acknowledge they were “complicit in the commission of a crime.” “There was not a hint of recognition that anything had gone wrong, nor a hint of recognition of individual responsibility,” he said of his interviews with key torture advocates.

Sands cited former Pentagon official Doug Feith, who was instrumental in shredding the Geneva Conventions, as an example:

When you read my account with Doug Feith and with others, you will see the sort of weaseling out of individual responsibility, the total and abject failure to accept involvement. Read Mr. Feith’s book. on how to fight the so-called war on terror. And it’s as though the man had no involvement in the decisions relating to interrogation of detainees. And yet, as I describe in the book, the man was deeply involved in the decision making from step one. So it’s about individual responsibility. And there’s been an abject failure on that account.

Watch it:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently argued that torture is not unconstitutional. Speaking with Moyers, Sands slammed Scalia for being “foolish” and not considering the implications of his words:

I’ve listened, for example, to Justice Antonin Scalia saying, if the president wants to authorize torture, there’s nothing in our constitution which stops it. Now, pause for a moment. That is such a foolish thing to say. If the United States president can do that, then why can’t the Iranian president do that, or the British prime minister do that, or the Egyptian president do that?

“You open the door in that way, to all sorts of abuses, and you expose the American military to real dangers,” Sands concluded.

That’s why they love secrecy so much. From Canada:

The federal Conservatives have quietly killed an access to information registry used by journalists, experts and the public that users say helped hold the government accountable.

The Coordination of Access to Information Requests System, or CAIRS, is an electronic list of nearly every access to information request filed to federal departments and agencies.

Originally created in 1989, it was used as an internal tool to keep track of requests and co-ordinate the government’s response between agencies to potentially sensitive information released.

Now, users mine the database to do statistical studies, fine tune phrasing on new requests and discover obscure documents — often using the information against the government.

“It was really a tool designed to make government more open,” said CBC investigative journalist David McKie.

“Now that it appears as though this is no longer going to be available it is very disappointing indeed and people are really wondering what the real motivation is.”

Last week, a notice to civil servants from Treasury Board stated that effective April 1, “the requirement to update CAIRS is no longer in effect.”

A Treasury Board official confirmed to the Canadian Press on Friday that the system is being killed because “extensive” consultations showed it wasn’t valued by government departments.

Instead, “valuable resources currently being used to maintain CAIRS would be better used in the collection and analysis of improved statistical reporting,” said Robert Makichuk.

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Interesting:

An expert panel’s new quit-smoking guideline says more smokers would quit if their doctors offered them both counseling and medication — and if health plans covered the expense.

The official 256-page U.S. Public Health Service guideline comes from a panel of 37 experts who reviewed some 8,700 scientific articles — about 2,700 of them published since the last guideline came out in 2000.

What’s different? More hope, says panel chairman Michael C. Fiore, MD, MPH, founder and director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention.

“The guideline represents a scientific statement of hope,” Fiore tells WebMD. “We now have a substantial body of evidence that we can take a patient who smokes and dramatically increase that patient’s likelihood of quitting.”

Steven A. Schroeder, MD, head of the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center at the University of California, San Francisco, praises the new guideline. Schroeder was not a member of the Department of Health and Human Services panel.

“Our center is very happy with this. They broadened the sense of who can we help quit smoke,” Schroeder tells WebMD.

The new guideline asks every doctor to intervene with every patient who smokes at every health care visit.

Doctors are encouraged to provide at least brief counseling, and to help patients who smoke find more intensive counseling from telephone quitlines (1-800-QUIT-NOW) and from trained providers.

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Anne Fisher reports in Fortune:

Each year, Weddle’s (www.weddles.com), a major U.S. publisher of print guides to Internet job hunting, invites the public to visit its Web site and vote for their favorite job boards. The 30 sites with the most votes at the end of the year are declared the winners of the Users’ Choice Awards. It’s not a scientific survey, since those polled are a self-selected sampling and tend to feel strongly about certain sites, both pro and con.

Some voters’ comments are raves: “SimplyHired is hands-down by far the best job board on the Web,” wrote one fan. Other remarks are “unprintable,” notes publisher Peter Weddle. Either way, the awards are “the only recognition in the $6 billion-a-year global online recruitment industry where actual users - job hunters, employers, and recruiters - get to pick the winners,” he says.

This time around, one-third of the sites with the most votes are general-purpose job boards that serve a broad cross-section of industries, professions, and locations. The other two-thirds are niche sites that focus on a specific industry, career field, or geographic area.

That mix is probably no coincidence. “Most job seekers use a number of different sites. The average now is five,” says Weddle. “I recommend using two of the big general sites like CareerBuilder.com or Yahoo! HotJobs and three specialty sites — one that concentrates on your career field, one industry site, and one that focuses on the location where you live or want to live. That way you’re covered from all angles, and keeping track of the activity on five sites is easier than it sounds, because most of them have features that will notify you when a new opportunity that’s appropriate for you gets posted.”

Now, without further ado (as they used to say at the Oscars), here are the 2008 Users’ Choice Award winners, listed in alphabetical order by category:

General Purpose

• CareerBuilder.com
• CareerJournal.com
• Craigslist
• Indeed
• Job.com
• Monster
• SimplyHired.com
• Workopolis.com (Canada)
• Yahoo! HotJobs

Niche - Career Field

• CareerBank.com (accounting, finance)
• ComputerJobs.com
• Dice (IT jobs)
• HealthEcareers Network
• JobsInLogistics

Niche - Industry

• Absolutely Health Care
• AllHealthcareJobs.com
• Bio Space
• Hcareers (hotels, hospitality)
• HealthCareerWeb.com

Niche - Geography

• JobCircle.com
• Jobing.com

Niche - Affinity

• CollegeRecruiter.com (new grads)
• LatPro (Hispanic and bilingual)
• VetJobs (military veterans)

Niche - Employment category

• EmploymentGuide.com (hourly)
• ExecuNet (senior level executive)
• The Ladders.com (senior level executive)
• Net-Temps (contract, temporary)
• 6FigureJobs (senior level executive)
• SnagAJob.com (hourly)

Here’s hoping one or more of these lists just the job you’re looking for, but remember: Don’t spend too much time online. Particularly in a sluggish economy, many openings are never posted anywhere, and your best bet is to meet and speak with as many real live humans as you can. Happy hunting!

Lots of factoids:

Mother’s Day: May 11, 2008

The driving force behind Mother’s Day was Anna Jarvis, who organized observances in Grafton, W.Va., and Philadelphia on May 10, 1908. As the annual celebration became popular around the country, Jarvis asked members of Congress to set aside a day to honor mothers. She finally succeeded in 1914, when Congress designated the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.

How Many Mothers

82.8 million
Estimated number of mothers in the United States in 2004.
Source: Survey of Income and Program Participation unpublished tabulations

55%
Percentage of 15- to 44-year-olds who are mothers.
Source: Fertility of American Women

81%
Percentage of women 40 to 44 who are mothers. In 1976, 90 percent of women in that age group were mothers.
Source: Fertility of American Women

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Take a look. (From Paul Krugman’s blog.)

Some good information in this Healthbolt post. Check it out as part of your continuing sex education.

Tobu looks pretty cool. Lifehacker has a post on it, and here’s a tutorial.

Are all cultures equal? I don’t think so. I believe in basic human rights, and if a culture deprives people of their rights—and even their life—because those people displease someone else but otherwise do no harm, then that culture is wrong in that area and should be fixed. An example is reported in The Observer in the UK by Afif Sarhan in Basra and Caroline Davies:

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. ‘If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,’ he said with no trace of remorse.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city’s Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. ‘They are men and know what honour is,’ he said.

Rand, who was studying English at Basra University, was deemed to have brought shame on her family after becoming infatuated with a British soldier, 22, known only as Paul.

She died a virgin, according to her closest friend Zeinab. Indeed, her ‘relationship’ with Paul, which began when she worked as a volunteer helping displaced families and he was distributing water, appears to have consisted of snatched conversations over less than four months. But the young, impressionable Rand fell in love with him, confiding her feelings and daydreams to Zeinab, 19.

It was her first youthful infatuation and it would be her last. She died on 16 March after her father discovered she had been seen in public talking to Paul, considered to be the enemy, the invader and a Christian. Though her horrified mother, Leila Hussein, called Rand’s two brothers, Hassan, 23, and Haydar, 21, to restrain Abdel-Qader as he choked her with his foot on her throat, they joined in. Her shrouded corpse was then tossed into a makeshift grave without ceremony as her uncles spat on it in disgust.

‘Death was the least she deserved,’ said Abdel-Qader. ‘I don’t regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion,’ he said.

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Great recipes at Cookthink for variations on pimento cheese. Take a look. Post begins:

You could make pimento cheese every day for the rest of your life and never follow the same recipe. Once you’ve figured in the three basics—cheddar cheese, jarred pimientos and mayonnaise—pimento cheese is whatever you want it to be.

Add black pepper, cayenne pepper or white pepper. Hot sauce, Worcestershire or beer. Onion, garlic or jalapeño. Oregano, nutmeg or cumin. Sugar, parmesan or cream cheese.

Even the three staples allow for variation. You can use cheddars of varying sharpness, which you can grate, shred or blend. Some people insist on Duke’s, while others prefer Hellman’s or their own homemade mayo. Do you leave the pimientos in strips or do you chop them? If you chop them, how finely? Do you use the back of a fork to work the cheese and seasonings together and then add the mayonnaise for consistency? Or do you use a food processor to blend the core ingredients and then stir in the seasonings? Speaking of consistency, should it be more like a paste, a spread or a dip?

More at the link, including various “bests”.

Carol Rosenberg of the McClatchy Washington Bureau has a hopeful story:

In a rebuke, a military judge has disqualified a key Pentagon general from any role overseeing the Guantánamo trial of Osama bin Laden’s driver, saying he doubted the general’s impartiality in the case.

The judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, ordered the Pentagon’s general counsel to assign a new official to oversee the trial in place of Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W.Hartmann, the Defense Department’s legal adviser for military commissions.

The decision is a key one. In addition to overseeing the prosecution, Hartmann also had the power to decide how much would be spent on defense experts, travel and staff that might be need by Hamdan’s four-attorney legal team, including a staff psychiatrist.

Allred issued the 13-page ruling Friday, a little more than a week after lawyers for the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, 36, of Yemen, called witnesses to testify that during nearly a year as legal adviser Hartmann had pressured for swifter, more numerous prosecutions at the commissions.

Hamdan’s trial is presently slated to open June 2 as the first full U.S. war crimes tribunal since World War II. Whether that schedule still holds is uncertain.

Allred wrote that he found ‘’substantial doubts” about Hartmann’s independence from Hamdan’s prosecutors, in part ”based on the length and intensity of the Legal Advisor’s involvement with the prosecution in general, as well the impact of his actions” in Hamdan’s case.

The driver, the Navy captain wrote, should be assured “fair and objective advice to which he is entitled during the balance of this case.”

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Charles Peters has a good column in the Washington Post on the legislation Barack Obama has passed:

People who complain that Barack Obama lacks experience must be unaware of his legislative achievements. One reason these accomplishments are unfamiliar is that the media have not devoted enough attention to Obama’s bills and the effort required to pass them, ignoring impressive, hard evidence of his character and ability.

Since most of Obama’s legislation was enacted in Illinois, most of the evidence is found there — and it has been largely ignored by the media in a kind of Washington snobbery that assumes state legislatures are not to be taken seriously. (Another factor is reporters’ fascination with the horse race at the expense of substance that they assume is boring, a fascination that despite being ridiculed for years continues to dominate political journalism.)

I am a rarity among Washington journalists in that I have served in a state legislature. I know from my time in the West Virginia legislature that the challenges faced by reform-minded state representatives are no less, if indeed not more, formidable than those encountered in Congress. For me, at least, trying to deal with those challenges involved as much drama as any election. And the “heart and soul” bill, the one for which a legislator gives everything he or she has to get passed, has long told me more than anything else about a person’s character and ability.

Consider a bill into which Obama clearly put his heart and soul. The problem he wanted to address was that too many confessions, rather than being voluntary, were coerced — by beating the daylights out of the accused.

Obama proposed requiring that interrogations and confessions be videotaped.

This seemed likely to stop the beatings, but the bill itself aroused immediate opposition. There were Republicans who were automatically tough on crime and Democrats who feared being thought soft on crime. There were death penalty abolitionists, some of whom worried that Obama’s bill, by preventing the execution of innocents, would deprive them of their best argument. Vigorous opposition came from the police, too many of whom had become accustomed to using muscle to “solve” crimes. And the incoming governor, Rod Blagojevich, announced that he was against it.

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Or so this post says. And I’m listening to one now. Pretty good.

AP has this story showing how sincerely the Bush Administration opposes public health:

The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority.

The government seeks to reverse a lower court ruling that allowed Arkansas City, Kan.-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef to conduct more comprehensive testing to satisfy demand from overseas customers in Japan and elsewhere.

Less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows are currently tested for the disease under Agriculture Department guidelines. The agency argues that more widespread testing does not guarantee food safety and could result in a false positive that scares consumers.

“They want to create false assurances,” Justice Department attorney Eric Flesig-Greene told a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

But Creekstone attorney Russell Frye contended the Agriculture Department’s regulations covering the treatment of domestic animals contain no prohibition against an individual company testing for mad cow disease, since the test is conducted only after a cow is slaughtered. He said the agency has no authority to prevent companies from using the test to reassure customers.

“This is the government telling the consumers, `You’re not entitled to this information,’” Frye said.

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McClatchy Washington Bureau has a somewhat depressing story by David Goldstein:

he Senate grounded the airline safety bill this week, a victim of political infighting and partisan wrangling.

“The most frustrating week I have spent in the Senate in my 24 years here,” Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, who led the fight for the bill, said on the Senate floor. “It defines what the American people find so inadequate about Congress. Days go by and nothing happens.”

The only vote taken was a 49-42, nearly party-line procedural step to end debate and bring the airline safety bill to a vote. But the largely Democratic backers needed 60 votes to be successful.

It was a defeat for consumer groups and labor, which backed mandates in the bill for tougher air safety oversight and better passenger conditions. Airports also would have benefited by being able to raise more revenue.

The Federal Aviation Administration now won’t have the money to hire more air traffic controllers, who safety advocates said are overworked and under stress.

Nearly a fifth of the workforce has left the FAA since 2006, plunging the number of experienced controllers to a 16-year low, according to Patrick Forrey, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. He said 2,300 more were eligible for retirement.

“We need urgent trauma care to stop the bleeding,” Forrey said at a press conference after the Senate failed to act on the legislation.

Inaction also will delay the agency’s plan to modernize the air traffic control network by replacing radar with a satellite system.

The bill probably won’t come up again until next year. In the meantime, Congress likely will approve temporary funding, but nowhere near the amount needed to do everything the bill had intended.

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The media quickly ignore another breaking story:

Bruce Falconer is calling out the mainstream media for ignoring the disturbing testimony that dominated recent U.S. Senate hearings into corruption by private contractors in Iraq. The testimony came from whistleblowers Frank Cassaday, Linda Warren (both former employees of Kellogg, Brown and Root) and Barry Halley (who worked in Iraq for Worldwide Network Services, the Sandi Group and CAPE Environmental Management. They told stories of widespread theft of materials and supplies needed by soldiers, looting Iraqi treasures (in one case melting down Iraqi gold to make cowboy spurs), and a prostitution ring run by the manager of a “major defense contractor,” which led to the death of a colleague whose armored car was diverted “to transport prostitutes from Kuwait to Baghdad.” Cassaday, Warren and Halley say they were punished and harassed when they tried to alert their companies to these abuses. Aside from Mother Jones, the only news outlet to file a report on their testimony was David Ivanovich of the Houston Chronicle, although a transcript of the hearings is available on the Senate’s website.

Source: Mother Jones, May 2, 2008

Interesting development, eh? Dana Milbank has the story:

It was already shaping up to be a difficult year for congressional Republicans. Now, on the cusp of Mother’s Day, comes this: A majority of the House GOP has voted against motherhood.

On Wednesday afternoon, the House had just voted, 412 to 0, to pass H. Res. 1113, “Celebrating the role of mothers in the United States and supporting the goals and ideals of Mother’s Day,” when Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), rose in protest.

“Mr. Speaker, I move to reconsider the vote,” he announced.

Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), who has two young daughters, moved to table Tiahrt’s request, setting up a revote. This time, 178 Republicans cast their votes against mothers.

It has long been the custom to compare a popular piece of legislation to motherhood and apple pie. Evidently, that is no longer the standard. Worse, Republicans are now confronted with a John Kerry-esque predicament: They actually voted for motherhood before they voted against it.

Republicans, unhappy with the Democratic majority, have been using such procedural tactics as this all week to bring the House to a standstill, but the assault on mothers may have gone too far. House Minority Leader John Boehner, asked yesterday to explain why he and 177 of his colleagues switched their votes, answered: “Oh, we just wanted to make sure that everyone was on record in support of Mother’s Day.”

By voting against it?

If Boehner’s explanation doesn’t make much sense, he’s been under a great deal of stress lately.

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Page van der Linden has an important story that, alas, is less surprising than it should be:

Whether you’re a conservationist or a climate change denier, undoubtedly you’ve been following the ongoing efforts to officially declare Ursus maritimus (also known as the polar bear) listed as an endangered species, under the US Endangered Species Act.

In 2005, the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned for the polar bear’s protection, based on research done by climate and wildlife experts worldwide (pdf). Indeed, there is international scientific agreement that the polar bear is heading toward extinction unless it is protected (details here). At last, in 2006, the US Fish and Wildlife Service responded to the Center’s petition, and proposed that the polar bear be listed as endangered.

Predictably, those interested more in the welfare of the fossil fuel industry than in the survival of the polar bears have been doing their best to prevent the bears from being protected.

To make a long story short, there was an initial Senate hearing in which Senator James Inhofe and a carefully chosen “expert” did their best to confuse the issue; there was a follow-up hearing investigating the Bush administration’s foot-dragging (to which a senior official didn’t even bother to show up ). Finally, a federal judge put her foot down and ordered the Department of the Interior to make a final decision by May 15, 2008.

Which leads us to the latest attempt by lawmakers to keep the bears off the endangered list. If the science shows something you don’t like, why, you pay scientists to come up with conclusions that match your business interests.The Alaska State Legislature has decided to go “scientist” shopping:

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Dana Priest (who broke the story on neglect at the Walter Reed Army hospital) and Amy Goldstein have a lengthy and highly worthwhile article in today’s Washington Post about the way the Bush Administration runs the system of detention for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Included with the story are multimedia presentations and reproductions of actual documents. The article begins:

Near midnight on a California spring night, armed guards escorted Yusif Osman into an immigration prison ringed by concertina wire at the end of a winding, isolated road.

During the intake screening, a part-time nurse began a computerized medical file on Osman, a routine procedure for any person entering the vast prison network the government has built for foreign detainees across the country. But the nurse pushed a button and mistakenly closed file #077-987-986 and marked it “completed” — even though it had no medical information in it.

Three months later, at 2 in the morning on June 27, 2006, the native of Ghana collapsed in Cell 206 at the Otay Mesa immigrant detention center outside San Diego. His cellmate hit the intercom button, yelling to guards that Osman was on the floor suffering from chest pains. A guard peered through the window into the dim cell and saw the detainee on the ground, but did not go in. Instead, he called a clinic nurse to find out whether Osman had any medical problems.

When the nurse opened the file and found it blank, she decided there was no emergency and said Osman needed to fill out a sick call request. The guard went on a lunch break.

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