I haven't yet had time to read the Red Cross report (PDF file) on conditions in US-run prisons in Iraq. Josh Marshall has, and is very skeptical of the claim that a few rogue soldiers just happened to focus their completely random and unauthorized abuse on the people the intelligence services were most interested in.

Corporate executives love to complain about "excessive government regulation." Well, it seems to me that forcing workers to breathe GaAs dust is just wrong. If it takes government regulation to make companies treat workers like human beings, then bring on the regulators.

"The President--whoever he is--has to decide. He can't pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That's his job." -- President Harry Truman, January 1953.

The buck, famously, stopped at Truman's desk. Too bad more recent occupants of the Oval Office haven't always followed his precedent.

Intel has decided to use multi-core designs in subsequent microprocessor generations. They have scrapped Tejas, the expected successor to current Pentium 4 designs.

Multi-core processors generally use slower individual cores working in parallel to maximize performance at lower speeds and operating voltages than comparable single-core devices. They therefore represent a triumph of architecture over conventional transistor scaling.

(Silicon Strategies article. Free registration required.)

5625 words since my last update, 50,270 since January 1. That's more like it!