The debate over prisoners is not about whether some field agent can dunk Osama bin Laden’s head to learn the location of the ticking bomb, as one senator suggested last week. It is about whether the United States can confront terrorism without shredding our democratic heritage.

Bush Untethered

Earlier this month Banksy surreptitiously placed a blow-up doll dressed as a Guantanamo detainee inside the fence of the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride at Disneyland, where it apparently remained for more than an hour before park officials shut down the ride and removed it.

I had heard about the Paris Hilton CD thing, but not this.

A Splashy Los Angeles Debut by Banksy

I was locked up and mistreated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time during America’s war in Afghanistan. Like hundreds of Guantánamo detainees, I was never a terrorist or a soldier. I was never even on a battlefield. Pakistani bounty hunters sold me and 17 other Uighurs to the United States military like animals for $5,000 a head. The Americans made a terrible mistake.

It was only the country’s centuries-old commitment to allowing habeas corpus challenges that put that mistake right — or began to. In May, on the eve of a court hearing in my case, the military relented, and I was sent to Albania along with four other Uighurs. But 12 of my Uighur brothers remain in Guantánamo today. Will they be stranded there forever?

Like my fellow Uighurs, I am a great admirer of the American legal and political systems. I have the utmost respect for the United States Congress. So I respectfully ask American lawmakers to protect habeas corpus and let justice prevail. Continuing to permit habeas rights to the detainees in Guantánamo will not set the guilty free. It will prove to the world that American democracy is safe and well.

I am from East Turkestan on the northwest edge of China. Communist China cynically calls my homeland “Xinjiang,” which means “new dominion” or “new frontier.” My people want only to be treated with respect and dignity. But China uses the American war on terrorism as a pretext to punish those who peacefully dissent from its oppressive policies. They brand as “terrorism” all political opposition from the Uighurs.

The View From Guantánamo

Click through.

What Iraq Was Like For Me | PostSecret

Arielle Dombasle invades New York this week, and she is popping up everywhere. If you have not yet discovered Mrs. B.H.L., wait no more!

Earlier this week, she appeared on Charlie Rose. Dombasle is briefly profiled in this week's New Yorker magazine, where she is introduced as "half of France’s most famous couple."

"You photograph well," he said, looking at a picture, propped on her music stand, of a sultry Dombasle embracing her late, beloved cat, Sloogy.

"Well, with the right lighting everyone does," Dombasle said.

Although she rose to prominence as an actress, first in Eric Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach, she is in New York this week to sing -- at the Supper Club, no less. She has two albums this year; the first, Amor Amor, has been out for several months and is a best seller in France. Her latest album, C'est Si Bon, goes on sale in the US on October 17.

Dombasle is also profiled in the Sunday NYT: More Parisian Than M. Eiffel’s Tower, where she is said to be "perhaps the Frenchest person alive", despite having been born in Connecticut and spending her childhood in Mexico.

She was also featured earlier this month in The Telegraph. Of her previous album, the reviewer wrote:

Even more so than last year's retro-hit for Pink Martini, it conjures up a forgotten world of romance and sensuality.

Also, battery life is up to 20 hours for audio playback.

The 80 GB iPod is here.

The reliability of information collected from at large Internet users by open collaborative wikis such as Wikipedia has been a subject of widespread debate. This paper provides a practical proposal for improving user confidence in wiki information by coloring the text of a wiki article based on the venerability of the text. This proposal relies on the philosophy that bad information is less likely to survive a collaborative editing process over large numbers of edits. Colorization would provide users with a clear visual cue as to the level of confidence that they can place in particular assertions made within a wiki article.

Congratulations to Tom, who has been published in this month's issue of First Monday.

The material his article covers was first presented at last year's PhreakNIC Conference. Video of the talk (Google Video) is available. The point where Tom talks about his reliability system for Wikipedia is about 30 minutes into the presentation.

Puppy smoothies: Improving the reliability of open, collaborative wikis

Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research we find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world.

2006 Innovator of the Year: Joshua Schachter

Apparently del.icio.us is one of the most innovative things to happen this year.

Other candidates in infotech: Tor, Tapestry, Asbestos, Google Maps mashups like housingmaps.com, and Ruby on Rails.

The biotechies might be more interested in the story of Alice Ting, an assistant professor in chemistry at MIT who pioneered a successor to GFP.

Young Innovators Under 35 | Technology Review | 2006

This list is drawn from the second edition of "The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made" (St. Martin's Griffin, $24.95), edited by Peter M. Nichols and published in 2004. For additional information about the list, read Peter M. Nichols's preface, or A. O. Scott's introduction.

How many have you seen?

The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made

What is Tube Poker?

Ever sat on an underground train and felt you were being watched? You might have been an unsuspecting participant in a game of Tube Poker, the gambling phenomenon that's sweeping the globe.

This is Poker with a difference - cards are replaced by people. Whether male or female, young or old, everyone is worth a certain value. The game can be played by two opposing players on any train with five seats in a row.

Originating in Japan in the late 80's as "Subway Poker" and tightly controlled by crime syndicates, the game has subsequently spread to many major cities around the world.

Tube Poker is an entirely original short film about a dangerous, addictive game that has left several dead and hundreds more injured. Involving interviews, foreign news reports and undercover police footage, this groundbreaking film ultimately reveals the final and shocking truth about Tube Poker.

Tube Poker - A short film by Simon Levene