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Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was stripped of immunity in a case involving the torture of two United States citizens.Two FBI informants, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, were detained and tortured by United States military personnel in Iraq in 2006. They filed suit against Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for violations of their constitutional rights. The Judicial Viewstates:

“Plaintiffs seek damages from Secretary Rumsfeld and others for their roles in creating and carrying out policies that caused plaintiffs’ alleged torture. Plaintiffs also bring a claim against the United States under the Administrative Procedure Act to recover personal property that was seized when they were detained.”

Rumsfeld and the United States government moved to dismiss the charges, and were denied. The plaintiffs relayed “in sufficient detail facts supporting Secretary Rumsfeld’s personal responsibility for the alleged torture.”

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A pair of House Democrats introduced legislation Tuesday to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling that freed corporations to spend unlimited money on elections.

Sponsored by Reps. John Conyers (Mich.), senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and Donna Edwards (D-Md.), the proposal would amend the Constitution to empower Congress and the states to limit corporate spending on political activities.

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The 5-4 Supreme Court decision split the ideological wings of the court, with centrist Justice Anthony Kennedy casting the deciding vote.

The majority argued there is nothing in the First Amendment to indicate that corporations shouldn’t be afforded the same constitutional protections as individuals.

I’ll accept that corporations are individuals once Texas executes one.

Faces from arturo castro on Vimeo.

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This is a technical demo for face substitution technique. The application works in real time and it’s developed using the opensource framework for creative coding openFrameworks

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“I always say how bullied I am, but no one listens,” he wrote Sept. 9. “What do I have to do so people will listen to me?”

Just over one week later, Jamey was found dead outside his home of an apparent suicide.

In the months prior, he routinely blogged about school bullying and thoughts of suicide in between upbeat posts about his pop star idol Lady Gaga and the ordinary types of teen rants typical for kids his age.

On Sept. 8, he wrote: “No one in my school cares about preventing suicide, while you’re the ones calling me [gay slur] and tearing me down.”

He put up a separate post that day letting everyone know it was National Suicide Prevention Week.

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Under new rules approved by TFF, only women and children under the age of 12 will be admitted to watch games free of charge involving teams which have been sanctioned for unruly behavior by their fans. On Tuesday evening, women queued up around Fenerbahçe Istanbul’s Sükrü Saracoglu stadium, some carrying babies in the team’s colors, many holding their children in hand, for an opportunity to watch their club for free. More than 45000 attendants wanted to witness the historic event.

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A 2008 poll of 1,400 Americans by the Cornell Survey Research Institute found that when people were asked whether they had “ever used a government social program,” 57 percent said they had not. Respondents were then asked whether they had availed themselves of any of 21 different federal policies, including Social Security, unemployment insurance, the home-mortgage-interest deduction and student loans. It turned out that 94 percent of those who had denied using programs had benefited from at least one; the average respondent had used four.

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Bing, Microsoft’s two-year old search engine, is losing nearly a $1 billion a quarter, with no sign of letting up.

Microsoft has lost $5.5 billion on Bing since the search service launched in June 2009, but the company’s search losses actually pre-date that. In fact, the software giant has never made money in its online services division. Since Microsoft began breaking out that unit’s finances in 2007, the company has lost a total of $9 billion.

Perhaps, just like Google, they can create their own browser so that people would use Bing more since it’d be tied in.

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I canceled the OnStar subscription on my new GMC vehicle today after receiving an email from the company about their new terms and conditions. While most people, I imagine, would hit the delete button when receiving something as exciting as new terms and conditions, being the nerd sort, I decided to have a personal drooling session and read it instead. I’m glad I did. OnStar’s latest T&C has some very unsettling updates to it, which include the ability to sell your personal GPS location information, speed, safety belt usage, and other information to third parties, including law enforcement. To add insult to a slap in the face, the company insists they will continue collecting and selling this personal information even after you cancel your service, unless you specifically shut down the data connection to the vehicle after canceling.

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By now, the story of patent trolls has become well-known: a small company with no products of its own threatens lawsuits against larger companies who inadvertently infringe its portfolio of broad patents. The scenario has become so common that we don’t even try to cover all the cases here at Ars. If we did, we’d have little time to write about much else.

But anecdotal evidence is one thing. Data is another. Three Boston University researchers have produced a rigorous empirical estimate of the cost of patent trolling. And the number is breath-taking: patent trolls ("non-practicing entity" is the clinical term) have cost publicly traded defendants $500 billion since 1990. And the problem has become most severe in recent years. In the last four years, the costs have averaged $83 billion per year. The study says this is more than a quarter of US industrial research and development spending during those years.

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Now that there is the Tec-9, a crappy spray gun from South Miami. This gun is advertised as the most popular gun in American crime. Do you believe that shit? It actually says that in the little book that comes with it: the most popular gun in American crime. Like they’re actually proud of that shit.

Your bones don’t break, mine do. That’s clear. Your cells react to bacteria and viruses differently than mine. You don’t get sick, I do. That’s also clear. But for some reason, you and I react the exact same way to water. We swallow it too fast, we choke. We get some in our lungs, we drown. However unreal it may seem, we are connected, you and I. We’re on the same curve, just on opposite ends.

Normally, both your asses would be dead as fucking fried chicken, but you happen to pull this shit while I’m in a transitional period so I don’t wanna kill you, I wanna help you. But I can’t give you this case, it don’t belong to me. Besides, I’ve already been through too much shit this morning over this case to hand it over to your dumb ass.