Electronic keys for two cars
Office door key
Desk key
Kroger savings card with "if found drop in mailbox" feature
Swiss Army (Victorinox) MiniChamp II pocket knife
Kingston Traveler small 64GB flash drive with encrypted copy of key documents
Pea-less rescue whistle
Streamlight Nano Light flashlight

It's Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit with Microsoft Security Essentials. You're lucky not to have experienced this little annoying bug that is probably not enough of a time waster that it's worth seeking a solution online, let alone spending the time to submit a detailed bug report. Yes, I know approximately how big the Windows source code base is. Yes, I've made money writing software and also been paid to find workarounds to stupid bugs like this one. I would not allow them to actually change the code, just make suggestions to the "code monkeys." Serious point though: I think there is something wrong with a company that spends 9.5 billion annually on research yet they cannot manage to fix a bunch of six-month-old bugs in one of the most important parts of their flagship product.

It's just completely infuriating that Microsoft has people working on projects like this when their flagship products are full of stupid bugs that it's impossible to imagine could have made it through the simplest testing. Maybe I'm just a little upset this morning because Windows 7 lost all the items that I had pinned to my Windows Explorer taskbar item AND THAT HAPPENS ABOUT ONCE A MONTH. And what's up with not fixing all of the Internet Explorer bugs that the one researcher found six months ago and just publicized yesterday? I've got a good idea for their Research group: Hand each one of them a list of 10 infuriating Windows and Office bugs, along with the source code, and tell them to fix the problems!

He would probably make more money writing a book about who killed JonBenet than he would have by selling his software. I wonder if that's what he's planning to do, because he boldly said that he was wrong in thinking that the mother killer her, but he did not say who the evidence led him to believe actually did it.

Government equipment, not passenger equipment:
http://biggovernment.com/tshepherd/2010/02/24/dept-of-homeland-security-loses-over-1000-computers-in-one-year/

They look downright responsible compared to the US Department of Homeland Security who supposedly lost over 1,000 laptops in a single year (2008).

I haven't ordered too many OEM drives from them, only five or six out of the fifty. The two drives that failed (the open box one that wasn't supposed to be, and its replacement) were OEM drives that should have been packed better. The two most recent desktop OEM drives that I received from them last week were packed very well.

That seems like an unusually high failure rate. I've only had two bad hard drives out of about 50 that I ordered in the past five years: There was the one I mentioned that came in an open sleeve (obviously opened by someone else and not meant to be open), and the replacement drive that I ordered for that one, a different brand, turned out to be bad. They were both high-capacity notebook drives.

I did not order the drive as an "open box" item. It was supposed to be new. They either made a mistake, or they were hoping that they could stick me with an "open box" item and I would not notice. I did notice. I tried out the drive anyway, to see if it was good, but it was not.

This reminds me of the time that I ordered a notebook hard drive from Newegg and the unit that I received came in an opened protective sleeve. The drive failed the first read/write test that I use to check all new hard drives. So I think that Newegg sometimes ships out used equipment, which is not a good idea with a company like this whose tech-savvy customers know when they receive something that does not work.

This hardly seems like news, except that Apple messed up by allowing people who received free, promotional copies of paid apps to rate those apps. If Apple were to prohibit that and also remove any such ratings then that should solve the problem.

I appreciate your listing what you think is a better solution. Why would your editor not whitelist your e-mail address through the Postini Web-based config page? I have not used SpamAssassin for three years now. It does not seem to have changed too much since then. Back then in 2006, I was using SpamAssassin for a medium sized business client. I had it configured with all of the possible options: Using all of the DNSBL lists that were available at the time except for SPEWS and couple of other very aggressive ones, using Razor/Pyzor, Bayesian filtering, extensive whitelists of their customer contacts, and frequent updates to SpamAssassin itself. I went through and configured and tested all of the features and monitored it to make sure that it was working. It never approached the level true positives that we achieved when we switched to Postini. There were lots of false positives too, more than we ever had with Postini. Plus I spent some serious time maintaining SpamAssassin that I no longer needed to spend with Postini. For people with new Postini accounts, I think that it is important to check their Web-based junk mail folder weekly and whitelist any false-positive messages they find. But once you have done that for a couple of months, I find that there are very few false positives after that. I spot check my Postini junk mail folder every two or three months just to make sure there are no false positives that I need to whitelist.

Would you be so kind as to tell us which open source anti spam solutions you think are nearly as good as Postini? Thanks.

I use a hosted Exchange e-mail provider who uses Postini to filter spam and very little spam gets through. I definitely recommend using a service that uses Postini. I use ExchangeMyMail but I suspect that there are other good ones out there. I went with this company about three years ago because they were one of the few that would sell individual hosted Exchange e-mail accounts. It's definitely been worth the $10/month for a hosted Exchange account with Postini filtering.