"Control, control! You must have control!" -- Yoda

My father was an HVAC engineer for a company that focused on commercial systems. They sold a great number of systems to schools in the midwest. Many of these were strictly controlled through telephone lines, an absolutely state of the art system at the time. However, this meant that the teachers no longer had thermostats in their classrooms. They called often and complained bitterly about the room temperature. No amount of adjustment could make them happy.

My father was tasked with finding a solution. He sent teams of local installers out to the schools to install thermostats in every classroom, and the subsequent silence was wonderful.

Of course, these thermostat cases had nothing more inside than a thermometer to display the current temp and a small washer to hold the adjustment dial on. But the users had "control" again.

Technically, you are correct. But in this incident, the web server being used IS relevant.

1. The payload is IIS/MSSQL specific. The author WANTS that platform.
2. The method of injection normally doesn't work on mySQL. jameswilkes over at http://nsmjunkie.blogspot.com/2010/06/anatomy-of-latest-mass-iisasp-infection.html stated it quite well:

"Also, the SQL contains multiple SQL statements. I use PHP and MySQL databases which by default will only execute one command. That makes it much harder to hack. So switching to PHP and MySQL might be a good security choice."

Two key points from the article ...

1. "The Computing A Level is not intended as a programming course but a course that covers the fundamentals of computing of which programming (and problem solving) form a key component."
This course is an entry level course to programming concepts. It isn't meant as an entry level course to Computer Science. And as others have already stated, I wouldn't want to learn VB or Pascal if my main focus was to simply change afterwards to C_ _ or to Java. Perhaps this is a programming course for all those other people, like accountants.

2. Teachers planning to use Java are warned that many universities are considering dropping it from their first year computer science programmes, "as has happened in the US".
This just reaffirms that languages like Java (and I will assume C, C++ or C#) are still taught at the higher levels. If you are going to be a computer science graduate, learning Delphi or Python should not be a major concern.

The real bottom line is that the article is discussing one entry level class, not an entire Computer Science degree program.

1. How can I determine if a laptop has this?
2. Are their any workarounds? Fixes? Can it/Should it be disabled?

I had "heard" about habanero pepper being dried and actually built into the cable extrusion, but never saw any proof of it. So when I read this story, I went looking for it, to no avail. Anyone else hear of this?

This was the closest link I could find, which tends to support what the hytechdistributors.com link above is doing.
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jul2001/nf20010712_107.htm