Seems to me that every time we get a TEMPORARY tax cut, we end up paying for more boondoggles at each "renewal". A two month extension? Really? Why? I would be ELATED to see this AND the "Bush/Obama Tax Cuts" expire. At least no one in congress would be holding it over my head like a damned dog biscuit expecting me to sit nicely while they "craft" another renewal bill. I think I'll just bite someone.

Throw all incumbents out for the next 20 years!

This legislation is a breath of fresh air in a world where people buy and sell information about me for their marketing purposes. Let me add to this though ...

I hope that this legislation will require that this consent must be obtained outside a standard EULA.
I hope that this legislation can be extended to ANY device that tracks my location, such as future cars.
I hope that this legislation can be extended to REQUIRE a warrant before any one can provide this information to the government.

What David Brinn misunderstood is that it has been attempted ... with miserable results.

Here is a C/Net Article from 2007 documenting just how horrible trying replace the current IRS computer system has historically been. I remembered when it totally failed in the 1990's, and I was reminded of the axiom, "if it cannot be done on paper, it cannot be done on a computer", a reference to computer efficiency rather than the uninformed perception that computers can work miracles.

Because a miracle is exactly what it would take to model the IRS code in a computer. As soon as one would get into the process, Congress would add another 1000 pages, and modify 500 others! This would be an annual issue, and as such, the model would never be finished.

Taxing should be simple and fair and the easiest way to do that is to tax income on people and tax sales on businesses, at a flat rate. That would cut the 10,000 pages down to one or two and STOP CONGRESS from messing with it every year.

Well, maybe it would slow them down.

Dammit, I so wanted to hate another company.

I have been doing this for years with Sony. After spending countless nights cleaning computers of their ill-written rootkit, I became quite set that I would never buy another Sony product, and I tell others about it to this day. I haven't had to touch a Sony infected computer in years, but I can guarantee you that my vendors all know not to even mention the name to me. What a shame that such a talented group of engineers was saddled with such a poorly envisioned marketing department.

However, this event seems to be quite different. Sony BMG was trying to prevent people from copying their music. (grrr - that statement alone is the nicest thing that I've said about Sony in years, and it SO inadequately describes how they failed)

Samsung is trying to do ... what? Simply gain marketing information? You could gain more information by targeting a specific demorgraphic and going through their trash! Something else is going on here, and it smells a lot worse than Sony.

Would you connect one of their internet ready TV sets up to the net? If so, get your wireshark up and running and start changing channels! Let us know.

The only advantage to keeping a prisoner in Guantánamo was that the prisoners could be considered outside the US legal jurisdiction. The US Supreme court, in June of 2008, essentially overturned that argument and stated that all Guantanamo captives were entitled to the protection of the United States Constitution. There would be no advantage to moving Julian Assange to Guantánamo by the US Government.

Of course, his lawyers can argue this all they want. But should the Swedish court throw that argument out as outlandish, they may throw other arguments out as well.

"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