Federal law prohibits websites from collecting personal information from anyone under the age of 13.

'Federal' suggests you are talking about a U.S. law. Many users of Facebook are not based in the U.S. What implications does this have here, specifically to non-U.S. users of Facebook, if any?

Article reports: "There are reports that this vulnerability is being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks via a Flash (.swf) file embedded in a Microsoft Excel (.xls) file delivered as an email attachment"

*BOGGLE* If that sort of functionality is even possible, then it was just an accident waiting to happen.

However when there was a mass shooting at LAX in 2002, they didn't shut down the airport.

Ah, but shooting is fine. It's much more American for a start. Americans like guns and shooting. It's carrying a bomb that makes you a terrorist, not carrying a gun.

Some extensions I installed use the status bar to display, you guessed it, their status. Could anyone inform me how the hell would that work if the bar is gone???

Don't worry. Those extensions probably won't work with Firefox 4 anyway, so this won't be a problem ;-)

I think "able to brute-force thousands of passwords in an hour" qualifies as a weakness in SHA-1.

Not really. It just shows that 6-character passwords aren't very strong. The hash itself is not the weak point.

German U-boats (submarines) were given deliberately 'inflated' numbers, to make it seem that there were many more than there really were. The strategic/morale effect of your enemy believing that you have hundreds of submerged threats at sea was an important consideration to the Germans.

I guess they didn't see the need to do this with tanks.

For the first time since, well, quite a long time, we have no sizeable opposition in Parliament.

The size of the opposition (i.e. number of MPs) is fairly typical really. The problem is that the opposition consists of MPs who belong to the unpopular former-governing Labour party. People have become too used, over recent years, to disbelieving them ;-)

Seeing 'Hacker' in the same sentence as 'UK' and 'Government' made me think this story was about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Hacker

If you want to play and allow proper nouns, then you don't need an official 'rule change' to do so. You just say to your fellow players "Hey, chaps, shall we allow proper nouns, then?"

And if the new 'offical rules' say that proper nouns are allowed, then you don't have to go along with it. You say to your fellow players "Hey, chaps, let's play Old School Scrabble: no proper nouns!"

Surely people do this all the time, where you have your own House Rules?

3. Make sure your PINs don't contain any 1's or 0's (some countries disallow those numbers).

Seriously?!?

His explanation describes how the compromise might work using online pizza ordering as an example. This is a superb way to highlight the risks. No-one wants their pizzas going to someone else, after all.

Goodbye car analogies, Hello pizza analogies :-)

Perhaps it's Wine, then, or another package that has modified it: see http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1430160&cid=29978100 and further comments.