They didn't "think of it", they simply borrowed the idea from Japanese deep fryers and applied it to laptops. So yeah, that too is so totally innovative.

A little context: officially, the sanctions are little more than travel sanctions that are targetted at specific individuals (ruling elite in Zimbabwe). They are not Economic sanctions aimed at the whole country. Also, Tsvangirai's support for sanctions is well known - nothing private about it. Sometime in 2002/3, Tsvangirai was advocating for Economic sanctions on Live TV (as an example of the kind of 'pressure' South Africa could exert on Zimbabwe). Zanu-PF (the 'ruling' party, to which Mugabe belongs) had a field day with this - calling him a traitor & looping it every 15 minutes or so, but it had 0-effect on the population's view of Tsvangirai. This cable is nothing in comparison, and won't make any change at all. If anything, Tsangirai's 'public' stance against the sanctions is nothing more than lip-service aimed towards Zanu-PF hardliners, who are using the issue as a bargaining chip to stall progress of negotiations.

There's no special flag to enable autorun - it's in the registry & enabled by default. Autorun.inf can replace the default action for double-clicking on the removable drive from simply opening the contents to launching a specific executable file.

My USB thumbdrive goes plugs into a lot of untrusted computers, and there's a trick I use to find out when it has been infected by worms that use autorun.inf as a vector. I use autorun.inf to set an icon for my drive. When infected, the drive will show up as the default removable disk icon & not my custom icon.

My autorun.inf is shown below
[autorun]
shellexecute=XDrive\Programs\winPenPack.exe
icon=autorun\lock.ico

Oh, and the second line is similar to the one used by worms, only that I use mine to launch a 'start menu'-like app for portable apps on my flash disk (see Portable apss, Win Pen Pack )

Either way, paper technical books are pretty much dead trees to me

There, fixed it for you

Am I the only one who read the headline the wrong way? I was expecting the first line to say "Steve Jobs filed charges for aggravated assault after an altercation with Tim O'Reilly..."

Rebooting is something you do only after a kernel upgrade...

No, here in the third world, we have to switch on our boxen after powercuts, you insensitive clod!. And after watching that Al Gore documentary, don't you feel a little guilty not shutting down your box when not using it - think of the glaciers and the penguins.