In any field, people have heard that its better to spend the time to fix the root cause of a problem than to just address the symptoms. It's not just common sense, but it costs lest in the long run too. You'd think the largest software maker in the world, would have this drummed into their collective brain by now, but you'd be wrong. Microsoft admitted that it had not patched a bug in its Jet Database Engine (I believe this is the black heart of MS Access) that it knew about since 2005 because it had already blocked the attack vectors it knew about.

But the company hadn't thought of the attack strategy now being used by hackers. "Everything changed with the discovery of this new attack vector that allowed an attacker to load an .mdb file via opening a Microsoft Word document," he said. "The previous guidance does not work against this new attack. So that's why we alerted customers to these attacks and are re-investigating Jet parsing flaws -- this is a new attack vector discovered that we didn't know about."

MS Rep claims that they can't fix the .mdb file format, because its designed to run code. But there should be some way to sand box the code that gets executed, ala javascript and flash. Plus, we're supposed to believe MS can't force their users to upgrade to a new file format in MS Office?

HT: cgisecurity.com

Richard Dawkins, in reviewing the Intelligent Design film "Expelled", states a positon on Darwinism that I'd never seen before, but it makes a heap of rational sense.\

As I have often said before, as a scientist I am a passionate Darwinian. But as a citizen and a human being, I want to construct a society which is about as un-Darwinian as we can make it. I approve of looking after the poor (very un-Darwinian). I approve of universal medical care (very un-Darwinian). It is one of the classic philosophical fallacies to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. Stein (or whoever wrote his script for him) is implying that Hitler committed that fallacy with respect to Darwinism. If we look at more recent history, the closest representatives you'll find to Darwinian politics are uncompassionate conservatives like Margaret Thatcher, George W Bush, or Ben Stein's own hero, Richard Nixon. Maybe all these people, along with the Social Darwinists from Herbert Spencer to John D Rockefeller, committed the is/ought fallacy and justified their unpleasant social views by invoking garbled Darwinism. Anyone who thinks that has any bearing whatsoever on the truth or falsity of Darwin's theory of evolution is either an unreasoning fool or a cynical manipulator of unreasoning fools.

City planners aren't very smart sometimes, or at least, don't fully grasp the concepts of cause and effect...\

Dallas had anticipated an annual \$14.8 million for red-light-running fines, money essential to keeping the cameras running --- before people stopped running lights and reduced violations more than 50 percent at some locations.