Well, I take that back: corporatism paid off well for Fisker automotive, as they nailed down a $529 million loan from the US Department of Energy (the same geniuses who were responsible for Solyndra). To be fair, Fisker hasn't gone bankrupt yet: instead, they've gone to Finland. The biggest friend of big business and sweetheart…
Congress: Tackling The Important Issues
Only the Senate can protect us against the horrors of fake maple syrup. Heaven forfend that people actually need to read the bottle or, gasp!, consume anything short of maple. 10 bonus points for the first person to make a Syrup-Industrial Complex comment...
Security Notes
All kinds of security notes this week... Google and the Citizens Advice Bureau are advertising regarding basic security. Google is offering SSL-protected searches. Armorize has a report out on ASP and ASP.NET pages getting attacked through SQL injection(?). Various sources are reporting that it's a SQL injection attack, but the report itself doesn't seem to state…
Malware Means Losing Internet Access
About a month ago, there was an article about an Australian woman whose internet access was cut off after her telephone company repeatedly warned her about malware on her computer. Malware on a computer is a classic externality problem. As long as your computer still works well enough, you might not really care about the…
SQL Injection, Part 4C Of 8: Bonus Material
I don't think I'll have room for this anywhere else, so I wanted to include a little bit of bonus material. In my simple workbench website, I included two extra columns in my gridview: one in which I simply Eval("Name") and another in which I have a label whose Text property is set to Eval("Name").…
Hopefully the end of the Hillis saga
Oh Peyton. Why couldn't you have just said this weeks ago? Each day, I begin to think it's entirely the media and his agent that stirred up this shitstorm in the first place. If he said this during training camp, this would not have been a nagging issue all season. Maybe with this behind the…
Central Planning: Jobs Americans Will Do
Vero de Rugy has a hilarious article by a former Gosplan planner who saw the light, writing to the Department of Energy and offering advice earned from years of sucking (which isn't his fault, but rather the necessary result of central planning). The sad part is that we know which side won the Cold War,…
SQL Injection, Part 4B Of 8: Defending Websites
Last time around, I spent some time on things not to do when attempting to secure a website against SQL injection. Now I'm going to suggest a few things you can do to lock down a site effectively. Parameterize Your Queries The single most important thing you can do is parameterize your queries. If you…
Anti-Democratic Thought In Modern Democratic Thinkers
Perhaps I should put scare quotes around the "thinkers" part. Steven Hayward starts us off with a nice essay. But what really gets me is a statement by Stephen Northcutt in a SANS security newsletter that I receive: "What a week. NC Gov. Bev Purdue suggests suspending elections; NY State Senators argue that free speech…
This Is Not How Jobs Are Created
Keith Ellison is a moron. You do not "create jobs" by dropping more and more onerous regulations. What happens in real life is that costs of doing business go up. When these costs go up, marginal businesses (the ones which were struggling to get by already) are forced under. When that happens, there are fewer…
36 Chambers - The Legendary Journeys: Execution to the max! 