Mr. Obama directed the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider the Bush administration’s past rejection of the California application. While he stopped short of flatly ordering the reversal of the Bush decision, the agency’s regulators are now widely expected to do so after completing a formal review process.

The president also directed the Transportation Department to draw up rules to implement a 2007 law requiring a 40 percent improvement in gas mileage for autos and light trucks by 2020. The Bush administration failed to write any regulations to enforce the new law.

Once the agencies act, automobile manufacturers will quickly have to retool to begin producing and selling cars and trucks that are cleaner and get better gas mileage on an accelerated schedule. The auto companies have lobbied hard against the regulations and have challenged them in court.

via Obama’s Order Is Likely to Tighten Auto Standards – NYTimes.com.

That last sentence is part of why U.S. automakers are lame: they fight innovation and technological advancement as hard as they can.   The non-American automakers have outpaced the Detroit industry with their commitment to cleaner and more efficient autos.

PLAIN TEXT PASSWORDS

This is a security hole in and of itself.  Only a complete idiot stores the passwords or credit card numbers of their customers in plain text, to protect against this very thing from happening.  The administrators of a website have no reason whatsoever to know their customers’ passwords, and the techniques to encrypt them are trivially easy to put in place.

To paraphrase the delightful Al Franken, “BILL O’REILLY IS A BIG FAT IDIOT”

This goes right along with McCain and his ignorance of technology.  My Korean War Veteran father, who turned 77 this past January, is an avid user of email and the internet, as well as other technology. He is always curious about learning new things, and that’s one of the things I admire about him.

McCain’s injuries do not qualify as a reason for not knowing how to use a computer, especially when there are technologies available to allow adaptive access to computers, like voice recognition software, and single-handed keyboards, and touch-screens, among others.  How else do you think people with more serious disabilities use computers?

John McCain: Do you trust him to handle our information-based economy?  I know I don’t.