Techcordance

MacAfee

McAfee’s popular antivirus software failed spectacularly on Wednesday, causing tens of thousands of Windows XP computers to crash or repeatedly reboot.A buggy update that the company released early in the day turned the software’s formidable defenses against malicious software inward, prompting it to attack a vital component of Microsoft Windows. The update was available for business customers for about four hours before distribution was halted, McAfee said.The damage was widespread: the University of Michigan’s medical school reported that 8,000 of its 25,000 computers crashed. Police in Lexington, Ky., resorted to hand-writing reports and turned off their patrol car terminals as a precaution. Some jails canceled visitation, and Rhode Island hospitals turned away non-trauma patients at emergency rooms and postponed some elective surgeries.Intel was also hit by McAfee’s bungled update, a source inside the company confirmed to CNET. The source said that all Intel’s computers inside the United States ran McAfee and many were affected but didn’t know how many or whether it impacted the company’s factories.

Demotion

A NASA employee in Pasadena, California, has filed suit over action taken against him for discussing intelligent design with other employees.David Coppedge, an information technology specialist and system administrator on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s mission to Saturn, claims he was harassed and demoted from a high-level job because he distributed DVDs that explain intelligent design.
Casey Luskin, an attorney with the Discovery Institute, tells OneNewsNow that NASA officials claimed intelligent design is religious material when it is really scientific.
“The evolution lobby has long claimed that intelligent design is religion and cannot be advocated in public schools,” Luskin reports. “But now they are claiming that intelligent design is religion and cannot even be talked about at scientific research organizations, whose primary goal is to study the origin of life.” The only employees who received the DVDs were willing recipients, and the Discovery Institute attorney explains that Coppedge “would offer these pro-intelligent design DVDs to his coworkers, and if they said that they were not interested, he would drop the matter. He was not pushy in trying to share these DVDs with his coworkers,” Luskin assures.Nonetheless, the NASA employee was accused of promoting ideas in a fashion that was unwelcome and disruptive, and he was charged with creating a hostile work environment. Action was taken without Coppedge being allowed to even see evidence against him, so now he is suing for religious discrimination, harassment and retaliation, violation of his free-speech rights, and wrongful demotion.

Appeal


Almost two dozen members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, came together Wednesday to issue a resolution calling on the Obama Administration to strongly appeal the recent ruling by a Wisconsin federal judge declaring the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional.
The members of Congress say they are willing to take the legal fight all the way up to the Supreme Court.
It was Congress in 1952 that designated the National Day of Prayer as a time to “turn to God in prayer and meditation.”
Now, it is current members of Congress who are trying to save the tradition.
“This decision is not representative of a vast majority of Americans regardless of their faith or even their non-faith,” Virginia Congressman Randy Forbes said.
Forbes, Chairman of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, and Democrat Ambassador Tony Hall are rallying bi-partisan support for the National Day of Prayer in the wake of the Wisconsin ruling against it.