Our local, world-renowned security expert Bruce Schneier wrote an excellent article about responses to the Aurora theater shooting. It is worth reading in its entirety.

The message of the article is that fear leads to irrational responses and horrible policy. Our Freudian Id responses are rarely correct. Many extreme measures we took after 9/11 did not make us any safer. In some cases, costly but ineffective security measures which Bruce Schneier refers to as "security theater" actually desensitize us to real threats and increase the risk of a second attack.

There are so many topics I would like to talk about at the moment.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was ruled constitutional as a tax. That topic can wait.

There is still so much more I would like to write about electric vehicles now that I have been driving one around for a month. That topic also can wait.

Only one issue demands my attention right now because it is so easily ignored and so important-- illegal foreclosures are still occurring because no major bank executive has been put behind bars for massive and blatant fraud.

Some of you may know that I pre-ordered a Nissan Leaf electric vehicle over a year ago. What you may not know is that my brand new, $37,250 electric vehicle could cost much less than I once spent to purchase my used Nissan Sentra.

The numbers sound unbelievable, but they make sense. Let's compute my total cost of ownership to show why.

Many misconceptions exist about the nature of money and currency. Some of these misconceptions came out in a recent blog post panning the Bitcoin. I appreciate the author's criticism, but I disagree with him.

All money is symbolism. Gold represents both the glitter of heaven and something very difficult to obtain. Every nugget must be mined by manual laborers over days, weeks, and months. The value of gold comes not merely from its scarcity and its uses in jewelry, but also from its value as a representation of stored labor value.

All paper money in America represents debts. This makes more sense when you understand fractional reserve banking. The U.S. government decides by fiat that all debts in America can be created and paid in dollars. Although paper is not scarce, our government creates counterfeiting prevention measures and uses law enforcement to ensure its scarcity.

It's a common myth that gold and silver are real money and paper money is just fake money. Gold and silver are still symbols of stored value. Gold only has inherent value because our society assigns value to it. Just because Gold has uses other than currency, in wiring for example, does not make Gold coins real and paper bills fake. I can also write on paper bills. Germans in the Weimar Republic famously burned them to stay warm after hyperinflation from printing too much money had reduced their stored value.

In fact, gold can make substandard currency because it tends to be deflationary. It causes recessions for the very same hoarding reasons Tav cited in his attack on the Bitcoin. There is a limited amount of gold in the ground and on Earth. Years of mining have depleted the future supply to the point that hoarding can be a very effective means to consolidate wealth.

In the four years since I first began to run for Minnesota state representative, my web site technology had become dated. I chose to clear away all the old cruft and start fresh. For now, this new site will function as my personal blog for technology and social issues while I'm developing hoodbid.com. Today, I want to blog about the reasons WHY upgrading is so important.

Any good web administrator knows that badly outdated content management systems tend to have serious vulnerabilities. Popular security sites labeled remote buffer overflows the "attack of the 90s." We hardly ever see these attacks succeed today. Ever since AMD introduced the NX (No eXecute) bit to its AMD64 processors and Intel followed suit, these attacks have become quite rare.

Today, SQL injection attacks have replaced remote buffer overflows as the most exploited vulnerability of this decade. It seems like security patches come fast and furious against these attacks, but they do not arrive fast enough. While the most popular open source CMS programs quickly patch, many third party modules and proprietary CMS products stay vulnerable a long time. In the famous Anonymous attacks against HBGary, SQL injection was used against their custom CMS to gain access to their password database.

As hackers, we must never grow so enamored of our favorite products that we fail to provide constructive criticism. This applies to hardware as well as software. While there are valid complaints about web scripting languages, CMS systems, web servers, and database servers, I want to focus on something more fundamental--

Structured Query Language is becoming the Achilles heel of the Internet.