Peter Norton was a nice guy who wrote some pretty good code, useful things that made working with MS-DOS easier. He finally decided to leave the world of coding and sold his company to Symantec.

The quality of products labeled “Norton” has not been uniform since that happened, but I have stayed with Norton Anti-Virus mostly out of inertia. It was okay, it did the job. As long as you limited it to anti-virus and avoided the “all-in-one” System product, it didn’t get in the way.

Well, no longer. I upgraded starting at almost midnight last night and it took hours. They downloaded the new 2007 version, then immediately started upgrading all of the modules in the package. If I had bought a copy at a “brick and mortar” and installed it, I would expect having to upgrade, but I downloaded from their bloody site, so why didn’t they give me a pre-patched version?

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The BBC is reporting: Saudi prince ‘received arms cash’

A Saudi prince received secret payments from the UK’s biggest arms dealer, a BBC investigation has revealed.

BAE Systems made regular payments of hundreds of millions of pounds to Prince Bandar bin Sultan for more than a decade.

The payments were made with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Defence.

Prince Bandar would not comment and BAE systems said they acted lawfully at all times. The MoD said information about the Al Yamamah deal was confidential.

The Prince served for 20 years as Saudi ambassador to the US.

This is the Shrubbery’s best buddy; the man who taught him everything he knows about the Middle East, the current national security advisor to Saudi King Abdullah. It looks like he was paid about $2 billion for his consulting gig.

Tony “the Poodle” Blair stopped the government investigation into the Al Yamamah deal because of “national security concerns.”

Update: I forgot to include the currency conversion when looking at the total Bandar received.