On February 15, 1934, Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Emil Wirth was born. He is best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering.
On October 12, 2011, computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, who designed the UNIX operating system as well as the C programming language, passed away. Thanks to his contributions, computing made a huge leap forward and enabled real-time processing and multi-threading.
Screen scraping is the art of programatically extracting data from websites. If you think it's useful: it is. If you think it's difficult: it isn't. And if you think it's easy to really piss off administrators with ill-considered scripts, you're damn right.