Users can choose from three quality settings by visiting the “Your Account” page on Netflix’s website and looking for the “Manage Video Quality” link. “Good quality” consumes up to 0.3 GB per hour, “Better quality” burns up to 0.7 GB per hour, and “Best quality” consumes up to 1 GB per hour for standard definition or 2.3 GB per hour for HD. The settings apparently apply to computers and televisions.

Netflix isn’t hiding its reason for offering the quality options: “We know that some of you have Internet data caps and we want to make it easier for you to manage how much data you use,” the quality management web page says. Most recently, AT&T instituted a 150 GB cap for DSL subscribers and a 250 GB cap for U-Verse subscribers.

What’s somewhat surprising to me is that Netflix isn’t publicizing the feature. As DSL Reports’ Karl Bode points out, Netflix added the quality management tool quietly, burying it on an account management page with no announcement. Netflix isn’t above shaming Internet service providers — the company publishes a chart of who streams the service fastest— so the fact that Netflix was driven to this point would seem like another way to paint itself as the consumers’ champion.

But Rich Karpinski at Connected Planet has a different take: Netflix “gets and keeps subscribers by delivering a high quality streaming video service,” he writes. “Limiting bandwidth limits its service.” So Netflix doesn’t want to let on that its streaming is anything less than high quality. If your service provider is putting a limit on usage, however, lower quality is a reality you might have to face.

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In its listing on the FDA website, it describes the reason for the recall as "Chemical Contamination: complaints of an uncharacteristic odor identified as 2, 4, 6 tribromoanisole."

2, 4, 6-tribromoanisole was also one of the culprits in this summer's recall of Tylenol products. It is a chemical that is produced when fungi break down a commonly used fungicide called 2,4,6-tribromophenol. In the Tylenol situation, it is believed that the contamination happened after the fungicide was used to treat wooden warehouse pallets.

But a rep for Pfizer says in a statement to CNN that the company "has been working closely with the bottle supplier to determine the cause of the odor problem and to rapidly address it."

The company also says that its own "medical risk assessment based on all the information we have has determined that the odor issue is not likely to cause adverse health consequences for patients."

Pfizer recalled 191,000 bottles of Lipitor for odor [CNN]

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According to the company's advance notice, four of the 16 bulletins will be rated "critical," Microsoft's highest severity rating. Microsoft rates a critical vulnerability as one that could be exploited to propagate an Internet worm without user action.

The 49 vulnerabilities will mark the largest ever batch of patches issued by Microsoft. The previous record was 34 vulnerabilities patched in August this year.

The October patch batch will include fixes for security flaws in the Windows operating system, the Internet Explorer browser, Microsoft Office and the .NET Framework.

It is very likely that Microsoft will include patches for a pair of elevation of privilege vulnerabilities that were exploited during the mysterious Stuxnet worm attack.

The flaws in this month's release affect all version of Windows, including the newest Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008.