DIABEETUS

"It hurts me to pee and it causes me to be short with my family. I can't sleep at night. The other day I stubbed my toe and I took it out on the dog. And two weeks ago I ran out of vanilla ice cream and struck my wife. Then I find out my wife's been dead for six years. Who the hell did I hit?!"

What a kafkaesque nightmare. In any normal society, you'd have a discussion with the security / police at the scene, it would all be cleared up, and you'd go home. Instead the action sets off an unstoppable sequence of events... except it's not actually unstoppable. There were numerous opportunities for the authorities to exercise common sense, but no one could be bothered to take the miniscule risk inherent in thinking for themselves. It's much easier to just go by the rulebook and put a family through hell in the process... and in the end, nobody ever lost their job for following procedure, right?

I think it's symptomatic of a larger trend in society: organizations setting up procedures and policies that practically have the force of law, and people carrying them out blindly so as to absolve themselves of any responsibility to think. We reward people for showing 'due dilligence' in these situations and never punish anyone for their ridiculous overreactions. In a sane society, everyone responsible for this debacle would be disciplined and possibly fired for incompetence.

Incompetence and zero tolerance policies once again combine to form a monumental pile of fail.

Upside: elementary school suspensions mean exactly nothing, so the kid just got an early lesson in the incompetence of authority and the absence of common sense in beaurocracy. This is probably more than he learned in daycare / coloring class all year.

Some people are standing around talking about films they've seen recently.

You enter the room.

"By the way, I have cancer, and I'm probably going to be dead in six months. Let's talk about that instead."

Can you see why that might not go over so well?

"...although environmentalists probably have truth and law on their side, corporations have money, which is much more important in society today."

You assume that because environmentalists aren't out to make money, they must be on the side of truth and justice and all that is right and good in the world, but people are driven by more than just money. In fact I'd say that faith is a far more powerful driving force than the almighty dollar.

Environmentalism isn't about truth. Well, sometimes... but mostly it's about appeals to emotion, hyperbole, the prioritization of aesthetics over true sustainability, and the condascending belief that the movement knows what's best for society.

Environmentalism has more in common with religion than with science, and it's my contention that people motivated by faith are often more dangerous, and always less rational, than those motivated by greed.

To bring it back to the issue at hand: If a large corporation wants to avoid being caught with their pants down by the next smear campaign, I'm all for it. Similarly, ENGOs should go on using leaked information to raise awareness of real issues.

I'd be surprised if it were anything more than a big degaussing coil - a thick coil of wire looped around the drive cage, and a big ceramic current-limiting resistor. Another variation might be to fry the drive's electronics by connecting mains voltage to the power and/or signal cables.

I've always wanted to build something like that, but I've never had sufficient cause to invest the time or money. Clearly, the device works - the police found no evidence against him.

Speculation: the switch is probably an emergency shutdown for the high voltage electrical system, which would explain why they can't just throw a lock on it.

It's one of those nebulous terms I could never really wrap my head around, so maybe someone can tell me: what exactly makes disneyland "postmodern?"

Does anyone know what format the download is in? I need to know that there's no DRM, and for that matter, that the songs are in high-bitrate mp3 rather than wma or mpeg4-aac.