Nefarious inventions that threaten our very society

The chlorine thing is still with me... I had a hard time sleeping last night. Call me a fool, but I had gotten used to this "breathing" thing and now that it's become difficult I sort of miss it.

I am not going to trivia this evening... instead, I'm catching up with Mary and her boyfriend (the one she met on Match a couple of years ago) and we're going to dinner somewhere. The original plan was to cook at home, but Mary said she hadn't gone and gotten stuff, so it's off to the Land of People Bringing Us Food. In fact, if I don't get out of here soon, I'll be late. I had to go over and pick up some shoes on which I had new heels installed. Normally, I'd have just thrown these shoes out when the heels wore down so far that there were voids opening up in them, but I really have liked these and want to extend their lives some.

Did I mention there's a new podcast over there? Yeah, I think I did.

The latest dumb-ass thing at work: apparently someone has been trying to charge money for a copy of a particular regulation which we don't normally publish to the public. It showed up on eBay the other day, and sure enough, today I get a note asking if there's a way for us to prevent our internal users from misusing information like that.

Ummm... no. I have no idea what they have in mind, but it's almost certainly both technically impossible and silly. Sure, you could inconvenience every user in the system by making them log in to view this type of information, but as long as they have access to these dastardly and insecure devices called "printers" and "copiers," they'll be able to print the thing off, and then use another nefarious invention called a "pocket" to magically transport it out of the building. Even if we took all the printers and copiers away, we have "email" and some people actually have a thing called "short-term memory" which would permit them to carry the information out of the building in this thing called a "head."

I fully expect someone to come up with an idea like, "let's track everyone who reads such-and-such page."

Let's not and say we did.