A middle school teacher has chosen to educate her students about the many perils of drug abuse by discussing the financial costs. In the reported story, a young girl comes home and reveals to her parents that she has a $300 (monthly?) pot habit. I think that’s terrific. Not the addiction, but that the realization of the (very tangible) financial cost allowed her to go to her parents with it.
On the other hand, one parent figured it was a bad idea to educate kids in this way, saying that they have enough temptations as it is. Whatever. Information and education are never as dangerous as ignorance. The only time information becomes dangerous is when it’s incomplete.

I came across this article about Fundamentalist Mormons. Well, really, it’s an article about a book written by one such Fundamentalist who murdered his wife and daughter in the name of his religion.

Afer hearing that Elizabeth Smart's kidnapper was an excommunicated Mormon, Dan Lafferty correctly deduced something about the crime that even seasoned lawmen failed to suspect: “I immediately guessed that he was probably a fundamentalist, and that Elizabeth was somehow involved in a polygamy situation.” Lafferty ought to know...

Now, I’m not so naive to think that this sort of extremism never happens in America; on the contrary, I’m very concerned that the religious right (usually the Christian right) has far too much influence in American politics and society. Although extremists can be found anywhere (look at various Islamic countries), there’s something especially sinister about finding non-Islamic zealots in America.
This entry will hopefully be the start of a series of comments reflecting my feelings about religion and social aspects often affected by it.

Yes, I'm special. I've got Panther. Not a pre-release, the actual GM. Weeks early, no less.
I must say, it really rocks. So many improvements, so many things I've been waiting.
Although you still can't let go of scrollbars.
More to come...

My dear friend Yellie has a blog. Check it out. She's much better at it than I am.

In the first what is sure to be an ongoing series of entries on how Mac OS X sucks, I’ll describe an issue I came across recently and how I solved it.
Yesterday I restarted my PowerBook (which is running Mac OS X 10.2.6) and found that I could not log in. The login dialog would appear, it would go through the motions, then disappear, then finally reappear.
I suspected that something early in the login process was crashing so hard it was taking down the login process itself. After a couple hours of snooping, and some luck (I was able to ssh in from another machine and watch the system log report the crashes), I discovered that Launch Services’ cache was corrupted, and was causing lsregister to seg fault. Removing that file (/Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices.LocalCache.csstore) allowed login to proceed normally.
Update (2009-03-10): Thanks to this post, I now know that the filenames have changed in more recent OS releases. Launch Services caches information per-user, in files of the form com.apple.LaunchServices-023<uid>.csstore, where <uid> should be replaced with the user ID of the user with which you're having trouble (my default user ID was 501).