All right, pop quiz. Guatemala City. Nerd with boring job. Social order is deteriorating; you're almost at your wit's end. What do you do? What do you do?

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Surprisingly the answer to the second question is "Yes" but we need to work up to that more slowly.

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George A Romero's Dead trilogy - Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead - were low-budget, low-production value gore-fests dismissed by critics but loved by horror fans. Over the years they wormed their way into popular consciousness and have been re-evaluated, elevated from exploitation B-movies to savage satires on modern American society. With the recent release of sequel Land of the Dead, now is a good time to look back at Romero's films and their cultural impact.

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I've got Good News and I've got Bad News.

Recently, the government of Florida managed to pull together to pass HB 0249, a law now commonly known as the "Stand Your Ground" law. This law provides for the following:

"A person, not engaged in an unlawful activity, who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so, to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself, herself, or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony."

So, finally, this Christmas, when we all leave our trailer parks and go to line up outside Walmart to score those cheap 40" TVs, and there is a riot when they finally open the doors, I can light you up like 2Pac when you get in my face.

Now, on to the bad news.

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Many people from various Open Source communities wave their hands and shout "Switch to Linux, switch to Free software". But when Windows users invite Tux to their computers, they face various problems with installation and configuration. They look for help, but they can hear nothing but "RTFM" or "Google it". Let's think about us - experienced users and them - newbies. They need help and we know the answer. We try to teach them not to ask stupid questions. However, our answers are stupid as well. Where's the golden mean? Let's try to find it.

If you work at technical customer support, you are paid to be nice and being helpful is your duty. You have to solve typical problems many times a day and you can't point users to the manual. But let's assume that you're a computer geek - you know everything and you are eager to share your knowledge. However, when somebody asks you for the sixth time in a week how to turn on a mouse wheel in Linux you lose your temper and explode.

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I have read with great interest the efforts of volunteers from across the country to assist the people who have been displaced by Hurricane Katrina get access to technology.  The survivors are using this technology to contact loved ones, register with the federal government, and begin the long process of rebuilding their lives.  My question to the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the dismal response to Hurricane Katrina is "where is the NET Guard promised after 9/11".  

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First off - someone might want to tell George about the internet, or get him a TV feed to ABC news, it was obvious to us foreigners that New Orleans was facing a disaster, including the high probability of the levees breaking well before Katrina struck.

Or perhaps just a link to the US National Weather Service which pretty accurately predicated what would happen.

But enough on the administration failures - its sure to be done to death by better than me. What's stunning Australians, and I'm sure most other countries around the world is the anarchy that's occurring in New Orleans, the complete lack of community spirit.

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I got to thinking about something after setting up the Ogg Vorbis and cdparanoia tools on my Mac so I could back up my collection of two hundred compact discs to a few DVD-Rs.

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I've noticed lately that the Australian media is trying so hard to brew a culture of hate and fear towards the Muslim communities in this country with sensational articles about their so-called extremism. The problem with all of these claims by the media is that many of them are plainly untrue or completely innacurate.

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Many school districts have recently implemented "Zero Tolerance" fighting policies. What this means varies from locality to locality, but it generally involves severe punishments for anyone involved in fighting, without regard to any details of the case. In practice this means that those who attack others and those who defend themselves are punished equally.

Recently a student has sued his school district because of severe injuries sustained in a fight where he did not fight back out of respect for the policy.

These cases pose several interesting questions about the way schools are administered, and, more importantly about a trend in which even self-defense has come to be viewed as inappropriate, unsanctioned, and potentially illegal violence.

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