[ale] erasing a hard drive

[Mike Harrison]

On Sat, 27 Aug 2011, Jim Kinney wrote:
> As astounding as it may seem, yes, even policy writers are bound by natural
> law.
>
> Even the ones who try and legislate pi to be exactly 3.

I'm currently dealing with a (foreign) legal system that is defining:

The last day of the month at exactly midnight, as the last timestamp of 
the day, and they want data readings timestamped '2011-09-01 00:00:00' to 
be what they think of as '2011-08-31 00:00:00' not groking that is the 
begining of that day, not the end of it.. at least as far as the OS 
(Linux of course) and MySQL are concerned.

mysql> select date_add('2011-08-31 23:59:55',interval 5 second) ;
+---------------------------------------------------+
| date_add('2011-08-31 23:59:55',interval 5 second) |
+---------------------------------------------------+
| 2011-09-01 00:00:00                               |

Which makes it the first day of the next month.

Lawyers and Politicians. Yyyeeeaaahhhh...