Word: harmless
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Peace virus capped a series of outbreaks that began last December, when a seemingly harmless Christmas greeting appeared mysteriously on terminals connected to a worldwide network owned and operated by IBM. Users who followed the instructions on the screen and typed the word Christmas inadvertently triggered a virus-like self-replicating mechanism, sending an identical copy of the original program to every name on their personal electronic mailing lists. In a matter of days, clones of the tiny program had multiplied in such profusion that they clogged the 350,000-terminal network like so many hairs in a bathtub drain...
When reports surfaced in the early 1980s that cocaine use by pregnant women could cause serious physical and mental impairment to their newborns, it was another warning that the snowy white drug was not as harmless as some believed. Doctors found that cocaine, like heroin and alcohol, could be passed from the user-mother to the fetus with disastrous results. Since then the epidemic of cocaine-afflicted babies has only become worse. The main reason: growing numbers of women are using crack, the cheap and readily available purified form of cocaine that plagues America's inner cities and has spread...
...excited about the prospect of having him in the cabinet. What to do? Create a positon where he could, under the auspices of the government, travel from school to school, reminding students to put "hope in their brains" instead of "dope in their veins." It would be harmless...
...flights like the 655, which must have appeared on U.S. radar screens hundreds of times before? The answer seems to be simply that nobody thought it necessary to do so. The Navy is just not used to operating in the half-war, half-peace atmosphere of the gulf, where harmless passengers and deadly enemies all whizz through the same cramped airspace. The Aegis system is designed for the open seas, where Pentagon planners mistakenly thought that wars would be fought...
...Representative Raymond ("La La") Lalonde introduced his bill to allow Cajuns to qualify for minority-set-aside contracts awarded by the state. Amid the bread-and-circuses atmosphere of Louisiana politics, Lalonde's crusade to "enhance the status of the French Acadian people" was seen as a bit of harmless posturing for his constituents. But then the Cajun legislators flexed their political muscle, and the bill sailed through the state house by a vote of 74 to 22, despite the bitter opposition of black legislators. "This is not only facetious but borders on the ludicrous," exclaimed State Representative Avery Alexander...