Anyone know how to disable a track pad?

Question

I and several others have problems with erratic track pad behavior, and the posts I've seen over the past couple of months haven't gotten any effective replies.
The cursor behavior is the same as if you were using a mouse and the left button sticks on; you can jiggle it off with an amount of effort that's unacceptable for routine use and it usually sticks again immediately. If I plug in a mouse, the same problems remain, which I interpret as meaning that the trackpad malfunction keeps the cursor control in the "left-button-on" state and the mouse input is just an additional signal.
Others who have reported similar trackpad problems also say their problems continue when using mice or external trackpads. I'm 99% sure that if communication between trackpad and processor is shut off, the mouse will control the cursor normally.
I don't see anything in the System Preferences to do this, can it be done from the Console?

Answer 1

That would imply that there are human-based reasons for the constant relocation of setting controls from version to version of applications and operating systems. It would be satisfying to believe this, just as it used to be nice to anticipate Santa's presents and Easter eggs. This does not seem consistent with these bizarre alterations in Apple software, however, and if you look at the revision patterns for software from a certain firm in the state of Washington, you will see that human decision making processes cannot explain the patterns for the extremely large number of "snipe hunt" events reported by users. One disturbing hypothesis is that the code modifying entities may have entered from an adjacent multidimensional universe and are slipping up by assuming that we can see links in orthogonal space. It goes without saying that I have a bad feeling about this. Where's the Doctor? We may need him.