Generally, this tracking is justified as "non-identifying". To be valuable to the mall owners and retailers, they track IDs as they move around, so they can provide insight like "people who shop at the Dizzknee store are more likely to cross the mall for a cookie", and "72% of shoppers walked past location X, place advertising there." And state DOTs are using such systems to track traffic flows and speeds. The data does have legitimate uses.

But what they don't generally advertise is that a single act of correlation to an ID identifies all that person's past behavior. While it may not matter much to my privacy if they send me a coupon for The Cookie Shop, it will matter greatly if that ID is used elsewhere. "Hi, I'm from LIZARD insurance, and we see you drive through tough neighborhoods on the way to work every day. Here's your high-risk rate hike."

Maybe, maybe not. Congress is saying "Since charities like food shelves and food banks take care of feeding people in trouble, we are cutting funding to food assistance programs." Never mind that people need food shelves because their assistance programs were reduced by the very same Congress.

They're outsourcing assistance programs and the only funding comes from donations. If people and corporations don't get tax exemptions for their donations, they won't donate as much. Many of the already stretched thin food banks would close, and the rest would have to cut back on their assistance. The resulting crisis might spark enough outrage to require restoration of the assistance programs.

But yeah, when it comes to religious organizations, they should be taxed exactly like nightclubs. They behave the same: mood lights, candles, music, ritualized dancing, ringing bells, drinking wine, their customers dress up for the occasion, and they're filled with people talking about unbelievable nonsense. The primary difference is that one of them cards you at the door.

All they needed was some marketing. If only they had called themselves SkyDrive, or OneDrive, or iCloud...

Extra? Do you know how washing machines were controlled before they were built with computer controls? There was a clock motor and clockwork gears driving a shaft with notched cam disks, and a series of cam following microswitches that opened and closed based on timing. When certain steps in the cycle needed more precise timing, a gear driven mechanism would speed up the camshaft.

Don't get me wrong, these devices were really cool mechanisms. But they had their limits. They could not adjust water levels by sensing the size of the loads, so they wasted water. They could not measure the outflow to know when they no longer needed to spin, so they wasted energy. This complicated mechanism cost a lot to make. And each individual component had a higher failure rate over time than a microcontroller. With an array of sensors and an intelligent controller, they can now be made cheaper, more durable, and more efficient. That's the point.

Millions of customers have already disagreed with you. Their devices are already connected to the internet, and the number is growing rapidly.

This is actually good news for you. That means the chances are very good that sometime in 2024 when your neighbor's house starts playing dub-step at max volume at 3AM, you can wake up, run to Slashdot and post "I told you so."

In the meantime, those millions of other people will have been saving energy, time, and money for a decade with their smart houses. But it will all be worth it, because you got to say "I told you so back in 2014."

I'm glad to know your toaster won't ever post "golden brown" to your Facebook page, but your opinion won't slow down the growth of the interconnected device market.

Now get off my lawn, because I'm watching you remotely with my cameras, and I'm about to turn on the sprinklers with my phone.

Nope. The $5 an hour waiter uses the battery powered skimmer that he has in his pocket, and sells them to Jimmy the Sneak out the back door of the restaurant. Writing the numbers takes too long, and he could get caught.

Physically, you can steal one box at a time, perhaps 1000 receipts. And the thief must be physically present, and risk his ass getting caught doing so.

Electronically, you can sit in Odessa, Ukraine, and steal 44 million accounts from every cash register at a major retailer. And the thief risks absolutely nothing, because his government is too busy fighting the Russian separatists who have taken over City Hall.

See the difference?

Libel laws have much tighter requirements in the case of a "public figure", where actual financial harm has to be proven. The (real) mayor can't simply claim "his false statements made me embarrassed, so I want $10,000 in pain and suffering", he has to show real losses, as in "when he claimed I smoked crack, my boss filled out an HR form that said they had to fire me because they couldn't have a drug user driving forklifts, so I was fired, and lost $10,000 in wages."

Apparently it's illegal in the same places where carriage returns, line feeds, paragraphs, and coming to a logical conclusion are illegal, too.

Whoosh.

I don't want any of my money going to Faux News or any other Murdoch property. Without a la carte pricing, a portion of my cable bill funds those bastards. Today I can't change that unless I drop cable entirely, which means giving up Game of Thrones, so screw that.

Do you see manufacturers of the future attempting to put restrictions on hardware hacking, either more technical or legal? Will manufacturers order CPUs without I2C pins, or toy drones with UEFI secure boot operating systems? Have other countries put restrictions on hardware hacking that have affected you?

Umm...no. Cash takes considerably longer to tender than credit. The customer takes time selecting the bills and coins, the cashier takes time counting it, then enters the amount in the cash register, and after the till opens, they have to count out the customer's change. This takes an average of about 16 seconds per transaction.

A credit transaction today is a swipe of a card, and can be processed and authorized in under one second.

Chip and PIN is not as fast as a magnetic stripe due to the very limited CPU doing the encryption, the slow data transfer rates to and from the card, the time spent by the customer entering their PIN, and the awkward handling sequence of insert card, key PIN, wait for authorizing, remove card. While not as slow as cash, it is nowhere near as fast as credit.

After the sale, cash continues to be expensive for a retailer to handle. After collecting it all day in a till, the cashier has to count it, bag it, and turn it in to the office. The office people count it again with a machine, and store it in a safe. Periodically the safe has to be emptied and transported via armored car to a bank for deposit. They also have to buy rolled coins for making change, and distribute the coins to the tills occasionally. The tills, safes, and counting machines cost money to buy and maintain. The payroll for the cashiers, managers, and office people for time spent handling money costs money. And there is always the risk of armed robbery, which puts innocent people in harm's way.

Non-intuitively, it can cost more for a retailer to take cash than they pay in fees for using credit.

"I forgot I was carrying it" is simply the most common excuse given by people caught with them, and is not necessarily the actual reason.

It's not like the game taught him to hack.