Since you know so much about me, you know that our weather actually changes from day to day, sometimes even in the same 24-hour period. I've even checked the weather, wanted to hear the news headlines of the hour, and set a tea timer within mere minutes of each other. Craziness, I know!

We don't actually walk by the switches for the lights in question. One is mounted in an area that's inaccessible because the refrigerator we installed is larger than ones the kitchen was designed for in 1963. I installed a Lutron switch with a remote control that's affixed to the front of the fridge with a magnet. Call it laziness, poor kitchen design, or whatever...it works (very well) for us and we like it.

Yes, actually. I don't have to get out , wake it from sleep, then launch or navigate to . Our local newspaper isn't worth the price of the paper it's printed on, so I simply say "Alexa, what's in the news?" while making my tea or coffee and she plays the briefing within 3 seconds.

My "excuses" are simply my use cases. It's a convenience for us and it was well worth the $99 they were charging for the Echo at the time. It's not quite the impulse buy it used to be at its current price point, but if mine were to die out of warranty, I'd likely replace it with another.

Nah, we use our "secure room" in the basement for all of our plotting and conniving.

Okay, I'll bite. My girlfriend and I use Echo several times a day, every day. Whether it's to ask the forecast for that day or the next, to set a timer for tea, to turn the lights on/off when we walk into the kitchen (where our Echo lives), or for the latest news brief from NPR and BBC (though you can set different ones). I've also used it for unit conversions while cooking or baking and it's used fairly frequently for playing Pandora stations or something from Amazon's music service since it's actually got a very nice speaker built into it.

I find it much, much more reliable than Siri (which is disappointing, being an Apple user) and fairly close to Google's Now as far as speed and accuracy. They're constantly adding new features and send an email every Friday letting you know what's new and how to use it.

...you must be the one sleeping. Under a rock.

...turn signals, mirrors, and a working horn.

Not even that. They held a lottery for registered developers and gave the winning developers a developer kit. As a registered developer who was not selected for the lottery, I cannot even buy an early-access unit.

iFixIt signed up for that lottery and was picked to receive a developer kit. I remember when I signed up for the same kit, I did a very cursory skimming of the NDA and it was pretty explicitly stated that I wasn't allowed to publicly publish pictures or even publicly discuss the unit/software.

And it seems that 225,000 people did the first part, but just left the lock off their door and didn't bother installing a new lock.

It's Chip. Chip Douglas.

He asked you to explain how it works, not how Apple is wrong in their explanation. Explain how it works, I'm genuinely curious. And please, feel free to dumb it down for my idiot brain; be as condescending as you like.

Are you speaking from experience? I own 5 Nest devices (4 Protects and a thermostat) and haven't had a problem with any of them (outside of short connectivity outages with the thermostat - which continued working normally, otherwise.) I've owned the thermostat since Christmas of 2011 and the Protects much less time (4 months), but have yet to experience a problem (and hopefully won't when I need it most.)

I'm not in an extreme climate where I am, but we see temps ranging from slightly below freezing to over 100F. There's generally a lot of complaining online when Nest has an outage, but I can deal with not being able to adjust my thermostat remotely during those short periods of time. I've never had a false alarm on my Protects, but I recognize they had some issues early on.

That's not to say that people haven't had problems, but it's not an "endless shitstorm of problems" for everyone.

Never thought I'd see a Lagwagon song posted on slashdot.

Well turn it up, man!

Sorry, I'm just having flashbacks of the Freedom Rock commercial.

Since your dictionary is broken and mine is not:

obduction |bdkt()n| noun [ mass noun ] Geology
the sideways and upwards movement of the edge of a crustal plate over the margin of an adjacent plate. the granitic magmas formed when the ophiolite complex was obducted onto the continental margin.

I remember spending a solid 24 hours playing Myst for the Mac when I was in high school and it remains my absolute favorite game of all time. I opted for the $75 level on Kickstarter. The enjoyment I got out of Myst is worth it even if this game is somehow horrible.

Oh yeah, seemed to work well for Motorola, they sold tens of hundreds of Atrix phones!

And don't forget the wildly popular Asus PadFone products.