I guess if I store my clothes in a closet, it's no longer a "closet," but a "closet with clothes in it." And really, it's gonna be filled with the same atmosphere as the rest of the house even before I unpack my pants. Probably dust, too. At least if I go on like this for long enough, my wife will put my things away just to get me to shut up.

Next up in our quest to solve the world's semantic quibbles: is it a metric system if it isn't SI?

Discuss among yourselves.

That's pretty much the extent of intelligent conversation we can have on this subject. Everything else is just bitching about terms becoming generic without our personal permission or whether descriptive terms should be allowed to become proper nouns -- also without out personal permission..

Well, I guess you're mean, rash, socially awkward, or some combination of those. I was referring to the situations I'd witnessed myself that had some similarity to the situation in TFA, not TFA guy. Seeing as I was suggesting a similar situation with a possible non-criminal explanation, whereas TFA guy admitted to doing it deliberately, I didn't think it was confusing.

Or maybe you just read my comment too quickly before posting.

I've seen more than one shop where some vital/important system required the personal intervention of one particular guy to get up and going again in the event that something needed to be reset/rebooted/repaired. I don't believe it was malice, just incompetence, overconfidence, understaffing or some combination that resulted in a plausibly deniable deadman switch.

Contact lenses? Lucky you. I thought I was saving money by getting Google Lasik.

Yes we did.

If you think that's good, try adding a shot of espresso, chocolate syrup and a Xanax.

Save your money. If you want it, you can probably pick up a cheap copy at your local thrift store.

Sure. That is in fact one of the reasons that people establish governments in the first place: to keep other people socially constrained to a certain minimal level of acceptable behavior and to sanction those who do not comply. In the case of the US, the Preamble to the Constitution clearly states this as a goal: "We the people of the United States, in order to [among other things] . . . insure domestic tranquility . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

What those behavior standards are and what sanctions can be applied reflect the society that establishes the government.

In the Weev case, I think society's expectations and the government's implementation of those expectations don't really work that well for anyone. We've got a guy with personality, psychological and social problems that make him prone to bad behavior. They also make him rather thoroughly unlikable. So when he does commit a crime, his punishment is at least as much -- IMO -- for his unlikability and society's distaste for mental illness as it is for the actual crime committed. And for his punishment we choose the one thing that will certainly make him worse: increased, extreme isolation and other abusive treatment. To not expect him to come out worse than he went in is pure delusion. But this time it's society's delusion, not Weev's.

The obvious strawman response to this is something along the lines of: "So, Rob, we should just let him get away with anything because he's 'sick'?" To which I have no response, because it's a strawman.

My point is if we wanted to find a way to make a bad situation like this worse, it's hard to imagine how we'd do it more effectively. It's unfortunate for all of us that this is the best we've got.

When you buy hardware as a service, I guess you should expect that your hardware could fail if the service goes away for whatever reason. The problem is, the hardware isn't advertised as "working until we brick it, which may be sooner than you think". The more this happens, the more consumers will demand a firmer guarantee. Or balk at "smart" stuff altogether. Or at least expensive "smart" stuff.

My Mom had a "Memory Frame" that used a 3rd party service to display pictures from Flickr, facebook, etc. Actually, I guess it would be a "4th party" since this was an online intermediary between the frame and the social sites. The fine print on the box implied those features would only work as long as the service existed, but to the casual reader that seemed to imply that if, e.g., facebook disappeared, then so would the pics. Well sure, you think, can't see your facebook stuff if facebook goes away. Fair enough. The intermediary service was only disclosed in the fine print of the "agreement" in the user manual sealed in the box. Users complaining on the Toshiba forums were advised that the company had a right to shut it down at any time: "just look at the fine print as you'll see we're right!"

So I'm resistant to getting a smart TV, or a smart door lock or a smart thermostat, and not just for security reasons. When you buy a product like that in the "durable goods" category, you expect it to have a working lifespan worthy of being called a durable good. Not to have to call the HVAC guy in the middle of the night in sometime January because Google discontinues Nest support and your thermostat is now just a piece of decor.

I'm in! Why not? I can't wait for that settlement when I get 47 cents off my next eBay invoice. Or 0.2% of my seller fees charged from July 1, 1998 to August 27th, 2004 refunded to my account if I have the documentation to prove it.

I don't get it. Why? How do you buy or sell stuff with fake info? Of if you don't buy or sell stuff, why create a login at all? Can't one browse through listings all they want without an account?

So you can read stuff from the future, but instead of checking lottery results or the Daily Racing Form, you're reading your eBay messages?