That's kind of my point - it already exists. And it exists on the most gullible user, cash-rich platform ever - iOS. Find My iPhone would allow an attacker to send a message to the user informing him or her of a complete wipe of their data unless they paid up. These are folks who would have no idea if they've backed up their phone or not, and even if they had half of them done' know how to reinstall what they lost. Tens of millions of phones with owners who would drop $100 in a heartbeat not to lose their friends texts or pictures of their grandkids. And yet it's not happening.

Surely the physicists should have just made their grad students move them?

How many iPhones and Android devices are currently being remotely wiped? I ask because both have the feature to do so currently.

You do realize that both Android and iOS have this feature baked in, right? You can remotely wipe your phone, and with a court order the police can coerce you to do it as well (if you worry about such things). All that's required is the device lock, which is fairly trivial given the propensity for modders to brick phones accidentally.

They both do. How else do you account for all the rotational energy which spawns tornadoes in the middle of the country?

Too expensive? Because otherwise it's the perfect, self contained sensor and communication platform for a wide variety of initiation options.

The top 1% don't earn money either, they merely collect it. And yet that cash spends just as easily (even more easily, some might say) as someone who worked for the money.

$70k is the standard repair fee for prosthetics not covered under an Applecare agreement.

Or pay 3x restitution on the retail value of the item stolen, and subject the engineer who designed such a foolish interface requirement to the 100 lashes and year of hard labor. That would seem a great deal more in line with the crime here.

After getting a quote from the dealers to get a lost key replaced for all three cars on my keyring (which dissappeared), I wondered if it wouldn't just be cheaper to have the cars towed away and re-buy new ones. (The prices ranged from $150-$275 EACH to have them replaced)

Well, we're at least half in agreement. Our brains are programmed to favor dietary items which are high in fat and high in saccarides, Which isn't surprising as we evolved to survive, and high caloric intake was valuable in survival. We've just gotten smart enough not to need such a large volume of input to produce the energy we need to survive. All the processed sugars and fat which are bad for us (well, most of them) exist in exactly the same form in paleolithic era foods - they're just not surrounded by indigestible fibers.

tl;dr If people would stop eating so fucking much and get out and exercise this probably wouldn't be an issue.

Wow, been saving that one up for a while 'eh?

..Chipotle.

Wish I had mod points for this. This is exactly the situation that crosses over. The idea of AirBNB was you rent out your personal, surplus space. If you've got more than a single living unit on an ongoing basis, it's not surplus private living space.

I think you may have just hit on the next advertising masterpiece:

I expect a roach free room and a mechanically sound taxi.
For everyone else, there's Lyft and AirBNB.