I also think "I could care less" is dumb. I just wanted to point out how zero is not always the lower limit, because obviously this is an important topic to many a Slashdotter.

Frankly, if you mean "I don't care", then by all means say so, there's no need to put it in any fancier terms. Especially when you get it wrong, which is what frequently occurs whilst endeavouring to overliteralize, perchance even hypercorrect matters.

Of course, if you actually say "I don't care about $x", there's still a non-zero level of caring. If you genuinely don't care, you won't even think about it, you just walk away.

Not caring would mean a care level of zero. "I could not care less" implies the impossibility of going below zero.

To get over this endless debate, we just need to define "care" properly. To me, "care" is a positive thing with an obvious negative. Say you walk past a kid who is sitting there and crying. If you care, you ask them what's wrong and offer help. If you don't care, you keep walking. You can easily go below this zero level of caring, for example by beating them up or molesting them. Of course, some people may interpret this as a kind of caring -- i.e. taking interest. In this case, we would have to consider "care" as the absolute value, thus legitimizing the impossibility of going below zero.

So far, the options are basically between a real number and a non-negative real. It's really (heh) as far as you can go, because e.g. complex numbers don't have the concept of less or more. Nevertheless, for another fancy insult you might as well say your care level for them is imaginary.

Good point, I'm mainly speaking against terms like gaming and gamification. They sound like we need "adult" terms to experience child-like wonder, because we can't admit actually doing/enjoying anything child-like. Also, things like education should be playful and open-minded to begin with, while "gamification" tries to take this boring old education, and make it into another product in a box.

When I was a wee lad, we called it "playing a game". And we liked it!

Later, some of us (a) grew up and quit playing, while others (b) keep on playing, not "a game", but their entire lives, the society and the world. I guess option (c) is gaming, where you can't decide whether to grow up, so you maintain a grown-up facade while consuming game entertainment marketed for grownups.

Look at the original post. It is a class-action.

Interesting. This reminds me of some current news sites that are paywalled by CSS, and everything is readable when you disable CSS.

Whoa. At first I thought you meant stoned as in a spiritual state, and only then I recalled that Brian movie.

(If a man lies with a man as with a woman, they both must be stoned... :-P)

Maybe all those uncashed checks are $ 2.56 each, from Dr. Knuth.

OMG, so that's why they named her Penny, rather than something like Trillian.