emulation on a VM farm.

There is also the non-insignificant security risk of sending all that to and from wherever your farm is and the security on the farm itself.

Exactly this.

A similar example I hit recently (although an admittedly lower end product than a fridge). Logitech HD TV Skype camera.
http://support.logitech.com/en...

Came out in 2012 or there abouts. I purchased a couple in 2014 and had good use for them. Then early last year (2016) they fail at "checking internet connectivity" stage of log-in to skype. On any wireless or wired network.

Turns out the camera is stupidly hard coded (firmware) to ping test skype.com at this step. No response means failed internet connectivity stage, no way past that step, non functioning camera. Skype had decided to configure skype.com to stop responding to ping requests (as they can do, it's their site not logitechs. Who knows, maybe they were sick of being flooded with ping requests from some other companies cameras for no good reason).

Logitech don't sell the camera anymore, so no firmware upgrade to fix it forthcoming. Fixable by hacking around with your DNS settings on your router (if your router allows it), or some other non-trivial networking hack in order to trick your camera into thinking it is on the internet when it is already on the fucking internet.

Logitech also went through a very helpful stage of removing all references to this problem, including customer documented workarounds, from their community support forums in an effort to sweep it under the carpet. They leave them up nowadays which is the very least that they could do seeing as it was their short sighted design decision that caused the issue in the first place.
https://community.logitech.com...

Welcome to the future traveller. Lightbulbs have had wifi and/or bluetooth connectivity for years.

New plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environment crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires and oil companies.

**shamelessley stolen from a bunch of places online**

Tomacco might work.

that's just a side-effect of the chemtrails.

Then he should have the integrity to say so rather than claim that he doesn't have the power to grant a pardon when he knows full well that he can.

I agree completely, it's sad to see that the puppets are either swamping the moderator controls or worse still, actually influencing real moderators and commentators to the point that anti-AGW appears to be the more popular stance even on slashdot.

Also, I don't believe industry is going to be able to deny AGW forever. I'd bet that industry heads are doing everything they can to kick the can down the road so that by the time the evidence is truly overwhelming they (as individuals) have collected their bonuses and are out of the picture in terms of personal prosecution so that it is their future replacements who are left standing when the music stops.

It's publicly available is not a good argument or excuse to vacuum it all up and analyse/monitor childrens social media.

Helpful in an active shooter scenario? If your incidence of active shooter scenarios are so high as to make this a significant reason to spy on kids then maybe spend the money to actually solve the active shooter problem.

It could pick up cries for help or threats of self harm/harming others...There is a cost to benefit judgement here that I feel the cost (kids privacy) is way too high but YMMV.

The NSA and whoever else do worse so why not have schools do a subset on students is a terrible reason.

A covert surveillance tool monitoring your nations children operated by police liaison stationed on school grounds.
For their own safety of course. (Well "mostly" for their safety. No mention of what the other motivations might be).

This isn't a slippery slope. This is halfway down the mountain heading for a cliff sliding at full speed.

Do people really choose an SUV so that if they crash into a smaller car they will be better off than the people in the smaller car?
Maybe some people do. I'm sure for most it is due to things like a) more room for passengers+luggage b) higher ride height for visibility c) "offroad" capability (whether that actually gets used or not) etc.

Don't you hate it when you are stuck using grep to find things?

It would be so much quicker if you could just use windows search. Someone should create a windows search emulator for unix.

Drones mostly.