i laugh at the horror of your hair-splitting, pedantic word-buffoonery, histrionic commentors!

I would be tempted to agree with Nelson.C, but no doubt that would cause a shitstorm of a shitstorm. Maybe just post an empty entry just so stoopid ppl can wail on each other about semantics.

p.s., anyone who can't infer the intrinsic meaning of "unpublish" probably isn't looking at BB for the insightful text. Perhaps more pretty unicorn pics to keep them quiet?

@quarterlyprophet #1368:
You know who else said that?* Hitler.

*though the actual words were spread out over a number of weeks.

So what's with the photo thing? I have that problem. I'm trying tiny little icons with .jpg and .gif extensions, to no avail.

One of our basic rights as human beings (and i'm not merely talking about the U.S. Constitution here) is freedom of speech, which includes freedom from speech, i.e., the right to NO expression, or the right to go back and change what we've already expressed.

In meatspace, people do this all the time. The only time anyone has a problem with it is when elected officials or corporate big-dogs do it. The fact is that Boing Boing is a blog, and even though some may consider them to be Authority Figures, and even if they themselves consider their blog to be authoritative to some degree about something, they are NOT authorities, and are NOT held to the same rules of accountability to which true authority figures are held.

The internets is a malleable, ever-changing medium, and it comes with its very own checks and balances called the Wayback Machine, Google cache, etc., in case we need to temporarily undo any undoings. All the drunken, idiotic posts/tirades i've ever made anywhere would be gone in a heartbeat if i wasn't so lazy, and i'm sure i probably did delete some of them, given the possibility and relative ease. And i fully understand that somewhere out there may already exist a more "permanent" archive that i may not have any control over.

Who really needs to dig that deeply into someone else's private life (or whatever!) to come up with a "valid" reason for Xeni doing what she did? The fact is that Xeni exercised her right to unpublish some of her material, and although it is not literally unquestionable, BB is not in any way liable or required to de-unpublish it.

So it is what it is, and people really need to talk about More Important Things starting, say, SOON.

Full disclosure: i am an avid reader of Boing Boing and a huge admirer of Violet Blue for her work in alternative sex ed. Although i have lost a little bit of respect for both BB and VB (BB for getting all weird on us, and VB for opportunistically fanning the flames while pretending like there could be no possible reason why anyone would ever take even the most passively negative action like deleting mention of (slash Yet-Another-Link-To) Poor Little Innocent Her), i honestly don't care what i think about it and will just carry on with my life like it never happened because it's such a non-issue.

Also: kudos to Xeni and Pesco et al for being exactly as transparent and open as they feel the need to be. Now please, can we finally put the lid on their [own, personal] garbage cans and get on with wonderful things?

Wow. Speaking as a huge fan of BB, VB (though decreasingly so), and the individual Boingers, i can say that

1) Boing Boing is a blog, people. Get over it.

2) I don't recall any promises ever having been made that Boingers will never ever modify any of their works nor take back anything they've said or done. That they are not always 100% perfectly perfect and their posts are not etched in granite for the rest of eternity is not a huge drawback here, especially since there are numerous sources which have archives anyway, if you really MUST have access to this material in order to survive.

3) This blog is an extension of the lives of some people who live in meatspace like the rest of us, who are imperfect like the rest of us, and who occasionally decide to hit the do-over switch like the rest of us.

4) I forgot what this one was.

5) To paraphrase Walt Whitman: BB contradicts itself? Very well then! BB are large; they contain multitudes.

Also, I can't help but wonder: are there really not more important things to debate? Really? Nothing else happening in the world right now worthy of this much pixelsteam and textfire? Really? REALLY? You people must live in a far, far blander world than i.

This sounds familiar. I work for a major online retailer, and our procedures for dealing with "missing pieces" is much the same. It sucks big time, but it makes sense in a robotic sort of way: the company doesn't want to open another set to send out parts, leaving themselves with more problems, so instead they make you trade the incomplete set for a (hopefully!) complete one. I assume that the return they get back from customers is then sent to the manufacturer/distributor/warehouse for credit.

The bottom line is that the procedure is designed to save THEM time and money, which, i suspect, makes the replacement process quicker and smoother for the customer, even if only marginally so. I still think it sucks, though.

Regarding the form e-mail... when a customer service department regularly processes thousands of e-mails a day from customers, you just have to expect that a great deal of each response is going to be cut-and-paste. They deal with a lot of the same situations over and over, and to free-write each and every bit of every response would only waste a whole hell of a lot of time for everybody... and probably delay your response by days (multiply the difference between, say, 30 seconds for pasting answers, and four or five minutes for hand-typing a whole reply, by thousands of replies). Not only that, but even the bits that ARE hand-typed will still look like forms, because responses really should look as professional as possible.

Anyway, don't feel too bad, and don't automatically assume that they're not going to take care of you, just because the return label hasn't come. Return it yourself, and tell them to just reimburse your credit card for the cost. Just make sure you use UPS or insure it, because if it gets lost en route, Westinghouse can't be held responsible. Count on it getting lost, even if it probably won't. Just cover yourself. You'll be alright.

Can't we just talk this out??!

80

Lee Gomes is apparently mixing up audio compression, which reduces the difference between loud and quiet for the purpose of sounding louder, with data compression, which removes or recalculates bits to save disk space.

Utterly shocking, date & journalistic quality notwithstanding.

zomg Old Navy SOOOOO needs to change their name to Cracker King