Man allegedly burgles home after cancelling Airbnb reservation
mountainviewpoliceblog.com
mountainviewpoliceblog.com
A nice couple from the other side of the world stayed with us for the weekend. When they left I noticed they had taken six Intermec Windows CE warehouse scanners with them. I'd been working from home for a bit so that why I had them, I was updating the software to work with our new ERP system.
They were backpacking so I'm not too sure what they planned to do with them. These devices are hard to hide and they didn't take the charging cradles.
I had to pay to replace them out of my own pocket as our home insurance wouldn't cover work owned items.
We also reported them to Couchsurfing who seemed completely disinterested.
Copying a key takes 2 seconds and costs less than a dollar. Giving your keys to someone is a huge security risk.
1. Wander around the store finding someone who looks like they know how to copy a key
2. Follow them awkwardly while they finish helping someone else
3. Watch them wander through all the key templates to find the right one.
4. 20 seconds into the first attempt he notices a deformity and starts over.
5. 11 seconds into the second attempt, the key catches and goes soaring majestically across the store.
6. 53 seconds into the third attempt you finally have your key.
7. Discover you forgot your wallet.
Still a bigger security risk than having digital lock doors.
I don't think they'll need to game the system with fake reviews for a long time.
This is odd advice. Essentially: "lock your stuff up in a safe but that's likely not sufficient."
In fact, it's absolutely not sufficient because safes are rated based on how long it takes to get into them. If the thief is renting out a place which has the safe they'll get into it, especially since most people following the advice to lock their stuff up in a safe are likely not going to purchase anything stronger than a consumer grade safe, all of which tend to be fairly trivial to break into either covertly or through brute force given sufficient time.
The better advice would be to not leave anything of value, period. A safe isn't going to save your stuff.
I tend to ignore these types of news articles, of the format: "[Pokemon Go/AirBnB/Uber/New Thing] used in crime!". Crime remains the same, the landscape and tools change. Crime rates have been dropping for decades, and continue to fall, new technologies are not bringing in a new crimewave, although you wouldn't know it from reading some news sources.
There's been no lack of articles about burglars using social media sites to find empty homes, google "facebook burglary tips" (sans quotes) for lots of examples.
A burglar burgled burghul and burghul burgled by a burglar
Say it three times without fumbling, you'd get a free tasty bowl of burghul.[1]
[1]: http://media.rd.com/rd/images/rdc/books/cut-your-cholesterol...
That car looked so tempting, so easy to drive / Just like that apartment that you burglarized
I thought the songwriter had invented the word to make the rhyming work. I couldn't believe it the first time I saw it in a serious context.
I normally find it pretty tiresome when Brits get all snooty about Americanisms (getting rid of all those redundant 'u's was a good idea!). But "burglarized" just sounds ridiculous.
Could be worse - at least we weren't told that the person cancellized the accommodation they'd previously reservized on AirBnB.
It's part of the "police bureaucratic mentality" to Latinize and inflate common concepts to make them sound more important (to uneducated ears, at least).
Americans - You can do a similar structure with any word that has noun/verb forms if you want to imagine how dumb we sound to other English speakers.
"Sure was exciting to watch Phelps swimmerize that last race!"
A burglar burglarizes, i.e. commits the act of burglary.
A sodomist sodomizes, i.e. commits the act of sodomy.
I'm sure there are other examples.
Following that pattern, I guess to burglarize something is to make it more burglared, rather than just the act of burgling it.
It's a strange linguistic distinction to make. Take a house that's not burgled and make it burgled. Why we talk about it that way instead of just using the normal verb "burgled" I have no idea.
You would not, to take the example from above, say that Michael Phelps had made a race more swum. You'd just say he swam it.
No it doesn't, the sense of increasing a preexisting quality is not what -ize does. It just makes verbs.
To fossilize isn't to make more like a fossil; dinosaurs were alive in the beginning.
To agonize is to experience and exhibit agony.
To hospitalize isn't to make someone more so in a hospital, but to put them there in the first place.
"burgle" isn't the normal verb, both "burgle" and "burglarize" emerged at about the same point. Two different ways of turning an old noun "burglar" into a verb.
I didn't mean to imply that it started with some non-zero amount, but I thought "make something X" wasn't as clear. At any rate, I think it's fair to say that something fossilized is more like a fossil than it was before it got fossilized.
> "burgle" isn't the normal verb, both "burgle" and "burglarize" emerged at about the same point. Two different ways of turning an old noun "burglar" into a verb.
One of those ways matches the pattern used for any profession word ending in "er" or "or" (swimmer, actor, etc). The other is a silly exception in a language that already has plenty. All I'm saying is that every other English speaking country did it the sensible way, and I like that way better.
I've never heard anybody say "beggarized", so at least we did the sane thing with that one.
-er comes to English from germanic languages
Burglar is a loan word from French, directly. It doesn't use -er/-ar/-or. It might seem like that... and that's why "burgle" was created, but "burgle" isn't the "normal" word, it was created to follow a common pattern in English, but -ize is just as valid and is very old.
It's no silly exception, it's just how words are used.
No one would say beggarized, because beg is already the root word. "burgle" wasn't already a root word. It seems like it might have been but it wasn't.
English is a collection of strange linguistic distinctions.
Following the pattern of compatible/incompatible, I might be surprised by the meanings of flammable and inflammable.