I, on the other hand, agree with the permanent ban. Certainly, telling someone to jump off a bridge is not the same as pushing them off; however, Baconizer was in a position in which he purposefully appeared helpful and caring to an unlearned victim; his responses appeared quite authentic and useful after the string of spammy responses. Users are more willing to trust the first or second person to come to their rescue. "Oh! He posted something nice and helpful! He must be a good person!", etc. He misused this trust.
Oh, to be sure, I enjoy the thought of telling people to go rm -rf / themselves as root, or stuff a format c: up their ass. However, actually doing it is a different matter. There are times where I would love nothing more than to get rid of people permanently, with a wonderful touch of irony to grace their own self-activated doom. However...having lost data in real life (Mostly my own fault, not watching what working directory is active, etc), I can safely say that telling someone to `rm -rf` their entire hard drive(s) is a very, very cruel thing to do; I would be hard pressed to think of someone that would actually deserved it.
Except, perhaps, Baconizer.
How'd you like to lose everything on your computer, N-Ron? Your documents? Your schoolwork? Your art? Your savegames, your applications, your programming projects? your 3d models, your maps, your textures, your sounds, desktop images, games, photographs, videos, schedules, notifications, saved e-mails, individual settings and profiles, any backups stored on one of your local drives, music, literature, end-of-the-semester thesis, your porn?
Everything?
Don't give me any crap about Aussie's computer being only 'partially' destroyed; Windows installations are almost always all-or-nothing in terms of workability, and there's a good chance that not all of his data (if any) can be recovered.
What Baconizer did is wrong, and he is paying for it.
Whooops, ben beat me to the punch. Here, hold still, I have no qualms about giving someone the slipper while he's down...