A man wins $102,000 in a slot machine, the casino scratches it’s head, calls it a computer malfunction (as the slot machine wasn’t set to pay out!) and instead gives the man two dinner tickets. Isn’t gambling supposed to be a game of chance? In other words, give the Philadelphia Park Casino a miss.

Illegal bars – in sheds, houses, etc. where people come to drink and smoke… This unlicenced drinking leads to more drink driving and more drinking under minors.

Novell claims that SCO is going down, and seeing as all of SCO’s intellectual property is actually licenced from Novell, they want all the money SCO owes them before SCO goes bust as a result of frivolous lawsuits.

Yet again a big database has been compromised – the US Secure Flight Database was accedentally opened up to an organisation that wasn’t supposed to have acces. Why do people insist that this won’t happen or that it’s somehow safe to have huge amounts of personal data in one place?

That PC has come to this: Academics for Academic Freedom (AFAF) is pissed off with how if academic research stirs controversy for some reason and challenges conventional wisdom, disciplinary action (eg. firing) is being taken against the academic who voiced the research. I thought the whole point of research was to challenge accepted wisdom, otherwise [...]

They own a fair chunk of YouTube – and got that chunk just scant hours before the sale with Google was signed!

This is the in depth story of how plane spotters found out about the secret CIA flights / torture taxis to detainee prisons based in Europe.

Yes, the USA will have all your passenger data. Untill June 2007, when they’ll “renegotiate”. Well done on the crumpling front, Europe.

Yet again there will be a bill in the EU parliament for software patents, but there has been some sort of compromise which means it’s likely to be ratified this time. Just what the compromise is, I can’t really find out, except that it seems to make lawsuits on patent infringements more expensive, meaning IMHO [...]

IBM sees flaws in the patent system, which is remarkable considering it’s the largest patent holder in the world. They will post their applications on the web before acceptance, considering that technological advance is preferable to stagnancy and they will oppose any non technological advancing patent. Good stuff IBM!

Limewire is slamming the RIAA with antitrust, consumer violations and other misconduct lawsuits. Good luck boys!

Earlier the Belgian SWIFT concern got into a muddle by stating that it had allowed the U.S. access to SWIFT transfer information based on warrants issued by the U.S., but refused to show the EU which warrants had been issued. They basically just maintained they had done nothing wrong and that was that. Now it [...]

This is an interesting A – Z on how retail stores make you stay in their stores longer and buy more. It’s not complete (such as it not having anything about the most expensive goods being on the right of the isle and the cheapest being on the bottom left), but it has a whole [...]

The UK is on guard after a huge database containing loads of trivial details of everyone under 18 and accessible to around 400,00 people is called ‘unsafe’ – duh. At the same time the US is parading it’s huge counter terrorism database – which no one will ever hack. Really. You’d have thought they’d have [...]

One complaint is all it took for Turner to review Tom and Jerry cartoons and decide to edit out most instances of them smoking. This really reminds me of the good old Stalinist days where Trotsky and any other ex-ranking member who had displeased the iron man was edited out of any movies or photographs [...]

Well done, Tammie Marson fought the giants and won! She claims that allthough there were illegal files on her computer that had been downloaded over her internet connection, there was simply no way that they could prove it was her who had downloaded the stuff. Anyone else of the hundreds of cheerleaders that came into [...]

In an earlier post, I vented my frustrations about smoking studies – few of them are available and the ones that are are flawed: there are very few indeed with a sample size larger than 15 (which is surprising considering the millions of smokers out there) and the one (and only one!) I’ve been pointed [...]

And because their LRO rocket had quite a bit of extra space on it, they decided to crash it into the moon, causing an explosion that should create a 17 foot crater and a 30 mile high plume. Yay science!

Here we go – it’s the second time the CCTV camera’s being set up in the home surveillance capital of the world, the UK, has been caught misusing the material captured on camera. The first time the cops were watching people undress at home, now they’ve gone a step beyond and are selling footage of [...]

Which the apple founder raised by going public with a company who’s charter states that it’s a ‘blank-check’ company – ie. one that doesn’t have to do anything. Oh and on the share issue, the company has allready run a $30m profit!

The Guardian has an odd article on how the Iranians think that anything and everything that happens in their country is due to the chicanery and sly dealings of the British. This apparently is the one thing that unites all Iranians.

Well, I’ve been looking for medical proof the past 8 years that smoking really is that bad for you, but have never been able to find it – all I’ve found is conjecture, sensationalism and bad quotes by reverends and law professors. Statistical studies containing only 8 or 12 subjects are bad science, so I’ve [...]

For a secret service, it’s quite amazing how they now have a website for the world to see! Together with neat marketing corporate logo’s and all!

The Register has had a fantastic competition to use Google Earth to find weird stuff in the system – and readers have responded! 11 pages of fantastic satellite imagery…

Microsoft had nothing better to do on the 17th, so it decided to patent the address book!