McDonalds is running a giveaway billed as a “thank you to our customers”. If you read the fine print in the advertisement, it turns out this giveaway is a settlement to a lawsuit. Here’s the allegation made in the complaint: The Complaint alleges that Plaintiffs and Class Members, were deprived of the chance to win certain prizes offered as part of McDonald’s Promotional Games, as advertised and promoted by Defendants. Specifically, the Complaint alleges that the promotional games were a sham because Jerome Jacobson, an employee of Simon Marketing, Inc., the company retained by McDonald’s Corporation to administer the promotional games, and others unrelated to defendants Simon Marketing, Inc. or McDonald’s Corporation, rigged the games by misappropriating many of the winning game prizes totaling at least $20 million. ...

Georgia is considering an e-Lottery because, according to the sponsor, “We’re trying to target a market that may not be part of the lottery now – techies or professional people tied to computers all day.” I’ve always been taught that lotteries are a tax on people who don’t understand probabilities. Perhaps the reason professional people don’t play the lottery is that they understand it is not a good investment.

Psst… want to be terrified? Take a look at this. It’s this guy exploring the worst case scenario of what happens when we run out of oil. It goes as far as cannibalism! Real end-of-the-world stuff. At some point, it’s not terrifying anymore, because clearly the guy’s just off his rocker, right? OK, now go read some of the writing here, which is a group of reputable experts discussing the same thing and coming to the same conclusions. ...

Another take on DRM. We come at the issue from different points of view, and end up at the same place: just wanting to make unencumbered MP3’s to work around the whole thing.

Today I came up with a vegetarian food that doesn’t exist, and probably should not exist. Vegetarian procuitto could be simulated with heavily processed and colored shitake mushrooms. It would be called “pro-shit-o”. Cue rimshot…

It’s 2004 for God’s sake. Why do idiots still insist on putting URL’s in plain text in a web page, so that I have to copy it and paste it into my URL bar? Is it because they are afraid I won’t come back to their website, and want to dissuade me from visiting the other website? If that is really their attitude, I want to run away screaming from them anyway. ...

The iPod, WMA, and DRM get Scobleized. The point he makes is that having many players available to you is important because once you commit to buying media locked up via DRM, you are locked in to whatever platforms support the kind of DRM your content uses. The problem with that argument is that I don’t accept the premise that content I buy should be locked up. I am responsible in the way I use and distribute digital music files. I do not share them more than I shared CD’s when I used to use them. My behavior might not be squeaky clean to the letter of the law, but I’m certain that I am not sharing my digital content more than the industry was able to bear in the early 90’s. But in order to exercise the same rights I used to enjoy with content I bought, I need it to be unlocked. ...

Wow, is this list of “Ten Reasons RSS is not ready for Primetime” clueless. He makes some fair points. But out of the ten, these are either simply false, irrelevant, or seriously debatable: 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10. I’m not going to rebut them one at a time, because I expect others to jump down his throat for me.

Turns out plants are thinking too. So there’s only one non-sentient food product left on the planet: Right-wing Republican Ribs! Finger lickin’ good. (And if you happen to get Rush’s ribs, you’ll get a nice buzz from the residual oxycontin.) Seriously, this is neat stuff. It is further proof that cellular automata are a critical part of the working of the world. Far from being simply a mathematical curiousity, they appear to be the mechanism by which complex behavior emerges from simple systems. ...

This posting reminded me of something I discovered last night. When you make a toll-free call to a US number using FWD, the ANI (if you’re not a telco guru, think “Caller ID”) shows up as a fixed number. This fixed number has nothing to do with your FWD account number, and it is the same for all FWD member who make outbound calls to toll free numbers. As a result, if you call a service which is personalized based on your ANI (like Tellme) you get whatever personalization someone else set up, or worse, other people can mess with your settings. ...