Ontario removes video slot machines flashing winning images

Ontario’s provincial gambling operator has pulled 87 video slot machines out of service or physically removed them from its casinos after a CBC investigation found what appear to be subliminal messages flashing at players.

A VC: The Freemium Business Model

Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

If you build it, they will come…

Java creator named to Order of Canada

The man credited with inventing the Java programming language commonly used on the World Wide Web has been appointed to the Order of Canada. James Gosling, a vice-president of Sun Microsystems Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., has been named an officer of the Order of Canada, the office of the Governor General announced on Monday. Java creator James Gosling at the Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, Calif., in 2005. Gosling is one of 29 Canadians named Officers of the Order of Canada and will receive his insignia later in 2007.

These guys think they know what the truth is.  Maybe they are right.  It is an interesting experiment, in any case.  ;-)

$5M to bring back ParticipACTION exercise program

The federal government pledged $5 million over two years Monday to renew ParticipACTION, the federal fitness-awareness campaign. Starting in the early 1970s, the non-profit agency encouraged Canadians to get fit. The program included a series of television ads that encouraged people of all ages to “keep fit and have fun.” The program ran for three decades, until its funding was cut in 2001. The federal government decided to renew ParticipACTION to help Canadians develop healthier lifestyles, said Secretary of State for Sport Helena Guergis. The focus is on kids 12 and younger, and groups at high risk, such as seniors, aboriginals and people with disabilities. The renewal of ParticiPACTION and a new website, www.HealthyCanadians.ca, were announced by Guergis, Health Minister Tony Clement and Public Works Minister Michael Fortier in Toronto and Montreal on Monday. “We all remember the ads … and so that’s the kind of thing we want to see happen again,” Clement said.

When Bill Gates and Steve Jobs agree about something…

Technology Watch » Blog Archive » Bill Gates : DRM causes too much pain for legitmate buyers

In an honest analysis of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) sector, Bill Gates conceded that DRM is causing too much pain for legitimate users and that few are satisfied with the current state.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

DEPRECATION WARNING: assert_invalid_column_on_record is deprecated and will be 
removed from Rails 2.0 (use assert(record.errors.invalid?(column)) instead)

DEPRECATION WARNING: assert_invalid_column_on_record is deprecated and will be 
removed from Rails 2.0 (use assert(find_record_in_template(key).errors.invalid?(column)) instead)

<br />assert_invalid_column_on_record "user", :password<br />

<br />assert(find_record_in_template("user").errors.invalid?(:password))<br />

java.net: Migrating from EJB 2.x to EJB 3.0

The EJB 3.0 specification makes programming much simpler. It makes the container do more work and the developers do less work. It decreases the number of programming artifacts for developers to provide, eliminates the requirement to implement ejb callback methods, and reduces the complexity of the entity bean programming model.