Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-11-2008

• Crowbar, headcrab, and Half-Life strategy guide shipped to CERN
  Just in case. You can't be too careful
  (tags: half-life funny gaming culture lhc)
• More freelancers might be taxed as employees after High Court ruling
  "An IT contractor has been hit with a £99,000 tax bill after the High Court ruled that he should be taxed as an employee of the company he undertook work for."
  (tags: tax IT)
• Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the earth yet?
  Worth checking. Heck, add the RSS feed to your friends list...
  (tags: technology science physics funny)

I love automated systems

For some reason, the South Florida Sun-Sentine's readers voted up an old story about United Airlines being on the brink of bankruptcy.  Could be any reason from deliberate stock manipulation to a bunch of high-schoolers reading it as part of a class.

This causes Google's newsbots to spot it.  The article didn't have a date.  So it got taken as new news, and ended up on Google News as if it was from today.

Other news aggregators picked it up from there.

Automated stock trading programs dumped stock.

Which plummeted from $12 to $3 - wiping out 1.14 billion dollars.

I'm highly amused, and unsure if anything could be done about it.  I guess it's just one of those things that happens.

I got it from the /. article here - which got it from the Wall Street Journal, which for some reason isn't letting me in right now.

Zoom!

From the observation last night in conversation with Lilian that people complain about speed cameras all the time, but you rarely hear anyone saying that the actual limit should be raised.

Note for for'n types - speeds are in MPH.

[Poll #1257772]

A question that came up in my mentor training this afternoon

[Poll #1257863]