Getting Rich Pennies At a Time
You know how some financial institutions which work with your bank account make small deposits into your checking account to verify that you are the owner of that account? You sign up for an account (such as Paypal) and they make a couple small deposits (usually less than a 25 cents each) of varying amounts into your checking account. You then have to verify the amount of money they deposited into the account in order to complete the sign-up process.
Turns out
this guy allegedly cobbled a script or two together which opened thousands of accounts at eTrade and others institutions which follow the same verification process. He made about $50k in six months before the secret service caught up to him.
A devastating article on the king scam artist of the Christian industry, Benny Hinn:
Hinn's services, for example, follow a strict pattern that's calculated for maximum emotional impact and, not so coincidentally, maximum offering collection. From the time the crowd enters the arena, they're massaged with mood lighting, repetitive music, responsive chanting, group gestures, group singing, various forms of choral and instrumental entertainment, all leading up to the moment Hinn makes his entrance. The song sung for the entrance is "How Great Thou Art," making convenient use of an ambiguous personal pronoun.
"There's power here, people!" Hinn will typically say. "Lift your hands and receive it."
All dutifully lift their hands.
"You will be healed tonight!"
They sob and shout hallelujah.
"All things are possible to him that believeth!"
Hinn repeats this same sentence three times, getting a bigger emotional reaction each time he says it.
Chant, song, gesture, salute--all the classic techniques used to submerge the individual into a group. It works for dictators and it works for Hinn. But now that he's joined them together in hope, he adds a dose of fear.
If you have about 10 minutes to kill give it a read.
As a bonus, here's a separated at birth for you.
The temple of Binn.
The temple of Doom.
Client-Side Session Variables
Brilliant.
A javascript library that stores up to 2 MB of persisted data on the client through the
window.name variable.
A bluetooth cassette adapter for those of us still using car radios made in the 80s.
And it's for sale.
The Unassisted Triple Play
You can probably go a whole season without seeing a triple play, but you may well go a lifetime without seeing an unassisted triple play such as
the one which happened last night.
UPDATEThanks JR. I should know better than to post video from YouTube of anything related to pro sports. They seem to have an itchy trigger finger.
This link goes directly to MLB and should play the same video.
Hopefully these are erasable inks, because it looks like a good wad of cash was creatively "refaced" in
this Flickr pool.
Obama Has Campaigned in 57 States
What planet is this guy on?
Much was made of the lexical incongruities of Dan Quayle, but surely this is a little bit more of a gaffe than knowing how to spell potato.
Charles Barkley Gets Punked
Thus spoke the messiah:
I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did.
Excellent. Here's how Truman spoke with our enemies in WWII:
No description can quite capture the awesome awesomeness of
this Flickr photo set.