It's not really that brilliant. That's just how bookies work

They estimate the realistic odds (what 10000000 / 1 ?) then work out what sort of safety margin they can put around that before offering you your odds. The more outlandish and unpredictable the bet, the bigger safety margin they want.

Hence, they give you a massively unfair and marked up bet based on that (100 / 1)...

If you want to bet the other way around (i.e. that we don't make contact with aliens in the next year), they probably wouldn't take that bet anyway, and if they did, then they're never going to give you 1 / 100, it'd be more like 1 / 1000000000000)

Bookies making money has nothing to do with growing their money with interest.

How about the fact that he posted it on twitter? If he was actually making a bomb threat and going to tell the world about it, surely telling the airport or the police themselves would be one of the first ports of call... not simply posting it on a microblogging website with a whole bunch of information that would lead you straight to him.

um... isn't it Qatar?

Um... WHAT?!

If the US want to censor twitter or facebook, they can just shut them down...
People got around this in iran by using anonymous proxies to tunnel requests to websites outside of their government's control... US citizens could do the same thing in such circumstances (using studivz or something more obscure if the conspiracy stretches that far)

And I think if we're talking about DARPA attempting to find some algorithm to silently censor certain posts about US unrest, unless they manage to completely disconnect a region from the outside world with nobody noticing, I think there would be a fairly large outcry. Tibet managed to get word out, I'm sure an american state could do the same...

Exactly, I would never have brought a $1000+ laptop travelling with me... but my $400 netbook still seems to be running after 4 months in central america, despite being roughly thrown about inside my travelling backpack strapped to the top of buses, taken to the beach, survived tropical storms, etc...

I think I would have had much more trouble keeping a bigger laptop running under the same conditions. In my experience, the most strenuous journey $1000 laptops make is between the desk at home and the desk at work/university.

Are you a TMobile UK (or US or Germany or wherever else TMobile do business) customer?

I'm a TMobile UK customer (because I wanted the G1), and my personally customer support experiences with them have been pretty terrible. They refused to pause my contract when I came traveling (whereas other UK telecommunications companies will do so), they lowered the price of the contract a week after I bought my G1 and wouldn't let me downgrade to the lower tariff and every time I talk to them, they just seem unwilling to help...

I'll be happy when my contract expires in February and I'll be able to move back to Orange or O2...

But maybe that's just me... Maybe they just hate me... :(

Thank you for that...

I feel the summary needs to be somewhat rewritten... All of this was unclear without RTFAs and there was not chance of me doing that. There were 3 for god's sake! That could have taken almost 10 minutes!

Teaching English as a foreign language in a different country is very VERY different to traditional teaching in a school or college in the US or UK or wherever...

Where were they surveying exactly? Right outside an programming convention?

Not that I've ever been to Australia, so maybe u guys are all really tech savvy, but I doubt that 18% of the population of Britain would know what C or Java are (nevermind cobol), or even what an operating system is...

The maths books by Ian Stewart are rather good for creating interest without getting too technical. "Does God Play Dice?" is a good example