MONTREAL (AFP) - After catching his 15-year-old smoking pot, a father sold the hard-to-get "Guitar Hero III" video game he bought his son for 90 dollars for Christmas at an online auction, fetching 9,000 dollars.

The sale took place after the father spent two weeks searching for the video game for the Nintendo Wii gameboard.

"So I was so relieved in that I had finally got the Holy Grail of Christmas presents pretty much just in the nick of time. I couldn't wait to spread the jubilance to my son," the father wrote on the eBay website.

"Then, yesterday, I came home from work early and what do I find? My innocent little boy smoking pot in the back yard with two of his delinquent friends."

The man, a school teacher, who kept his identity private, said he sold the coveted video game to punish his son and discourage him from smoking dope.

The sale was a boon for the family's bank account, since the game the father purchased for 90 dollars (US) was finally sold to an Australian who plunked down 9,100 dollars for it.

The naughty son, however, will not go without a present on Christmas.

"I am still considering getting him a game for his Nintendo. Maybe something like Barbie as the Island Princess or Dancing with the Stars ... I know he will just love them," the father said, tongue-in-cheek.

Is the game really worth 9 grand?

Dad sells son's 90-dollar video game online for more than 9000 - Yahoo! News

AKRON -- It looks and fires like something out of Star Wars, but the latest weapon that Akron Police have in their arsenal certainly appears to be from a galaxy far, far away.
It's called "Corner Shot", and it allows officers to load their sidearm into an expandable arm that extends around a corner. Using a video monitor to see that target, the officer can fire a round at a 90-degree angle while staying protected behind cover.

Sort of cowardly. If crooks get these too, shoot-outs are going to become real pointless.

Local police test new high-tech weapon system

Imagine enjoying a friendly lunch with co-workers at the company restaurant. Now imagine every bite, sip and swallow being monitored by company researchers, in a kind of culinary Big Brother scenario.

That's the reality at the new Dutch Restaurant of the Future, where 23 cameras track customers' every move. Facial recognition technologies record every smile and every frown, and a scale built into the floor weighs customers as they check out. Specially designed chairs note diners' heart rate as they get their first taste.

It's all part of a life-size, 10-year social science experiment designed to answer one seemingly simple question: Why do we consume the way we do?

"We're trying to understand what the underlying factors of eating and drinking habits are," said Rene Koster, the project manager and an economist at Wageningen University, which hosts the restaurant.

Why do I have the feeling that this will be ultimately be used for something more ominous?

'Big Brother' Restaurant Spies on Diners

Defeating the Shoe Scanning Machine at Heathrow Airport

For a while now, Heathrow Airport has had a unique setup for scanning shoes. Instead of taking your shoes off during the normal screening process, as you do in U.S. airports, you go through the metal detector with your shoes on. Then, later, there is a special shoe scanning X-ray machine. You take your shoes off, send them through the machine, and put them on at the other end.

It's definitely faster, but it's an easy system to defeat. The vulnerability is that no one verifies that the shoes you walked through the metal detector with are the same shoes you put on the scanning machine.

Here's how the attack works. Assume that you have two pairs of shoes: a clean pair that passes all levels of screening, and a dangerous pair that doesn't. (Ignore for a moment the ridiculousness of screening shoes in the first place, and assume that an X-ray machine can detect the dangerous pair.) Put the dangerous shoes on your feet and the clean shoes in your carry-on bag. Walk through the metal detector. Then, at the shoe X-ray machine, take the dangerous shoes off and put them in your bag, and take the clean shoes out of your bag and place them on the X-ray machine. You've now managed to get through security without having your shoes screened.

This works because the two security systems are decoupled. And the shoe screening machine is so crowded and chaotic, and so poorly manned, that no one notices the switch.

U.S. airports force people to put their shoes through the X-ray machine and walk through the metal detector shoeless, ensuring that all shoes get screened. That might be slower, but it works.

EDITED TO ADD (12/14): Heathrow Terminal 3, that is. The system wasn't in place in Terminal 4, and I don't know about Terminals 1 and 2.

Schneier on Security: Defeating the Shoe Scanning Machine at Heathrow Airport

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They may have committed a high crime, but a former Dearborn cop and his wife are only going to be charged with a misdemeanor for allegedly smoking pot in Dearborn Heights.

Edward Sanchez, 30, and his wife, Stacy, 27, are expected to turn themselves in for arraignment on one charge each of using marijuana, according assistant Wayne County Prosecutor Maria Miller.

On April 21, 2006, Sanchez, who lives in Dearborn Heights, called 911 in a panic after he and his wife ate brownies laced with marijuana he said he took from criminal suspects.

Dearborn police allowed Sanchez to resign from his job on May 23, 2006, even though investigators said he admitted to taking the marijuana from his police car and using it to make the brownies. Dearborn police reports the Free Press obtained said Sanchez told investigators he planned to use the marijuana to train his police dog.

Dearborn police have declined to discuss their handling of the matter.

A recording of Sanchez’s 911 call – during which he said he thought he and his wife were dying and asked a dispatcher for the score of the Red Wings’ game – became fodder for comedians and Internet parodies after it appeared on the internet.

The 911 call is great.

Stoned cop to face charges | Cowardly Cops

ROXBURY, Conn. (AP) -- Karaoke can be scary, but threatening? A school custodian's impromptu after-hours karaoke performance prompted a police response when a teacher thought she was being threatened over the loudspeaker.

State police say the teacher at Booth Free School barricaded herself inside a classroom Wednesday when she mistook someone singing a Guns N' Roses song over the public address system for a threat.

She was working after hours and thought no one else was in the building. Then she heard someone say over the loudspeaker that she was going to die.

Six troopers and three police dogs showed up and found three teenagers, one of them a custodian at the school, who had been playing with the public address system.

Police say one of them sang "Welcome to the Jungle" into the microphone. The song contains the lyrics "You're in the jungle baby; you're gonna die."

News from The Associated Press

South Korean scientists have cloned cats by manipulating a fluorescent protein gene, a procedure which could help develop treatments for human genetic diseases, officials said Wednesday. In a side-effect, the cloned cats glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet beams.

"The ability to produce cloned cats with the manipulated genes is significant as it could be used for developing treatments for genetic diseases and for reproducing model (cloned) animals suffering from the same diseases as humans," it added. The technology can also help clone endangered animals like tigers, leopards, and wildcats, Kong said.

Biological hacking = no more boring pets.

Woah, cool.

South Korean scientists clone cats that glow in the dark.

Military funded researchers are preparing to test a nonlethal weapon that combines light and sound. Nicholas C. Nicholas, chief scientist of Penn State's Applied Research Laboratory, told an audience yesterday at a nonlethal weapons conference that in the first half of next year, the lab plans to test DSLAD, the Distributed Sound and Light Array Debilitator. It'll use essentially off the shelf technology to see if combining aversive noises with light produce some special debiliating effects. Anecdotal effects include dizziness and loss of balance, and of course, nausea. In other words, DSLAD could be another potential "puke ray."

Light Sound = New Weapon | Danger Room from Wired.com

19 year-old Allieu Shaw was, until today, going to school at Frostburg State University. Now, he's suspended -- and facing two years in jail -- for what he did, in a game.

Videogame Threat Leads to School Disruption, Arrest | Danger Room from Wired.com