Month: September 2017

Back in like the 1890s a slot machine was probably the coolest entertainment device anyone had ever seen. In 2017, though, despite a lot of advances in slot technology, those flashy one-armed bandits just aren't drawing in "the youngs" who all have access to both Candy Crush Saga and Internet porn on a magical device in their pockets.

To try fight back, casino owners are turning to purely skill-based video games for their betting floors, and the trend is getting a big-name boost in Pac-Man Battle Casino, a newly announced machine from Namco and Gamblit Gaming hitting casinos next year.

Enlarge (credit: Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images)

Equifax's new CEO is very sorry.

"On behalf of Equifax, I want to express my sincere and total apology to every consumer affected by our recent data breach," Paulino do Rego Barros Jr. wrote in an open letter published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday afternoon. "We didn’t live up to expectations."

Equifax has a lot to apologize for. The company left a vulnerability unpatched for more than two months, allowing hackers to steal private data on 143 million customers. Hackers began infiltrating the Equifax network in March, but the intrusion wasn't discovered until July.

Enlarge / New Mexico, land of disenchantment.

In the US, most education standards are set by the individual states, and local communities are free to develop lesson plans that ensure that their students meet the state's expectations. Unfortunately, that has often led to education standards becoming ideological battlegrounds, as different groups try to put their stamp on things like history education. Even more unfortunately, battles often break out over basic reality, as scientific topics that people reject for cultural or ideological reasons—think evolution and climate change—can get diluted or eliminated entirely from the state standards.

In an attempt to make it easier for states to handle science education a bit better, a group of prestigious scientific societies banded together to make their own science education standards. The resulting Next Generation Science Standards were offered to the states free of charge, allowing them to be adopted in their entirety or modified to fit a state's needs.

Last week, it became apparent that New Mexico's modification of the standards was a bit extreme, eliminating references to climate change, the age of the Earth, and evolution. And this week, some New Mexico legislators are blaming it on a misguided attempt to "politically sanitize" the science.