Random afternoon musings

Remember the pension 'solution' that was going to be some version of a dead peasants policy on steroids.  Whatever actually happened to that idea actually?  Well, the concept is running into some legal problems elsewhere. WSJ:  Insurers Sued Over Death Bets.  No problem at all with scaling that city-wide. 

You know, the existance of secondary markets for this type of insurance has a striking analogy to the market for credit default swaps.  Beyond all the other problems, there is a certain ponzi-esque-ness to it all.  When too many companies actually defaulted, the CDS market went kaput fast.  and for life insurance, we all do eventually die.

And I still don't get this.  Story of local folks stealing money from slots machines.  OK, but isn't the real story that somehow local slots machines can be hacked?  Something I have to believe the industry has all but gotten rid of.. if not then those folks in Las Vegas must be losing money left and right.  The quote is: 

Authorities said the men were aware of a software glitch in a high-limit slot machine and entered a specific set of keystrokes to expose the weakness and cause the machine to generate false double jackpots.

I just think the real story is that such a "specific set of keystrokes" even exists.  I really thought hacking slots machines had to be just about obsolete.. at least not without a lot of sophisticated help.  How much money and efforts goes into programming and monitoring slots machines?  I'm just missing something here. 

I really wonder what a "specific set of keystokes" could be that would result in a slots machine going haywire?  Is that something like voting for the Constitution Party candidate on comptuer voting machines.  I always wondered what would happen if I did that.