The Register on "spinners": "Essentially what a spinner does is buy a new pre-paid handset and then burn up the inclusive minutes (talk time) which come with the accompanying SIM card. Once those minutes expire, the spinner throws away the new SIM and goes back to his or her old SIM (and accompanying telephone number)."

It's just hacking of the commercial models that phone companies put in place, isn't it? And not much differently from the folks who buy a phone "just for emergencies" - they're not generating revenue as a normal customer would, yet they benefit from subsidies and continual access to the mobile network, even if they're not using it. Of course, many of these customers succumb to temptation and become more conventional subscribers (which is perhaps why the operators let this happen)... but they're still gaming the system.

In fact in its early days, text messaging was another example of customers finding something their phone could do - but wasn't designed for - and putting it to good use.

As handset penetration hits and exceeds 100% (at least here in the UK), we'll see more of this. For instance, customers might buy a PAYG handset for incoming calls to keep their number consistent and avoid paying monthly charges, and keep another handset (with constantly "spun" SIMs) for outgoing calls.

I remember when I were a lad there were similar tricks for pay-phones - some would allow you to dial a number and get about half-a-second of conversation before the machine realised you hadn't deposited any money and cut you off. Just enough time to say who you are and request a call back from a friend or parent, say.

Johnny Pi on games where players learn to degrade: "I envision a game that reverses the notion that player-characters must always increase in power and options. What if you played a character with memory loss?"

Via Mr Jones, a post concerning games where peace, not conflict, is the aim:

"Once we have a game system where the player is trying to maintain peace through a series of interesting choices (the same as one would make war in a typical Real Time Strategy), we can make things more complicated. What if the player not only needs to maintain peace, but also needs to be in a dominant position over the other players?"

One of the "aha" moments I belatedly had about 3-4 months after a group of us started playing Go, was the idea that efficiency is important in tallying up final scores: you get more points for capturing the maximum ground with minimal pieces. Or to put it another way (and given how err "undeveloped" my Go-playing skills are, I may be completely misunderstanding things): you win more by minimising direct conflict.

Good lord - well it had to happen, I guess. Phone sex outsourced to India: "Some call center operators have secretly set up phone sex operations in Bangalore and Mumbai, though it's strictly against the law and call forwarding to cell phones is making it even harder for the police to nail the offenders"

The Everquest Economy: "...in the course of litigation discovered that the plaintiff ran a sweatshop in Mexico where workers participated in the game solely to collect salable items."