I found this good reading. Here's the background on it: http://www.tabberone.com/Trademarks/ShabbyChic/sc.html

A good lawsuit to read if you are interested in VERO or trademark law

Can you say OOOPS?

Bush caught with his fly down

They are not required to notify you. The secret service uses the 'feature' to trace counterfeit money back to where it was printed.

Some laser printers encode documents so they can be traced

I sold a bracelet to someone that had the exact same street address as I did. She got it, emailed me, and left good feedback on ebay.

That was a while back. October 6-7. Paypal was flakey when I was both looking at the transaction AND when I tried to put in the shipping number. It crashed, zrrrrrrrrrrrrp and was down for a week. It made national news.

Updates they said. Made the system unavailable.

Woa - it did more than that! Nov. 16, I got a chargeback. I went to my account to see what it was, and it was a pugster charm I'd never sold. I got scared my eBay account was compromised, but when I checked ebay, I saw that it was not me that was the seller in th eauction. Looking closer, I realized I had someone else's transaction data merged with my own.

I freaked worse. Called paypal. The first 4 people I talked to said "your account is weird." Then I got to Nebraska where the security and fraud folks are. I was told a hacker accessed my buyers account - she had fraudulent funds. Then someone told me that a hacker messed with my buyers address. I kept saying what about this pugster charm? Finally one person told me that my account got 'hosed' during the updates.

Well, that is simply not acceptable. A financial institution - even though Paypal is not a bank, they do offer money market accounts and dividends, would normally NEVER let this happen.

What caused this? One thing that was interesting is that my buyer and I had the same address. She and I both had an item in our account that we did not have anything to do with. I called her - she had not filed the chargeback against me but against the seller of the pugster charm.

There was a scam alert about vulnerabilities in credit card address processing that came out about this time. Were these part of the updaetes? I don't know, it all makes me go hmmmm.

Some folks think they were hacked. If they were hacked, then I suspect someone had fun in the database...but wait...wouldn't their internal controls lock records of transactions and prevent multiple postings to different accounts?

If it was 'bad code' this is not acceptable. Financial institutions have databses with intergrity out the wazoo. They have to - Look at the SOX act. Failure to have proper controls is just not something they'd allow. Surely?

Do I put this under terrorism?

Women denied access to birth control

Living in the south lately is like being surrounded by aliens that used to be people...

Fuck the south

...It ran out of memory. The actual memory limit quoted by the maker was NOT what it was.
Electronic voting.
Are there any questions?

Computer loses 4500 votes

I've not rec'd one yet, but all over the university system of georgia, webmasters are recieving the following :
I received a letter last week from Acacia technologies about some patent infringements that might be occuring if we use streaming audio/video. I thought something was mentioned about this at DLA this year, but couldn't remember the details. Has anyone else received any similar letters? If so, have they been handled, and how? I'm just wondering what my next steps might be...David, doesn't your DL director at GPC have background in this area?

Old news Sex.com back Acacia New news:Acacia threatening to sue the University system of Georgia

] The dollar index, a measure of the dollar against a
] basket of currencies, extended a slide to a nine-year
] low.

This is going to require a little explanation as to why this is important. A large portion of the US economy is dependant on imports. We'll start with cars. Currently the #1 domestic car manufacturer is GM followed by Ford and Toyota (yes, that's right, Toyota). The trick here is, no one makes a car anymore with all domestic parts. Toyota obviously makes a good number of their parts in Japan where they are brought over and installed in US cars, GM does similar things, primarily in Mexico, and Ford and Chrysler both do a good amount of their construction in Canada, which means the dollar sliding across the board will increase prices for DOMESTIC products. The sliding dollar will also cause increased pressure on import prices, so things actually made in other places will be more expensive as well.

Because we're an "import" economy, this means that costs are going up, but there is no concurrent increase in revenue, so wages (the demand side of that supply-demand equation remain stagnant. This also applies in other areas as well. The computers we're reading this on are most likely made out of all, or nearly all, imported parts and just assembled here, and those two products are not unique, far from it in fact.

The results on the international markets has already started this morning, with the Nikkei (the Japanese version of the Dow) down a bit under a percent, with expected slides in US companies on the German and British exchanges later today. We'll see how that goes.

One thing that will prove interesting will be oil. With the dollar sliding, one would expect that the price of oil will increase further. This may not actually be the case, but there's a pretty big BUT at the end of this. Oil prices are universally done in terms of US dollars. If you're in Germany, you take your Euros, buy dollars and then use those dollars to buy oil. This is something that was done by of all people OPEC. Thirty odd years ago, their #1 trading partner was us, and so to make oil transactions simple globally, they benchmark the price of oil in dollars. It worked for them and so now, all oil exporting companies/nations handle this pretty much the same way. They sell oil for dollars.

So, what happens to the price of oil? Good question. Other countries, notably European ones are in theoretically good shape. Their money is worth more, so oil costs less. Some other countries, notably Japan are going to get squeezed. They export heavily to us, so the sliding dollar hurts them, pretty badly in fact. But, the sliding dollar also means that oil is less expensive. The bottom line I think is that the sliding dollar hurts them more than it helps them. Oil is cheaper, but because we're not buying as much stuff, they don't need the oil and so they aren't helped by the decreased costs as much as they're... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Yahoo! News - Dollar Hits New Low, Gold at 16-Yr High

Have any old moterboards laying around? How about a lot of them? Get to grinding!

Also see: http://ishor.com/simplicityInstr.htm

(Information on refining gold, silver, and platnium.)

Refining gold - acid method