slamboard

One of the most contentious issues in American politics is military spending.

Around twenty years ago, General Electric was the first and possibly the biggest corporation to face fines and lawsuits stemming from a crackdown on fraud related to contracts with the Pentagon. Maybe it’s time for another crackdown. It could provide a needed boost of revenue for the military.

A little over ten years ago, GE was caught cheating the Military by not adequately testing aircraft components. A GE engineer approached the FBI after the concerns that he expressed within the company failed to result in changes that he felt were necessary. The approximately $7 million awarded in a subsequent lawsuit mostly went to the government, with some going to the whistle-blower and his lawyers as well.

If this is a pattern, it would seem that a payment is overdue. There were also some criminal convictions against GE in 1990 and 1992.

This year, they sold their plastics division to the Saudis.

I decided to make a brief post on this specific topic because there is still a lot of information on the Internet that is based on 1994 regulations. The FDA made some ‘final rulings’ related to dietary supplements in July of 2007.

I don’t see any fundamental changes from the 1994 law. The additions include current good manufacturing practice requirements and a requirement for companies to report adverse effects. These changes should increase consumers confidence in dietary supplements. The FDA website has lots of valuable information and advice related to dietary supplements.

I have researched some new products online and found that the web marketing of supplements is sometimes very secretive about the ingredients. I am suspicious that some companies hide behind the screen of claiming a proprietary blend of ingredients. Many products are aimed at making money from some positive buzz that a botanical ingredient is receiving without actually going to the expense of adding an effective dose of the ingredient. I have even heard of products that use botanical ingredients that are similar to a truly beneficial ingredient but are not, in fact, the exact species and varietal that has proven health benefits. I don’t think the FDA can prevent this. Buyer Beware is still a good slogan to keep in mind.

If you want to try a supplement that is getting good press, I would advise you to find the original science. Even if you can’t understand most of what is written in a medical journal, just copy down the full scientific name of the ingredient that is being touted and be sure that is what is in any supplement that you consider buying. Also, be sure to discuss any and all dietary supplements that you are taking with your doctor. Some supplements interact adversely with prescription and OTC drugs.

I have transcribed depositions before. One of the reasons that I was not very productive was the fact that I would become interested in the actual context and back story instead of just typing the words in as quickly as possible. The main reason that I would never choose transcription as a vocation is the fact that I just don’t type very fast. I would encourage any fast typists who would prefer to work at home to look into transcription. Most of the time the content is boring enough that you won’t become over engaged, although we all tend to have emotional responses when we listen to someone lie.

The largest source of work by a wide margin is health care. Most employers prefer to hire trained and certified medical transcriptionists.

Legal transcription is a pretty big business as well. Licensed court reporters outsource a lot of verbatim transcription that they review and edit themselves before submitting certified documents. General transcription can include creating transcripts of television and radio shows, typing authors notes and even creating transcripts of podcasts.

I have already published a short post about the increase in reblogging. I delete trackbacks everyday that come from ‘blogs’ that are nothing but a collection of excerpts from real bloggers who are creating real content. Given the automated nature of this method of creating a website that appears to have relevant content to the search engine spiders, I can assume that they occasionally feed off each other. I have noticed in the past few days that the reblogs that are set up to have a little attribution blurb are attributing it to the wrong author. A post that I wrote discussing LAP BAND surgery was incorrectly attributed to CarbWire. This attribution is in the form of unlinked text. The rebloggers get to exist in a gray area of ethics and legality because they link to the original source. They do not add to the discussion in the blogosphere, they simply feed of it to gain ranking for their URL so they can be monetized.

Have you ever mistyped a domain address into your browser and gone somewhere strange and new because somebody had the foresight to buy that domain ahead of the big guys and exploit it for some purpose, evil or otherwise?

Face-book.com has been owned by a company registered on the Isle of Man since before Facebook.com really caught on. It it what is called a link dump. Facebook.com has taken recourse. The WIPO has finally ruled in their favor. This is actually a great case to study because it shows the system working for an unquestionably valid complainant. Facebook paid the same amount that everyone pays to have this kind of thing dealt with, $1,500. That seems like just the right amount to prevent frivolous suits from bogging down the system. The process took a few months, the defendant made no effort to put forth their side.

Face-book.com appears to be gone. You can see what it looked like on the Wayback Machine.

I actually found a good site once when I mistyped Big-Boards.com. Bigboards.com sells whiteboards

You don’t need to ask the question “How do they get away with stuff like this?”

The 18 or more people who were arrested in a sting operation did not get away with it in the end. I have to wonder about what kind of big ‘holes’ exist in overall airport security for these guys to think that they can carry out this kind of operation.

Back when I was a blue collar plant worker, I had a coworker who had recently been convicted of defrauding video gaming machines. He had a fantastic story about having had a conversation in the courthouse hallway with some other ’scheduled to appear’ dudes. He told them in detail what he had done. Weeks later he saw in the papers that they had been caught in an attempt to replicate his crime. Shouldn’t they have given more consideration to the fact that he had been caught?

Hopefully the drug trafficker who was able to convince all these New York guys that they wouldn’t get caught is sharing a cell with them.

I carry out some customer service everyday for a website that we operate. On those very rare days that I don’t have a page full of people who have forgotten their passwords, I always look at my spam folder. If you have a Gmail address that you have submitted to countless forms all over the internet, your spam probably looks like mine. It’s nasty and it’s relentless and I am glad that everything is working out so that I don’t have to look at it everyday.

I was quite pleased to see that some spammers have been caught by the police and that a judge is sending them to jail. The first US prosecution under new federal anti-spam laws will see two men spending up to five years in prison. Conspiracy, money laundering, fraud and transportation of obscene materials were the charges. Authorities were also able to get their hands on $1.3 million of the over $2 million that these guys made over a 9 month period in 2004.

Source: Guardian

Read my Kimkins.com series here and see all the Kimkins-related Slamboard posts here.

Thanks to Kimkins Dangers, we may have some new insight into the truth about Kimmer aka Heidi Diaz. One of their readers found this PlentyOfFish.com profile of “Kimmer2″. PlentyOfFish is a popular free dating site started around 2003. This profile lists Kimmer’s son’s age as 16, which would date it about two years ago.

Could this profile be a hoax? At first, I seriously considered the possibility that the profile was faked. But here’s why I don’t think that’s the case: the uncropped photos on this profile, which appear to be of Heidi and her son Brandon (who is now about 18 years old) have not to my knowledge been seen anywhere else online.

Take a look at the picture with the marina in the background. Heidi send this exact uncropped picture to Catherine to crop and use as her before picture for Kimkins.com. Catherine has never released the uncropped photo to anyone else. Neither of us had seen the uncropped seated photo until now.

If Heidi did indeed create this dating profile herself, it seems quite likely that she is now an older, perhaps heavier version of the woman in the blue sweater. After all, why not post the red dress photo if that is what she looks like now?

Also, the profile says Kimmer is a former foster mom. If Heidi did not really have foster children when she accepted money fundraised in their name (summer of 2006) then she could perhaps find herself facing criminal liability for fraud.

Things are only going to get more interesting.

The GotTrouble.com directory is a unique directory for legal services and other services like traffic schools and rehab. What makes it a great service and a great marketing model is that it is categorized by personal problems. There aren’t very many of us who go window shopping for lawyers because it is such a nice day and we just love looking at lawyers. We start a search for a legal service because we have a compelling problem.

On the lighter side, they are sponsoring a Sing Your Troubles Away Video Contest and the available prize money is a heart warming $5,000. I have embarrassed myself on YouTube for much less than $5,000.

Amy Winehouse is famous for a tongue in cheek song about Rehab. I hear she is in Rehab now. If that is how writing these problem songs works, I’m going to minimize my risk and choose a problem that I can handle better…

How about White Collar Crime? I have not actually committed one of these, but I read about them a lot. It seems like the tide has really turned in the way that judges view this problem.

Here’s a few lines that I have managed to think up on the fly…

“They say I did the crime,
So I should do the time,
But I’ve seen that State facility,
It has a horrible back nine.

I’ve got the blues,
I’ve got the white collar crime blues,
If I had used a shredder,
Things would’ve been much better,
I’ve got the blues.”

I may enter GotTrouble.com’s Video Promotion, but don’t worry too much about me as far as competition, I have a horrible singing voice. I wish you the best of luck, should you decide to enter this contest.

When you are a law firm consisting of partners with three very distinguished names, how do you decide on a url? The Arizona estate planning attorneysat Morris, Hall & Kinghorn must have left that decision up to mister Morris.

Besides getting down to the nitty gritty of planning estates for individuals, these guys also publish instructive and engaging books related to estate planning. Dan R. Morris recently teamed up with Amelia Pohl to pen the book A Will is Not Enough in Arizona. They carry out free information seminars related to estate and life care planning as well as trusts and wills. Elder Law is their specialty.