dixiegrrrrl
dixiegrrrrl's JournalTurn telemarketers calls into CASH. Yep, it works.
Damn..I am so kicking myself for not thinking of this.
How one man turns annoying cold calls into cash
First, he registered a phone number with the area code 09, the equivalent of a 900 number here in the United States and Canada. Whenever a company he did business with asked for his home phone number, he gave them that one. They didn’t like it? Too bad. If they didn’t want to call it, they could contact him through email.
Then he waited for the marketing calls to come in. Only they don’t come as often as they used to: he used to up to 30 a month, and now gets maybe half as many. Working from home, he can keep them on the line chatting in order to rack up more fees. For every minute he keeps them on the phone, he gets about eleven cents. That adds up to $6.60 an hour…not a full-time job, but not bad either if he’s able to multi-task. He’s earned $465 from the scheme so far.
The entity that hands out premium numbers is discouraging other consumers from following his lead, though. Boo.
http://consumerist.com/2013/08/29/what-if-telemarketers-had-to-pay-you-to-annoy-you/
I found this short vid. very very helpful in understanding the multi-faceted issues about Syria
.
History really really is important in understanding a country's behavior today.
hope others find it as helpful as I did. 
Obama Willing to Pursue Solo Syria Strikes, Aides Say
Source: NY Times
WASHINGTON — President Obama is prepared to move ahead with a limited military strike on Syria, administration officials said on Thursday, even with a rejection of such action by Britain’s Parliament, an increasingly restive Congress, and lacking an endorsement from the United Nations Security Council.
Although the officials cautioned that Mr. Obama had not made a final decision, all indications suggest that the strike could occur as soon as United Nations inspectors, who are investigating the Aug. 21 attack that killed hundreds of Syrians, leave the country. They are scheduled to depart Damascus, the capital, on Saturday.
The White House is to present its case for military action against Syria to Congressional leaders on Thursday night. Administration officials assert that the intelligence will show that forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad carried out the chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of Damascus.
The intelligence does not tie Mr. Assad directly to the attack, officials briefed on the presentation said, but the administration believes that it has enough evidence to carry out a limited strike that would deter the Syrian government from using these weapons again.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/30/us/politics/obama-syria.html?_r=0
$%#@!!*&%#
Transcript of Today's House of Commons debates
for those who , like me, missed the videos.
Some very interesting points of view.
( I wish the Congress was so transparent)
http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/hansard/commons/todays-commons-debates/read/unknown/11/#c11
Health officials fear bubonic plague outbreak after teenager who ate infected Bar-B-Q marmot dies
Ok, I know the story is a serious one
but the bar-B-Q marmot did give me a long pause..who could imagine getting the Black Death from cooking a marmot?
Here is the story:
Health officials fear an outbreak of bubonic plague in central Asia after a teenage boy died from the disease and three more were admitted to hospital in Kyrgyzstan.
Temirbek Isakunov, a 15-year-old from a mountain village near the border with Kazakhstan, reportedly died from the disease last week after eating an infected barbecued marmot. Kyrgyzstan's emergency ministry said a young woman and two children from a different village who came into contact with Isakunov were hospitalised on Tuesday with the high fever and swelling around the neck and armpits characteristic of bubonic plague, local news outlets reported.
A total of 131 people, including 33 medical personnel, have been quarantined, although none of them have yet exhibited symptoms of the disease, the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in Kyrgyzstan reported. The health ministry continues to find and quarantine people who came into contact with the teenager, according to its director.
Kazakhstan has stepped up its border control with Kyrgyzstan and is operating quarantine points in light of the possible outbreak, the news agency Tengrinews reported. The Kazakh health ministry is searching out people who might have come into contact with the dead teenager, and is also determining where animal carriers of the disease might be moving between the two countries, according to a ministry official.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/27/bubonic-plague-outbreak-feared-central-asia
Finally! A church I feel comfortable joining!
The Missionary Church of Kopimism.
The Church, based in Sweden, has been officially recognized by the Swedish Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency as a religious community, after three application attempts.
The followers of the religion are called Kopimists from copy me. A "Kopimist" or "Kopimist intellectual" is a person who has the philosophical belief that all information should be freely distributed and unrestricted.
The sacred symbol:
info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Church_of_Kopimism
Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
Mycle Schneider is an independent consultant who has previously advised the French and German governments.
He says water is leaking out all over the site and there are no accurate figures for radiation levels.
"What is the worse is the water leakage everywhere else - not just from the tanks. It is leaking out from the basements, it is leaking out from the cracks all over the place. Nobody can measure that.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23779561
Below are pics showing the increased # of tanks to hold more and more and more contaminated water.
Seems obvious that there is less and less room to put the tanks.
UK gov.raided the Guardian’s offices & destroyed hard drives of Snowden's information!
Oh my, a modern Watergate is unfolding....
In a remarkable post, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger describes how the British government raided the Guardian’s offices in order to destroy hard drives containing information provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. The British government had been pressuring the Guardian to return or destroy the Snowden documents.
Rusbridger says he tried to explain that destroying hard drives would be pointless:
I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments.
Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?
The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred - with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents… Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age.
http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/19/u-k-government-thought-destroying-guardian-hard-drives-would-stop-snowden-stories/
Fracking boom could lead to housing bust
Key parts of this story:
Lawyers, realtors, public officials, and environmental advocates from Pennsylvania to Arkansas to Colorado are noticing that banks and federal agencies are revisiting their lending policies to account for the potential impact of drilling on property values, and in some cases are refusing to finance property with or even just near drilling activity.
Real estate experts say another problematic trend is that many homeowners insurance policies do not cover residential properties with a gas lease or gas well, yet all mortgage companies require homeowners insurance from their borrowers.
Plus, there is this interesting aspect about Fannie Mae ( Fannie Mae bought millions of mortgages from the banks, remember??)
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also prohibit property owners from signing a gas lease.
May said many owners are now in “technical default” under the terms of their mortgage if they signed a gas lease without first getting consent from their lender.
Another clause in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages prohibits hazardous materials on a residential property.
“It comes as a surprise to a lot of people. They weren’t aware that their mortgage came with those restrictions,”
May said.
http://grist.org/climate-energy/fracking-boom-could-lead-to-housing-bust/?source=Patrick.net
Thanks to DU member ms. smiler who found this story.
EBook Sellers Strike Deal To Share Customer Details With Anti-Piracy Outfit
A new digital distribution agreement for eBook platforms will formalize a system for identifying customers whose purchases later appear on the Internet. The deal will see eBook sellers watermark digital downloads and log them against specific customer accounts. That data will be kept for a minimum of two years just in case books appear on file-sharing sites. If they do, vendors will hand over customer details to rightsholders and anti-piracy outfit BREIN.
Watermarking has traditionally been used to describe a relatively ancient method of introducing patterns or information into paper. These markings are often applied to items of value, such as banknotes or certificates, in order to make the counterfeiting process more difficult.
In recent years ‘watermarking’ has been expanded into the digital domain. All kinds of digital media can be quietly marked in order to identify the origins of the content, which has proven particularly useful with the ‘dots’ to be found in Hollywood movies. By tracking these marks within pirate copies of movies, studios are able to identify which theater they were ‘cammed’ in.
More:
http://torrentfreak.com/down-torrent-pirates-130813/
Profile Information
Gender: FemaleHometown: Washington state, for half my life
Home country: USA
Current location: SW Alabama. for the rest of my life
Member since: Wed Feb 27, 2008, 02:09 PM
Number of posts: 60,010
