Tikker Chase Bank Slams the Door on More Porn Stars By Lila Gray Tuesday, Apr 22, 2014Text size: LOS ANGELES — Chase Bank has reportedly sent out letters to hundreds of porn stars notifying them that their accounts would be closed on May 11. Teagan Presley confirmed to XBIZ that her personal account was one of the ones shut down. “I got a letter and it was like please cancel all transactions, please fix your automatic pay account and make sure everything’s taken care of by May 11,” Presley told XBIZ. One of the letters, posted here by Perez Hilton, succinctly informs the recipient of the impending closure without citing specific reasons. “We recently reviwed your account and determined that we will be closing it on May 11, 2014,” the letter reads. Then, continuing in a more "compassionate" vein, "We want you to have enough time to complete pending transactions and open an account at another bank." And yet, when Presley went to Bank of America to open up a new account, she was summarily turned away.
These Vintage Videos Accurately Predicted Today's Technology I remember in the 80s seeing a technology show with a Computer Navigation gadget in the car. But instead of satellites and GPS, it was using sensors buried in the roads. I think it was being tested in France. At the time I thought that was an ambitious hope, needing to tear up every road in the world, but the concept of computer navigation thrilled me. I also remember reading an article where somebody was going to try and build a real Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy handheld gadget containing an interactive encyclopaedia.
At Walgreen, Renouncing Corporate Citizenship Photo A little less than two years ago, Gregory D. Wasson, the chief executive of Walgreen, sought a series of tax breaks from Illinois, where his company is based. “We are proud of our Illinois heritage,” he said at the time. “Just as our stores and pharmacies are health and daily living anchors for the communities we serve, we as a company are now recommitted to serving as an economic anchor for northeastern Illinois.” The state gave Walgreen $46 million in corporate income tax credits over 10 years in exchange for a pledge to create 500 jobs and invest in upgrading its offices. Mr. Why? Alarmingly, dozens of large United States companies are contemplating the increasingly popular tax-skirting tactic known as an inversion. In Walgreen’s case, an inversion would be an affront to United States taxpayers. According to Americans for Tax Fairness, a move by Walgreen to Switzerland would most likely cost United States taxpayers about $4 billion over five years. Mr. Senator Richard J. Mr.
Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: The Year of the Oculus Rift The latest in an ongoing series of themed collections of creative projects assembled by Prosthetic Knowledge. This edition brings together projects that make use of the Oculus Rift, a device that has reignited interest in Virtual Reality and provided creative inspiration for hackers and artists alike. Kim Laughton, Timefly. Every year, there is usually at least one piece of technology that stands out, that captures the attention of engineers and creatives, that inspires new ideas and makes new experiences possible. Released this year, the current model is intended for developers; the consumer-level version is planned to be available late 2014. In this submission, I will present a sampling of interesting Rift-related projects from both artists and engineers. Entropy Wrangler Artist Ian Cheng debuted the Oculus Rift version of his Entropy Wrangler piece at the Freize Art Fair in London this year. Ian Cheng discussed his thoughts on the future of storytelling in a recent roundtable in Frieze:
Thank You for Your Service: How One Company Sues Soldiers Worldwide This article was co-published with The Washington Post. Army Spc. Angel Aguirre needed a washer and dryer. Money was tight, and neither Aguirre, 21, nor his wife had much credit history as they settled into life at Fort Carson in Colorado in 2010. That's when he saw an ad for USA Discounters, guaranteeing loan approval for service members. "We ended up getting a computer, a TV, a ring, and a washer and dryer," Aguirre said. Aguirre later learned that USA Discounters' easy lending has a flip side. From there, USA Discounters files lawsuits against service members based anywhere in the world, no matter how much inconvenience or expense they would incur to attend a Virginia court date. "They're basically ruthless," said Army Staff Sgt. Timothy Dorsey, vice president of USA Discounters, said the company provides credit to service members who would not otherwise qualify and sues only after other attempts to resolve debts have failed. Before he could, he was deployed to Germany and Afghanistan.
Asia’s Richest Man Invests In BitPay An error occurred with this part of the page, sorry for the inconvenience. After some serious drubbing in two of the world’s largest countries during past few weeks, the Bitcoin ecosystem may have found its biggest individual backer yet in Li Ka-shing, Asia’s ... Netflix requests the help of cloud gaming specialists in its recent job listing posts, a possible hint at what’s to come for its ongoing gaming venture. As noted by Protocol, the company is o... “You want to get your $7,500, then build this industry.” Apple is introducing a handful of new ways to support U.S. EV acceleration hit a new and interesting phase at the Monterey Car Week event that wrapped Sunday. Elon Musk’s legal team has subpoenaed former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, marking the latest development in the legal battle over Musk’s attempt to break his $44 billion acquisition agreeme... New Carta data is a mishmash of sorts, with the numbers not pointing cleanly in one direction. Is Coinbase cheap, or is FTX overvalued?
Insta-Loophole: In Florida, High-Cost Lender Skirts the Law This story was co-published with The Tampa Bay Times. When Florida lawmakers banned high-interest car title loans in 2000, then-Gov. Jeb Bush proclaimed that the new law would protect Floridians from lenders "who prey on the desperate." But in the past three years, the largest title lender in the country has swept into the state, offering a new version of the loans that effectively allow it to charge the sort of sky-high rates the law was supposed to stop. TMX Finance, which has opened 26 InstaLoan stores across Florida, skirts the ban on triple-digit interest rates by offering loans larded with costly and nearly useless insurance products. TMX is clearly violating "the spirit of the law," said Alice Vickers of the Florida Consumer Action Network, a Tampa-based nonprofit advocacy group. TMX's refashioned loans are yet another example of how the nation's high-cost lenders have modified their offerings to circumvent city, state and federal laws designed to limit them.
Capturing images of bystanders by zooming in on pictures of corneas In Identifiable Images of Bystanders Extracted from Corneal Reflections, British psychology researchers Rob Jenkins and Christie Kerr show that recognizable images of the faces of unpictured bystanders can be captured from modern, high-resolution photography by zooming in on subjects' eyes to see the reflections in their corneas. The researchers asked experimental subjects to identify faces captured from these zoomed-in images and found that they were able to do so with a high degree of reliability. The researchers used 39 megapixel cameras, substantially higher-rez than most people's phone-cameras, but low-cost cameras are making enormous leaps in resolution every day. What's more, the researchers suggest that the determining factor for identifying a face isn't resolution; it's having a viewer who is already familiar with the subject. Reflected hidden faces in photographs revealed in pupil [Kurzweil AI]
Settlement Expected With Banks Over Home Loans Under the settlement, a significant amount of the money, $3.75 billion, would go to people who have already lost their homes, making it potentially more generous to former homeowners than a broad-reaching pact in February between state attorneys general and five large banks. That set aside $1.5 billion in cash relief for Americans. Most of the relief in both agreements is meant for people who are struggling to stay in their homes and need the banks to reduce their payments or lower the amount of principal they owe. The $10 billion pact would be the latest in a series of settlements that regulators and law enforcement officials have reached with banks to hold them accountable for their role in the 2008 financial crisis that sent the housing market into the deepest slump since . As of early 2012, four million Americans had been foreclosed upon since the beginning of 2007, and a huge amount of abandoned homes swamped many states, including California, Florida and Arizona.
Reflected hidden faces in photographs revealed in pupil Zooming in on the pupil of a subject’s eye reveals hidden bystanders (credit: Rob Jenkins) The pupil* of the eye in a photograph of a face can be mined for hidden information, such as reflected faces of the photographer and bystanders, according to research led by Dr. Rob Jenkins, of the Department of Psychology at the University of York and published in PLOS ONE (open access). The researchers say that in crimes in which the victims are photographed, such as hostage taking or child sex abuse, reflections in the eyes of the photographic subject could help to identify perpetrators. Images of people retrieved from cameras seized as evidence during criminal investigations could be used to piece together networks of associates or to link individuals to particular locations. Lineup-style array of reflected images from photographs for spontaneous recognition task in experiment. “The pupil of the eye is like a black mirror,” said Jenkins. Forensics implications Abstract of PLOS ONE paper
Sarah Silverman and John Oliver hammer payday loan industry ‘motherf*ckers’ By Tom BoggioniMonday, August 11, 2014 7:34 EDT On this week’s edition of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver was joined by Sarah Silverman to take on America’s predatory payday loan industry “motherf*ckers.” Calling attention to the virtually unregulated industry capable of charging up to 1700 percent interest on short term loans which fall disproportionately on the poor, Silverman advised doing anything else rather than “dealing with these payday loan motherf*ckers.” Pointing out that the payday loan businesses — which grants short term loans at exorbitant interest rates– is a $9 billion industry, Oliver noted that there are more payday loan stores in America than Starbucks and McDonalds. “McDonalds!” With more the three quarters of borrowers having take out an additional loan before they are able to pay off the original loan, Oliver explained, “Basically, payday loans are the Lay’s potato chips of finance: you can’t have just one, and they’re terrible for you.” Tom Boggioni
Visit to the World's Fair of 2014 August 16, 1964 By ISAAC ASIMOV he New York World's Fair of 1964 is dedicated to "Peace Through Understanding." Its glimpses of the world of tomorrow rule out thermonuclear warfare. And why not? If a thermonuclear war takes place, the future will not be worth discussing. So let the missiles slumber eternally on their pads and let us observe what may come in the nonatomized world of the future. Cheat Sheet: BofA Supplied Default Answers for ‘Independent’ Foreclosure Claims Reviewers The Independent Foreclosure Review, the government’s main effort to compensate homeowners for harm by banks, is supposed to be independent from the banks. But in Bank of America’s case, it wasn’t. The Independent Foreclosure Review, the government's main effort to compensate homeowners for harm by banks, is supposed to be independent from the banks. The Independent Foreclosure Review is the government's main effort to compensate homeowners for harm they suffered at the hands of banks — and, as its name indicates, it's supposed to be independent. But until recently, that was hardly the case with Bank of America. No evidence has emerged that Bank of America pressured reviewers to accept its answers, and the bank did not supply answers for the final questions: whether the bank should pay compensation and, if so, how much. This practice only ended a month after ProPublica published a story showing that Bank of America was doing much of the work itself [1]. Potential Conflict of Interest