Fascinating and scary story of the credit card underground...

By the time David Thomas eased his Cadillac into the parking lot of an office complex in Issaquah, Washington, he already suspected the police were on to him.

An empty Crown Victoria in one of the parking spaces confirmed it. "That's heat right there," he told his two passengers -- 29-year-old girlfriend Bridget Trevino, and his crime partner Kim Marvin Taylor, a balding, middle-aged master of fake identities he'd met on the internet.

It was November 2002, and Thomas, then a 44-year-old Texan, was in Washington to collect more than $30,000 in merchandise that a Ukrainian known as "Big Buyer" ordered from Outpost.com with stolen credit card numbers. His job was to collect the goods from a mail drop, fence them on eBay and wire the money to Russia, pocketing 40 percent of the take before moving to another city to repeat the scam...

http://www.wired.com...ology/1,72515-0.html

An interesting discussion of the need for systems to elicit self-control rather than brute force measures to keep would be evil doers away...

We’ve all gone to school on the moderation and reputation systems of Slashdot and eBay. In those cases, their growing popularity in the period after their respective launches led to a tragedy of the commons, where open access plus incentives led to nearly constant attack by people wanting to game the system, whether to gain attention for themselves or their point of view in the case of Slashdot, or to defraud other users, as with eBay.

The traditional response to these problems would have been to hire editors or other functionaries to police the system for abuse, in order to stem the damage and to assure ordinary users you were working on their behalf. That strategy, however, would fail at the scale and degree of openness at which those services function. The Slashdot FAQ tells the story of trying to police the comments with moderators chosen from among the userbase, first 25 of them and later 400. Like the Charge of the Light Brigade, however, even hundreds of committed individuals were just cannon fodder, given the size of the problem. The very presence of effective moderators made the problem worse over time. In a process analogous to more roads creating more traffic, the improved moderation saved the site from drowning in noise, so more users joined, but this increase actually made policing the site harder, eventually breaking the very system that made the growth possible in the first place.

http://many.corante....community_patent.php

Back in February 2006, SuperboyAC started a thread with this post:

I don't know if this is a good idea, but I wanted to start a thread where we can all just brainstorm about note-taking software.  Anything you want to say, wishlist of features, what you like about existing programs, what you'd like the ideal program to do.  I know a lot of us would like to see a good review of this genre done here at DC, and we all know how hard that would be to accomplish, so maybe this thread could be a place where ideas can be collected....

This thread turned out to be the longest active thread on our forum, and is still going strong after over 380 replies and over 31000 reads.

And make sure you don't miss SuperBoyAC's Notetaking Software Roundup #1 (of several planned):  https://www.donation.../Archive/NoteTakers1

Someone asked me for the link to this a little while ago and I just realized I never shared it here...

You can upload a photo of yourself and transform it to make yourself look a different race, in the style of a famous artist, or even into an 'ape'.

To save the images after transformation, you will need to do a screen capture (what better reason to download Screenshot Captor and give it a try).

http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~morph/

Very cool and clever stop motion movie about android 207.

http://www.carrotkid...android207video.html

I recently discovered the Coding4Fun section on Microsoft's website. It's a great section where you can choose from a range of topics and view sample code and tutorials, mostly aimed at C# and VB .NET. I specifically like the Gaming topic, where some new technologies like Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML as well as DirectX programming are explained in detail.