California Attorney General Appealing Court’s Reversal Of Foie Gras Ban

(apricot cafe)

Almost a month after a U.S. District judge ordered California to reverse its ban on selling foie gras, the state is fighting back and appealing that decision in an attempt to get poultry liver back off the menu.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris gave notice yesterday that she’ll be appealing the recent ruling, reports the Sacramento Bee, which overturned a ban that was passed in 2004 and took effect in July 2012.

The judge said in his Jan. 7 decision that federal poultry inspection rules preempt the state’s ban on selling the dish made from either ducks or geese.

California had argued the ban was imposed on products created by a particular process, but Judge Stephen V. Wilson didn’t agree, writing: “California cannot regulate foie gras products’ ingredients by creatively phrasing its law in terms of the manner in which those ingredients were produced.”

There were no details in the one-page notice of appeal from Harris’ office, or what legal arguments it will bring up to challenge the ruling.

Activists opposed to the fattening of ducks and geese for their liver — a practice they call inhumane — will likely be pleased, as they’d urged Harris to appeal the ban’s reversal.

On the other side, farmers and foie gras producers cited losses of millions of dollars after not being able to sell their products to restaurants and business in California, and had sued to overturn the ban.

It’s still illegal to produce foie gras in the state, as the ruling only overturned the part of the ban that applied to selling it in California.

Kamala Harris appeals court ruling against California foie gras ban [Sacramento Bee]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Pizza Shop Customer Sends Owner Letter Apologizing For Writing Bad Check In 2002, Encloses Money Order

(morgan_freemun)

While there are many bad consumers in the world, there are also those out there who recognize they haven’t done the right thing, and seek to make amends, even if it’s years later. That’s how it went down for a pizza shop owner who was surprised to find a letter in the mail from a customer who’d written a bad check in 2002 — and enclosed a money order to make up for it.

Reddit user morgan_freemun (we see what you did there!) posted the letter detailing the customer’s desperate situation, in which he or she admits to knowingly writing a check for $20 that the bank wouldn’t honor.

“Received this today. I’m speechless,” the redditor writes with the image of the letter dated Jan. 28, 2015 (it took a few days to get through the mail, the poster adds).

“Back in 2002 I bounced a check at your pizza shop. I was going through a very difficult time financially and was at the end of my rope,” the letter reads. “I had no money and a hungry child at home, so I wrote a check that I knew would not be honored by my bank. I’m not making excuses for my behavior, just applying some context.”

The customer adds that they think about the situation a lot, and still feels ashamed and embarrassed for writing that check. Even though they’ve visited the store several times in the past few years, they write that they couldn’t summon up the courage to confess and ask for forgiveness until now.

“I have worked hard and built up a solid business over the last decade and feel that it is my responsibility to remedy this situation. I hope there are no hard feelings,” they write, enclosing a money order for $54.

“I came to this amount by assuming the original order was $20 and then adding 8% interest compounded yearly for the last 13 years,” they explain.

The pizza shop owner writes that he assumed at first the letter writer was a guy, but admits it could just as easily be a woman. Either way, he appreciates the effort.

“I feel bad for the poor guy,” he writes in the comments. “I probably forgot about him when I wrote the check off as a loss and never gave him another thought. This poor dude has been dwelling on this for over a decade. If I find out who he is I’m going to have a beer with him, I’m buying.”

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Top 20 blogs más relevantes en español (de todas las materias) (02/2015) #infografia #socialmedia

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Top 20 blogs más relevantes en español (de todas las materias) (02/2015) #infografia #socialmedia

Hola:

Una infografía con el Top 20 blogs más relevantes en español (de todas las materias) (02/2015). Vía

Un saludo

Top 20 blogs más relevantes en español (de todas las materias) (02/2015)

Archivado en: Infografía, Sociedad de la información Tagged: Blogs, Infografía, internet, tic



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Twitter CEO Admits “We Suck At Dealing With Abuse And Trolls”

(Tom Raftery)

Because it’s so easy to set up a new Twitter account and users don’t have to share any info that would immediately identify them in the real world, the social media platform is overflowing with fake accounts and users who harass others while hiding behind screen names. It’s a well-known problem with Twitter, but one that the company has done little to acknowledge beyond making vague promises. But recently leaked e-mails show that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is fully aware of the issue.

The Verge acquired internal e-mails at Twitter in which Costolo is candid about his company’s inability to deal with harassment and other unacceptable behavior.

“We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” wrote Costolo in response to an employee’s question about what could be done to curb bullying on Twitter. “It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.”

Costolo says he’s “frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue” since he took over as CEO from Twitter co-founder Evan Williams in 2010.

“There’s no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front,” he writes. “It’s nobody else’s fault but mine, and it’s embarrassing.”

The CEO makes promises that the company has plans to combat the problem, but doesn’t go into specifics.

“We’re going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them,” he writes, without providing details as to how this may actually happen.

As we’ve noted before, the only ways in which Twitter could cut down on trolls is by making alterations to core policies that also make the platform useful to legitimate users.

You can’t take away anonymity, as there are countless Twitter users who rely on the platform for a safe outlet where they can express statements and release information they wouldn’t be comfortable or able to if their real names were attached.

Twitter may be able to do a better job of policing trolls, but with hundreds of millions of users there is no possible way it could afford to hire enough humans to monitor every complaint. Automated flagging and banning systems can easily be gamed so that users who don’t like the opinions of a certain account can have that person blocked for behavior that isn’t abusive.

A follow-up response from Costolo demonstrates that he truly does take this issue seriously, but again fails to directly address ways in which Twitter can handle trolls without fundamentally altering the nature of the platform.

“We HAVE to be able to tell each other the truth, and the truth that everybody in the world knows is that we have not effectively dealt with this problem even remotely to the degree we should have by now, and that’s on me and nobody else,” he writes. “So now we’re going to fix it, and I’m going to take full responsibility for making sure that the people working night and day on this have the resources they need to address the issue, that there are clear lines of responsibility and accountability, and that we don’t equivocate in our decisions and choices.”

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Mall Owners Will Really Miss RadioShack

(Penn Cann Mall)

RadioShack no longer serves an important role in most American consumers’ everyday lives. Yet one group will miss the chain quite a bit: mall developers, who will need to find replacement tenants for about 2,000 current Shacks that are expected to close.

While the bankruptcy hasn’t been announced or finalized yet. Shoppers and mall owners are only seeing bits of news attributed to people familiar with the negotiations who report that the most likely outcome is that most of the chain will close, with about half of its store remaining open as co-branded Radio Shack stores and Sprint mobile phone shops. Amazon was apparently part of these negotiations, as were the new owners of massage chair vendors Brookstone.

No matter who ends up bidding on remaining stores, there will still be thousands of locations that will close, and mall owners are preparing for when that happens. One mall owner in Florida has already listed the Radio Shack location even before the company has announced whether it will stay open or not. “It will take me four to six months of rent lost to get a tenant in there,” he explained to the Wall Street Journal.

Worse still is that Radio Shack already is delaying rent payments on some of its stores, which means that mall owners could miss out on even more income.

RadioShack Store Closings to Jolt Some Developers [Wall Street Journal]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Complaining Comcast Customer Renamed “Super B**ch” On Her Cable Bill

While Comcast says it’s doing its best to stop employees from renaming customers things like “A**hole Brown,” the reports of Comcast customers with rudely revised account names continues. This time, it’s a Chicago-area woman who has been dubbed “Super B**ch” on her Comcast bill.

The 63-year-old woman, who may be super but whose name is Mary and not a pejorative, tells WGN-TV that she’s had months of problems with her Comcast service.

“I had 39 technicians here from November to April,” she explains.

And after her tech issues were finally resolved, her bills mysteriously stopped showing up.

“I was nice enough to call them to ask how much I owe,” she says, admitting that she did get “a little angry because I never got good service,” but says she never swore at the Comcast rep.

Then she got her Comcast bill, in which she was rechristened with the Super B name.

“This is a disgrace to me. Why are they doing this to me?” she asks. “I pay my bills. I do not deserve this.”

Comcast’s response is exactly what you’d expect: “We are investigating this thoroughly and will reach out to our customer.”

Again we ask — why does Comcast, which can’t keep its own employees from making such boneheaded blunders, think that it deserves to acquire another 10 million customers?

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Slip-On Keyboard Company Has To Pay BlackBerry $860K For Continuing To Sell iPhone Accessory

BlackBerry’s trying its very best to stay relevant, and as such, it’s going after one company that actually seems to admire its phone design: After suing the makers of a slip-on iPhone keyboard by Typo Products that was similar to its own keyboard and successfully nabbing an injunction against sales of the accessory, BlackBerry will now get $860,000 after it claimed the company continued to sell the product.

A federal judge said this week that the Ryan Seacrest-backed company owes the cash for violating that injunction barring sales of its original iPhone keyboard case, reports re/code.

Typo had released a newer model of the keyboard that it said didn’t come in conflict with BlackBerry’s intellectual property rights, but BlackBerry wasn’t about to give up this particular bone.

BlackBerry asked for $2.6 million in sanctions plus attorney’s fees, saying Typo made at least two bulk sales of the original Typo cases and performed 100 warranty replacements after the injunction went into effect.

A Typo representative said in a statement that the ruling is “part of the ongoing patent litigation related to the initial Typo product.”

“It has no impact on the Typo 2 product currently in the marketplace or our other planned product releases for the tablet.”

BlackBerry’s representative kept it sweet and (I can only imagine smugly) simple, saying: “The court’s order speaks for itself.”

Judge Orders Keyboard Case Maker Typo to Pay BlackBerry $860,000 [re/code]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Walmart Manager Says He Was Fired After Stopping Alleged Shoplifter

(Mike Mozart)

For several years now, Consumerist has reported on variety of stories where a former Walmart employee says they were fired either stopping a shoplifter or defending themselves in an altercation with customers. The latest such incident involves the manager of an Alabama Walmart who claims he was dismissed after stopping an alleged repeat offender from shoplifting again.

AL.com reports that the former manager was blindsided when he was fired a month after he chased and confronted a shoplifter attempting to steal nearly $1,000 worth of merchandise.

The man says the incident occurred during the night shift, when he heard an alarm signaling that an emergency door was open.

When the manager reached the door, he saw a man he described as an habitual shoplifter leaving with a cart full of merchandise.

“When I caught up to the individual he turned and grabbed me, struck me in the face and dragged me to the ground,” the manager says. “I got loose and was holding him down when security personnel from an apartment complex across the street came to help until police arrived.”

The man says instead of being commended for his action, he was fired 27 days later for “gross misconduct” for not looking out for his own welfare and not complying with Walmart’s security measures.

A Walmart spokesperson told AL.com that he couldn’t speak specifically about the man’s firing.

“It is a tough situation anytime we have an associate that does something that unfortunately puts himself in danger,” the spokesperson said. “We don’t think there is any amount of stolen merchandise that is worth anyone’s life. Associates are trained to follow certain security measures.”

While the manager admits that he was trained not to pursue a shoplifter more than 10 feet from the store, he and other managers have routinely broken that rule in the past.

“I am expected to keep the shoplifting at a minimum,” he said.

Additionally, he says the amount of shoplifting is reflected in associate pay. If shoplifting is up, then associates don’t get bonuses.

The suspected shoplifter arrested after the altercation is also accused of stealing $3,500 in merchandise from the store over the previous nine days.

Alabama Wal-Mart manager gets punched in face by shoplifter, loses his job [AL.com]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

Google para educación: 4 herramientas para enseñar a programar a los niños

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