Laura Landro, assistant managing editor at The Wall Street Journal writes about being detained by Kmart security after they accused her of intentionally putting $24.50 shoes in a $16.50 box, known as "ticket switching."

As soon as we stepped outside the store, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to face a serious-faced young man who identified himself as store security and asked me to step back inside. When he said the shoes I'd purchased were in the wrong box, I followed him inside, promising my family I'd be right back.

Instead, I was led to a windowless security room in the back of the store, detained for an hour and accused of deliberately switching a more expensive item into a cheaper box. The adult flip-flops, it turned out, were $24.50, and the box had been for a child's size nine, with a $16.50 price. My stunned protestations and explanations were summarily dismissed. My driver's license and credit card were temporarily confiscated, I was told to expect a civil notice of a fine by mail, and finally, I was advised never to return to the store.

Link | MP3 interview with Landro

A few years ago, we had a story about a store that was kicking people out if they caught them comparison shopping via a mobile device. Obviously, a store can kick out anyone they want to, but perhaps a better approach is to actually focus on better serving the customer so that when they're done comparison shopping, they still want to buy from you (either because you have the best price, or you offer some additional convenience or service they can't get elsewhere). This issue seems to be coming up again, but with a new twist. alex writes in to let us know that the bookstore at Harvard is kicking people out for taking too many notes about pricing (via Boing Boing). When confronted about this, the store's president actually claimed that book prices were the store's "intellectual property." Of course, just because you say something is your intellectual property, it doesn't mean it is. Unfortunately for the bookstore, the law is pretty clear that you can't copyright facts -- and whether the bookstore likes it or not, prices are facts. The store certainly has the right to refuse service to anyone, but that doesn't mean that it's smart for business or that copying down prices infringes on any kind of intellectual property.

Remember a couple of weeks ago when Steve Jobs took the stage and announced a $200 cheaper iPhone. That was pretty bad. And an iPhone that's just an iPod. Who needs that! The new Nano sure is cute, but cute insn't enough. I have a 1.5 year old 60GB video iPod that still works (sorry Steve) and I never use the video, so the $300 I have burning a hole in my pocket for my monthly Apple impulse buy (above and beyond the new Mini I bought last week) is going to (drum roll please) Nokia!

Yup, my next iPod/iPhone-alike thingy isn't even from Apple and it runs Linux, and comes highly recommended by geeks everywhere. I just put in the order on Amazon, I'll let you know how cool it is in a few days.



PS: This is my way of thanking Ben Bernanke for the huge windfall I got in the stock market yesterday and today. I think the 1/2 percent drop in interest rates is supposed to make us go out and buy stuff to stimulate the economy. Just doing my part Uncle Ben!

Link, by -- who else? -- Ape Lad.

While we're at it, Salon's Farhad Manjoo has an interview with one eyewitness who seems to believe that the tasered student, Andrew Meyer, may in fact have been a bit of a troll, egging cops on for an "overreaction that would make him a viral video star." Link (thanks Wagner James Au).

Have your say in the comments.

Previously: Don't Tase Me, Bro.

symbolset writes "The Nasdaq Staff has decided to delist SCO at open of business on September 27, 2007 under their discretionary authority and as a result of SCO filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. SCO can get a hearing but "There can be no assurance that the panel will grant the Company's request for continued listing.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sherri Shepherd, the co-host of The View who said she didn't know if the Earth was flat or round and that she didn't care, today said she knew all along it was round. She was just having a “senior brain-poopy moment,” when Whoopie tossed her that difficult question.

Her co-host, Elizabeth Hasselbeck defended her conservative pal:

HASSELBECK: I don’t think you have to learn to be perfect either… you’re just yourself. I thought you handled that so well yesterday. You said ‘You know I actually, my mind is full of what’s my son doing right now, what am I going to feed him for dinner, I’m a mom.’ Like I think that’s completely fine to say ‘You know what, today I don’t care if the earth is round or flat. I may not care tomorrow, I just wanna know that…’

Link

Mark your calendar: November 22.

That's the day, barring something unforseen, that OPML 2.0 will move from a draft to a final frozen spec.

If you plan to use OPML 2.0, or you're already using it, please set aside a few hours to carefully review the spec, between now and the end of September, or at the latest early October, to be sure it makes sense to you.

We're doing this very slowly and carefully so people will believe in the quality of this spec. If you don't think it's a good spec, now is the time to say why. Speak now or forever hold your peace.

You may not like the format, that's not the issue now -- it's the spec we're trying to finalize.

Thanks for your help!

A think tank has released a report bashing the idea of requiring paper trails for e-voting systems. The logic behind this uses some sleight of hand and some misdirection to make such a statement actually try to sound sensible. The key argument the group makes is that a paper trail would not increase security while increasing cost. That's actually true -- but that's not the point. People aren't asking for a paper trail to increase security. They're asking for a paper trail to make the machines auditable so the machine's ability to count accurately can be checked. In response to this, the think tank notes that the paper trail might not be perfect, so it's a waste. They point out that printers jam and the hand counts of paper trails may not be accurate either. That's nice, but again it's missing the point. Without those things, there's simply no way of knowing whether or not the computer count was accurate or whether the votes were tampered with. No one has suggested that a paper trail is the perfect solution to all of e-voting's problems. No one denies that paper trails potentially add other problems to the process. But the concern here is not in making e-voting cheaper -- but in making it better. Adding additional mechanisms to make the machines more reliable and more trustworthy seems like a reasonable step, though certainly not the only one that should be taken.

• Stanley Multi-Functional Ruler Pen Link

• Canon Powershot G9 Camera Reviewed (Verdict: A Fiddler's Dream) Link

• Stanley Multi-Functional Ruler Pen Link

• Roddler Custom Strollers Link

• Ute Tribe's Mechanoluminescent Proto-Gadget Link

• Extract 32 AA Batteries from 1 Six-Volt Lantern Battery Link

• The Device: Homebrew Homebrew Beer Maker Link

• Ponoko: Mail-Order Custom Furniture Market Link

• Belkin TuneScan FM Transmitter for iPod Link

• Oobject Top Ray Gun Collection Link

• "Snail" Espresso Machine Prototype Link

• USB 3.0 On Its Way Link

• Slide Skateboard Segway Hybrid Concept Link

• Watches Made from Meteorite Link

• Working Pop-Up Lamp Book by Tekeshi Ishiguru Link

• Morning Tech Deals Highlights Link

A veterinarian was surprised to pull a 7-inch long toy lizard out of a 12-inch long lizard that had eaten it.

Rossi ended up pulling a 7-inch rubber lizard from Mushu, a living 12-inch bearded dragon that had swallowed an inanimate cousin placed in her pen as a companion. Rossi said Mushu's owners took the family pet to the Riverside animal hospital Friday after noticing an unusual protrusion beneath the lizard's tail.

Mushu's master, Finley Collins, 7, thought her pet was having a baby.

Rossi said he knew nature wouldn't agree. P>"This species doesn't have babies, it has eggs," he said.

But after sedating Mushu and beginning to pull, Rossi ran into the unexpected.

"The next thing I knew, I was seeing legs and a body and a head," he said. "It was very strange to be tugging on this thing."

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

Paul Krugman has a weblog. Subscribed.

CyberSalon in Berkeley, September 23, "Politics 101 Meets Web 2.0: Democracy or Demagoguery?" 4 to 6PM, Hillside Club, $15 at door for food, drink, and open mike discussion for digital and analog political activists. Political candidates of all stripes now have web sites, participate in social networks, and can respond to folks via YouTube. So are we closer to democracy?

An anonymous reader writes "In a little-noticed press release issued Tuesday, credit reporting bureau TransUnion said it would begin offering credit freezes to all Americans, a change the belies the credit industry's oft-uttered claim that doing so would be too expensive and burdensome. The program takes effect Oct. 15, 2007, will cost $10 each to place and to remove, and request and must be filed by certified mail. As The Washington Post reports, the move comes as some 39 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws entitling their residents to credit freeze rights. The new right may have little benefit unless the other two major credit reporting bureaus follow suit, and both companies are staying mum about any plans to do so. In May, Slashdot examined a related story on the credit bureaus' traditional resistance to freeze laws."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nalini Ghuman, a UK-born music professor at Mills College in Oakland, can't return to her home in the US, because the State Department revoked her visa and won't tell her or anyone else why.

Ms. Ghuman’s descent into the bureaucratic netherworld began on Aug. 8, 2006, when she and Mr. Flight returned to San Francisco from a research trip to Britain. Armed immigration officers met them at the airplane door and escorted Ms. Ghuman away.

In a written account of the next eight hours that she prepared for her lawyer, Ms. Ghuman said that officers tore up her H-1B visa, which was valid through May 2008, defaced her British passport, and seemed suspicious of everything from her music cassettes to the fact that she had listed Welsh as a language she speaks. A redacted government report about the episode obtained by her lawyer under the Freedom of Information Act erroneously described her as “Hispanic.”

Held incommunicado in a room in the airport, she was groped during a body search, she said, and was warned that if she moved, she would be considered to be attacking her armed female searcher. After questioning her for hours, the officers told her that she had been ruled inadmissible, she said, and threatened to transfer her to a detention center in Santa Clara, Calif., unless she left on a flight to London that night.

Outside, Mr. Flight made frantic calls for help. He said the British Consulate tried to get through to the immigration officials in charge, to no avail. And Ms. Ghuman said her demands to speak to the British consul were rebuffed.

“They told me I was nobody, I was nowhere and I had no rights,” she said. “For the first time, I understood what the deprivation of liberty means.”

Link

Boing Boing reader Jeffrey McManus says,

In October, NBC will launch a craptastic DRM-laden video download site that will let people do less than virtually any video delivery system ever devised. In the NY Times' outstanding tradition of technology journalism, they announce the new "store" without mentioning that the reason these movies customers download will self-destruct after seven days is because they're wrapped in Windows Media DRM.

Link.

RedHanded writes "Forensic chemists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a color-changing spray that can identify people suspected of making or planting bombs. The chemical turns from yellow to bright red when it comes into contact with urea nitrate, an explosive residue that may be left behind on the hands of someone who has handled an improvised device."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Holy smokes. The talented artisans at Pressure Printing have just issued this mind-blowing Jim Woodring print. Titled "The Artist's Eye," the photo etching is a staggering 32.5" x 26.6". It's an edition of 25 and available unframed for $650 or framed for $950. Writes Woodring, "The eye of an artist is an organ upon which the love-hungry world depends for its quasi-spiritual sustenance." Link

We've seen in the past how easily bogus stats from a biased industry can suddenly become "fact" as the press uses the stats without questioning the assumptions or even noting the inherent bias in the numbers. Michael Geist is examining exactly how that has happened in Canada in the debate over what to do concerning counterfeit goods. Apparently, many pushing for stronger anti-counterfeiting legislation in Canada point to the RCMP's supposed claim that counterfeiting is costing Canada $30 billion. The problem is that the number the RCMP is using wasn't based on a careful study or anything -- it was based on some random claims they found online, that were actually numbers thrown around by lobbyists paid to pump up the supposed threat to (yes, you guessed it) push for stronger protective laws. Yet, because the RCMP used those numbers without bothering to explain that they just plucked them off the internet with no effort to research the actual situation, many are now assuming that the numbers are accurate. In the meantime, two separate recent studies by neutral parties have shown that the claims over losses from counterfeiting have been grossly exaggerated. Unfortunately, no one seems to have paid that much attention to either study... not when the RCMP is showing the cost as $30 billion.

Gimli writes "GNOME 2.20 has been officially released. There are a number of enhancements and improvements to things such as power management, Evince (the GNOME document view), Totem (the video player), and note-taking application Tomboy. There are also some changes to GNOME's configuration utilities with an eye towards streamlining them. The timing is impeccable, too: 'This release coincides with the tenth anniversary of GNOME's existence. The project has evolved considerably since its earliest incarnation and has become a global phenomenon. Used as the default environment in popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora, GNOME is widely used by Linux desktop users and is supported by a growing community of companies and independent developers. GNOME 2.20 will be included in the next major releases of many mainstream Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 7.10, which is scheduled for release next month. Users who wish to try it now can use the latest Ubuntu 7.10 live CD images, or the latest build of Foresight Linux. You can also check out the release notes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.