Friday, June 8, 2012

PayPal Fraud


An Email from PayPal?
Read this to stay safe!



Your PayPal account (xxxxxxxxx@xxxxxx) has been limited.

Hello peterblakeborough,

PayPal is constantly working to ensure security by regularly screening the accounts in our system. We recently reviewed your account, and we need more information to help us provide you with secure service. Until we can collect this information, your access to
sensitive account features will be limited. We would like to restore your access as soon as possible, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Why is my account access limited ?

Your account access has been limited for the following reason(s):

June 7th, 2012 (11:30:09 p.m.) We would like to ensure that your account was not accessed by an unauthorized third party. Because protecting the security of your account is our primary concern, we have limited access to sensitive PayPal account features. We understand that this may be an inconvenience but please understand that this temporary limitation is for your protection.

How can I restore my account access ? 
It's easy:

1.   Use your personal paypal form attached to this email.
2.   Confirm that you're the owner of the account by updating your account information.

The process takes about 3 minutes. After your information is successfully verified and updated, you'll be prompted to log into your restored account.


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Peter’s Comment
If you receive an email like the one above from PayPal or from any bank do not respond to it. It is a fraud. PayPal and banks do not ask for the above information. If you fill the spaces you will give fraudsters everything they need to empty your account.

A REGISTER FOR BAD BOSSES


Waitress jobless as boss gets wrong drink
NZ NewswireJune 8, 2012, 3:26 pm

A New Plymouth waitress has been awarded more than $10,000 in lost wages and compensation after she was fired for serving a director of the company she worked for the wrong drink.
Jessica Chand, who started working for $13.50 an hour at the Japanese Steak House in New Plymouth on August 31, last year, was fired under the 90-day trial legislation.
She filed a personal grievance with the Employment Relations Authority (ERA).
The ERA said her employer Otaku Holdings acted in a grossly unfair way.
Ms Chand thought her work was going well until the evening of September 16 when Thomas Buckthought, a director of the company employing her arrived for a late meal.
Thomas Buckthought
Ms Chand took over responsibility for his table after there were difficulties with the service.
She was told the next day that she was being dismissed because she served Mr Buckthought the wrong drink.
The ERA said the employer's processes were poor. The probation clause in Ms Chand's contract did not explain the provisions of the law as required and was therefore defective.

Peter’s Comment
Served him wrong or served him right? I’ll go for served him right. How much perfection did the ‘buck thought’ was appropriate for $13.50 an hour?

Just as there are registers of people with bad credit histories there should also be an official register of bad employers where a job applicant can check out a prospective employer before committing themselves to something they may regret.

I decided to Google Thomas Buckthought and below is what I found. Jessica Chand should not hold her breath awaiting payment. And perhaps she did serve him the wrong drink; some people may say she should have given him something more potent than alcohol.
Description: Stuff.co.nz


Taranaki home builder goes into liquidation
JOHN ANTHONY
Last updated 05:00 02/03/2012
ON THE RUN: Taranaki housing company Dream Homes has gone into liquidation with more than $1.5 million owed to creditors. Attempts to speak to Dream Homes owner Thomas Buckthought on Thursday were unsuccessful.
Failed Taranaki housing company Dream Homes has been put into liquidation amidst revelations the company traded under a fake Registered Master Builders logo.
Dream Homes director Thomas Buckthought said he was now selling his home and leaving Taranaki, possibly for Australia, to keep his family safe after receiving threats from suppliers.
All six housing and property companies owned by Mr Buckthought were put into liquidation on Tuesday.
The first liquidation report for Volk Industries, trading as Dream Homes, showed the company owed more than $1.5 million dollars to creditors.
On February 28 the company had only $13,000 to its name.
Hamilton-based liquidator Kim Thompson said the company had virtually no assets to pay creditors.
"There's a huge hole there and right now I can't quite figure out how it got so big," Mr Thompson said.
The report shows more than 80 unsecured creditors were owed $823,000 and 12 secured creditors were owed $692,000. . . .


Click here for great reading



Thursday, June 7, 2012

Pilot Inexperience?


Air France Flight 447 Investigation: Pilots Not Properly Trained to Fly the Airbus A330?

By MIGUEL SANCHO, NIKKI BATTISTE (@NikkiBattiste) and JON MAYERSOHN
June 6, 2012 ABC News
The Airbus A330 has one of the most sophisticated automated piloting systems in the airline industry, but the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 has some experts saying that the pilots weren't adequately trained to handle the plane in an emergency situation, and that the plane's stall alarm system may have added to the crew's confusion and contributed to the disaster.
An Air France Airbus A330
The crash, which killed all 228 passengers and crew on board, is considered one of the worst -- and most mysterious -- aviation disasters in modern history. One theory for what caused that Airbus A330 to go down is that the two co-pilots, led by 58-year-old Captain Marc Dubois, were not properly trained and depended too heavily on the plane's autopilot system. That system disconnected at high-altitude when a speed sensor, called a pitot tube, froze over, sending inconsistent readings to the plane's computers.
Air France declined ABC News' request for an interview, pending the July release of the final report from France's investigation. But according to Bill Voss, the president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, Air France was so confident in the design of the Airbus A330, the airline had not trained nor prepared its pilots for the situation the crew of Flight 447 encountered the night of the crash.
"No one was trained for high-altitude stall recovery in the cockpit," said Voss. "It's not part of the normal training curriculum...this is something that really has to be reformed globally. This is a really big deal."
Air France Flight 447 was en route from Rio de Janiero to Paris on May 31, 2009, for an overnight trip, when it vanished. The plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in the early morning hours of June 1, 2009 -- nearly four hours after take-off.
Black box tapes were recovered from the wreckage two years later in April 2011 and, amazingly, still worked. The tapes revealed that almost four hours into the flight, the plane was 800 miles off the coast of Brazil, and Captain Dubois left the cockpit for a scheduled nap. At the time, the plane was about to fly into a thunderstorm, one that other flights that night had steered around.
Once in the storm, the plane's pitot tube, a critical piece of equipment that tells the pilot the aircraft's air speed, failed, likely from ice crystals forming on it, according to BEA officials who inspected the wreckage. When the pitot tube fails, the Airbus's automatic pilot system disengages, shifting control back to the pilot.
According to the tapes, First Officer Cedric Bonin, a 32-year-old pilot who had fewer than 5,000 flight hours under his belt, was at the controls but had never been in this situation before at high-altitude. Bonin made the fatal mistake of pulling the plane's nose up, which caused it to go into a deep stall.
"It seems that the pilots did not understand the situation and they were not aware that they had stalled," said Jean-Paul Troadec, the director of BEA, the French authority conducting the investigation into the Flight 447 crash.
When the Airbus A330 goes into a stall as severe as what happened to Flight 447, Voss said the plane's computer rejects the data it's receiving, thinking the plane couldn't possibly be flying in such a radical condition, and then shuts off the stall alarm.
"The computer is thinking 'this doesn't make any sense, we must be on the ground. We must be parked at the gate or we would be dead,'" Voss said.
Airbus claims the stall alarm on Flight 447 "was performing as designed," and said there is rationale behind its design.
"If you get as low as 60 knots, the stall warning will cut out by design, and we do that because on landings and take-offs at a low air speed, when the angle of attack is erratic and it may not be reliable, we cut that out so it would not distract pilots during take-offs and landings," said Bill Bozin, the vice president of safety and technical affairs at Airbus.
As co-pilot Cedric Bonin pulled continuously up on the controls, the stall alarm sounded for 54 seconds straight. But as Flight 447 went deeper into its catastrophic stall, the alarm cut in and out intermittently, the black box tapes revealed. The stall warning was working as designed, but critics charge the pilots would have been confused by the mixed signals.
The co-pilots called frantically for help from the captain, the black box tapes showed, but it took Dubois more than one minute to return to the cockpit.
"What's happening?" Dubois is heard asking when he re-enters the cockpit.
"I don't know what's happening," one co-pilot responded.
It was not until the final three seconds before the plane hit the Atlantic that the pilots even realized they were going to crash, the black box tapes revealed. Co-pilot David Robert is heard on the tape recording saying, "Oh my God, we're going to crash. I can't believe it." The last words on the recording are Bonin saying, "But what's happening?"
Peter's Comment
If the stall warning was designed to switch off automatically during lower than normal stalling speed flight (deep stall) then it was an accident waiting to happen.

The pilots don’t need a stall warning while the wheels are on the ground but they will certainly need it at any time in flight when the angle of attack is critically high regardless of speed. It is normal on modern airliners for the speed brakes, once armed, to automatically deploy when the wheels touch the runway. In my view, it follows that the stall alarm should only be silenced by the wheels touching the runway rather than when the airspeed falls below normal stalling speed.

And what of the pitot head heating failure. That would have been turned on during routine checks at the beginning of the flight and the pitot should not have iced up. This indicates a technical failure rather than crew inexperience.

All too often dead pilots are blamed for the shortcomings of others. This crew appears to have been one of normal age and experience. I don’t think the same can be said of the aircraft with regard to its design and/or maintenance.

BEYOND THE SEAS

This is my latest historical novel  Beyond the Seas When twelve-year-old orphan Nathaniel Asker is shipped from the back alleys of London to...