The Millennium Shrimp

This “Capt.” at the UN “Directorate of International Payment and Transfers”(?) wants to give me an ATM card. All I have to give them is my name, age, telephone number, address and present occupation. I mean, it’s the UN, it must be legitimate!

UNITED NATIONS
(WORLD BANK ASSISTED PROGRAMME)
DIRECTORATE OF INTERNATIONAL
PAYMENT AND TRANSFERS.
870 UNITED NATIONS PLAZA 20-ANEW YORK NY 10017
WIRE TRANSFER/AUDIT UNIT
Our Ref: WB/NF/UN/XX027

ATTN: BENEFICIARY,
IRREVOCABLE RELEASE OF YOUR PAYMENT

We have actually been authorized by the World Bank and international monetary fund (IMF), to investigate the unnecessary delay of your payment, hence recommendation and approval of your claims for payment is certified as genuine.

During the course of our investigation, we discovered with dismay that your payment has been unnecessarily Delayed by corrupt officials of the Bank For this reasons, the formal officials that has been handling your payment before have been instructed to hands up from your payment due to the petitions and complain we have been receiving from all parts of the world against African countries the way they are delaying their beneficiaries fund. Some petitions we received made it known to us that some beneficiaries have loose all they have achieved in their life time due to the way they are been treated in regards to their Contract Payment, Inheritance and Lottery Award Winning. and also we noticed that the corrupt officials were  Trying to divert your Fund into their private accounts. To forestall this, security for your funds Was organized in the form of your personal Identification number (PIN) and your payment has been approved via ATM CARD, this will enable only you have direct Control over this fund.

We have also agreed with the World Bank and international monetary fund (IMF) that, we will handle this payment ourselves to avoid the hopeless situation created by these corrupt Officials. We have obtained an irrevocable payment guarantee on your Payment,  from the World Bank and international monetary Funds (IMF).We are happy to inform you that based on our recommendation/instructions; your Entire contract fund/ inheritance claim has been credited in your favor through our overseas paying bank. You are therefore advice to contact:

REV VINCENT FISHER International Auditing unit, United Nations Liaison Office London United Kingdom on EMAIL: revfisher_un@live.com to collect your original ATM CARD with your access PIN code. Once the ATM CARD is delivered to your door step, you will have total control access to your funds because the ATM CARD will be upgraded and activated in your favor.

NOTE: You are advice to reconfirm the following information to Rev. Vincent Fisher to avoid any further delay in processing of your payment. Your full name, Your Age, telephone number, mailing address, Present Occupation.

Thanks for your cooperation

CAPT. GEORGE DONALD
UNITED NATIONS, NEW YORK

Saw this essay posted on slashdot this afternoon. He conducted an independent recount of votes in Humbolt County, CA and discovered a software bug in  Diebold’s GEMS (which counts scanned paper ballots generated by touch screen voting) that will delete the first set of scanned ballots if you delete any other set of scans(!)

It’s a good example of how horribly flawed the closed source software development model is when applied to the public sector. Diebold bought a piece of crap that someone else wrote and now they’re trying to recoup their investment. They have no incentive to actually fix the software - that would cost money and it’s far more profitable to downplay the issue and keep pushing the product. Meanwhile, the people who have an interest in fixing the software can’t because they don’t actually own it. Imagine your car having an annoying oil leak and you have to wait for GM to get around to fixing it. GM doesn’t really care if your car is burning oil. They’re not the ones buying a quart of oil every week to top it off. Can you imagine the City Fire Department not being able to get their trucks fixed because they only lease them? That’s exactly the problem with Closed source software. You don’t own the software and the person most affected by the problem is powerless to remedy it.
It’s not so much that there’s a vast conspiracy to control American elections as there is a misapplication of a bad business model to a sector where it should never have been applied in the first place.

Wall Street mogul was arrested today by the FBI after his sons turned him in for what is possibly the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme. From the Wall Street Journal:

Ms. Leavitt said she recently discussed her investment with a friend who told her he was suspicious about the firm’s ability to generate such profits amid the economic crisis. “I thought, ‘He’s probably just jealous,’ ” said Ms. Leavitt. “We’ve been with [Mr. Madoff] for 15 years, and it’s grown every year at 10%.”

If it’s too good to be true, it probably is. I don’t think we’ve seen the bottom of this economic crisis. It’s going to take more than Washington throwing money at the Street like drunken salarymen at a strip club to restore confidence in the financial sector. This was a company managing 17 billion in assets, and the whole thing is going into receivership. According to the article, Madoff told his sons he lost around $50 Billion in investor money, paying the older investors dividends with money from the newer investors. He got caught out because the liquidity in the market dried up and he couldn’t raise enough capital to keep the ball rolling.