PayPal strikes again, and this time an antique violin pays the ultimate price

It hasn’t been a particularly good few weeks for the customer service industry. Last week it was the saga of Paul Christoforo, the man who would be friends with the mayor of Boston, bro, who decided that civility was for the weak and paid a hefty price when he picked on the wrong guy. Now it is PayPal. Again.

PayPal is one of those services that has so dominated the space it exists in that it has inevitably become a source for users around the world to share, use, and occasionally become victims of. To be fair, there are millions of transaction every month at PayPal that go off swimmingly, with nary a problem. But when problems due arise, they can be whoppers.

Cats > Children Last month PayPal awoke the Internet on the wrong side of the bed, and then proceeded to face the digital hounds following an incident with Regretsy.com over blocking gifts for needy children. The condensed version is that Regretsy asked people to

Mayan Ruins in Georgia? Archaeologist Objects

The textbooks will tell you that the Mayan people thrived in Central America from about 250 to 900 A.D., building magnificent temples in Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and southern Mexico.

But could they possibly have left stone ruins in the mountains of North Georgia? Richard Thornton thinks so. He says he's an architect by training, but has been researching the history of native people in and around Georgia for years. On Examiner.com, he wrote about an 1,100-year-old archeological site near Georgia's highest mountain, Brasstown Bald, that he said "is possibly the site of the fabled city of Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto failed to find in 1540."

This might all be fairly arcane stuff, except that an archeologist he cited, Mark Williams of the

Chicago Bulls rally to down Atlanta Hawks

NBA Most Valuable Player Derrick Rose led a furious fourth-quarter rally, but it was Luol Deng who delivered the game-winner for Chicago in a 76-74 victory over Atlanta.
With the Hawks focused on Rose on Chicago's inbounds play, Deng cut inside and collected a pass from Joakim Noah for a layup with 3.7 seconds remaining.
The Hawks, who led by as many as 19 in the third quarter, could not respond, with Joe Johnson's jump shot at the buzzer failing to reach the rim.
The Hawks, who handed mighty Miami their first defeat of the lockout-delayed season on Monday, had appeared on their way to another victory over a lackluster Bulls team that shot just 27.3 percent from the floor through three quarters.
Rose scored 17 of his 30 points in the fourth quarter as Chicago rallied, hitting three three-

Mavs, NBA differ on who set up White House trip

NEW YORK (AP) — The Mavericks are getting their White House trip, though Mark Cuban and the NBA disagree on how it was arranged.

And Cuban insists the league still messed up by not giving the champions a game in Washington.

"It doesn't change the fact that they didn't (schedule) a game in DC for us," the Mavericks owner wrote Tuesday in an email. "Given the compressed schedule it should have been more of a priority because they knew better than any of us how few days off we would have to do something."

Cuban said Monday night in Dallas that "the league office was stupid or dumb or worse" to not schedule the defending champions in Washington so they could have the traditional trip to meet the president. But the NBA noted that scheduling that game wouldn't have necessarily meant seeing President Barack Obama.

"Our jurisdiction doesn't extend to scheduling the president, and scheduling the Mavericks against the Wizards would have been no guarantee that the president would be in town and available," league spokesman Mike Bass said.

But, Bass said, the league did find a suitable solution.

"We learned that he would be available on Jan. 9 and began working with the Mavericks to accommodate that availability and the Mavericks' schedule. Fortunately, we were able to make it work," Bass said.

The Mavericks will meet Obama on Monday, at the start of a road trip to Detroit and Boston.

North Korea military strategy superior, says think-tank

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea's military strategy is superior to the defensive posture of its affluent neighbor to the South, an independent think-tank said on Wednesday, giving Pyongyang the edge in the early days of any war on the divided peninsula.

The Seoul-based Korea Economic Research Institute said in a report that in 2011 North Korea operated a 1.02-million-strong army and a record number of tanks, warships and air defense artillery. Total military personnel strength is 1.2 million.

"The depressing reality is it would not be entirely wrong to say North Korea's military strength is stronger," the institute said.

"We need to remember that the North is far superior in terms of the number of troops, and especially the North's military is structured in its formation and deployment with the purpose of an offensive war."

AT&T to pay $215M to TiVo to settle patent suit

LOS ANGELES (AP) — AT&T Inc. will pay TiVo Inc. at least $215 million through June 2018, becoming the latest TV signal provider to settle a patent lawsuit involving the digital video recorder pioneer.

Per subscriber, this payout will be much larger than a similar $500 million settlement TiVo reached in May with satellite TV company Dish Network Corp. and its set-top box provider, EchoStar Corp.

Dish had about 13.9 million subscribers at the end of September, while AT&T's U-verse had just 3.6 million. That makes AT&T's settlement worth at least $59.72 per subscriber, while Dish's cost $35.97 per subscriber.

TiVo CEO Tom Rogers said the bigger settlement resulted in part from the fact that AT&T

BlackBerry maker vows privacy safeguard amid probe

Research In Motion vowed Tuesday to defend the legal privacy rights of BlackBerry users after a judicial commission in Pakistan ordered copies of smartphone communications in a scandal probe.
The Canadian firm reacted to news that a Pakistani commission was seeking records for a probe into an unsigned memo purported to ask for Washington's help to rein in Pakistan's military.
The highly controversial memo was allegedly an attempt by a close aide of President Asif Ali Zardari to enlist the US military's help to head off a military coup in May in Pakistan.
It was made public in October by Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz.
On Monday, the commission directed Pakistan government officials to obtain the BlackBerry "record of conversation" between Ijaz and a former envoy to the US accused of crafting the memo, Husain Haqqani.

Microsoft fumbles UFC promotion on Xbox Live, promises improvements

Partially kicking off Microsoft’s jump into becoming a provider of live television, the software company ran into a series of problems on Friday when attempting to broadcast the UFC 141 fight through the Xbox Live service as detailed by Dan Hsu. Designed to allow the purchase of UFC fights in either high or standard definition, the application brings more elements to the viewing experience including watching video of the weigh-in, choosing the winner of each fight and ranking your picks against friends who are also interested in UFC. The user can also check out the stats of each fighter as well as other information pertinent to the match.

Hoping to promote the event to hardcore UFC fanatics, Microsoft gave away approximately 30,000 free codes to access the fights. Once the matches started to kick off, technical issues on Microsoft’s end caused the application to stop loading for many users. For the users that did gain access to the app, the video feed was filled with stuttering and had a difficult time

Strong Quadrantid Meteor Shower, One of 2012's Best, Peaks Wednesday

If you enjoy the sight of "shooting stars" then make plans to be out looking skyward during the predawn hours on Wednesday (Jan. 4) when a strong display of Quadrantid meteors may appear. This first meteor shower of the year may end up being one of the best of 2012.

To paraphrase Forrest Gump: The Quadrantid meteor shower is like opening up a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get!  Indeed, the Quadrantids are notoriously unpredictable, but if any year promises a fine display, this could be it.

Peak activity is due to occur early on Wednesday at about 2:30 a.m. EST (0730 GMT) and favors eastern North America. The Quadrantid meteor shower sky map here for this story shows where to look to see the display.

The Quadrantids (pronounced KWA-dran-tids) provides one of the most intense

World-first hybrid shark found off Australia

Scientists said on Tuesday that they had discovered the world's first hybrid sharks in Australian waters, a potential sign the predators were adapting to cope with climate change.

The mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world, said lead researcher Jess Morgan.

"It's very surprising because no one's ever seen shark hybrids before, this is not a common occurrence by any stretch of the imagination," Morgan, from the University of Queensland, told AFP.

"This is evolution in action."

Colin Simpfendorfer, a partner in Morgan's research from James Cook University, said initial

Drought Led to Demise of Ancient City of Angkor

The ancient city of Angkor — the most famous monument of which is the breathtaking ruined temple of Angkor Wat — might have collapsed due to valiant but ultimately failed efforts to battle drought, scientists find.

The great city of Angkor in Cambodia, first established in the ninth century, was the capital of the Khmer Empire, the major player in southeast Asia for nearly five centuries. It stretched over more than 385 square miles (1,000 square kilometers), making it the most extensive urban complex of the preindustrial world. In comparison, Philadelphia covers 135 square miles (350 sq. km), while Phoenix sprawls across more than 500 square miles (1,300 sq. km), not including the huge suburbs.

Suggested causes for the fall of the Khmer Empire in the late 14th to early 15th centuries have included war and land overexploitation. However, recent evidence suggests that prolonged droughts might have been linked to the decline of Angkor — for instance, tree rings from Vietnam suggest the region experienced long spans of drought interspersed with unusually heavy rainfall.

Angkor possessed a complex network of channels, moats, and embankments and reservoirs known as barays to collect and store water from the summer monsoons for use in rice paddy fields in case of drought. To learn more about how the Khmer managed their water, scientists analyzed a 6-foot (2-meter)-long core sample of sediment taken from the southwest corner of the largest Khmer reservoir, the West Baray, which could hold 1.87 billion cubic feet (53 million cubic meters) of water, more than 20 times the amount of stone making up the Great Pyramid at Giza.