Businesses must file tax forms for every vendor that sells them more than $600 in goods.

The goal is to prevent vendors from underreporting their income to the Internal Revenue Service. The government must think vendors are omitting a lot because the filing requirement is estimated to bring in $19 billion over the next decade.

It remains to be seen for congress can work together to fix this.

President Barack Obama’s nominee soldiered through her second day of testimony on Capitol Hill apparently in good shape to win Senate approval — barring a major gaffe — in time to take her seat before the court opens a new term in October. If confirmed, Kagan, 50, would succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.

The Senate Judicial committee called Kagan back Wednesday for a second and likely final day of questioning.

The lawsuit alleges that the trouble began after a teacher confiscated the cell phone of the student, identified in the suit only as N.N., when she broke school rules by making a call on campus in January 2009.

She was later called to Principal Gregory Ellsworth’s office, suspended for three days and told that her cell phone had been turned over to authorities after Ellsworth found semi-nude and nude photos inside, the lawsuit says.

When other students at the same high school were caught allegedly sending nude and semi-nude photos on their cell phones last year, the Wyoming District Attorney General gave them a similar choice: taking re-education classes or facing charges.

The lawsuit says N.N.’s photos were never printed, distributed or uploaded on the Internet and were intended to be seen only by the student and possibly by her long-time boyfriend.

The lawsuit seeks damages, reimbursement for the re-education course she was required to take and the deletion of any stored copies of the photographs.

As technology continues to expand and enter into our lifes, new and more interesting types of cases will emerge to address those new advances.

After weeks of fucking up the environment, BP finally conceded that the oil leak is larger than it originally estimated, adding more worry as portions of the massive spill began appearing on shore.

They finally made available video footage of the amount of oil that continues to gush out into the ocean.  Is it me or does it seem that every week, BP comes up with a new idea and their execution fails to stop the spill.

Could this fucking mess become the death nail of future oil drilling in the ocean.  I guess time will tell.

If the stock price of Goldman Sach is an indicator then the company came out ahead as the stock rose $1.01 per share, to $153.04.   Other would argue that the stock was due to go up after dropping from the $180 per share levels just a few weeks ago.

Some of the things that came clear from today’s interplay is that Gold is stating that the people that they were dealing with that is at the core of the SEC fraud charges – were institutions and not your regular “Joe”.  Institutions with a high level of knowledge about the markets and who possessed knowledge about the market.  So they know what they were doing and Gold just accommodated or created an environment for them to make their trades.

The other argument that Gold made was that the short selling was just a byproduct of their risk measures.  They take action from institution and avoid too much risk they edge their bets to offset their risk.

It will be interesting to see how things play out in the public arena as well as in the court.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that questions whether a California city violated a public employee’s rights by reading sexually explicit text messages on an electronic device owned by the Police Department. A decision has not been made.

Although the case involved a police officer, some legal experts said the ruling could have broad implications on how public and private employees can be monitored.

In the digital era, employees often are expected to be in constant contact with their managers. The use of cell phones and mobile internet service has skyrocketed over the last decade, and some of the growth can be attributed to companies giving cell phones and smartphones to their employees

Employees should protect themselves by keeping their personal lifes out of work communications.  If your employer has anything to do with giving you your phone – whether it is paying for it or not, its sale to assume that your text are not private so you should have no reasonable expectation of privacy towards them.

These days, one’s ip address is the equivalent of one’s home address or finger print.  As each home is appointed to a unique ip address.  Once they have your ip address, they can subpoena your Internet Provider for the account associated to your ip address.

With this information, they can now connect you to the comments being made on the Internet.  They then amend their complaint to add you as a Doe.  Serve you and the lawsuit begins.

Blue Cross has announced or has notified some of its 800,000 individual policyholders in California that it plans to raise their rates by up to 39 percent on March 1, 2010.

Blue Cross has also elected to raise the rates of their consumers in Maine up to 32 percent.

Individuals in Kansas and Oregon will also face rate increases in varying amounts.

Premiums are far more volatile for individual policies than for those bought by employers and other large groups, which have bargaining clout and a sizable pool of people among which to spread risk. As more people have lost jobs, many who are healthy have decided to go without health insurance or get a bare-bones, high-deductible policy, reducing the amount of premiums insurers receive.

Its fucking crazy what these insurance companies are allowed to do especially in such hard economic times.  Who these days can afford to survive much less pay for their insurance policy.