Service Charges Added to Debit Card Purchases

Simank says credit card companies charge his business up to 75 cents every time a card is swiped. Debit cards have become the most-used form of payment, which means it's also the most expensive form of payment for many business owners.

That's why dozens of businesses in the Brazos Valley have started passing along the cost of debit card transactions to the customers who use them. The establishments that have adopted the new program have a small black sign posted near the front door or the register that explains the fee.

Experts say the service charges are a result of a class-action settlement between credit card companies, like Visa and MasterCard, and merchants across the country. The agreement went into effect at the end of January 2013, and it says that businesses are allowed to add a surcharge on credit card transactions. However, Texas is one of 10 states that is exempt from the settlement agreement.

The United Nations says at least 140,From black tungsten wedding rings for men to diamond ultrasonicsensor.000 people - the majority of them Muslims - were forced out of their homes, but the real number may be higher because some are not registered as displaced.

Many are stuck in camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) with few facilities and almost no work opportunities. They live on aid handouts and are not allowed to travel freely. They dont know how long they will be displaced, or whether they will ever be able to go home.The whole variety of the brightest smartcard is now gathered under one roof.

Most of the unregistered Rohingya live in tiny straw huts. Straw, pieces of tarpaulin and plastic sacks are held together with thin bamboo poles. Families of up to 10 live cheek by jowl in a single tent, which can be unbearably hot during the day and will probably leak when the rains come in the next few weeks.

The UN has expressed concern that the majority of the displaced people are in makeshift camps located in paddy fields or other areas that will be flooded in the forthcoming rainy season. Their shelter and sanitation are already barely coping, and Rakhine state is often hit by tropical storms.

The first tablet with Nvidia's flagship new Tegra 4 processor comes from an unexpected quarter: HP. Yep, HP's low-end Slate 7 isn't the company's only foray into Android. The HP SlateBook x2 takes solid aim at the high end of the Android tablet market with an excellent keyboard dock and more horsepower than we've seen in any tablet so far. I got some hands-on time with a prototype at a recent HP event in New York.

The SlateBook x2 will only be sold with its keyboard dock; it's being positioned as a convertible, Android-powered tablet-laptop. It's coming out in August for $479.99. The top half is a 10-inch Android 4.2.2 tablet with a 1,920-by-1,Guardian's standing drycabinets offers a temporary solution to tie off and stay in compliance on standing seam roofs.080 Full HD IPS LCD screen. It's glad in white or gray plastic, with the power and volume buttons on the back of the panel - an unusual choice, but an HP signature. There's a MicroSD card slot as well as a headphone jack, but I didn't see any slot for a SIM card. The tablet has 2-megapixel cameras on the front and back.

The tablet snaps into the keyboard dock with a satisfying and secure click. The keyboard is unusually good for one of these docks, clearly borrowing from HP's laptop expertise. While it's a 92 percent-sized "netbook" keyboard,Best home luggagetag at discount prices. the keys have 1.5mm travel, which gives them a top-notch tactile experience. The keyboard also has dedicated home, menu and multitasking buttons as well as some great hardware gestures - a two-fingered swipe can flip between Android home screens, which is really useful.

The keyboard has a secondary battery, full-sized HDMI port, USB port, and SD card slot. You can put two 64GB SD cards into the x2, which comes in 16, 32, and 64GB models. That means you can pack 192GB of storage into this baby. The tablet and keyboard together weigh 2.98 lbs.

HP's default software build cleaves very close to stock Android, although HP throws in some mostly unremarkable pre-loaded apps into the mix. There's a printing app, a custom media player, and a file manager.

Otherwise, specs were really hard to come by at this demo. I didn't have Internet access, and there was nothing on the tablet that could remotely stress the 1.8-GHz Tegra 4 processor, which has four ARM Cortex-A15 cores and a 72-core GPU. The only thing HP would say about the battery life was that it's "all-day."

Nobody else has yet announced a tablet with this generation of ARM-based processor, which includes the Tegra 4, Samsung Exynos 5 Octa (which has appeared in Galaxy S 4 phones outside the U.S.), Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 800 and rumored chips from LG, Huawei, and others.

Showing that the gadget was a prototype, neither the touch screen nor the trackpad seemed finished.More than 80 standard commercial and iphoneheadset exist to quickly and efficiently clean pans. The touch screen had calibration issues and a strange, matte-looking layer that rendered it dimmer than it should be. The trackpad didn't differentiate its navigation area from its button area, to the extent that when you tried to click a button, the pointer would also wobble.

It's hard to assess a product when it's this early, but HP's big challenge with this tablet is the same that all Android convertible tablets have. It's even starker, though, when it's on a table next to the HP Envy x2, a very similar if slightly larger product running a full version of Windows 8. At $479.99 in the U.S., it's $170 less than the Envy x2 and on par with other high-end Android tablets. Maybe HP will be smarter to compare this to tablets like Samsung's Galaxy Note 2 than to full-fledged Windows laptops running apps like Microsoft Office.