This was posted on the bASIC forums. It seems to suggest all customers should now be refunded automatically unless they notify bASIC that they want to keep their order.
By law, you must have a reasonable basis for stating that a product can be shipped within a certain time. If your advertising doesn't clearly and prominently state the shipment period, you must have a reasonable basis for believing that you can ship within 30 days.
If you can't ship within the promised time (or within 30 days if you made no promise), you must notify the customer of the delay, provide a revised shipment date and explain his right to cancel and get a full and prompt refund.
For definite delays of up to 30 days, you may treat the customer's silence as agreeing to the delay. But for longer or indefinite delays - and second and subsequent delays - you must get the customer's written, electronic or verbal consent to the delay. If the customer doesn't give you his okay, you must promptly refund all the money the customer paid you without being asked by the customer.
Finally, you have the right to cancel orders that you can't fill in a timely manner, but you must promptly notify the customer of your decision and make a prompt refund.
http://business.ftc.gov/documents/alt051-selling-internet-prompt-delivery-rulesCan't remember the full details, but I think Tom had some investment cash from "prominent members of the Bitcoin community" prior to accepting pre-order money, which is not to say that he hasn't spent all of that and some of the pre-order capital too, but I don't think he was funding the whole venture entirely on pre-payments.
Yep.
Also like the ModMiner quad this project is being partially funded by lenders in the Bitcointalk lending syndicate. We contracted a well known overseas company to provide us with a SHA256 hashing core that could be applied to Bitcoin mining, this company is one of the top design firms in the world when it comes to SHA256 IP cores. We leased what is called an RTL design which allows us to use any target ASIC process technology of our choice, once we had the core design we spent some money to have some made (this took some time) and turned those over to the hardware development team. We have two guys which I have no problem admitting are much smarter than I am who have come up with a working development board using multiple instances of the hashing core I indicated above. They have a very very (did I mention very?) primitive hacked together mining program that is being used to test, testing has been going on for about 2 weeks now with positive enough results that encouraged me to go public with our next generation of Bitcoin mining product. The hardware guys are still working on finalizing the pcb board design and there is a lot of firmware and software work that needs to be completed.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1157886 
