No coverage for shoplifting, just for "most" employee fraud and theft. You can't get coverage for the 8000 CD's that are stolen one at a time. You might get coverage for the employee that steals 8000 at once, but what I was referring to was shoplifting coverage. No insurance company foots the bill for shoplifting...the stores absorb this loss or pass it on to consumers.
How does an insurance company come into play here? Stores don't have insurance for shoplifting. There are policies for financial misdeeds and armed robbery, but shoplifting and petty employee theft are not covered by any policies I've seen offered to retail locations.
The only one getting screwed is the retail store, and if it's an independent retailer (are there any left in the CD business?) then it's really sad. I probably wouldn't lose sleep if it was Wal*Mart getting ripped off.
Too bad they only are showing little snippets of the ads. I would have liked to see the full ads...for those who are seeing them for the first time it's tough to figure out some of the commercials. For example, the eTrade monkey ad with the "Deliverance" guys clapping along wasn't really funny until you saw the ending tagline "Well, we just blew $3 million dollars". In fact, with that tagline it's even funnier now.:-)
When I was about six or seven my parents purchased a set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Seemed to be the thing to do back then for parents that wanted their kids to do well in school, and of course it looked real impressive on the bookshelves in the living room (like all my O'Reilly books over my desk at work). I decided that I was going to learn everything there was to know so I started to read the first volume with the goal of reading the entire encyclopedia (and the annual Book of the Year update!). I got about three pages into the thing and gave up. Pretty dry reading the encyclopedia so props to Mr. Jacobs for getting through it.
Motorola and Oakley better check with their legal departments...Suntiger Inc. might try and sue to protect their intellectual property for "blue blocking sunglasses" which sounds eerily similar to "blue tooth technology".
How about attaching your claria.exe text file to all your outgoing emails, sending your emails out with a subject of "I'm not selling Viagra , Cialis, or Rolex Watches!!!!" and see what kind of false positives you get from anti-spam and anti-virus filters. It's not a precise science, so I'd expect false positives when you make a concious attempt to fool the program.
That's not to say they can't make it more accurate, but they may be trading off accuracy for speed (filename match rather than file signature). If I was designing it I wouldn't be real concerned with trying to correctly deal with bored users trying to fool our program by renaming their important documents to "claria.exe".
You're right...and I do have Firefox installed on a few of my PC's. Just never got around to putting it on the kid's PC.
My point, however, was that real-time scanning is important as part of the OS since malware can arrive via software CD's. I assume by using Firefox for browsing you would not get the pop-ups but the spyware processes would possibly still load and bog down the system.
Hollywood seems to have forgotten that plot, characters, and writing are what drives the moving-going experience, not how many machines you needed to render 4 seconds of some over-blown CGI shot.
Sideways, Million Dollar Baby, Hotel Rwanda, The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine, Spiderman 2, and The Terminal are all plot driven with great characters and writing. Incredibles and Spiderman 2 even mix in a ton of CGI. Of course we have dreck like Catwoman and Van Helsing, but don't make a blanket statement about the decline of writing in Hollywood. I'm a big fan of independent films (my sister just completed a feature length documentary and my brother is producing a new film by Roger Majkowski), but Hollywood actually had a lot of excellent films in 2004.
A few weeks ago one of my home PC's became infected with Spyware after my daughter installed a malware ActiveX control from a website. I installed Spybot, SpywareBlaster and CWShredder and cleaned up the PC (took several "safe mode" reboots). Everything looked fine until two days ago when we started getting pop-ups and search page redirects in IE. I ran Spybot and found a bunch of new spyware that had been installed with a game CD my daughter got in a grab bag at a Christmas party. After some research I found out that eGames included (and possibly still includes) spyware on their game CD's. Needless to say the eGames product is removed and the CD is in the trash (My daughter didn't like the game anyway).:-)
I'll admit that browser protection is the most important but don't neglect real-time scanning to catch the spyware that shows up in shareware, freeware, and even commercial products. One nice feature in the new MS AntiSpyware program is the automated nightly scan. I'll be installing the MS product tonight on the home PC.
When I was at MIT (circa 1980) there was a recording studio down the hall from TMRC in building 20 (it was across the hall from an old anechoeic chamber...but I digress). The was pretty much abandoned and used by a small group of students for recording punk demos. The actual studio was isolated from the control room completely...the studio was on springs to completely prevent sound from bleeding through to the control room. The recorder in the control room was an old Ampex rack-mounted 2" 4-track machine...yes, FOUR-track. Recording at 15ips on 2" of tape yielded some incredible sound quality...think about later machines that squeezed 24 tracks of material on the same 2" of tape. In 1981 someone from Ampex contacted us and gave the group a new 1/4" 4-track so they could get the 2" 4-track for their museum. Seeing as how Ampex changed hands since then I wonder what ever happened to those vintage machines.
People used to buy those old Ampex machines just to get the tube pre-amp electronics...nice warm sound, pleasant distortion (when you wanted it), and no harsh digital clipping.
You are so right...think about how many formats digital has abandoned (8" and 5-1/4" floppies come to mind first) but I can still play my 1/4" reel-to-reels nearly thirty years after first recording on them.
And music never sounded warmer than when recorded through the old Ampex tube electronics with a bit of dB boost to saturate the tape. Even if you got some distortion (and occasionally it was desired) it was a cool distortion and not the digital crackle you get from today's electronics.
I've been slowly copying my old 1/4" reel-to-reels (1/2 track from my college radio days) to digital as some of the tapes are starting to deteriorate. Luckily I managed to purchase an old Scully 1/4" 1/2 track machine from a local studio (a steal at $200).
I probably don't have a leg to stand on, but wouldn't it be nice to make them stop using my idea to turn a profit? My brother and I did the cuckoo eggs mainly as a "proof of concept" as well as a promotional gimmick, but Overpeer is making serious money and wreaking serious harm. Any lawyers out there want to take on the case?:-)
I have a friend who just shares a limited portion of his collection at any one time. He'll leave five or six torrents open for a week, then close them and open five new torrents. Sharing all 500 of your DVD rips or all 50,000 MP3 files is definitely asking for the MPAA/RIAA folks to knock on your door.
Could be the case...this happened with some of the early home computers (Atari for example) when they were added to the department store shelves. The price dropped compared to prices at computer specialty shops but people bought them and were disappointed since they weren't trained to use them (or the department store carried no accessories, software, etc.). Atari, TI, Commodore, Colecovision all became more of a joke than a computer (well, Colecovison was a joke to start with) while Apple and IBM stuck with the computer dealers and stayed "serious".
That's not to say there weren't enthusiasts for particular machines (notably Commodore) but to the general public these machines had been cheapened by showing up in the department stores.
That's because CR does the reviews almost a year before it makes it to print. Our hardware store is located near their Yonkers headquarters and they would come in to purchase specific model numbers. They always had a list of the most current models, often before the version they wanted was even on the shelf. They also had weird purchasing habits...they would buy lawn mowers at our store in NY and ship them to Florida to be tested. They even had us express ship some new mowers to our store (cost as much as the mower) and they then shipped them to Florida. Mower reviews usually hit close to on time as they tested them in Florida in January in order to get reviews into the June issue.
They always paid cash and insisted we keep their identity secret. That was sometimes tough to do...when you call a lawn mower manufacturer to air express a $200 lawn mower for $150 shipping it raises eyebrows. We would tell the manufacturers our customer was an eccentric.:-)
based on their early dabbling in anti-P2P efforts. Right now they are just searching out offenders but Lyco's move to bring down spammer sites might encourage the MPAA and RIAA to take more agressive steps.
While Lycos was on unsteady legal footing in terms of their targets (i.e. it's often tough to connect a web site to the spam sender) the MPAA and RIAA can easily prove that a particular user or BitTorrent link site is sharing/hosting/providing copyrighted material. It may be just a matter of time before earlier efforts to legalize RIAA and MPAA DDOS attacks are resurrected.
The won't need to pass a law...TiVo is already planning on popping up ads when users try and skip commercials. I'm going to need to dig back into my "Hacking TiVo" book and see if there's a way to prevent the TiVo software from being updated automatically.
Slashdot Mirror
No coverage for shoplifting, just for "most" employee fraud and theft. You can't get coverage for the 8000 CD's that are stolen one at a time. You might get coverage for the employee that steals 8000 at once, but what I was referring to was shoplifting coverage. No insurance company foots the bill for shoplifting...the stores absorb this loss or pass it on to consumers.
How does an insurance company come into play here? Stores don't have insurance for shoplifting. There are policies for financial misdeeds and armed robbery, but shoplifting and petty employee theft are not covered by any policies I've seen offered to retail locations.
The only one getting screwed is the retail store, and if it's an independent retailer (are there any left in the CD business?) then it's really sad. I probably wouldn't lose sleep if it was Wal*Mart getting ripped off.
Found a site with many of the classic ads...including the full version of the monkey ad.
Too bad they only are showing little snippets of the ads. I would have liked to see the full ads...for those who are seeing them for the first time it's tough to figure out some of the commercials. For example, the eTrade monkey ad with the "Deliverance" guys clapping along wasn't really funny until you saw the ending tagline "Well, we just blew $3 million dollars". In fact, with that tagline it's even funnier now. :-)
There are a few more classic eTrade commercials here (bottom of the article), including the "Money coming out the wazoo" ad.
Talking Ralphie (in case the joke was too obscure for some)
When I was about six or seven my parents purchased a set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Seemed to be the thing to do back then for parents that wanted their kids to do well in school, and of course it looked real impressive on the bookshelves in the living room (like all my O'Reilly books over my desk at work). I decided that I was going to learn everything there was to know so I started to read the first volume with the goal of reading the entire encyclopedia (and the annual Book of the Year update!). I got about three pages into the thing and gave up. Pretty dry reading the encyclopedia so props to Mr. Jacobs for getting through it.
Motorola and Oakley better check with their legal departments...Suntiger Inc. might try and sue to protect their intellectual property for "blue blocking sunglasses" which sounds eerily similar to "blue tooth technology".
One of the best features in the MS product are the detailed explanations for the various items it found.
Yeah, those sneaky worm writers would never think to delete the important files themselves...that's exactly what we'd expect them to do. :-)
If the user has a worm infected PC then the adware is the least of his/her worries.
How about attaching your claria.exe text file to all your outgoing emails, sending your emails out with a subject of "I'm not selling Viagra , Cialis, or Rolex Watches!!!!" and see what kind of false positives you get from anti-spam and anti-virus filters. It's not a precise science, so I'd expect false positives when you make a concious attempt to fool the program.
That's not to say they can't make it more accurate, but they may be trading off accuracy for speed (filename match rather than file signature). If I was designing it I wouldn't be real concerned with trying to correctly deal with bored users trying to fool our program by renaming their important documents to "claria.exe".
You're right...and I do have Firefox installed on a few of my PC's. Just never got around to putting it on the kid's PC.
My point, however, was that real-time scanning is important as part of the OS since malware can arrive via software CD's. I assume by using Firefox for browsing you would not get the pop-ups but the spyware processes would possibly still load and bog down the system.
Hollywood seems to have forgotten that plot, characters, and writing are what drives the moving-going experience, not how many machines you needed to render 4 seconds of some over-blown CGI shot.
Sideways, Million Dollar Baby, Hotel Rwanda, The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine, Spiderman 2, and The Terminal are all plot driven with great characters and writing. Incredibles and Spiderman 2 even mix in a ton of CGI. Of course we have dreck like Catwoman and Van Helsing, but don't make a blanket statement about the decline of writing in Hollywood. I'm a big fan of independent films (my sister just completed a feature length documentary and my brother is producing a new film by Roger Majkowski), but Hollywood actually had a lot of excellent films in 2004.
A few weeks ago one of my home PC's became infected with Spyware after my daughter installed a malware ActiveX control from a website. I installed Spybot, SpywareBlaster and CWShredder and cleaned up the PC (took several "safe mode" reboots). Everything looked fine until two days ago when we started getting pop-ups and search page redirects in IE. I ran Spybot and found a bunch of new spyware that had been installed with a game CD my daughter got in a grab bag at a Christmas party. After some research I found out that eGames included (and possibly still includes) spyware on their game CD's. Needless to say the eGames product is removed and the CD is in the trash (My daughter didn't like the game anyway). :-)
I'll admit that browser protection is the most important but don't neglect real-time scanning to catch the spyware that shows up in shareware, freeware, and even commercial products. One nice feature in the new MS AntiSpyware program is the automated nightly scan. I'll be installing the MS product tonight on the home PC.
When I was at MIT (circa 1980) there was a recording studio down the hall from TMRC in building 20 (it was across the hall from an old anechoeic chamber...but I digress). The was pretty much abandoned and used by a small group of students for recording punk demos. The actual studio was isolated from the control room completely...the studio was on springs to completely prevent sound from bleeding through to the control room. The recorder in the control room was an old Ampex rack-mounted 2" 4-track machine...yes, FOUR-track. Recording at 15ips on 2" of tape yielded some incredible sound quality...think about later machines that squeezed 24 tracks of material on the same 2" of tape. In 1981 someone from Ampex contacted us and gave the group a new 1/4" 4-track so they could get the 2" 4-track for their museum. Seeing as how Ampex changed hands since then I wonder what ever happened to those vintage machines.
People used to buy those old Ampex machines just to get the tube pre-amp electronics...nice warm sound, pleasant distortion (when you wanted it), and no harsh digital clipping.
You are so right...think about how many formats digital has abandoned (8" and 5-1/4" floppies come to mind first) but I can still play my 1/4" reel-to-reels nearly thirty years after first recording on them.
And music never sounded warmer than when recorded through the old Ampex tube electronics with a bit of dB boost to saturate the tape. Even if you got some distortion (and occasionally it was desired) it was a cool distortion and not the digital crackle you get from today's electronics.
I've been slowly copying my old 1/4" reel-to-reels (1/2 track from my college radio days) to digital as some of the tapes are starting to deteriorate. Luckily I managed to purchase an old Scully 1/4" 1/2 track machine from a local studio (a steal at $200).
I probably don't have a leg to stand on, but wouldn't it be nice to make them stop using my idea to turn a profit? My brother and I did the cuckoo eggs mainly as a "proof of concept" as well as a promotional gimmick, but Overpeer is making serious money and wreaking serious harm. Any lawyers out there want to take on the case? :-)
I agree....qualifies as a hack in my book. Required some techical skill, was harmless, and quite funny.
I have a friend who just shares a limited portion of his collection at any one time. He'll leave five or six torrents open for a week, then close them and open five new torrents. Sharing all 500 of your DVD rips or all 50,000 MP3 files is definitely asking for the MPAA/RIAA folks to knock on your door.
Search for' NeverEverNoSanity' on Lycos and you get a JScript error:
/common/static/error.inc, line 49
Microsoft JScript runtime error '800a1391'
'cTabTypeMulti' is undefined
bigger screens on the electronic signature capture pads so they can display the EULA.
That's not to say there weren't enthusiasts for particular machines (notably Commodore) but to the general public these machines had been cheapened by showing up in the department stores.
That's because CR does the reviews almost a year before it makes it to print. Our hardware store is located near their Yonkers headquarters and they would come in to purchase specific model numbers. They always had a list of the most current models, often before the version they wanted was even on the shelf. They also had weird purchasing habits...they would buy lawn mowers at our store in NY and ship them to Florida to be tested. They even had us express ship some new mowers to our store (cost as much as the mower) and they then shipped them to Florida. Mower reviews usually hit close to on time as they tested them in Florida in January in order to get reviews into the June issue.
:-)
They always paid cash and insisted we keep their identity secret. That was sometimes tough to do...when you call a lawn mower manufacturer to air express a $200 lawn mower for $150 shipping it raises eyebrows. We would tell the manufacturers our customer was an eccentric.
While Lycos was on unsteady legal footing in terms of their targets (i.e. it's often tough to connect a web site to the spam sender) the MPAA and RIAA can easily prove that a particular user or BitTorrent link site is sharing/hosting/providing copyrighted material. It may be just a matter of time before earlier efforts to legalize RIAA and MPAA DDOS attacks are resurrected.
The won't need to pass a law...TiVo is already planning on popping up ads when users try and skip commercials. I'm going to need to dig back into my "Hacking TiVo" book and see if there's a way to prevent the TiVo software from being updated automatically.
Wal*Mart is still taking pre-orders.