Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is insisting on deposing a 10-year old girl in relation to her disabled mother’s counterclaim against the organization.

This is a case that many in the Internet community will be watching closely. The RIAA employs a number of tactics to catch those who download and share music files illegally from their homes, including alleged “data farming”. Data farming is the act of suing an Internet service provider to obtain the IP Addresses (the address of their customer’s computers) in an effort to identify likely file sharing suspects.

Tanya Andersen, a 41 year old disabled single mother found herself to be the target of one of the RIAA’s cases in Oregon. The only problem is that she claims to never have downloaded or shared a song on the computer in her life. The RIAA doesn’t really care much about denials, but the Association may have bitten off more than they can chew this time.

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Anytime the ACLU gets involved with a case, I always wonder what the motivations behind the organization’s involvement are. In their most recent courtroom victory, the ACLU has defeated a law that was intended to prevent minors from being exposed to pornography on the Internet.

The ACLU convinced a U.S. District Judge in Philadelphia that the already-embattled Child Online Protection Act (COPA) is unconstitutional and violated Americans’ First Amendment rights.

A news parody program called The Half Hour News hour aired the commentary below about the ACLU and its frequent alignments with the less than desirable forces in society today.

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St. Hugo of the Hills School in Bloomfield, MI, has enacted a policy that specifically prohibits any student enrolled in the private school from maintaining a MySpace.com web page.

The Schools website states that students may not send or display offensive messages or pictures on or off the St. Hugo network. In addition their website states:

“The �myspace.com� sites of many of the students violate these rules. Therefore, it is the RULE of St. Hugo School that NO ENROLLED STUDENT SHALL have a �myspace.com� web page or any similar type personal Internet site. Students were informed on March 20, 2007 that they must delete their �myspace.com� accounts if they wish to continue to attend school at St. Hugo. If a family chooses to allow their children to continue their �myspace.com� account, they will not be allowed to continue as students at St. Hugo.”

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OK, so this post has nothing to do with technology at all. With that said, I found this blog while surfing online this morning and was astonished that any “service business would do something like this to a little girl. This is one of those stories that makes you happy to live in Nebraska and not New York.

A Manhattan mother posted a tale on her blog of an interaction between her little six year old girl and a Manhattan American Girl Doll Hair stylist (yes, you read that right – someone who makes a living styling plastic hair on dolls).

American Girl dolls sell for about $90 each, without any accessories at all. This little girl wanted one because everyone else at her public school had one, but her mother warned her that if she wanted accessories should would not have much money left after buying the doll.

So the little girl managed to save up $30 of her own money and choose to buy a more reasonably priced doll named Gracie at Target that came with tons of accessories in the package. A smart move, in my opinion – especially for a six year old. Until she was confronted by a plastic-hair dresser about her fake baby.

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With all of the anti-piracy devices on today’s software programs it is easy to forget the “good ‘ol days” when programmers were good enough to make neat programs and games, but could not devise ways to protect them from being pirated.

In the days before online activations, serial numbers, and telephone activations, some developers relied on a simple 10 minute public service announcement to protect their work. This is genuinely funny – Don’t Copy That Floppy!

Schrock Innovations has aquired a number of new website development customers over the past few months and we need to hire another HTML developer to keep up with demand!

Schrock Innovations has an IMMEDIATE opening for an HTML developer in our Omaha Service Center. The position is hourly, with benefits including 401K/Roth retirement package with company match, flexible scheduling, free web hosting space, and frequent bonuses for work completed on time.

Candidates should have at least 2 years of HTML experience and be familiar with the industry’s terms and software packages. While not required, experience with PHP, MySQL, AJAX and the .Net Framework are also helpful qualifications.

Candidates can apply by emailing hr@schrockinnovations.com. Please do not call or mail your resume – email only. I personally review all resumes and will respond to let you know I received yours. For more information, visit our employment page at www.schrockinnovations.com/employment.

Schrock Innovations is an equal opportunity employer.

I have been privately warning politicians locally that they need to be aware of the impact that anonymous online activity can have on a political campaign. It seems that politicians, at least on a national level, are starting to wake up about the threats and opportunities posed by the Internet and websites like www.youtube.com.

I like to keep on top of the political scene, and while I certainly have NO dog in the Democratic presidential race, there is an interesting spat developing between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

This video below showed up on YouTube earlier this month. It is a parody of Apple Computer’s 1984 Super Bowl commercial which positioned Apple’s new computer – the Macintosh – against a charachacher of “Big Brother” from George Orwell’s book 1984. At the time, Big Brother was supposed to represent IBM.

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The latest Compute This show has been posted on our Compute This page.

This week’s show was a little longer than usual, about an hour an a half. The extra time allowed us to take a lot more callers than usual and dish out a ton of help.

As usual, we talked about the Schrock Innovations Website and this blog. A caller called into the show to ask me if there was anything I could do to make the blog more accessible to the visually impaired.

We have been working hard to make all of our software and websites accessible to ALL computer users, but on this blog if you want to post a comment you are presented with a visual challenge puzzle called a captcha. A captcha requires a visitor to look at the image and type the letters in to a box to complete your comment. These devices are used to slow the torrent of spam that is auto generated by computers attempting to post on the blog. Without the captcha, we would be receiving about 12 spam comments a day on the blog.

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I caught a report today the the CompUSA store in Omaha, NE was going out of business. I did some investigating and found that the Omaha location is in fact closing, along with about 50% of the chain’s other stores nation-wide.

All merchandise in the store is 10-30% off, including all computers, accessories, and other items. Although the company’s website states that the sale only applies to in-stock items, after a weekend of heavy sales, a local CompUSA employee confirmed off the record that another truck of merchandise was arriving some time tomorrow.

CompUSA has one store in Nebraska, at 151 North 78th Street in Omaha. Ironically, the home page of the company’s website is touting a 23rd anniversary sale at the same time half of their stores are going out of business. When I called, I asked the CompUSA employee how the company planned to service the warranties on the computers they had sold. I was told that the store was not going out of business, but that CompUSA was “closing this location” and that warranties will need to be serviced through the manufacturers.

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The weather has been so good for the past few days that My wife and I decided to do some spring cleaning. I found myself wondering why we even bought some of the things we were now throwing away. A perfect example is our Mr. Sticky.

Mr. Sticky was advertised in a home and garden expo as the lint roller that never needs to be refilled. We have hard wood floors, a cat and a dog, so a never-ending sticky lint roller on a broomstick sounded like a great idea at the time.

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