• Why is it that car companies seem to have a hard time NOT making offensive ads? Ford India recently apologized for some terrible ads depicting bound and gagged women in the spacious hatchback trunk of a Ford Figo. But Ford wasn't the only example, Hyundai and GM also had some horrible commercials to retract recently. [url]
• Dr Pepper posted an ad on Facebook with a common geeky joke, showing the evolution of humans -- starting with a chimp-like ancestor and ending with a modern upright person holding a can of his favorite beverage. Poking the beehive of anti-evolution religious folks might be a fairly safe way of creating some controversy, but it probably doesn't sell that much more sugar water. [url]
• The Economist once ran an ad for itself, asking "Why should women read The Economist?" Maybe publications written by -- and read by -- mostly men should be a bit more careful when trying to step away from being a "Maxim for nerds"..? [url]

The vulnerability is allegedly present in the uPlay launcher, which when exploited gives DRM free access to gaming titles from almost all game publishers including the likes of EA Games and Square Nix. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, which hasn’t been released yet, is lying on Ubisoft servers which hackers have downloaded. As a proof of the exploit, hackers even posted an 1 hour 30 mins long footage of the game.

E*Trade Financial Corp. said it paid its former Chief Executive Steven Freiberg $10.7 million in 2012, including a severance payment, according to a regulatory filing early Friday.

In its proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the online brokerage said Mr. Freiberg received $3 million in stock awards, $630,769 in salary and a $7 million lump sum cash severance payment.

E*Trade also said Mr. Freiberg collected a prorated bonus of $1.6 million paid in February and outstanding equity awards, which were valued at $3.3 million under an accelerated vesting schedule.

E*Trade also handed over $2.5 million to its chairman, Frank Petrilli, including $2.2 million for doing Freiberg’s old job during the waning days of 2012. And E*Trade wasn’t the only good place to be a former or soon-to-be-former CEO last year.

Marsh & McLennan Cos. gave outgoing chief executive Brian Duperreault a $17 million pay package last year, a 17% increase from 2011, according to the company’s annual proxy released Friday.

Mr. Duperreault’s compensation included a $1 million salary, stock and option awards of $10 million, and a $5 million bonus. It also included the personal use of the company’s corporate jet, valued at $441,875.

Mr. Duperreault, a longtime insurance executive who ran Marsh & McLennan for five years, stepped down at the end of 2012. The proxy said his pay increase was based in part on the company’s financial performance for the year, his work in positioning the company for future growth, and the “successful transition of CEO responsibilities” to Mr. Glaser.

Good Friday compensation disclosures were less kind to the poor schmucks who still have to run their companies. Charles Schwab CEO Walt Bettinger hasn’t gotten a raise in four years, and the IntercontinentalExchange gave CEO Jeffrey Sprecher a 15% pay cut for the year in which he bought the fucking New York Stock Exchange.

Mr. Sprecher, who has led ICE since its formation in 2000, in 2011 was the second-highest-paid exchange CEO after Duncan Niederauer, CEO of NYSE. Under terms of NYSE’s deal with ICE, Mr. Niederauer will become president of the combined company, while Mr. Sprecher will remain chairman and CEO.

Former E*Trade CEO Paid $10.7 Million in 2012 [WSJ]
Marsh & McLennan’s Outgoing CEO Got $17 Million [WSJ]
Schwab CEO Pay Stays Around $10.2 Million [WSJ]
InterncontinentalExchange Chief’s Pay Down 15% [WSJ]

• S&P Cries “Conspiracy!”
• Half Of Hedge Fund Employees Pretty Sure Their Competitors Are Up To No Good
• M&A Bankers Developing Serious Jealousy Of IPO Guys

So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn't fit with our vision. We did not focus on the "single city in isolation" that we have delivered in past SimCities. We recognize that there are fans – people who love the original SimCity – who want that. But we're also hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality. The SimCity we delivered captures the magic of its heritage but catches up with ever-improving technology.

Over the weekend, the Irish-based website shuttered itself completely, noting in a statement to customers that there may be “financial irregularities.” Uh-oh.

All this comes at the worst possible time for InTrade customers, who were looking to cash in on that sweet, sweet Conclave action…

Customers in the U.S. already lost access to InTrade back in November, when the CFTC waved around a 2005 cease and desist. The CFTC’s beef with InTrade revolved around the website selling contracts that looked an awful lot like commodity futures. The CFTC does not like commodity futures traded from outside their regulatory framework. And even though InTrade specifically asked the CFTC to step in and regulate their trading, the CFTC opted to functionally shut them down (once the Presidential election contracts were all paid out, of course). The CFTC didn’t give a very clear explanation for this decision, but the CFTC apparently felt that allowing micro-level trading on commodity futures constituted a societal ill they could not accept — while institutional investors tossing around trillions seems perfectly harmless. Or the CFTC was just lazy. Never underestimate “just lazy.”

InTrade’s closure over the weekend was not related to trading commodity futures, but some vague suggestion of “financial irregularities.” Details remain sketchy, but the best guess out there alleges that InTrade failed to maintain duly segregated accounts.

What on earth is going on? My best guess is that the margin posted by traders was not held, as it should be, in segregated accounts separate from company funds. When bets are made on this market, both parties must post margin equal to their worst-case loss, so that neither is subject to counterparty risk. In effect, each party is taking a position against the exchange, but these positions are exactly offsetting so the exchange bears no risk. To ensure that all promised payments can be made, these funds must be held in the form of cash, insured deposits, or safe dollar-denominated securities such as Treasury bills. They cannot be invested in risky assets, and cannot be used for the payment of salaries or expenses.

The latter point about the “payment of salaries or expenses” is in line with the recent announcement that auditors had flagged payments to InTrade’s former CEO, the late John Delaney.

The loss of InTrade will spark glowing eulogies from multiple sectors, but losing the political prediction market will be the toughest loss. The political reporting class openly crowed about InTrade’s predictive power for years. The Washington Post already published its lament over the passing of InTrade as the loss of the last, best hope for pundit accountability:

It’s a shame, and this is why. We live in a world of punditry in which there are large amounts of, to put it nicely, horse manure. Those of us who write and talk about what will happen inevitably rely on vague predictions, full of qualifications. I’m guilty of it myself, and often find myself writing things like “this ought to be an OK year for the economy, if fiscal austerity isn’t too severe and there isn’t a return of the European crisis.”

On Intrade, by contrast, the traders who participate and collectively set market prices, are forced to choose—and put money where their mouths are. Will the United States enter a recession in 2013? Before it shut down, the prices for that contract on Intrade implied a 16.9 percent chance that the answer was “yes.” In a world in which people hold their pundits to a higher standard, people spouting off on the economy (or politics, or foreign affairs, or the selection of the pope) would be forced to make specific, testable predictions, and attach probabilities to those guesses.

I actually thought the best hope for pundit accountability would be a media willing to confront their own pundits with past flawed predictions, rather than sweeping the past under the rug every day, but what do I know?

But the legal fallout from the end of InTrade, for the U.S., will be the inevitable rise of the next online predictive market. With InTrade out of the way, some other online gambling site — anyone from PaddyPower to Betfair — will grow into the hole created by InTrade, subtly open itself to U.S. customers, and likely reignite the legal battles with the CFTC all over again. Hopefully, next time around, cooler heads will prevail at the CFTC and welcome these predictive markets to the regulatory regime.

But I’m not buying that contract.

To Our Customers [InTrade]
A Prediction Market Mystery [Rajiv Sethi]
RIP Intrade: The Last, Best Hope for Pundit Accountability [Washington Post]
Now You Can’t Buy Your Crude Oil Futures In $10 Increments On Intrade [DealBreaker]

Michigan has 4.5 million individual taxpayers, and the state gave the film studio $39.7 million to shoot the movie in Pontiac. That works out to a subsidy of $8.82 per taxpayer while average ticket prices nationwide are $7.96.

The subsidy was granted in 2010 when the program refunded up to 42 percent of Michigan expenses to film makers — essentially a check from the treasury to Hollywood studios. The program expired, but the Legislature, dominated by Republicans, overwhelmingly decided to keep it around.

As part of the financing process, the filmmakers wanted to borrow about about $18 million in municipal bonds. In order order to do that, they needed a backer. So the state stepped in, and agreed to use its state worker pension funds as a guarantee. "If the investors failed to pay," the New York Times reported in a piece on the deal last December, "the retirees would be on the hook."

Michigan Motion Pictures Studios, which is being celebrated in the local media for having made the movie, "Oz The Great and Powerful," in Pontiac, has missed its last three payments on $18 million in bond obligations...

According to state officials, the state retirement system has made three payments since February of last year totaling $1.68 million.

In March 2012, Raleigh Studio's then-chief financial officer Steve Lemberg blamed the studio’s financial struggles on the film tax credit being reduced.

The state reduced the tax credit from $100 million when the studio was being built in 2011 to $50 million last year. Gov. Rick Snyder has $25 million budgeted for tax credits this year.

The city of Allen Park recently requested an emergency manager after losing what will turn out to be tens of millions of dollars on a failed movie studio project that promised to create 3,000 jobs. It created none and left the town nearly bankrupt.

Presumably this is to give the servers more time to process the thousands of simultaneous city simulations that are all feeding into its global and regional networks. In any case, this is a core piece of the gameplay that's now being hampered by EA's continuing server problems; in my 16 or so hours playing the game, I'd estimate 15 or so have been spent running at Cheetah. Slowing things down, even temporarily, is likely to impact a whole lot of players negatively.

The Evansville Courier & Press recently wrote a lengthy piece about HOAs and how they can range wildly in quality, from being so laissez-faire that you wonder where your money is going to providing the services your area needs to micro-dictatorships that leave residents unhappy.

The HOA at the center of this story is called Stonecreek Arbors, in Indiana’s Vandenburgh County. According to the paper, the Stonecreek HOA was responsible for more than half of all the liens filed in the county last year. Many of these liens were for unpaid HOA dues worth a little more than $200.

The 49 liens filed by the HOA translates to slightly less than 1/6 of all the homes in the subdivision.

“[T]his notice also requires you not to at any measure mention anything regarding my name, any resident of Stonecreek, NOR will we ALLOW any of your printing in any article regarding Stonecreek at any time in any publication… You will be held liable for any violations of this letter and notice/request in this email. If we find/discover you have mentioned Stonecreek in any legal matter their (sic) will be action toward yourself as well as any print paper you represent in the media article.

“You may contact any HOA in the County of Vanderburgh, the State of Indiana, but Stonecreek will not PERMIT OR ALLOW YOU our legal name in any future article.”

That obviously didn’t work, nor did the phone call to the Courier & Press, which demanded the paper “stop this article immediately, because I will sue you just like I sue the people who don’t pay their dues.” he said.

Editors' note: The Dish Hopper with Sling was removed from consideration for the Best of CES 2013 awards due to active litigation involving our parent company CBS Corp. We will no longer be reviewing products manufactured by companies with which we are in litigation with respect to such product.

1. Hello Streisand Effect. There were approximately one gazillion articles this week about products coming out of CES, and the place was wall to wall with journalists -- probably half of whom were coming up with their own "best of" lists. Most people were completely saturated with CES stories and would barely glance at such a story. Except... now, tons of people are suddenly finding out about this awesome Dish DVR, the Hopper with Slingbox. In fact, they're hearing that the damn thing is so good that CBS is trying to block any news of it from getting out. Talking about increasing the awareness... I have no clue whatsoever what product CNET -- or any other publication -- awarded "best of CES" to. But I sure as hell am well aware of Dish's new DVR.
2. Goodbye to the wall that separates the suits from the journalists at CBS/CNET. CBS execs have just confirmed that they don't want their journalists and reviewers to cover things based on the merits, but rather on what it means for their corporate masters.
3. Hello slippery slope. Is it really that hard to see where this heads next? Is CNET still allowed to report on the lawsuit if CBS loses? If they can't talk about the products, what about the legal issues themselves?
4. Goodbye journalists with credibility. Frankly, CNET has always had some of the strongest tech reporters in the business. For many years I've considered it one of the top tech news sites out there. I have tremendous respect for many of the reporters there. But, now I have to wonder how much the suits are interfering with their ability to report things accurately.
5. Goodbye to principled journalists who want to work for CBS. If I'm a journalist at CNET right now, I'd be seriously considering quitting in protest. This move seriously harms the brand and reputation of the site, and this is the kind of thing that journalists should stand up against. Having the suits interfere with what they can write about is generally seen as a massive offense to journalists. I would bet this leads to some of the best, most principled CNET reporters jumping ship to elsewhere.
6. Good luck to CNET hiring new journalists. Who wants to jump into that toxic situation?

Shelbi Walser, 12, has brittle bone disease, and was flying to Tampa, Fla., to receive treatment on Sunday when she was randomly selected for an explosives screening on her way through security. Tammy Daniels, Walser's mother, said that her daughter tested positive for explosives when a screener swabbed Walser's palms and fingers.

Speaking with ABC affiliate WFAA, Walser said that she has no idea how the traces of explosive got on her. "It could have come off fertilizer, because we have chickens. I could have run through something from them," she said. "It could have just come off the ground, because I roll through everything."

"I am by no means undermining our safety in the air. After 9/11, by no means am I doing that," Daniels told WFAA. "But when it comes to children, common sense is not in a textbook."

The first 3 months are Operation: Stay quiet. Produce and publish content, but don't advertise it. leave it for people to randomly stumble across. You don't want to advertise, have people love it, want to see more, and realize there is no backlog of content. No one wants to be the first to arrive at a party. Let the backlog build up while no one is watching.

First month: Everything went as planned. 4 improved songs, 1 developed song, a few odd hits, nothing unusual.

Second Month: artist grows impatient. Is discouraged that no one is watching. Writes more songs. No developed, proper song is released this month. slightly more hits than last month, but nothing unusual.

Third Month: Artist grows impatient, begins posting new songs to facebook. A much lower than expected number of friends follow through and watch the videos (they will drive an hour and pay $10 to watch him play live, but they wont click a button in facebook?!?!) Artist is discouraged. No proper, developed song this month.

Fourth Month: only 2 improvised songs see the light of day this month. viewership drops. Artist gets discouraged.

[I]f reader Synimatik had bought a paperback book a few months ago and picked it up to read now, the book’s pages wouldn’t magically glue shut just because the credit card she normally uses at the bookstore has expired.

Yesterday, I tried to download an ebook I paid for, and previously put on my Nook, a few months ago. When I tried, I got an error message stating I could not download the book because the credit card on file had expired. But, I already paid for it. Who cares if the credit card is expired? It has long since been paid for, so the status of the card on file has nothing to do with my ability to download said book. I didn’t see anything in the terms of service about this either, but it’s possible I missed it.

This is just one more reason to either not buy ebooks, or strip the drm off of the ones you purchase so you can you the book you BUY on all your devices without having to purchase multiple copies for no reason and have access to something you already bought when you want it.

In just three years the revenue generated by the anti-piracy outfit reduced from $92.8 million to $49.6 million. The decreased budget is a direct result of the major Hollywood studios cutting back on their MPAA funding. In the same period membership dues dropped from $84.7 million to $41.5 million, more than a 50% decline.

"I'm very much interested in expanding the behavior detection program, upgrading it if you will, in a way that allows us to….have more interaction with a passsenger just from a discussion which may be able to expedite the physical screening aspects," [TSA boss John] Pistole said during an appearance at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. "So, we've looked at what works around the world, some outstanding examples and we are planning to do some new things in the near future here."

Pistole declined to elaborate on the enhanced behavior detection program but said it would "probably" be announced in August. During an on-stage interview with CNN's Jeanne Meserve, Pistole acknowledged that the Israeli techniques have been carefully examined.

"There's a lot--under that Israeli model--a lot that is done that is obviously very effective," he said.

First things first: EMI is still a great British label. I mean, it owns the Beatles back catalogue! So why is it in the hands of a bank? It’s just economics. Guy Hands bought it in 2007, at the height of the market, when people were paying stupid prices for everything, not just labels.

The trouble is, now everyone has woken up to the reality, which is that illegal downloading is murdering the music business.

I actually think Guy Hands didn’t do a bad job. He was just personally unfortunate. He came along at the wrong time. Shit happens. It was a time of affluence of abundance. Then the world economy turned upside down, Lehman Brothers went broke, and the world changed. The market crashed.

EMI's problems should be a wake-up call. How did they get into this mess? It all comes back to the impact of illegal downloading. We have to change the legislation in this country and come down much harder on piracy.

Otherwise guys in little bands starting out now are never going to be the next Rolling Stones.

When you download an album illegally, it's not the record company guys that get fucked -- those people are still on massive salaries -- it's 19-year-old kids, it's guys in bands making £100 a gig.

When I came along in the 80s and 90s, I was lucky to be in a market where people bought music. Now If I wanted an album, I could just go on some torrent site and download it. You've got to give bands a chance, let them develop. In the 80s, bands started dodgy, then they got good. The bands I worked with – Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, even Oasis -- it took them a few years to go from being OK to being good. These days bands don't get the chance, they just get dropped.

There's only one independent label, post-Creation, that's really been phenomenal, and that's Domino. Laurence (Bell, owner) is a genius. He's touched with gold dust. Whether it sells or not, he's got the magic touch.

As for me, if I ran EMI, I'd get legislation changed and make a profit by stopping piracy.