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Comment Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score 0, Flamebait) 987

isn't this exactly what is the problem with copyright? People sitting on their asses, demanding to get paid, while blaming piracy for not getting money for some work created ages ago.

Fuck you. Stop talking about industries you know nothing about.

Go try making a living at this. Go try making any money at all as an author, a musician, an artist, or anything creative, THEN come back and tell us that it's all about "sitting on your ass and demanding to get paid."

The reality is exactly the opposite. Just because the law makes it possible for someone to sit on their ass doesn't mean that anyone ever makes money doing that. The reality is you have to put days, months, and years into creating work and you never know if you'll make a damn penny off it. You have to write, you have to paint, you have to perform, and then you have to go out and promote your work over and over again until someone comes along and pays you money for your copyrighted work.

Any other business, you would get paid while you were working. By relying on copyright, you work for free now -- to create something of value to society -- in hopes that someone will find it worthwhile enough to pay you later. It's one of the riskiest businesses out there, and it takes so much hard work and dedication that saying creative people "sit on their asses and demand to get paid" shows you know nothing about how these industries work.

Comment BSOD (Score 1) 725

The term "Blue Screen of Death" is now deprecated. It has been replaced with "Blue Mushroom Cloud of Death."

Also, does that 22-million-saved figure include the cost of fixing the horrible errors and accidents that occur as a result of this?

Space

Submission + - French Threat to ID Secret US Satellites (beskerming.com)

SkiifGeek writes: "Space.com has reported that the French have identified numerous objects in orbit that do not appear in the ephemeris data reported by the US Space Surveillance Network. Since the US has claimed that if it doesn't appear in the ephemeris data, then it doesn't exist, and the French claim that at least some of the objects have solar arrays, it seems that the French have found secret US satellites.

While the French don't plan to release the information publicly, they are planning to use it as leverage to get the US to suppress reporting of sensitive French satellites in their published ephemeris.

The Graves surveillance radar (the French system) and a comparable German system may form the basis of a pan-European Space Surveillance network — another system that the Europeans don't want to rely on the US for."

Feed Clear Channel Continues To Cut Away At Ad Spots (techdirt.com)

A couple of years ago, Clear Channel announced that it would limit the number of commercials its stations aired in a bid to stay competitive with other modes of listening to music, like satellite radio and iPods (yes, they do compete). Clear Channel's experiment, however didn't have the brightest results as fewer commercials translated to lower profits, despite efforts to charge more on a per ad basis. Still, even as the company was reporting lower revenue, it promised to maintain its limited number of ads. Now it looks to be going further in this direction, as one of its stations in Dallas will go completely commercial free. Instead of running 30 second spots, the station will make money by having companies sponsor blocks of time, with the promise that their product will be talked about in some way. Again, the station will probably see a revenue hit, but what choice does it have? As long as competition continues to take its toll on Clear Channel's bottom line, it might as well take an aggressive, proactive stance. It's also likely that the company will be criticized for not drawing a bright line between content and advertising, since the DJs will be talking about the sponsor company. But the company will be clear that the company is a sponsor of the programming, which should ameliorate these concerns. Furthermore, there's always been a blurry line separating advertising and content, as the best advertising is that which makes for good content in its own right. As long as the company is being forthright, this should be a worthwhile experiment.

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