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As far as secondary revenue streams go, authors can license their IP to TV, Movie and Video Game makers or they can sell merchandise themselves.

That's a bit like saying coders can just make a game then license the IP to TV stations, moviemakers, writers and merchandisers as a secondary revenue stream. It happens but it's rare enough that it may as well not exist for most. Musicians on the other hand almost all play gigs (as well as being able to sell their music to videogame makers, TV shows and movies), and the movie industry practically invented merchandising as well as other avenues of income.

But that requires they build a fanbase. And in that endeavor, a literary agent is far more beneficial than an industry trade group

Literary agents liaise between writers and publishers/producers etc. They have nothing to do with building up a fanbase, most authors do all of their marketbuilding themselves, in their own time, on their own dime.

And it's been pretty well established that there's few (if any) people who pirate media that would run to Amazon or iTunes and buy something if they couldn't obtain it via piracy.

Certainly established to the satisfaction of people who pirate books anyway.

And most of the books I buy from new authors these days most often comes from authors who do things like release the first book in a trilogy for free or via word of mouth suggestions from people who are where I was in my teens and twenties and read stolen or borrowed versions of their books.

Freely released books are a very different matter to piracy, especially from creators who can least afford it.

what other means does a writer have to earn money beyond direct sales?

As far as secondary revenue streams go, authors can license their IP to TV, Movie and Video Game makers or they can sell merchandise themselves.

But that requires they build a fanbase. And in that endeavor, a literary agent is far more beneficial than an industry trade group whose only interest in an individual author is whether they've paid their membership dues who goes out and does boneheaded things that are more likely to incite spite in burgeoning literary fans and thus encourage and spread piracy rather than stifle it.

And it's been pretty well established that there's few (if any) people who pirate media that would run to Amazon or iTunes and buy something if they couldn't obtain it via piracy. People usually pirate things when buying isn't an option. I was no different. In my broke ass teens and twenties, I first got all my books from a library and then later when things like BBSs and gopher became available to me, via piracy. Authors didn't earn a dime from me for a couple decades, except perhaps via a few people who weren't as broke as me who might have bought books based on suggestions from me that I based on the books I borrowed or stole.

But what they did earn during those decades was my loyalty to their "brand". Now that I'm older and have a far greater amount of disposable income and far less patience for digging around looking for books I want on virii and annoying ad infested piracy sites, I'm a prolific purchaser of books (and other media). I've since bought many of the books I'd previously borrowed or stole. And most of the books I buy from new authors these days most often comes from authors who do things like release the first book in a trilogy for free or via word of mouth suggestions from people who are where I was in my teens and twenties and read stolen or borrowed versions of their books.

The hit HBO show Game of Thrones is a quintessential example of this. The show is sometimes downloaded illegally more times each week than it is watched on cable television. But even if HBO put the shows online, the price it could charge would still pale in comparison to the money it makes through cable operators.

Whoops. Game of thrones has been available online/streaming via HBO GO since the very first episode. It's a free streaming service for HBO subscribers. Pretty sure episodes become available right when the they air on the cable channel, too. So that whole theory about an "inverse relationship" because the show isn't available online is (to use a technical term) bullshit. The author might have been well served to visit the website of the companies he was writing about at least a single time prior to writing an article about them. It's called research if you want to use the term loosely.

BTW, Showtime (and probably most other pay channels) do the same thing. The other show the author mentioned "Dexter" is available online for showtime subscribers for no additional charge.
http://www.sho.com/sho/showtime-anytime
http://www.hbogo.com/

Your comeback is a tired internet meme? Why don't you respond to what I said rather than going off on tangents like you're trying out for The United States of Tara? You got caught, dude. Admit it. Your argument hinged on linking to security reports that the writer of the report explicitely states can't be used to compare competing products. Yet you can't just admit you're wrong. You got beat by the better debater (not to mention cold hard facts). Be a man and have some dignity.

    I've seen it, only because when I'm out shopping I'm looking for the best deal. Since it appears that I know what I'm looking at, and for some strange reason people think I'm approachable. I suppose people can really misjudge people.

    I've probably heard every dumb thing customers can ask. If they aren't asking me, they're asking salesmen within earshot. Every time I hear it, I lose a little more faith in humanity. Marketing almost always beats common sense.

    I had fun a few months back. I needed a new monitor. I was had picked a nice Asus 24" LCD. It was on sale, and a pretty good deal. One of the salesmen made the mistake of approaching me. I swear, I usually have the "all salesmen should fuck off" aura. I guess I forgot to turn it on. That or maybe he thought I was going to shoplift it. :) Anyways, he came over, and kept asking questions, so I went straight into my dumb-customer mode.

    "like, a friend of mine built me a computer. He said it had an aaasooz board thing in it. Will this aaasooz screenie thing work with it?". I kept it up for about a minute, and then laughed and told him I was fucking with him. :) He was very relieved that I wasn't another dumb customer. And hey, he still got his commission, so all was good. At least he didn't have to answer too many dumb questions while I contemplated if I really wanted one.

We need more Dexters out there.

Well, there's a TON of positive effects. No noisy lawnmowers waking me up on the weekend, no need for me to use a lawnmower, that's a big plus. It's safer, especially if you have a hilly spot of land. Lawnmowers rolling and flipping on to people is serious business, but I can't think of any way a goat rolling over due to a steep hill has ever killed anyone, or even seriously disfigured a foot. Much safer.

The downside? Goats poop a lot, and have devil eyes.

They do taste pretty good, though. If you cook 'em right.

Having just watched 3 seasons worth of Weeds I now have an image in my head of an entire suburb full of identical houses, each with a couple of goats in the yard....and they all look just the same.

I'd bet kids are SAFER now than we were then

You're very right.

A recent study shows that even our smalled state, Rhode Island, with population density of over 1000 per square mile, has an average speed of only 6.7 Mbps. If you can't make that dense of an area high speed there is something seriously wrong with our system.

The Showtime Network had an extended documentary about this very phenomenon - it was called Brotherhood.

Well fuck. Who's going to call everyone on their bullshit now?

Is this it?

Think of it as the difference between a politician and a serial killer.

yeah, that Dexter is charming....I'd vote for him.

I'd take a sample from every lamb. Then I'd feed all the sheep the same feed for 2 years under the same conditions (ie: the same farm). I have no idea what the correct "harvest" date is for Mutton, but I'd make a mental note of the sheep that produced the most and best quality meat on slaughter day. Or the most and best quality wool. Whatever.

Then I'd clone that one.

Just takes one or two iterations to dramatically improve results. Farmers have been doing this for 1000's of years, but you can already imagine the impact cloning animals will have. (we've always been able to clone a lot of plants...)

Instead of having a large, cumbersome herd, I could have a smaller, more specialized herd and just selectively clone as needed. Now that I think about it, its like the farmers in the show "Weeds"....but with mammals.

Is this a spillover from Reaganomics?

What in the world are you talking about?

Do you even know who Ronald Reagan was?

Some of you left-wing kooks are absolutely pathological in your addiction to political fantasies.

PS: If you want to know how "politics" really works, then watch Showtime's Brotherhood.

And no, it's not a show about the GOP.

Apart from the organs, it sounds suspiciously like the score to the SHO series Dexter. (Not the music on the website, the main title music..)

The one about that serial killer?

Uhh, you can flash the CPU Microcode from within a Microsoft OS?!? [Other than DOS?!?]

Wouldn't this pose like the Mother of All Possible Challenges to the Black Hat community - how to right a worm that could flash CPU's, thereby rendering nearly limitless power over every possible sandboxing or anti-virus countermeasure?

Kinda the Helen of Troy [or Anne Boleyn] of Hax0r/Crax0r Wet Dreams?

Seriously - how can you hope to maintain the illusion of Virtual Machines if you can write to the microcode?

That said, taking care of the environment in general is a good thing. So either way we ought to research renewable energy, keep recycling, etc.

http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/prevepisodes.do?episo deid=s2/r

It costs more energy to recycle a plastic bottle than to make a new one. Recycling does not help take care of the environment.

You forgot the obligatory link.

P&T did a show on Feng Shui in which no two of the three "experts" came up with the same answers about how to arrange the furniture. There's only one place Feng Shui works, and that's in Nintendo's Animal Crossing game.

Actually, you are, and it is probably this episode.

The same goes for EVERY smoker out there. Yes, that's right, FUCK YOU SMOKERS for using our public money for crap you do to yourselves.

On an episode of Bullshit! Penn & Teller filled up water bottles with NYC tap water from a garden hose. Many people actually prefered the tap water to the store-bought stuff. It's a Season 1 episode; put it in your Netflix queue.

http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/prevepisodes.do?episo deid=s1/bw

As seen on Penn & Teller!

hahahhaha

I see someone hasn't been keeping up on their episodes of Bullshit!

Enjoy pretending you're eating chemical-free foods.

Penn and Teller covered that issue as far as I'm concerned.

Whereas the conservatives have decided to say "up yours" to the Kyoto Treaty.

Erm, Kyoto was bullshit from day one, that's indisputable fact. How many signatories have ever satisfied its requirements? Also, any agreement that doesn't cover China or other 'developing economies' is a total nonstarter.

A true market-style population based international carbon credit scheme makes a lot more sense.


I agree that the current species-protection laws aren't perfect. They are better than nothing, and can be much improved.

Bullshit!

They're _not_ better than nothing.

Convince the ultra-rights that we should actually conserve our resources for our grand-children, and there's have the battle.

Oh those nuts don't give a damn, they're eagerly awaiting the Rapture and are stoking the Iranian nutjobs to bring Armageddon. There are fair and rational free-market arguments for conservation, the oldest being 'waste not want not'. Of course the duckspeakers on the left would never want to give subsidies to actually pay the expensive costs of making "big corporations" able to conserve and increase profits at the same time, and the duckspeakers on the right won't invest in conservation that has long-term profitability since it doesn't guarantee short-term "shareholder value".

Ok...There are criminals hocked up on drugs...Doing bad things...No surprise...Where's your percentage of people hocked up on drugs that aren't naturally evil as well? You can't use a percentage of criminals that are drug users to say that drugs make you rape and kill people...What you want is a percentage of drug users that are criminals...One does not equal the other.

That page also says that more inmates were arrested drunk than high...And where does it say that all these high criminals are responsible for rape and/or death of children?

Something you should think about:

http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/topics.do?topic=war

"At a time when doom-sayers were hopping around saying everyone was going to starve, Norman was working. He moved to Mexico and lived among the people there until he figured out how to improve the output of the farmers. So that saved a million lives. Then he packed up his family and moved to India, where in spite of a war with Pakistan, he managed to introduce new wheat strains that quadrupled their food output. So that saved another million. You get it? But he wasn't done. He did the same thing with a new rice in China. He's doing the same thing in Afica -- as much of Africa as he's allowed to visit. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1970, they said he had saved a billion people. That's BILLION! Carl Sagan BILLION with a B! And most of them were a different race from him. Norman is the greatest human being, and you probably never heard of him."

Penn and Teller covered this on their show Bullshit! ... I think it was the episode Safety Hysteria.

(Unlike in Mythbusters, they also swabbed people, just for comparison)

Oh -- and if you wash your hands after using a public toilet -- don't touch the door handle, as there's a large number of people who don't, and you'll just get contaminated again.

Penn and Teller covered this on their show Bullshit! ... I think it was the episode Safety Hysteria.

(Unlike in Mythbusters, they also swabbed people, just for comparison)

Oh -- and if you wash your hands after using a public toilet -- don't touch the door handle, as there's a large number of people who don't, and you'll just get contaminated again.

by Bullshit.

actually the trees used to make paper would be worthless to make houses out of. Also there are more trees in the US now than back in 1940. So that means paper companies are using regrown trees to make paper, and by the time they run out of those tress, the trees they planted to replaces the regrown ones will be grown up enough to use. In other words the paper companies have all the trees they need and therefor do not need to chop down any more "virgin" trees. but hey don't take my word for it, check out what Penn And Teller have had to say about it: http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/topics.do?topic=r

...is bullshit, as Penn and Teller would say, they did an entire episode on it.

http://www.sho.com/site/video/player_flash.do?vers ion=6&flashURL=/site/video/player_flash.do&pass_va riable=/ptbs/2003/shs_clip&pass_variable_2=&pass_v ariable_3=&altContentURL=/site/video/right.do&pass _variable=/ptbs/2003/shs_clip&pass_variable_2=&pas s_variable_3=

No it shouldn't, Chiropractic is bullshit. See a real back doctor who went to medical school, not a pretend doctor.

You are right to a point. Its mainly the leadership that are the extremists. PETA kills and puts down far more animals than they save. They kill far more than shelters that do not have a no kill policy. The true meaning on PETA is People Executing Tame Animals. Oh and if you have pets acording to PETA you own SLAVES.
And that is ONLY the beginning of the hypocrisy with PETA. And with that I give you the following...


" PETA's Mary Beth Sweetland should also answer for her own personal hypocrisy. Like more than ten million Americans, she's diabetic. Sweetland injects herself daily with insulin that was tested on animals; she has conceded that her medicine "still contains some animal products -- and I have no qualms about it.... I don't see myself as a hypocrite. I need my life to fight for the rights of animals."

Well then HBO for gods sake please, pretty please, *let me pay you guys*!!

HBO rules, I would gladly pay for watching The Wire, Bill Maher and Penn and teller`s bullshit...(showtime) But as it stands my European IP isn`t even good enough to get on the showtime website! Let alone paying for HBO. I can get the sopranos, but only two seasons late... and I haven't seen a six feet under for a couple of seasons now.

Ofcourse living Europe I can:

• wait for public broadcasters to buy another season
• pay 80 euro per series per season for dvd`s (while still having to wait decades for a season)
• go to my tracker, fire up azureus and enjoy another The wire...

Now ofcourse I can get all emotional about this but there is a cool thing about using azureus. It has room for crazy plugins that do stupid useless things like displaying the flags of the countries that the client I share with come from. The thing is based on geolocation (Like I assume the showtime site is).... So it is even less scientific than a slashdot poll. The funny thing is that most of these clients apear to be from European countries, especially the ones where people tend to know a bit of english. Say Denmark, the UK, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany.

It makes perfect sense that HBO original series would appeal more to European audiences than American shows that lack at least two things, acting, and seven English words that Europeans still know but American apparently stopped using... wait, thats eight things, but still.

So the whole idea that this will significantly increase download times is complete BullShit!

No dude, that's on showtime

Wrong word. Try this one: Bullshit!.

SHO already blocks all non-US access. The article speaks of this being a slippery slope. I recently started to use a proxy (easy to turn on and off with Mozilla and PrefBar) to go around it.

And if you ever wanted a reason to quit: http://www.peta.org/

Please see http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/topics.do?topic=peta
Peta are a bunch of lying fanatics.

They hit an all-time bottom with "Scare Tactics" and "Crossing Over with John Edward", neither of which has anything to do with SF or even "Sci Fi".

Scare Tactics didn't bother me, not that I watched it. But Crossing Over ... words fail me. I suggest watching what Penn & Teller had to say about him.

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!

The last episode debunked the hysteria that was used to pass to embed government very deeply into our lives AKA the Patriot Act. It is scheduled to air again this week if anyone wants to see.

Link to information on the P&T episode I mentioned

Well, I saw an episode of Penn & Teller's: Bullshit the other night, so I go online to find it's website and some more info about it..

SORRY

We at Showtime Online express our apologies;
however, these pages are intended for access
only from within the United States.

WTF ! Here's the link, http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/home.do

Guess I'll have to anonymize myself with Tor to visit that webpage. (possibly having to press reload a few times to make it work.)

I must say that I find this very strange. Infact I am almost speechless. First of all evolution does not negate the existence of G-d. All it does is negate inaccurate account of creation in judaeo-christian religious texts.

The thing I most find disturbing though is the fact that these people most likely have nice cars, live in nice houses, have indoor plumbing. These are all things that are possible because of science. I think everyone wishes there was an after life but I think these people are no more sane then Scientologists.

Anyway if you want a good laugh on this crazy argument check out Penn & Teller: Bullshit!

We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States.

Because if you go from star to not-star, you gain weight. If you want to be a star again, you better lose the weight. So stars must have a weight limit.

It's bad enough lawmakers are sticking fees and surcharges in everything from cell phone bills to cigarettes. Now they want to add $10 to the cost of computers under the guise of environmentalism? WE DO NOT HAVE A LANDFILL PROBLEM! We do NOT need to recycle computers unless that means giving them to the poor.

Shame people don't do research like these guys.


End of The World and Environmental Hysteria.

Shame people don't do research like these guys.


End of The World and Environmental Hysteria.

Bringing on Manny Coto...

Manny Coto was the executive producer and did a lot of the writing for the ill fated Odyssey 5. The show had a weird but interesting concept, was intelligently done, was creative, and was one of the best SF shows I've seen in quite a while. It had a lot of geek appeal, but was still approachable to non-geeks. The entire cast was excellent.

Too bad it was the sort of thing that takes off slowly, and was probably killed by cable network executive goofs at Shotime in the first season because it didn't go platinum in two episodes.