Stan Lee is being sued by a law firm for non-payment:
Lee, 87, former chairman of Marvel Comic, comic book writer, editor, actor, producer is facing a heavy lawsuit for money over due to Lavely & Singer.
One lawyer from the firm claims that Lee refused to pay them for legal works that was done for him since 2007 for his creations of Spider-Man and X-Men.
Former Pirate Bay scalawag looks into micropayment scheme.
“The money you pay each month will be spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month,” said Peter Sunde.
“We want to encourage people to share money as well as content,” Mr Sunde told BBC News. “It’s a test to see if this might be a working method for real micropayments.”
The price of a “free” web is your privacy. NO, we do not collect or sell info at my websites. I wouldn’t know how, anyway.
Every day Google gathers millions of search terms that help them refine their search system and give them a direct marketing bonanza that they keep for months.
Every week Facebook receives millions of highly personal status updates that are kept forever and are forming the basis of direct advertising revenue.
Every month free newspapers plant and track a cookie tracking device on your computer that tells them what your range of interests are and allows them to shape their adverts and in the future, even content around you.
So you’re not just being watched, you’re being traded. The currency has changed.
It costs THIS MUCH to run the supposedly free, information-wants-to-be-free-so-lets-not-pay-the-people-who-work-to-provide-the-content internet:
BusinessWeek’s Spencer Ante got ahold of Digg’s financial statements. They are frightful, even for a startup. Last year, the company took in $4.8 million and spent $7.6 million, for a loss of $2.8 million. In the first nine months of this year, losses grew almost as fast as revenues: Digg took in $6.4 million and spent $10.4 million, resulting in a $4 million loss. At an annual clip, that’s more than $5 million out the door a year.
And sad financial news at YouTube:
According a recent report by analysts at the financial-services company Credit Suisse, Google will lose $470 million on the video-sharing site this year alone. To put it another way, the Boston Globe, which is on track to lose $85 million in 2009, is five times more profitable—or, rather, less unprofitable—than YouTube.
Enjoying the taste of all that free? Isn’t it yummy.
Old news. Wow, I need to clean up my system.
A boo-hoo blogger scammed thousands of readers with a story about a terminally ill baby.
She is actually Beccah Beushausen, a 26-year-old social worker from the Chicago suburb of Mokenka who says she didn’t know how to free herself from the web of lies she wove.
“Soon I was getting 100,000 hits a week, and it just got out of hand,” she told the Tribune. “I didn’t know how to stop. … One lie led to another.”
Novelist/jockey Dick Francis dead at 89. This article covers the Grand National loss that led him to a writing career. Also, interesting tidbits about who may have been the talent behind the bestsellers:
Mary was a crucial part of the thriller-writing ‘team’. Although partly paralysed by polio and suffering chronic asthma and bronchitis, she researched all the books – in the process becoming a computer expert, photographer, accountant, painter and wine buff, even qualifying as a pilot for the book Flying Finish…
In 1980, Mary told me: ‘Yes, Dick would like me to have all the credit for them, but believe me, it’s much better for everyone, including the readers, to think that he writes them because they’re taut, masculine books that might otherwise lose their credibility.’
…Mail on Sunday reported that Mary was ‘evasive when asked bluntly whether she is the true author.
She said equivocally, “It is not exactly true to say that I write Dick’s books … I could get him to write you a letter and you would see he can write”. The amount of sharing we do is, to my mind, sort of private. We would really like people not to press us too hard on this”.’
This looks like junk science to me, but what the heck. A study of a handful of people seems to indicate that exposure to luxury makes people greedy. Because, yeah, after one Chanel suit, I confess I want two.
“Results . . . suggest that when primed with luxury, people endorsed self-interested decisions that could potentially harm others,” the researchers said in the study.
“Luxury-primed individuals tend to make decisions that are self-interested and arguably unethical.”
