If Slashdot users can't discuss the featured article meaningfully without having to buy something first, then the story should be considered a Slashvertisement, the product being copies of the featured article.

Are you sure it isn't because a patent takes "about one research-career-length" to expire?

Where does this leave people outside the United States who claim breakthroughs in fusion but don't want to set foot on United States soil for fear of being the next Dmitry Sklyarov?

Then why has radio overwhelmingly chosen not to play an album straight through?

Some industries tend to be immune to cost-cutting through mooching off free software hobbyists. For example, let me know when a major-label video game lands on a TV near you while being distributed as free software from day one.

Especially given the unfortunate coincidental baggage of this doctor's name. It sounds like Jim Crow, the nickname for the policy of systematic racial segregation in the southern United States during the first half of the twentieth century. (Outside the US, you might know it as "apartheid".) James Crowe was also the name of one of the six Confederate veterans who founded the Ku Klux Klan, the others being Richard Reed, John Lester, Frank McCord, Calvin Jones, and John Kennedy. And Ebola is often thought of as a "black" disease.

Instead of DRM, physical CDs had the counterbalancing drawback of having to buy all the filler.

From the article you linked: "working with public money".

Essentially these LECs operate as private security contractors paid for with public funds obtained through taxation. And you'll only see them on the level of the several states because the Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893 prohibits the U.S. federal government from hiring private rent-a-cops.

OTA TV is very careful to show only general interest programming intended for the broadest of audiences, so that advertisers alone are willing to pay the cost of producing high production value series. This isn't enough for narrower interest shows.

Which such provider exists today for Dish to begin to deploy tomorrow?

In that case, the market dynamic is more like Android, or like music on the iPod prior to iTunes Plus: supporting only one digital restrictions management platform as well as DRM-free works from anywhere.

A lot of authors choose to use digital restrictions management so that they can sell more than one copy without having it be leaked to a mass infringement ring through an untraceable, judgment-proof member. The owner of an iPod can install DRM-free MP3 or M4A files from anywhere. But for nearly a decade after the iPod came out, the major record labels refused to sell DRM-free audio files over the Internet for fear of a leak to Napster or its successors (Gnutella, KaZaA, WinMX, and eDonkey2000), and iPod supported only the so-called FairPlay DRM platform used by iTunes. The owner of an Android device can install apps from anywhere (with "Unknown sources" turned on) with the APK file. But APK files lack DRM, so a lot of app developers publish their paid apps only through Google Play Store. And for the same reason, a lot of e-book authors publish their paid books only through DRM platforms. Can Kindle load e-books from any DRM platform, or does it support only Amazon's DRM platform?

Good luck not "host[ing] your content on someone else's systems" when the market-dominating viewing device is hardcoded to use "someone else's systems". This appears to be true of both e-readers (Kindle) and handheld video game players with buttons (PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS).

What's next? Taking down Winnie the Pooh because there are too many bounces before Tigger pounces?

That's easy. With commercials alone or with retransmission consent royalties alone, most pay TV channels can't pay the bills to produce original programming. Only the combination of both provides enough revenue. If pay TV channels relied exclusively on retransmission consent royalties, every channel would be as expensive as, say, HBO, and many channels that aim for a more niche audience would go out of business.

The difference between satellite television and satellite Internet is that satellite television is broadcast with conditional access and satellite Internet is unicast. The limited throughput of a satellite's transponders causes each customer to pay several dollars per GB of transfer (source: exede.com) to reserve time on the transponder to bounce the signal. Netflix over satelliet would quickly run you into your monthly quota.