Commercial vs. Independent Content: Human and Financial Resources

Concerning their human and financial resources commercial media and independent content provider are an extremely unequal pair. While the 1998 revenues of the world's leading media conglomerates (AOL Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom and the News Corporation) amounted to US$ 91,144,000,000 provider of independent content usually act on a non-profit basis and to a considerable extent depend on donations and contributions.

Also the human resources they have at their disposal quite differ. Viacom for example employs 112,000 people. Alternative media conversely are mostly run by a small group of activists, most of them volunteers. Moreover the majority of the commercial media giants has a multitude of subsidiaries (Bertelsmann for instance has operations in 53 countries), while independent content provider in some cases do not even have proper office spaces. Asked about their offices number of square meters Frank Guerrero from RTMark comments "We have no square meters at all, because we are only on the web. I guess if you add up all of our servers and computers we would take up about one or two square meters."

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Bad Aibling Station

Latitude: 47.86353, Longitude: 12.00983

RSOC - Bad Aibling is a ground station for the interception of civil and military satellite communications traffic operated by the NSA. About 1000 personnel are on the staff at the Bad Aibling Regional SIGINT Operations Center in Germany, which conducts satellite communications interception activities and is also a downlink station for geostationary SIGINT satellites, like the CANYON program or the MAGNUM/ORION system. Operational responsibility of the groundstation was transfered to the ARMY Intelligence and Security Command in 1995, but there is also influence from the Air Force's 402nd Intelligence Squadron. Till the end of the cold war the main target was the Soviet Union.

for more information:

Description by FAS intelligence resource program.

http://www.fas.org/irp/facility/bad_aibling.htm

Description of the tasks of the Signals Intelligence Brigade.

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm34-37_97/6-chap.htm

Look at a detailed guide for military newbies at Bad Aibling.

http://www.dmdc.osd.mil/sites/owa/Installation.prc_Home?p_SID=&p_DB=P

http://www.fas.org/irp/facility/bad_aibling.h...
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm34-37_97...
http://www.dmdc.osd.mil/sites/owa/Installatio...
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