The figure I gave above didn't include such a big staff, maybe two or three including kos himself, but did contain payments on hardware (consider the archiving requirements!), bandwidth (I have no idea how much a T3 connection costs, lets say $2000 monthly and I'll bet my last dollar that's a really low figure), MySQL licensing (we paid $142,000 yearly for two big Oracle installations and of course they're not using the MySQL community edition), attorney's fees (dkos has been to court once already - kos won), and basic but unavoidable incidentals (like a graphic/web designer's bill).
So the figure I gave was for the old dkos, assuming it was watching it's burn rate closely and went lightly on the organizational frills, not the present dkos with the larger staff and I excluded Congress Matters entirely.
Let us as well consider just one item where ET would differ greatly from dkos: legal fees. Assuming ET is deliberately EU-wide, across countries whose slander and libel laws differ, ET might require some legal expertise that dkos did not. "It Can't Be Just About Us"--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire
There was also an amazing court sentence last year in Modica that ruled blogs are the equivalent of newpapers and are therefore accountable as is a newspaper.It was a very adroit sentence since it did in no way affront what was actually produced on the blog- dossiers and documents alleging corruption and mafia ties- but seized and blacked out the site on purely normative grounds. The site- like all blogs- had not been duly registered as a news source. The case, I hope, should go to Europe.
Off the top of my head, there are a couple cases I've read about:
Verdammte scheisse! It's all too much for a layman! As I said before, operating a blog and contributing to one is worth thinking hard about. "It Can't Be Just About Us"--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire
