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Five Positive Actions You Should Do After a Lay-off Lay-offs are hard for most people and are essentially difficult to cope with if you were and excellent worker and outstanding employee. Sometimes lay-offs are general cuts such as the closing of a whole department. It often times hits good employees that the company otherwise would have never gotten fired. So what do you need to do after you get laid off? Here are five positive steps you should take after you have been laid-off. The first and probably most important step is coping with the situation. Get your feelings straightened out. Of course you are upset and plain dumbstruck by what happened, but if you are not able to get this sorted out with yourself, the company is not going to take you back. Then you won’t even have a chance of finding another job. In some cases, if it was not very clear why you have been fired, it helps to talk to coworkers, and maybe the human resource person to just find out that it was not you or any of your doings that got you laid-off. Within this step falls also the realization that the job market currently is a tough one and that you might have to make some budget adjustments first off all. Do not be picky about what kind of jobs you want to choose. Sometimes, this means a new beginning, some job you might like much better than your old one, and you just do not know it yet. After you have been able to work through the situation and are ready for the job hunt, get your résumé out. If you have not been looking for a job in a while it might be dusty and not be up to date. Add your last job to the list; add your role and responsibilities to your list and maybe you even have to adapt your résumé to a more current style. Résumés and cover letters are your way into a job and the first impression that a new employer gets from you. When you are finished getting your résumé up to date, apply to as many jobs as there are. As a third step, make yourself clear that the job market is difficult and finding a new job might mean to apply for something that you might have not really wanted to do, maybe because you did study it, but you never really liked in the university classes? Well, it is worth applying for. The sooner you get another job, the better of you are. Face it, if you really do not like the work you can find another job after a year or two. After a lay-off it is very important to get back into the working world as fast as you can. To make your job search even more successful, as a fourth positive step after a lay-off, you also need to network. Talk to friends, other companies’ bosses you know, and anybody you have ever met that might have a job available for you. Besides networking, you can also always try to do some cold calling, writing letters to businesses that are not having a newspaper add out. There is always the possibility that they are looking for somebody. As a fifth positive action after you are laid-off there is always college. Taking classes that will refresh your topic and specialty you are working in can make a good bullet on your résumé. If the job market is quite tough, why not go back and finish that degree or add another maybe a graduate degree. This always is better on your résumé than plain being out of work.

Got Java on the Brain? Get Free Coffee Products! There are many wonderful web pages on the Internet that help their users and visitors to free products. Some of the pages hold links to free samples; others offer coupons and advice on how to get free products. If it is Java that is on ones mind and one is looking for free coffee products, there might just the right web page on the Internet for that. Finding pages that offer free java, is as easy as drinking a cup of coffee. Internet savvy persons just need to enter the words free coffee into any of the Internet search engines and a variety of great pages will pop up on the search screen. Coffee pages offer samples, links to samples, coupons and more on their sites. Any coffee lover has the chance to try a great variety of new and fancy coffees. The Internet pages that offer free coffee samples are updated frequently, so that links should not be outdated and new products are listed as soon as they appear on the market. As with so many pages on the Internet, these web sites rely on their users to help out with new sample tips, coupon tips and promotion dates. Users are asked to contact the web page master whenever there is a link that is not working, so that that link can be fixed or removed. Users are also encouraged to send in any data about free samples, links to company pages that offer free coffee and even links to coupons and deals that are unbeatable. Since free coffee is sometimes hard to get too and there are only that many free samples that coffee lovers can get a hold of, many of the free coffee sites also offer other great free deals and links to coupons and samples, so that it is anyways a good idea to visit the free coffee sites. For coffee lovers it is also important to check out their local coffee stores. Many of the stores have promotions, such as an advertisement campaign, where free coffee in connection with other products might be available. Just recently one of the major coffee chains had an ongoing promotion, where coffee lovers bought their friends a coup of coffee and they themselves received their drink of equal or lesser value for free. This might have been a way of the company to lure m ore new customers, but in the end it meant a free coffee for one of the two friends. Sometimes it is a promotion at one of the local festivals, where coupons and vouchers for free coffees are handed out. How about a free coffee with breakfast? Some of the major breakfast places offer a free complimentary coffee, when a breakfast or a breakfast sandwich is bought. For the person that every once in a while or maybe even every morning gets a breakfast sandwich, a bagel or a doughnut at one of the many restaurants this is a good deal. By the way, if coffee is not the desired morning drink, but rather teas, the websites and coffee shops also offer free tea and free tea samples. Even though it is more rare, the pages also offer samples for hot chocolate and new chocolate drink creations that can replace coffee or tea for the ones who rather like it sweet and chocolaty with their breakfast. Whichever one if desired, it is well worth checking out the Internet pages online that offer free samples. Free samples are the way for the customer to try without buying. After all, no one would buy a car before it was not test-driven, so here is the chance to test-drink coffees and more.

Music copyright infringement How Does Music Copyright Infringement Affect Me? Music copyright infringement happens all around us every day, by both well meaning people downloading music from their favorite social networking site to the guy who’s reselling MP3s. To be certain, most people who commit music copyright infringement don’t realize what’s going on, and are in turn doing something very illegal and prosecutable in the United States. Copyright Infringement, as defined by Wikipedia.org states: “Copyright infringement (or copyright violation) is the unauthorized use of material that is protected by intellectual property rights law particularly the copyright in a manner that violates one of the original copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works that build upon it. The slang term bootleg (derived from the use of the shank of a boot for the purposes of smuggling) is often used to describe illicitly copied material.” We’ve all heard of ‘bootleg’ recordings – usually audio recordings taken from concerts and sold on home made cassettes or CDs and distributed (sometimes out of the trunk of a car) to anyone that will buy. Bootleg recordings have changed, however, as music copyright infringement has branched into video recordings. Music copyright infringement has exploded with the advent of the internet, and now people from all over the world are sharing every type of imaginable file – from eBooks to audio to music – and small label artists began feeling the pinch years ago. However, many new and older artists are beginning to see the beauty of the internet, and are offering their music for sale track-by-track on iTunes and other MP3 sales websites, as well as through their own band websites and MySpace pages. The internet has exploded in the possibilities it’s given up and coming musicians to become visible, while at the same time drastically increasing the number of music copyright infringement cases – some of which were against innocent people who just weren’t informed. Music copyright infringement cases have helped to create organizations that protect the fair use of an item, such as a song. Organizations such as CreativeCommons.com and the Electronic Frontier Foundation help individuals to know their rights under copyright acts. While there are organizations that help you understand your rights as a purchaser of copyright use, there are organizations that want to limit the ways in which you use the products you buy. It is rumored, for example, that record distribution and production companies want to limit the ways in which you use the music you buy – they don’t want you to put it on your computer or make a Mix Tape or CD from it – for fear of ‘sharing.’ It seems to me, however, when music publishers and distribution companies limit uses like this, they’re opening up a tidal wave of music copyright infringement cases. By limiting the use of purchased material, the companies are alienating their client base and pushing all their sales away from physical products and toward electronic ones – which are much harder to control. A way in which these companies tried to limit the uses was by creating a DRM program, which severely limited the where a CD could be played (on one computer, for instance). And, in one drastic measure, Sony placed a DRM program on all their CDs in the Winter of 2005, and severely crippled several networks when their ‘program’ was actually malware that seriously crippled network security. As you can see, music copyright infringement is something that is currently being fought between end users and music production and distribution companies. In this new century, we must find a way to retain copyright, and allow the customers to use the products they buy in a meaningful way, or otherwise the market will shift and the industry as we know it will be abandoned.