No, you just change your launch keys and kill the infected nodes, which can all be done in seconds.

Any intelligence service that doesn't have at least one mole in Google is worthless.

You should always assume the worst. It's the only way to keep a company in check.

That wasn't exactly it, Amazon was testing different price points for items and set a cookie to make sure once your price point was set it remained. However some people noticed if they cleared their cookies they would get a lower price sometimes. The people who got a higher price didn't really have much to say about it. In the end everyone got charged the lowest price even if they thought they were paying the higher price.

How else do you think google knows what comments are left for any particular page?

Google saw the writing on the wall, they were going to lose, and they were taking a huge beating in the press while losing, and an even bigger one when they would eventually lose. So they did what most companies do, try to find a settlement.

The Open Book Alliance started with Professor Raj Reddy at CMU and Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive. They started their scanning and making public system about five years before Google cracked a single book. Brewster personally asked Larry Page to join them as they had a mature scanning system that had already scanned hundreds of thousands of books in India, Page decided that Google would go on it's own. (Google really doesn't partner with anyone)

While I agree that Falun Gong is a total wacky cult (and I have old friends where sadly involved with it), but maybe you should think with a little objectivity calling the media atheist. I mean the one thing that a US presidential candidate must do is prove their love to Jesus. Don't you think if the media were atheist this sort of thing would be questioned a bit more. The one thing that a major political candidate simply can not be is Atheist, polls have pretty much proven that we will get an islamic president before we get an atheist. Personally I find the rites of all christianity, and bible stories just as nutty as the Xenu crap. Think for a second if you first heard these stories when you were in your 20s.

Before google scanned a single book Brewster went down to Mountain View and asked google to join with their the Internet Archive's and other's scanning effort which was already quite well under way. Brin and Page preferred to go on their own.

Usually books last 3 or 4 years in the US too, just people like to be dramatic. The truth is, that you can either easily find it used, or you can easily sell it back when you have bought a brand new edition. Most physical science or math texts are updated only once a decade. I only had one professor who wrote the text for his class and he told us not to buy it, as we had a copy in the lab.

BTW some of you may want to invest in an econ 101 or macro text, they explain the textbook market quite well.

You Tube? That's funny, the only people who make any money with You Tube are the IT guts who keep it running, and then only due to the subsidy from search and Adwords. I have friends who are very funny, talented film makers, while they do put stuff on You Tube, stuff that they make in their spare time, which isn't all that much. What do they with the most of their time? Work for Pixar on Toy Story 3, make the Comcast Town ads, or for Lucas on that shitty Terminator sequel.

The laws regarding music is very different than those for written or visual art. For the most part music has statutory royalties which means that as long as the proper royalty is paid to the proper agency, the song can be played. This covers most everything except the use in movies, video ads (radio ads are covered by ASCAP/BMI), and television. So in the case of Weird Al, for his disc sales he must pay at most $0.09/song (Mechanical Royalty) sold but most likely negotiates a deal whereas he splits the Mechanical with the original writers, because he gets some of the mechanical for his original lyrics. Live performance is even easier, as those are simply covered by the BMI/ASCAP fee paid by the venue.

Music has very different laws due to statutory copyrights. You can cover (and parody) anything you would like as long as it has been released (recorded and distributed) and the royalties are paid to the proper agencies.

That is only a problem if you make the cover sound too much like the original, so a it sounds as though a particular performer was sponsoring something that they haven't agreed to. Tom Waits has successfully sued a few times for the use of his songs and even a performer who simply sounded too much like him singing a song that wasn't his in the use of television advertisements. At the same time, you can use a Tom Waits cover that is obviously not Tom Waits singing it in any ad you want to, so long as you pay the statutory songwriting royalty.

Actually, anyone is allowed to cover or parody any published song without any permission needed so long as they pay the songwritering royalties. In the case of a parody, those royalties are usually split between the original writer and the writer of the parody, in other words Weird Al himself gets a check from ASCAP or BMI (I'm not sure who he is registered with) for performance. As for his CD's those are covered by the mechanical royalty, which is also split in a very similar way by and handled by the Harry Fox Agency.