So they'll just move to Wordpress or Blogger or use some other random blogging platform. What's the problem?

You never look at pictures on Flickr then?

Of course there are terms. Here they are. You can't use YouTube without agreeing with the contents of this document.

ABP doesn't, no. A person using ABP to watch YT without ads maybe.

Google cooperated on that one. But for WP they weren't so keen on helping out.

There are not using any API's at all. They're just scraping YT's website.

Microsoft isn't using a hidden API. They're using no API at all because Google isn't providing them with one and for some reason they think that gives them the right to violate the terms of service.

Which might be a valid point if they didn't provide an application to access YouTube for their biggest rival: iOS. But they do, so apparently Google has no problem providing an application for a competing platform when there are a lot of people using that platform. I think the main reason Google doesn't make a YT-app for WP (or BlackberryOS for that matter) is because the market share is in the single digits and therefore it isn't worth the hassle.

The point is that Microsofts application isn't using publicly available API's, they are abusing YouTube and violating their terms. Just because Google doesn't provide API's to allow you to make something that meets their conditions doesn't mean you may violate those conditions. It simply means Google doesn't want to present YouTube through anything but their own applications.

I'm not even sure I receive that many pieces of mail per year in total.

I'm genuinely interested: how could these sort of research projects be of any help at all with anything? Isn't it this simple: if you want a drawing but can't draw one, hire an artist. If you want music but can't make music, get a musician. It's not expensive nor complicated to get some help from an expert on these things.

Software as a tool to empower people who create is great, but software that actually generates creative content itself is completely useless in my opinion.

Adaptive music in video games has absolutely nothing to do with what Song Smith attempts to do. This is Song Smith's algorithm: it analyses a melody (recorded by voice), then does a bad guess at the suggested tonal scale and harmonies (which is basically impossible to get right, because the data just isn't there) and then uses these guesses to accompany your singing with chords, played by a cheap sounding midi rhythm machine. The result can barely be called music at all and is completely unrelated to anything that happens during the actual process of creating music.

Now I'm somewhat of a fundamentalist on this subject, as I believe that any from of generative music is a mistake. In my opinion music, like any art form, is about communicating ideas. They have to be from one human to the next, by definition. Just like animals or plants, a computer doesn't have ideas it can communicate, therefore it is unable to ever create music. It might, at best, automate the task of creating variations of human compositions. That might be somewhat useful as long as a human is in control. But as the human factor decreases, the result will move away from music and toward random sound. And even if you like listening to Yoko Ono, sound does not equal music.

Yeah, just like there's a thin line between crazy and genius. Doesn't make every crazy person a genius though, just like there is very little beauty involved with these Microsoft Research projects. I'm sure they do plenty of awesome stuff, but I don't think the notion of automating creative processes can lead to anything good.

So instead of drawing a cartoon face yourself, which is something everyone can do and enjoys very much, Microsoft wants to automate this "task" away from you so you can do what? Have a good time with Excel instead?

It's just like the horror that is Microsoft Song Smith, where Microsoft wanted to automate the "tedious chore of composing music" by letting a computer generate tunes instead. It's just stupid. It has no application. It leads to nothing. I'm not against fundamental research or anything, but this sort of nonsense is really just wasting the time of everyone involved.

Obviously lab meat will have to live up to the standards of real meat. But once it's edible, I don't see any other complications.