admsteiner - Slashdot User

Submission + - Why Google Wanted a YouTube Lawsuit

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 21, 2007 @06:59PM

An anonymous reader writes: After YouTube was purchased for $1.6 Billion, there was rampant speculation that Google would soon be waist-deep in billion dollar lawsuits. Despite the enormous liability issues, Google purchased YouTube for a mind-numbing sum, leaving many doubters wondering if Google considered all of costs involved. Well, a theory has been put forth explaining what Google may have been thinking when it bought the company: "Letting YouTube fight this battle alone with their own lawyers might have resulted in a very public and unnecessary loss that would have crippled Google's video ambitions and possibly caused collateral damage to a bunch of related industries (especially search)." In short, the author argues that Google had a lot more to lose had it kept away from YouTube and let the old-media companies crush it with lawsuits.

Morality — Biological or Philosophical? 550

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday March 21, 2007 @04:18PM from the monkey-see-monkey-do dept.

loid_void writes to mention The New York Times is reporting that Biologists are making a bid on the subject of morality. "Last year Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book 'Moral Minds' that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language. In another recent book, 'Primates and Philosophers,' the primatologist Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes."

SpaceX's Falcon Launches... Sort Of 164

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday March 21, 2007 @08:29AM from the i-think-i-can-i-think-i-can dept.

JHarrison writes "Spaceflight Now is running a story on the SpaceX Falcon 1 launch yesterday. Those of you watching the stream will have no doubt noticed the telemetry failure at 04:50, and turns out that was more than them turning the webcast off.. "A year after its maiden flight met a disastrous end, the SpaceX booster lifted off at 9:10 p.m. EDT (0110 GMT Wednesday) from a remote launch pad on Omelek Island, part of a U.S. Army base at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Controllers lost contact with the Falcon during the burn of the second stage that would have placed the rocket into orbit around Earth. "We did encounter, late in the second stage burn, a roll-control anomaly," Elon Musk, founder and chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said in a post-launch call with reporters. Live video from cameras mounted aboard the rocket's second stage showed increasing oscillations about five minutes after liftoff, just before the public webcast was cut off. The rolling prevented the necessary speed to achieve a safe orbit, instead sending the stage on a suborbital trajectory back into the atmosphere.""

NFL Caught Abusing the DMCA 357

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday March 21, 2007 @12:14AM from the poorly-chosen-victim dept.

Implied Oral Consent writes "You know how the NFL puts up those notices before every game saying 'This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience, and any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited?' Well, Ars Technica is reporting that Wendy Seltzer thought that that was over-reaching and posted a video of the notice on YouTube. Predictably, the NFL filed a DMCA Take Down notice on the clip. But Ms. Seltzer knows her rights, so she filed a DMCA Counter Notice. This is when the NFL violated the DMCA, by filing another Take Down notice instead of taking the issue to court — their only legitimate option, according to the DMCA. Unfortunately for the NFL, Ms. Seltzer is a law professor, an EFF lawyer, and the founder of Chilling Effects. Oops!"

Comment Re:The King and the Chalice -Decentralized - (Score 1) 1965

by admsteiner on Sunday October 16, 2005 @02:54AM (#13801646) Attached to: Your Favorite Math/Logic Riddles?

How about we decentralize the leader. In other words, the King *has* to call on everyone an arbitrary number of times. Who cares who the leader is? Make everyone the leader. You always flip the same way, that way being the way you flipped the chalice the first time you went into the room. Since k n*k, as long as someone has flipped it n*k +1 times, he knows that every other prisoner has gone in (mind's a bit mushy, so that math may be off). The only problem left then is that the King might decide to call everyone in once, in which case they'll never go free....but its closer...

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