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YouTube, the ubiquitous video-hosting site, recently changed its terms of service to basically allow them to do whatever they want with the stuff you upload to them. This, of course, has completely freaked out the technorati because now their lip-synching videos will be commercialized by the company paying for their bandwidth! Oh noes! You mean it costs money to serve 100 million videos every day? You mean that leaching that bandwidth from the company comes at a price? YouTube isn’t Utopia?

Nightmare Scenario (TM) #1 is that YouTube will find that super-special music video, strip the audio, and sell it on a CD. Aside from the huge “Uh, yeah, right” that comes to mind, how would that be so bad? If you’re so farked for cash that you can’t publish your own work on, say, your own website (and therefore establish copyright), wouldn’t the free exposure do you some good? Any CD resulting from YouTube’s hypothetical effort would certainly reference the originating artists. No one would ever believe that some network engineers at YouTube created a CD full of diverse, high-quality audio to market under the YouTube name.

I understand the desire to have a single point of contact for all your XTREME roof jumpers and pirated clips of the Daily Show (which I highly enjoy, by the way), but this concept around the web that all services are supposed to a) free and b) completely without strings is a little too Pollyanna for me. YouTube is not your buddy, there to hand over bandwidth to you for no gain on their own part. YouTube is a business and needs to make money. Their money comes from vidoes, your videos. If you want to keep all the rights to your video, copyright it and host it yourself.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the hysterics (and the accompanying Wired article, certainly penned by a BoingBoinger or friends of such).

One question for the BoingBoinger’s; weren’t you celebrating a friend of yours having his book pirated recently? Something about free market and how cool that was. I’m just wondering how it is that actually getting free publicity by having your work pirated is a good thing, but when you give your own content to someone else who then legally distributes it for you and has yet to commercialize that, that’s bad. Just curious.

You read that right, FIFA suspended Zidane, who is retired, for 3 games. Zidane was kind enough to let FIFA save face by agreeing to do 3 days of community service instead of, you know, laughing his ass off.

For his part, Italian player Materazzi was given a 2-game suspension, which seems reasonable. I would’ve liked to see Materazzi banned from 2 World Cup games, but that’s not really a FIFA policy. Too bad he still won’t fess up about what actually was said.
Link

MITCH ALBOM: With on-field insults, it’s all in the head

Mitch manages to string together a fairly coherent column today about the Zidane head-butt. We’ll give him a break over the lateness of the column because he’s a) an American sportswriter b) in Detroit and c) is Mitch Albom.

But, he did catch the most important quote of the controversy to date: Zindane’s mother. Her pearl?

“Some things are bigger than football.”

She’s right, of course. And, despite her obvious bias toward her son, her statement is controversial in itself. Around the world, as Albom points out, we accept that “trash talking” is somehow part of the game, something almost venerated to the same level as the players ability to actually, you know, play.

Which is sad. I both played sports and watched my father play them for years. Was there trash talked? Sure. But the players who did it most were arrogant pricks who, frankly, didn’t get a lot of respect. They often stunk up the field, as well. Trash talking was almost exclusively consigned to the realm of the loser, the loud-mouth, foul-crying, whiney bastard who thought you always took the bat with the largest number on the end.
Mitch almost, but not quite, commits to sort of not liking trash talking by way of a huge stretch of an analogy. What he doesn’t do, of course, is pin the blame where it belongs; on the worst of the trash talkers. I wonder if that because any of them play in someone’s home town? Hmm, that would be an interesting question to ask. Good thing there’s a professional sports columnist on the case.

Check out that graph.

There is no epidemic of youth violence in America.

The whole concept is a lie… Kids are not killing each other more frequently than they used to. In fact, it turns out the opposite is true. (link)

Where’s the Senate panel to look into the fleecing we’ve been taking for the last year.  Why aren’t things like this on the evening news? Oh, right, bribes.
gamepolitics: Youth Violence Waaaay Down – Games to Blame?

Well, that’s an interesting turn. Comments are running pretty heavily that FIFA will not, in fact, take away the Cup. I’m pretty sure a war would break out if they did. However, it is interesting that an amendment to the rules was made that allows FIFA to take away 6 points (essentially causing the team to forfeit the match) if a player users a racial, religious, or ethnic slur. Considering Zidane is an Algerian Muslim, his forthcoming comments could be very interesting. Sepp Blatter, head of FIFA, apparently found his dignity and said they are also considering taking away Zidane’s best player award.

Link

Update: Zidane has said at a press conference that the comment was “very personal”, but would not elaborate. Materazzi immediately again denied saying anything about terrosists, Zidane’s mother, or any racial comments. I think Materazzi is lying; he even went so far as to issue this gem of a quote: “Zidane is my hero and I have always admired him a lot.” So, now Zidane is his hero?

To his credit, Zidane did apologize to the children who watched, but not to Materazzi, saying: “I can’t regret what I did because it would mean that he (Materazzi) was right to say what he said.” Zidane also implied that his attack wasn’t in response to just one insult, but many, although he did not single out Materazzi.

Link to the Beeb

Some anti-abortion zealot (Pete) decided to saddle up his high-horse and take down an evil, vile, pro-abortion advocate (Caroline) on his blog (and I use those terms purposefully; you’re not pro-life or pro-choice).

Sorry ma’am, if you hadn’t had sex you wouldn’t have gotten pregnant, it’s not the HMO’s fault for not supporting your promiscuity while not married.

One small problem though; Pete is an idiot. The article in question was on, say it with me, The Onion. Missing moutains of satire and deftly proving the point of the original article, Pete goes on to call Caroline a “murderer” and graciously offers to pray “for the suffering which you will endure when you realize what you have done.” That’s right, he’s going to pray for her suffering, not to lessen that suffering, but just to ask God to make sure she gets what she deserves, apparently.

He then leaves his readers with a call to action.

Speak out against abortion. Don’t just complain about it.

Consider that done, Pete. I’m not complaining, I am speaking out. Against you. You’re an idiot. You represent all that is wrong with your side of the debate; you’re a man, you’re too emotional to process basic forms of communication, and you use religion as a weapon, not a a tool. Abortion is not a black and white issue. Abortion is something that requires deep philosphical debate. Abortion is something that is deeply, deeply personnal.

It’s also something you need to let go because you obvisouly don’t have the mental faculties to participate in the discussion.

You can read the entire, mind-numbingly idiotic post at March Together For Life: Murder without conscience. I highly recommend reading the comments.

Syd Barrett, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, died.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Pink Floyd’s Barrett dies aged 60

The rumors, they were true.

mlive.com: NewsFlash – Report: Google to open Ann Arbor-area facility, hire 1,000

Warning, NSFW comments ahead

Via Kottke, two British newspapers hired lip-reading translators (I’d like to see that invoice) to see what Marco Materazzi said to Zinedine Zidane. If they’re correct, Materazzi’s lucky Zidane didn’t bicycle kick his head into the stands.

The alleged comment:

Hold on, wait, that one’s not for a nigger like you.

We all know you are the son of a terrorist whore.

So just fuck off.

And, to FIFA, if Rooney’s case is receiving high levels of scrutiny over his behavior, we, the fans, expect this incident to receive as much, if not more. And if Materazzi did, in fact, say these things on the pitch, he deserves to be punished as well.

Mark this one down as questionable. With a lead off paragraph like this one, it’s got to be hard science, right?

People who have been drinking may miss objects that appear unexpectedly in their field of sight, even when their blood alcohol levels are just half the legal driving limit.

Pretty bold statement. There must have been some serious research behind this.

To investigate, the researchers had 47 volunteers watch a video of two teams passing basketballs back and forth and asked them to count how many times the team wearing white T-shirts passed the ball. During the video, a woman dressed in a gorilla suit appeared among the players, stood in the middle of the screen and beat her chest, and then walked away.

The subjects were given a beverage and instructed to drink it over a 10-minute period five minutes before watching the video. After viewing it, the researchers interviewed them to determine if they’d seen the gorilla.

Ok. Interesting technique. What were the conclusions?

Overall, one third of the study participants didn’t notice the gorilla. Among those who were sober, 46 percent spotted the gorilla, compared to 18 percent of the intoxicated group.

Notice there are no hard counts here, only statistical numbers (percents, not numbers of people). Any other observations from the study?

This phenomenon, known as inattentional blindness, occurs commonly among people who are sober, Clifasefi and her team note

Wait, wait just one cotten-pickin’ minute. Sober people exhibit this behavior, as well?
Let’s review the methodology here. People are shown a video of basketball players passing the ball and asked to count the passes. No indication is given of how intensely one would have to watch that video in order to fulfill that directive. People in studies are paid to do what researchers tell them to do; if I’m a paid subject told to count passes in a basketball video, you can be damn sure I’m going to be concentrating pretty hard on the ball moving around.

Here’s some interesting questions not addressed; how accurate were the counts of the “drunk” people? Did they perform as well on the task given to them as the sober people? Was the level of cognitive involvement (watching the basketball passes) equal to or less than the cognitive involvement of a seasoned automobile driver? Because, let’s face it, what else would a study on perception and drinking be aimed at besides drivers?

Repeat after me everyone; language matters. And when researchers–sorry, I can’t call them that–when grant seekers spew out crap like this “research”, it makes you wonder just what their agenda is. Leading off with laughable conclusions that don’t even pass the Smell Test doesn’t exactly give your work much credance either.

One strong drink can make you ‘blind drunk’ | Reuters.com