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AlertNet.org (tagline: alerting humanitarians to emergencies)
July 4, 2008
The days of YouTube.com as we presently know it are likely numbered. And that number is probably 2010. That will likely be the year that a billion-dollar lawsuit that Viacom has brought against YouTube will likely be settled. And all of that cool illegal music will go bye-bye.
And that isn't even the scariest bit of the lawsuit. This is: A U.S. court has ruled that Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube. That's you and me, buddy.
The lawsuit was filed in March 2007, with Viacom claiming that 160,000 unauthorized clips of their programs were on YouTube, and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.
Want to know more about this story? Visit BBC NEWS Google Must Divulge YouTube Log.
July 24, 2008
On 7/9/08, The Weather Channel [W] agreed to be bought for $3.5 billion by NBC Universal, which is a subsidiary of General Electric and Vivendi. See video: Al Roker Becomes Part of Our Family (4min 11sec).
September 9, 2008
Will the upcoming Swiss experiment cause a black hole? An EMP (electro-magnetic pulse)? Could it destroy our solar system, galaxy, the universe?
Sources: NPR article - CERN at Wikipedia - USA Today search results - CERN website - CERN rap video at ENGADGET - Swiss Scientists to Do Monster Smash at ABC NEWS - Dark Matter at NASA - Hawking Bets CERN Experiment Will Not Find God's Particle at Yahoo News - Large Hadron Collider at Wikipedia - Big Bang Experiment at BBC NEWS - Big Bang Day on BBC Radio 4
Three hundred feet below the surface, in a 17-mile-long particle accelerator that extends across the Swiss border into France, scientists will smash together protons in hopes of recreating, and thereby understanding, the Big Bang. This big toy, the Large Hadron Collider, has a pricetag of some $10 billion. Among other things, the responsible party, CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) hopes to better understand mass (the source of gravity) and "dark matter" (invisible particles that have an effect on the motion of our galaxies). The first attempt to circulate a beam through the entire Large Hadron Collider is scheduled for September 10, 2008, at 7:30am GMT (aka 8:30am London time, or 3:30am Eastern Time in the U.S.) and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place on October 21, 2008.