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Gee, aren't we the optimist.

> I also suspect this is why we've never been visited by aliens. They can't escape their own solar system due to lack of energy.

Never A Straight Answer begs to differ with their own photage. Evidence: The Case For NASA UFO's.

Part 1
http://www.guba.com/watch/3000113495/The-Case-For-NASA-UFOs-PART-1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72P5OtrHNyk
Part 2
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8524267568796529301

This type of decision making might simply be an evolutionarily-selected random seeding.

For example, when running an evolutionary algorithm, it is vital to have randomness seeded into the mix. This allows for the system or algorithm to escape from local maxima.

Douglas Adams had a great quote at the end of one of his last lectures regarding humans' re-invention of everything - nothing is ever 'good enough': http://www.guba.com/watch/3000053272

Perhaps this is all that just random, unpredictable outcomes from a horrendously complex system we call the brain, which has emerged out of a random, unpredictable and horrendously complex universe.

Like here?

Indeed it was...

You can watch them (except part 5) on Guba (change query to find the rest)

I think it was part 8 specifically. I got the DVD but its been awhile since I wandered through it... But its fairly brief, everything on the difference between 2, 3 and 4 Dimensions is basically described as it was here, and just as brief.

However, its still a good way to spend 13 hours because of everything else he covered in that series.

I blame George Carlin for the confusion. For the past thirty years he has been encouraging us all to "Make f---, not kill!"

You know youtube posts all its; stuff in even tinier than hell 320x240 resolution at a partly 300kbit encoding bandwidth.

Even though almost every other site uses better video quality people are still stuck on youtube. Hell I see people attaching music to a single image so they can upload it to youtube and share their favourite tracks - all that effort when there's sites like imeem.com that let you post and share the mp3's, and do it legally.

So, viacom has added one more media site to the mix.

http://www.guba.com/watch/3000020991?featured=free _home&pp=10&sb=8&set=5&o=5&sample=1161271793:a93a1 f0602ec290b1ef0b032c0058df783efc4bb

Having looked at the Guba Website, I'd be amazed if they could find anything on there. There seems to be some horrific bugs in the javascript making the site damn near impossible to navigate.

Business / Internet video

The trouble with YouTube
Aug 31st 2006 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition

It attracts a lot of viewers, but can “user-generated” video make money?

“STARBUCKS has comfy chairs, but they don’t charge people for sitting in them,” says Tom McInerney, the boss and co-founder of Guba, an internet-video company. Instead, he explains, Starbucks provides a comfortable environment, at considerable expense, so that people will buy overpriced coffee. That, in essence, is the business model being pursued by websites that host “user-generated content” such as personal blogs, photographs and today’s craze, amateur videos, which can be uploaded and watched on sites such as YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, Guba, Veoh and Metacafe. By offering a setting for free interaction, such sites provide the online equivalent of comfy chairs. The trouble is that, so far, there is no equivalent of the overpriced coffee that brings in the money and pays the bills.

IMAGE: Head and shoulders above the rest, for now (AP)

That is why people like Chad Hurley and Steven Chen (pictured), the co-founders of YouTube, the clear leader of the pack by audience size, are casting around for a business model. Aware that inserting advertisements at the beginning of video clips, as some sites do, is annoying and risks driving away YouTube’s users, Mr Hurley and Mr Chen have announced two experiments with advertising, with the promise of more to come. One idea is for “brand channels” in which corporate customers create pages for their own promotional clips. Warner Brothers Records, a music label, led the way, setting up a page to promote a new album by Paris Hilton. The second experiment is “participatory video ads”, whereby advertisements can be uploaded and then rated, shared and tagged just like amateur clips. This “encourages engagement and participation,” the company declares.

Even as advertisers evaluate these new ideas, however, YouTube and the other video-sharing sites face other difficulties. For one thing, they are in a no-man’s land of copyright law: they promise to pull pirated content from their sites when asked to do so, but it is only a matter of time before one of them is hit with a big lawsuit. Then there are the costs of running such a site—video requires a lot of bandwidth and storage. A rival estimates that YouTube is losing more than $500,000 a month.

Putting paid-for advertisements alongside amateur video clips, perhaps based on keywords or tags, poses another problem. “How do you know the guy in a video doesn’t make a racial slur?” asks Mr McInerney. Many firms will be cautious about letting an automatic system—such as, say, Google’s AdSense—place their ads next to user-generated clips of unknown provenance and with potentially embarrassing contents. (Even so, Guba is testing AdSense for Video, which has not yet been officially launched.)

For its part, Guba is betting on a combination of advertising plus the sale and rental of commercial video material. Its site offers both free amateur videos and paid-for content, including films from Sony and Warner Brothers. When Guba cut its prices last week, allowing new films to be downloaded for $9.99 and older ones for $4.99, its sales jumped tenfold. Google Video also allows content owners to charge for video. This suggests that internet-video sites are on a collision course with DVD-rental outfits, such as Netflix, which are moving towards the delivery of films via the

Not a perfect solution of course. Someone could still pay for the answers, but it would take them more time to watch a video than look at one image. The videos might be related to the subject matter of the site and actually be entertaining or informative for valid users to watch. Captcha questions might be a little harder for a topically relevant video to further insure a user is worth the price of admission.

Really?

Try this sample link:

an episode of the Simpsons

If clicking to download the avi file is too hard you can click "Watch now in Flash!".

Right, but this service puts a searchable web interface on it. So you go and search "multimedia" and clicky to download the video. It's an interface to a binary archive. You don't need a news client.
Check it out, you can even download (or watch online via flash):

a sample episode of the Simpsons

Gee I bet they're licensed to distribute that.
I've noticed they are not including music, movies and software groups. Just the multimedia, music videos and TV ones. I guess they are trying to avoid the MPAA and RIAA's attentions.
Yeah, that'll work... not.

Check out www.guba.com. Of course it's not hard to shut down one easy to use server, but you said it wasn't possible. Your free out: Just claim Guba isn't usenet. :-)