Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google buys DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion

Posted by Zonk on from the still-waiting-for-my-buyout-offer dept.

marvinalone writes "The New York Times reports that Google has purchased DoubleClick. That seems to be the conclusion to the speculation we've talked about earlier. From the article: 'Google reached an agreement today to acquire DoubleClick, the online advertising company, from two private equity firms for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies announced, an amount that was almost double the $1.65 billion in stock that Google paid for YouTube late last year.'"

4 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. /etc/hosts by Sloppy · · Score: 0, Troll

    127.0.0.1 www.google.com

    --
    As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
  2. Re:What ever happened to ... by DanTheLewis · · Score: 0, Troll
    "Do no evil", if it was ever anything other than clever PR, went away the moment they caved to China. It actually probably went away, again if it ever was even a real credo, long before that.

    Don't get your "so-called credo" up in Google's "lesser of two evils". You weren't there, buddy. And forgive me if I snort at the prospect that you have gone through life with a better principle than "do no evil" and have performed up to said maxim. Consider this paragraph my sardonic rejoinder to such a claim of moral superiority. Read Camus' The Fall while you're at it.

    Up next in depressingly naive Manichaeism on Slashdot: cats not dogs, Muslims want to kill us all but George Bush wants to save us, there is a ticking timebomb do you torture the terrorist, and health care is for communists.

    Finally, the brain in a vat. Keep in mind that your answer or non-answer will influence countless Slashdot readers for days to come, and thus that the effects of your decision will be amplified:

    The brain in a vat, via the supercomputer, is at the wheel of a runaway trolley. There are only two options that the brain can take: the right side of the fork in the track or the left side of the fork. There is no way in sight of derailing or stopping the trolley and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows trolleys. The brain is causally hooked up to the trolley such that the brain can determine the course which the trolley will take.

    On the right side of the track there is a single railroad worker, Jones,who will definitely be killed if the brain steers the trolley to the right. If the railman on the right lives, he will go on to kill five men for the sake of killing them, but in doing so will inadvertently save the lives of thirty orphans (one of the five men he will kill is planning to destroy a bridge that the orphan's bus will be crossing later that night). One of the orphans that will be killed would have grown up to become a tyrant who would make good utilitarian men do bad things. Another of the orphans would grow up to become a great moral philosopher, while a third would invent the pop-top can.

    If the brain in the vat chooses the left side of the track, the trolley will definitely hit and kill a railman on the left side of the track, "Leftie" and will hit and destroy ten beating hearts on the track that could (and would) have been transplanted into ten patients in the local hospital that will die without donor hearts. These are the only hearts available, and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows hearts. If the railman on the left side of the track lives, he too will kill five men, in fact the same five that the railman on the right would kill. However, "Leftie" will kill the five as an unintended consequence of saving ten men :
    he will inadvertently kill the five men rushing the ten hearts to the local hospital for transplantation. A further result of "Leftie's" act would be that the busload of orphans will be spared. Among the five men killed by "Leftie" are both the man responsible for putting the brain at the controls of the trolley, and someone (a person of your choice,it could be yourself, someone close to you or even the author of this example). If the ten hearts and "Leftie" are killed by the trolley, the ten prospective heart-transplant patients will die and their kidneys will be used to save the lives of twenty kidney-transplant patients, one of whom will grow up to cure cancer, and one of whom will grow up to be a nasty/twisted dictator. There are other kidneys and dialysis machines available, however the brain does not know kidneys, and this is not a factor.

    Assume that the brain's choice, whatever it turns out to be, will serve as an example to other brains-in-vats and so the effects of his decision will be amplified. Also assume that if the brain chooses the right side of the fork, an unjust war free of war crimes will ensue, while if the brain chooses the left fork, a just war fraught with war crimes will result. Furthermore, there is an intermittently active Cartesian demon deceiving the brain in such a manner that the brain is never sure if it is being deceived.
    --

    Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
    A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
  3. So now... by IANAAC · · Score: 0, Troll
    we can look forward to blocking URLs such as *.google.com/*/ad/* or some other such crap, much as we now have to do with Yahoo.

    Yeah, I can hear the "Do no evil" mantra silencing itself quickly.

  4. Re:whoa by neoform · · Score: 0, Troll

    Google maps is pretty much their only content site. Everything else is just an aggregation of other people's content.

    --
    MABASPLOOM!