My guess is the same reason ArduSat uses phone hardware.
All the sensors one might want on a Satellite (motions sensors, cameras, magnetic field detection) are all built into phones now. Android (or more to the point Android's Linux kernel) is specifically compiled to be compatible with most of that hardware. So less work for them as opposed to using another version of Linux.
60,000 pre-orders for a completely unknown company months before launch is not small. Usually they sell more once the thing is actually in stores, and they already have the best kind of marketing they can get, hype and people putting dollars into it before a physical product exists.
Yes, the big console makers sell that many every week, but they are not a big console maker, so they don't need lots of numbers to sustain themselves, that's what growth is for, and they are showing better indications of it then Nintendo or Sony when they first got on the market, assuming they actually deliver the product they will see more. and their price point puts them in closer competition to a PS2 or Roku.
For them, the hardware order isn't small, no. However, they're pricing it so low that they're almost certainly making very little money per-unit, so they're hoping to make money on their app store.
To make money on their app store, they need games.
Not many developers are going to write games for a platform with around 1/16th of the user base of your average front-line Android phone. (Please don't say "it's an easy port"; it's not and the Ouya people's claim that it is is fucking dishonest.)
A few companies have committed to bringing their products to the Ouya. I am interested in seeing how many of them follow through. Of those who follow through, I am interested in how many just push shovelware because doing a real port to a platform with 60,000 guaranteed users, many of which are probably going to be hacking the shit out of the thing (and making software security a non-starter), is not economically viable for most people.
No, assuming filters are easy and foolproof is intentionally stupid and ignorant. Google took years to develop the technology and it was because they had the massive capital at their disposal. But all it takes to get around the technology is apply a few audio/video filters to get around the fingerprinting technology and words and phrases don't work, what if its a celebrity gossip video on Rihanna? That's fair use. The technology Google developed is easily gotten around by those determined and hits enough false positives that people with legitimate content have their videos taken down for no reason.
As far as the suffering of the music industry. Music sales are up, not down. There are also plenty of studies that show people who listen to artists online for free have a higher likelihood of purchasing the album online or attending a concert. People are buying more indy artists, not just what they hear on the radio and the middlemen in the record companies no longer control the distribution channels or who is exposed to what artists. Artists are benefiting from this loss of control, so I don't exactly feel bad for Universal, a one of the many record companies that has fought tooth and nail against any progress in consumer friendly methods of distribution and a legit and easy alternative to pirating. It took Apple to get them to finally let people buy audio files, and even then it was locked down which hurt people buying the music, not the people downloading MP3's off Limewire. They created the situation they are in now.
They don't need to filter the audio files themselves, that's completely un-needed, all they need to do is filter the meta data (eg: artist name, song title, album name). That is not hard. If you have a list of artists with their songs and albums you could easily match the submitted data against this and work out if the submission is disallowed. If they upload with "fake" meta data (eg: fake artist name) it doesn't matter because no user is going to find that music.
Yeah, I go to Grooveshark to listen to remixes and artists I find on turntable.fm I can't simply listen to through Amazon MP3, Rhapsody, etc.
Grooveshark provides a legit service, as long as they take down the music when requested by a copyright holder, they are following the same rules as everyone else.
"But the professors say their bigger gripe is with the procedural, rules-based approach in all of Mr. Khan’s videos."
Well, that's how they teach it in public school, here are the steps, no explanation of why it works, just accept that it works and memorize the steps. So if you want to attack teaching the procedure instead of the concept, look at just about every math teacher in K-12 first.
Your problem here is that you are using your own experiences and extrapolating to the general. You think any math teacher you see teaches like that. This is not the case. The teachers that have been the loudest critics of Khan tend to be really excellent teachers. You know why? Teachers who teach like you describe don't care enough about their teaching let alone worry about what some website is doing.
He also wrote some of the code for the first iterations of Digg himself, so its not like he didn't do any coding originally. He just passed in on to more skilled people once the requirements were out of his league.
Strange form of karmic justice I suppose.