Out of print or out of copyright? There is a very important difference. I thought Google Books was only giving full text for books that are out of copyright, and therefore they can do whatever they want and there is no consent required.
I only skimmed the actual agreement, but it looks like Google is claiming the right by default to sell any book that they determine is not "commercially available" (ie out of print), and to pay royalties on that book. The rights holder as the right to opt out of that at any time, but by default Google is claiming that the settlement gives them that right.
IANAL, but I don't see how a settlement of a class action suit AGAINST Google can actually transfer rights to them from class members.
Okay why can't the PS3 hit $100?
I won't even get into the hard-drive argument as I don't really know if they can get costs down to where it's a profitable sale at $100. The fact remains that this is the 3rd place console in the market, and it will be discontinued much sooner than either the Wii or the 360. It may hit 100 bucks before that happens, but not in the good way that the PS2 did. The PS2 was the clear market winner of it's generation, and is still marketable. The PS3 is looking more and more like the clear market loser. It's a different world when you're on the bottom of the heap. The PS3 won't be a successful $100 game platform for the same reason the gamecube isn't.
The real question that Sony should ask themselves is if people are going to buy a 9 year-old console to play a cool game?
Good point. More importantly IMO is the question of how much longer PS3 will even be on the market. For me, I don't see how it's remotely possible for this product to make it through a 9 year cycle, as they are way behind both MS and Nintendo right now. They better have a next-gen product plan that's a lot more market friendly than the PS3 if they plan to ever be a player in this market again.
Are you serious? With that logic, any company that has been put out of business by better technology and services should be compensated for their "lost revenue". Please, not every company needs to try the RIAA tactic when losing customers.
I'm not going to weigh in with a position either way in this one, but I think there's something wrong with thinking it's okay for a packaging technology to drive it's own content authors out of business via "better technologies and services".
Author's guild has a legitimate concern. Aside from the big names, author's make very little, and losing a billion dollar revenue stream is bound to be a serious problem. There should certainly be some dialog on the issue whatever the resolution is ultimately.
So using your numbers, the computer market in Iran (11 % of 70m, or 7.7m) is many times larger than Kuwait's and UAE's put together. It's also about the same size as Israel's. It's about 1/3rd the size of Canada's (the size of Ontario's market for example).
This is not negligible, especially in a market with restricted access to many competing products.
I reject this logic. I can't believe that, given the same amount of time and familiarity, that users will find Gnome or KDE less user friendly than Windows.
And I in turn reject yours. So I'm a naive Windows user installing linux for the first time. What the hell is a Gnome or a KDE? Which one do I want? In fact, which distro do I want? This is a whole layer of confusion that Windows and OSX don't have.
In fact diversity might just be one of Linux's biggest problems in the desktop market. Too many distros. Too many desktop/window managers. Too many package formats and package managers. (Not enough vendor support).
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
