Parent comment is right on the mark! Except for the 5%... Try 30-40%. And yeah, I bet GroupOn is looking back on that offer from Google and wishing they would have taken it.

Somewhat misleading. Read Google's actual comments: http://www.google.com/webelements/#!/translate

"For website translations, we encourage you to use the Google Translate Element."
http://www.google.com/webelements/#!/translate

So its not really gone, just a new way to use it.

Your local ISP's FTP server is not "the cloud".

A google service that replicates your data to multiple datacenters and dozens of servers, provides tape backup, and gives you easy and secure accessibility from anywhere... that is "the cloud".

and when you do go looking for it, those little ad boxes on the right come in real handy...

I put on my Druid robe and hat...

That is the same philosophy that said never try to stop airplane hijackers, just do what they say and you'll eventually be let go.

Of course, if the pirates read this they are going to say - 'hey, great idea. Why chase down these ships when we can just disable them.'

Now you can just use google maps as your GPS device to plan your trip.
Its awesome.

Awesome. Soon all us 'old folks' will have a secret code we can use to communicate that the youth will never be able to decipher.

How can one circumvent copyright law for books in the "public domain"? If they are in the public domain, they are free to anyone.

What you meant to say, was they are making previously unavailable books that are still under copyright available to everyone. They are even providing competitors with access to the works that Google spent a fortune to scan. Nothing prevents Amazon or Microsoft from scanning these books themselves and working out a similar agreement with the authors guild, but they don't want to invest the money since they are already so far behind.

In the end, everyone (including the authors) benefits because these books will once again be available to the public as they were intended.

This is such tin-foil crap, and has been debunked many times. Every mail server, router and switch reads your email by your definition, it has to in order to route a message, or copy data from one buffer to another. Just because gmail targets an ad based on a word or two in an email does not mean that someone is READING your email. Every time you search for a message in Exchange, Microsoft processes are "reading all your emails", right? Get real dude.

Most importantly, ads are only displayed in the "free" versions. If you get the $50/yr version there are no ads so your entire point is moot anyway.