BA will do their best to get you there...

I assume that's in the rare case the BA crew aren't trying to strike?

It's my understanding that in English and Welsh law in this hypothetical situation I don't have a contract with Sony; They haven't received any consideration from me, and I haven't received anything from them. I do have a hypothetical contact with Amazon however.

To explain this in terms of your car analogy, the accelerator is broken and I have two choices: Go to Bill's Discount Cars and demand compensation from them that the car doesn't work properly on the basis of my contract of sale with them (i.e. go to amazon and complain that my PS3 doesn't play the latest games) or I can get Toyota to fix it and accept that they'll break my radio (install the update from Sony and lose the Linux support.) I can't complain to Toyota about the way they'd fix the car because I've got no contract with them and they're under no obligation to do so (they're doing it to stop Bill getting annoyed with them in turn and to protect their image, but not because they legally have to).

This said the above Anonymous Coward has some very good points about advertising which may give me additional redress and totally debunk my main points. Yey for anonymous cowards!

In the UK at least the consumers have no redress against Sony unless Sony sold them the console, which in most cases it didn't - Amazon (or a high street retailer) did. You'd need to sue the retailer (who then, in turn, could sue sony.) Is this different in the states?

The summary says:

Most PC users hit the web using Internet Explorer by default, simply because that's what came along with Windows.

But the way most people think is

Most PC users hit google using Internet Explorer by default, simply because that's what came along with Windows.

Google Earth in your browser

Break this down on a personal level - if someone takes a mallet to my car, I'm going to sue them for the value of the damage to the car, i.e. what it costs to compensate me for the damage they caused. If someone burns down my house, I should be able to sue them for the value of the house. The loss they have caused is not mitigated by the ability they have to pay for it.

Now, if you're going down these lines you need to separate out the punitive damages from the actual damages. The former should be taken in context of the ability for the person to pay (i.e. if you're suing a multinational, you expect punitive damages significant enough for them to sit up and take notice.) The later should probably not be.

There's a small flaw in your logic here. Your getting confused by the percentage that each entity gets from each book and and the absolute money receive. The fallacy is that you sell the same number of books no matter what the price. Assume that you reduce the cost of the book by 50% and sell twice as much. Now we're talking ebook rather than physical book the printing and wholesaler costs don't cost double when you 'produce' two books (as they're zero in your model.) So now we sell twice as many books at half the price and everyone gets the same money.

Aren't you a geek? Doesn't this mean you're flying with a laptop which you'd never, ever, under any circumstances, want to check into the hold?

Are you going to let them do that to you again???????

Honestly? Probably.

You wonder what around the streets?

I suspect that's meant to be read as "Google will be charging $3.99 for *each* of the five films that will be available on launch"

The trouble with that is that you're then forcing them to be assessed on the metric you're assessing on them or inadvertently game the system (intentionally or not). I can think of plenty ways to make hospitals more "efficient" if you can compromise patient care...

Er...in this case BT refers to the communications company British Telecom, not Bittorrent.

You can buy a pay as you go phone at the airport or on any London high street. A cheap model shouldn't cost you more than 20 pounds. This solves the problem of a) your phone not working here because you don't have roaming b) People not being willing to call you back because you've only got a US number when you roam c) Stupidly high roaming charges.