For Gmail, I'm sure they would rather have you use the web app. But don't assume POP/IMAP access is a loser for them. They are still mining your data stream.

Good idea. If you've set the password on the hard drive, moving it to a different machine won't help.

What do you mean? Assuming you aren't using a company computer, you're allowed to make that decision all by yourself. There are quite a few machines out there with TPM on board.

-ec

But (if I RTFA correctly), Edwyn Collins does own the rights.

I don't understand the monopoly argument. As far as I know, Google has a monopoly only because they are the only ones trying to do this. Is there anything that prevents others from doing the same thing?

I mostly agree with you with the exception of certain out of print books. Somebody in another part of the thread mentioned than an author may deliberately choose to have only a small print run. I hadn't thought of that before. The work may then be valuable because it is scarce or out of print.

Oh. I didn't understand that they were going to republish anything more than just excerpts (which I believe would be fair use).

I thought Project Gutenberg was doing this only with public domain works. That would be the big difference, no?

I don't understand what Google is doing wrong. Can somebody please explain it what it is that so many people and corporations object to? I've read a bunch of articles but none have explained what the actual underlying problem is.

The closest thing I've heard that makes sense is that a book (unlike a web page) was never written with the understanding that it would be read and indexed by a machine. But really, I have a hard time seeing how this would hurt authors or publishers or anybody. The benefits seem great.

-ec

Are there any thriving languages that are static?

It seems to me that languages evolve for quick and accurate communication with others close in time and space. You say it is hard to read a 300 year old text and I agree. I would also say that it can be difficult to understand someone from 300 kilometers away, both ostensibly speaking the same language.

How do you know they wanted it for free? Perhaps this has been discussed somewhere, but I don't think the details of the discussion have been made public.

It seems to me that this is exactly what happened years ago before Qt was GPL'd. People were unhappy with the terms of the Qt license and so they made GTK. In the end, I think we are all better off and I have no reason to suspect differently this time. Competition is good.

Thanks. :)

I actually mostly agree with your comment.

I think complaints about the abuse of English has been around forever. I can remember reading about the publishing of an Ebonics bible (back in the '80s I think). For some reason, certain people were quite upset about that.

And whatever happened to talking jive. The jive talking scene in Airplane is one of my favorites.

Of course there is an increasing number of high school drop outs. The population is growing and those that were drop outs last year, are likely still drop outs this year. (If you return to school later in life and graduate, are you still considered a drop out?)

If, however, you look at the high school drop out rates you will see they have generally been in decline for the past 30 years.
http://www.childtrendsdatabank.org/indicators/1HighSchoolDropout.cfm

tards?