This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
I think you could use multiple degrees in remedial reading comprehension. He didn't say multiple from each place; he said that he had multiple degrees and that they came from those three schools. Most likely one from each.
No, "multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford" implies that the poster has at least 4 total degrees from those 3 schools.
Someone with a single degree from each school should have written "with degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford". Although this phrasing doesn't exclude the possibility that more than 3 total degrees from those 3 schools were granted to the person, it's more likely that someone with 4 or more would make specific mention of that in some way.
I did take a 25% paycut to leave the country, but when I was in the US making around $100k, I was paying $10k in actual income tax.
To pay only $10K in federal income tax in the US, you'd have to have about $55K in taxable income.
I know it's possible to reduce your income quite a bit, but even if you are putting the max into various retirement accounts, and have $12K in mortgage interest (much higher than you could have had with $1K P&I), you'd only be down to about $68K taxable.
I suspect you are either mis-remembering or are soon going to get a nasty letter from the IRS.
As for FICA plus Medicare, it's 6.85% of income below $106,800, plus 1.45% of your total income. This means you give about 30% of your taxable income between $80-1000K to the feds. Then, state taxes (if any) get their big chunk.
Besides, the moon is a lousy launch platform for either offensive or defensive missiles... you can see them coming much too long in advance.
I think that "brilliant crowbars" launched from the moon would be hard to stop even if you knew they were coming, especially if there were enough of them.
First, on $100K income in most states, you'll end up with about $65K take-home (with no pre-tax deductions), but you seem to be allocating only $15K instead of $35K to the government. Even with $20K pre-tax, the $80K remaining will end up as about $50K take-home.
Second, I did say "at least". There are a lot of people who are having problems finding equivalent employment in 12 months.
Third, $30K/year expenses is less than $3K/month. Many of those people making $100K are what I like to call "house poor" in that they are paying $2-3K/month in mortgage. Then, there's the $500/month car payment. Add in other required bills (utilities, food, etc.), plus the many not required but much cheaper to not break the contract bills like cell phone, cable, Internet (at least some of which really are required if you are looking for a job today), and $4K/month with no money spent on things like Starbucks, movies, etc., isn't out of the realm of reality. So, that $50-65K take-home doesn't look too good when you have $35-45K in standard expenses.
Of course, most people have the plan that they will get a new job in few months so living on credit for everything they can (i.e., not the mortgage and car payment) seems viable to them. Until their job search stretches out a few more months and the interest payments on the cards are about all they can make.
I've been in job hunts both as the dummy without the cushion and the smarter guy with one, and it's a whole lot less stress when you don't have to take the first job that comes along.
The only way copyright violation can become a criminal matter involving arrest is by running it as a for-profit enterprise.
You were doing so well until this sentence.
17 USC 506 lists quite a few ways that violating copyright can become a criminal offense, but the most likely way for an average person to get bit is this one:
Any person who infringes a copyright willfully by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000, shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.
So, if they can prove you willfully distributed 1000 total copies of one or more songs in a 180-day period, it's a criminal offense (based on the slightly more than $1 average cost per track...adjust the count upward for lower priced tracks). The "willful" part would be the hardest to prove, because of the last sentence in the statute.
How would you pay off a $54k settlement in 2 years? Even if you have a $100k/year job, you probably don't have the money to pay off that much debt that quickly.
In these tough economic times, it's irresponsible to yourself and your family not to have at least 6 months of money in an easy to liquidate form. I know there are people here who will claim they can get an even better job within a week, but even if it is true for them, they are way less than 1% of the population.
I know many people don't have a safety cushion in the bank, and many that do won't have $50K, but there are people who make less than $100K/year who can write that $54K check. Not that I would ever consider paying the RIAA that sort of money, unless they could prove I had violated copyright on at least 50,000 songs.
Give Google, RIM, Nokia, etc., time to see what becomes of their "iPhone-killer" devices. Many are available with no carrier lock in, so if they still sell one unit for every five iPhones, I suspect that the Apple model will start to become a lot more attractive to both the handset makers and the carriers.
Also, even if Android phones (for example)) outsell iPhones, unless it's by a factor of at least the number of separate Android models, Apple would still be winning.
I take it that you believe that the Ipad is just a large Ipod with additional functionality?
It certainly seems to be.
I heard somebody describe it as a giant iPod touch with an optional 3G modem.
If you want to make voice calls, you'll still need a regular phone, so if you are already in the Apple camp, you'll have both an iPhone and an iPad with 3G, because you can't tether your iPad to your iPhone.
If the "artificial limitations" are "completely unnecessary, and unjustifiable", then consumers won't buy it. In your car analogy, people can still buy Chevys and Hondas.
The problem becomes when Chevrolet and Honda see that Ford is making more money in a month than they make in a year and decide the same business model is good for them, too.
Next, they'll get even more lawmakers to agree with them that just because all the big car companies are doing the same thing and have a single industry lobbying organization, it's not collusion or price fixing. As a matter of fact, it'd be just like the music recording industry, and we all know they aren't doing anything to hurt consumers.
Now I know most discs have about a natural 7-14 year lifespan unless we're talking special storage.
If by "special" you mean "keeping the disc in the case when not in use", then I'd agree with you. I don't do anything more than that and my music CDs (90% of which are older than 15 years) all work fine.
For non-pressed media, though, there is a definite limit to the lifespan that people have probably already hit a lot.
There should be an exemption in the DMCA for Fair Use/Dealing, but there is not.
So, you believe the MPAA when it says "no fair use". Really? Would you like to buy some swampland^Wlakefront real estate?
In 17 USC 1201 (what is commonly called the DMCA), there is the following text:
Other Rights, Etc., Not Affected.-(1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
What this means is that no text in section 1201 removes "fair use" as a defense. What this really means is that as long as you are not doing any copy-protection breaking for other people (e.g., writing and distributing DeCSS) and are not distributing copies yourself, "fair use" is a perfectly reasonable defense to breaking copy protection.
Nowhere in that publication is the text "thirty" or "30", and there are no hard and fast limits listed for phonorecords (which are mistakenly referred to as "music" in the pamphlet). It does mention "in no case more than 10 percent" after stating that other fuzzy limits (i.e., standard fair use text) might apply instead, and then going on to say that in some cases it is OK to copy 100% of the work. So, I stand by my statement there is no reference in any publication by the copyright office to any length of time or percentage of work as being "acceptable" as fair use.
In addition, this pamphlet doesn't even mention audiovisual works other than taping news programs off the air...apparently the LoC believes that making a copy of part of a movie isn't something an educator might want to do.
Also, the LoC actually is responsible for a *lot* of copyright-related rulemaking.
These are administrative rules, not laws.
For example, Congress passed a law that said that statutory payments for certain licenses were an acceptable method of licensing (but did not preclude other licensing methods), and then picked a group of people to set the rates.
The reason many people believe in the so-called "30-second rule" is that it is codified by a copyright office circular, but only for academic purposes.
As far as I know, there is no reference in any publication by the copyright office to any length of time or percentage of work for audiovisual recordings as being "acceptable" as fair use.
Even if there was, this has no standing in law, as they don't get to make or even interpret the law...Congress does.
The really sad part here is that if the video had been 2.1 seconds shorter, she would have been well within the widely-accepted standard for fair use - perhaps she's still legally in the right, but it would have been a whole lot easier to argue if she could use the 30-second/10% guideline to support herself.
There is no "widely accepted standard" of "30-seconds/10%" for fair use of a musical work. All cases where fair use is a defense are judged solely on their own merits, with no hard and fast rules.
This is why there are rulings of "infringement" for sampling 5 seconds of a 5 minute song, and rulings of "not infringing" for using every second of a song.
It's all subjective, and until people start realizing this, they will let the big corporations push them around, since it is in the best interest of those corporations to make people believe there are hard and fast rules when none actually exist.
Most Copyright lawyers consider 'safe harbor' for fair use to be one tenth of a song or, if longer than five minutes, thirty seconds (even Wikipedia implements this).
I'm not sure what "most copyright lawyers" believe, but I do know that there has never been any codified limit on the portion of an audiovisual work that makes "fair use" an unassailable defense.
The bogus 30-second limit has been used countless times in references that know nothing about copyright law, similar to the way that 10 or 25 words or "one sentence" or any other essentially random number is used as the layman's criterion for fair use when quoting text.
The four pillars that make up fair use are:
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
the nature of the copyrighted work
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work
In a particular case, if the other three far outweigh the "amount and substantiality", then it's still fair use, even if you are using the entire original work.
Not without an engine block heater, which warms up the engine for you (at least enough so you can start it and start driving).
The only reason to let a vehicle "warm up" on idle is to allow the passenger compartment to warm up (or cool down, for those 120F days), which is just a waste of gas (as others have said).
Under the Berne Convention 1886 the basic term was 50 years after the death of the author.
Except that in 1886, life expectancy was about 50 years.
So, it wouldn't be unsual for someone to author a work at 30 and die a little young and have the total length of copyright on their works be 65 years.
Now, an author at 30 will get 100 years of copyright.
The whole point of copyright was to encourage creativity, which means copyright should be shorter, not longer. With current rules, one best-selling book that gets turned into a movie gives the author all the money they will ever need for the rest of their life, so they have no further incentive to be creative.
Mozilla doesn't have to implement anything, just make the video plugin architecture extensible.
They could even include an H.264 player plugin as part of default install, but only make it a hook to already installed codecs.
Then, add some code so that if you try to play HTML5 H.264 video without the right codec, it displays a page that tells the user how to download one for the current OS. If your OS has support out of the box, then you'd never know that Firefox couldn't play H.264 without some third-party code.
The Swedes may pay more in taxes, but in return get free healthcare, good roads, low crime, free schooling and university, (i believe) free (or heavily subsidised) childcare, efficient public transport, and much more.
Which means that healthy people who don't drive much and are long-ago graduates with no children pay to support people who want to freeload off the government.
Seriously, the #1 problem with all government spending is that it is controlled by various special interests and tends to take the most money from people that are the most self-sufficient and independant, while creating a large class of people who feel they deserve money from the government just because they are alive.
There only difference between the stereotypical welfare mother having another child for the money and the RIAA is that the RIAA is getting millions from their ability to work the laws in their favor. It's the old punchline: "we've already determined what you are...now we're just haggling over price". Both are screwing the government for money.
I'm really surprised that people are getting spam sent to WHOIS contact addresses.
I know that Network Solutions sold their list to spammers quite a while back, and I still get spam to the e-mail address I used when my domains were all registered with them, but I haven't gotten a single spam e-mail in the 5 years since I started using a new e-mail for recently registered domains.
Raskin describes this idea of the interface for every task being different. The device mutates and models itself on whatever is being done. The UI CHANGES to suit the task.
For a device as small as the iPhone with a limited OS, a modal interface that changes with the mode is really the only way to go.
The reason the "desktop" metaphor works for computers is because they have larger screens and multitask.
So, regardless of how amazing an Apple tablet might be, if it can't compete significantly with portable computers of the same size, then it will be a niche product. It still might sell millions, but with netbook/laptop sales in the billions, it will still be a drop in the bucket.
Basically, if Apple compromises frame rate by using e-Ink to extend battery life, then it won't have any of the video features of an iPhone. If they use a display that updates quickly, then the battery life will make this a poor eBook reader (especially at 2x-3x the price of existing ones). Last, if they lock in to an "app store" concept, then there will probably be a lot less useful software (like nothing to compete with any Apple products).
So, it's likely this will be a big announcement and the product might be good, and will almost certainly make Apple a great deal of money, but it's going to compete with too many markets to be more than a minor player in the grand scheme of things.
My librarian told me that they would rather get the book from their sources and that it would probably cost me less because they buy books at a discount through some sort of consortium. I was surprised, since the "libraries pay more" meme has been thrown around quite a bit in the copyright discussions of the last decade or so.
For recent bestsellers, they probably do pay more than your best price, since their "consortium" doesn't have the buying power of WalMart.
For other books, they probably do get a better price for the same quality book. What this means is that library binding and the different dust jacket probably cost more than normal one you would find at a bookstore.
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There was a stretch in the 30s and 40s where I felt like I was rushing, and apparently I was. Didn't quite compensate enough in the 50s.
So, you were playing piano in theaters where they were showing silent movies?
I know, you meant "my 30s and 40s", but it would be interesting to have a 90-year-old poster on /.
This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
I think you could use multiple degrees in remedial reading comprehension. He didn't say multiple from each place; he said that he had multiple degrees and that they came from those three schools. Most likely one from each.
No, "multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford" implies that the poster has at least 4 total degrees from those 3 schools.
Someone with a single degree from each school should have written "with degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford". Although this phrasing doesn't exclude the possibility that more than 3 total degrees from those 3 schools were granted to the person, it's more likely that someone with 4 or more would make specific mention of that in some way.
I did take a 25% paycut to leave the country, but when I was in the US making around $100k, I was paying $10k in actual income tax.
To pay only $10K in federal income tax in the US, you'd have to have about $55K in taxable income.
I know it's possible to reduce your income quite a bit, but even if you are putting the max into various retirement accounts, and have $12K in mortgage interest (much higher than you could have had with $1K P&I), you'd only be down to about $68K taxable.
I suspect you are either mis-remembering or are soon going to get a nasty letter from the IRS.
As for FICA plus Medicare, it's 6.85% of income below $106,800, plus 1.45% of your total income. This means you give about 30% of your taxable income between $80-1000K to the feds. Then, state taxes (if any) get their big chunk.
Besides, the moon is a lousy launch platform for either offensive or defensive missiles... you can see them coming much too long in advance.
I think that "brilliant crowbars" launched from the moon would be hard to stop even if you knew they were coming, especially if there were enough of them.
First, on $100K income in most states, you'll end up with about $65K take-home (with no pre-tax deductions), but you seem to be allocating only $15K instead of $35K to the government. Even with $20K pre-tax, the $80K remaining will end up as about $50K take-home.
Second, I did say "at least". There are a lot of people who are having problems finding equivalent employment in 12 months.
Third, $30K/year expenses is less than $3K/month. Many of those people making $100K are what I like to call "house poor" in that they are paying $2-3K/month in mortgage. Then, there's the $500/month car payment. Add in other required bills (utilities, food, etc.), plus the many not required but much cheaper to not break the contract bills like cell phone, cable, Internet (at least some of which really are required if you are looking for a job today), and $4K/month with no money spent on things like Starbucks, movies, etc., isn't out of the realm of reality. So, that $50-65K take-home doesn't look too good when you have $35-45K in standard expenses.
Of course, most people have the plan that they will get a new job in few months so living on credit for everything they can (i.e., not the mortgage and car payment) seems viable to them. Until their job search stretches out a few more months and the interest payments on the cards are about all they can make.
I've been in job hunts both as the dummy without the cushion and the smarter guy with one, and it's a whole lot less stress when you don't have to take the first job that comes along.
The only way copyright violation can become a criminal matter involving arrest is by running it as a for-profit enterprise.
You were doing so well until this sentence.
17 USC 506 lists quite a few ways that violating copyright can become a criminal offense, but the most likely way for an average person to get bit is this one:
So, if they can prove you willfully distributed 1000 total copies of one or more songs in a 180-day period, it's a criminal offense (based on the slightly more than $1 average cost per track...adjust the count upward for lower priced tracks). The "willful" part would be the hardest to prove, because of the last sentence in the statute.
How would you pay off a $54k settlement in 2 years? Even if you have a $100k/year job, you probably don't have the money to pay off that much debt that quickly.
In these tough economic times, it's irresponsible to yourself and your family not to have at least 6 months of money in an easy to liquidate form. I know there are people here who will claim they can get an even better job within a week, but even if it is true for them, they are way less than 1% of the population.
I know many people don't have a safety cushion in the bank, and many that do won't have $50K, but there are people who make less than $100K/year who can write that $54K check. Not that I would ever consider paying the RIAA that sort of money, unless they could prove I had violated copyright on at least 50,000 songs.
Give Google, RIM, Nokia, etc., time to see what becomes of their "iPhone-killer" devices. Many are available with no carrier lock in, so if they still sell one unit for every five iPhones, I suspect that the Apple model will start to become a lot more attractive to both the handset makers and the carriers.
Also, even if Android phones (for example)) outsell iPhones, unless it's by a factor of at least the number of separate Android models, Apple would still be winning.
I take it that you believe that the Ipad is just a large Ipod with additional functionality?
It certainly seems to be.
I heard somebody describe it as a giant iPod touch with an optional 3G modem.
If you want to make voice calls, you'll still need a regular phone, so if you are already in the Apple camp, you'll have both an iPhone and an iPad with 3G, because you can't tether your iPad to your iPhone.
This really is Steve Jobs' ultimate wet dream.
You can fully understand a phone being locked down to phone applications delivered by the manufacturer and the same with mp3 players.
Speak for yourself. I can't think of one legitimate reason for locking down these devices other than greed and power over customers.
A phone makes some sense, since apps could do things to the phone network that would be really bad.
But for a device that is self-contained or does not have full access to the network, there isn't any need to completely lock it down.
If the "artificial limitations" are "completely unnecessary, and unjustifiable", then consumers won't buy it. In your car analogy, people can still buy Chevys and Hondas.
The problem becomes when Chevrolet and Honda see that Ford is making more money in a month than they make in a year and decide the same business model is good for them, too.
Next, they'll get even more lawmakers to agree with them that just because all the big car companies are doing the same thing and have a single industry lobbying organization, it's not collusion or price fixing. As a matter of fact, it'd be just like the music recording industry, and we all know they aren't doing anything to hurt consumers.
Now I know most discs have about a natural 7-14 year lifespan unless we're talking special storage.
If by "special" you mean "keeping the disc in the case when not in use", then I'd agree with you. I don't do anything more than that and my music CDs (90% of which are older than 15 years) all work fine.
For non-pressed media, though, there is a definite limit to the lifespan that people have probably already hit a lot.
There should be an exemption in the DMCA for Fair Use/Dealing, but there is not.
So, you believe the MPAA when it says "no fair use". Really? Would you like to buy some swampland^Wlakefront real estate?
In 17 USC 1201 (what is commonly called the DMCA), there is the following text:
What this means is that no text in section 1201 removes "fair use" as a defense. What this really means is that as long as you are not doing any copy-protection breaking for other people (e.g., writing and distributing DeCSS) and are not distributing copies yourself, "fair use" is a perfectly reasonable defense to breaking copy protection.
Here you go.
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ21.pdf
Nowhere in that publication is the text "thirty" or "30", and there are no hard and fast limits listed for phonorecords (which are mistakenly referred to as "music" in the pamphlet). It does mention "in no case more than 10 percent" after stating that other fuzzy limits (i.e., standard fair use text) might apply instead, and then going on to say that in some cases it is OK to copy 100% of the work. So, I stand by my statement there is no reference in any publication by the copyright office to any length of time or percentage of work as being "acceptable" as fair use.
In addition, this pamphlet doesn't even mention audiovisual works other than taping news programs off the air...apparently the LoC believes that making a copy of part of a movie isn't something an educator might want to do.
Also, the LoC actually is responsible for a *lot* of copyright-related rulemaking.
These are administrative rules, not laws.
For example, Congress passed a law that said that statutory payments for certain licenses were an acceptable method of licensing (but did not preclude other licensing methods), and then picked a group of people to set the rates.
The reason many people believe in the so-called "30-second rule" is that it is codified by a copyright office circular, but only for academic purposes.
As far as I know, there is no reference in any publication by the copyright office to any length of time or percentage of work for audiovisual recordings as being "acceptable" as fair use.
Even if there was, this has no standing in law, as they don't get to make or even interpret the law...Congress does.
The really sad part here is that if the video had been 2.1 seconds shorter, she would have been well within the widely-accepted standard for fair use - perhaps she's still legally in the right, but it would have been a whole lot easier to argue if she could use the 30-second/10% guideline to support herself.
There is no "widely accepted standard" of "30-seconds/10%" for fair use of a musical work. All cases where fair use is a defense are judged solely on their own merits, with no hard and fast rules.
This is why there are rulings of "infringement" for sampling 5 seconds of a 5 minute song, and rulings of "not infringing" for using every second of a song.
It's all subjective, and until people start realizing this, they will let the big corporations push them around, since it is in the best interest of those corporations to make people believe there are hard and fast rules when none actually exist.
Most Copyright lawyers consider 'safe harbor' for fair use to be one tenth of a song or, if longer than five minutes, thirty seconds (even Wikipedia implements this).
I'm not sure what "most copyright lawyers" believe, but I do know that there has never been any codified limit on the portion of an audiovisual work that makes "fair use" an unassailable defense.
The bogus 30-second limit has been used countless times in references that know nothing about copyright law, similar to the way that 10 or 25 words or "one sentence" or any other essentially random number is used as the layman's criterion for fair use when quoting text.
The four pillars that make up fair use are:
In a particular case, if the other three far outweigh the "amount and substantiality", then it's still fair use, even if you are using the entire original work.
Ever start your car in temperatures below -40?
Not without an engine block heater, which warms up the engine for you (at least enough so you can start it and start driving).
The only reason to let a vehicle "warm up" on idle is to allow the passenger compartment to warm up (or cool down, for those 120F days), which is just a waste of gas (as others have said).
Under the Berne Convention 1886 the basic term was 50 years after the death of the author.
Except that in 1886, life expectancy was about 50 years.
So, it wouldn't be unsual for someone to author a work at 30 and die a little young and have the total length of copyright on their works be 65 years.
Now, an author at 30 will get 100 years of copyright.
The whole point of copyright was to encourage creativity, which means copyright should be shorter, not longer. With current rules, one best-selling book that gets turned into a movie gives the author all the money they will ever need for the rest of their life, so they have no further incentive to be creative.
I don't support perpetual copyrights, nor renewal of copyrights.
It's not like an author needs renewal anymore...after all, their copyright doesn't expire until their corpse is pretty well decomposed.
OTOH, with cryogenic technology, Disney, et.al., might re-animate a dead author so they can argue for longer copyright.
Mozilla doesn't have to implement anything, just make the video plugin architecture extensible.
They could even include an H.264 player plugin as part of default install, but only make it a hook to already installed codecs.
Then, add some code so that if you try to play HTML5 H.264 video without the right codec, it displays a page that tells the user how to download one for the current OS. If your OS has support out of the box, then you'd never know that Firefox couldn't play H.264 without some third-party code.
The Swedes may pay more in taxes, but in return get free healthcare, good roads, low crime, free schooling and university, (i believe) free (or heavily subsidised) childcare, efficient public transport, and much more.
Which means that healthy people who don't drive much and are long-ago graduates with no children pay to support people who want to freeload off the government.
Seriously, the #1 problem with all government spending is that it is controlled by various special interests and tends to take the most money from people that are the most self-sufficient and independant, while creating a large class of people who feel they deserve money from the government just because they are alive.
There only difference between the stereotypical welfare mother having another child for the money and the RIAA is that the RIAA is getting millions from their ability to work the laws in their favor. It's the old punchline: "we've already determined what you are...now we're just haggling over price". Both are screwing the government for money.
I'm really surprised that people are getting spam sent to WHOIS contact addresses.
I know that Network Solutions sold their list to spammers quite a while back, and I still get spam to the e-mail address I used when my domains were all registered with them, but I haven't gotten a single spam e-mail in the 5 years since I started using a new e-mail for recently registered domains.
Raskin describes this idea of the interface for every task being different. The device mutates and models itself on whatever is being done. The UI CHANGES to suit the task.
For a device as small as the iPhone with a limited OS, a modal interface that changes with the mode is really the only way to go.
The reason the "desktop" metaphor works for computers is because they have larger screens and multitask.
So, regardless of how amazing an Apple tablet might be, if it can't compete significantly with portable computers of the same size, then it will be a niche product. It still might sell millions, but with netbook/laptop sales in the billions, it will still be a drop in the bucket.
Basically, if Apple compromises frame rate by using e-Ink to extend battery life, then it won't have any of the video features of an iPhone. If they use a display that updates quickly, then the battery life will make this a poor eBook reader (especially at 2x-3x the price of existing ones). Last, if they lock in to an "app store" concept, then there will probably be a lot less useful software (like nothing to compete with any Apple products).
So, it's likely this will be a big announcement and the product might be good, and will almost certainly make Apple a great deal of money, but it's going to compete with too many markets to be more than a minor player in the grand scheme of things.
My librarian told me that they would rather get the book from their sources and that it would probably cost me less because they buy books at a discount through some sort of consortium. I was surprised, since the "libraries pay more" meme has been thrown around quite a bit in the copyright discussions of the last decade or so.
For recent bestsellers, they probably do pay more than your best price, since their "consortium" doesn't have the buying power of WalMart.
For other books, they probably do get a better price for the same quality book. What this means is that library binding and the different dust jacket probably cost more than normal one you would find at a bookstore.