According to industry indisders, the cost of putting paper on ink and getting in to the store is about 10% of the cover price. Yeah, that little. (And that's consistent with most other forms of manufacturing, too, where the average is more like 15%.) Charlie Stross estimated that as many man-hours are put in by the publisher as by the author, to turn a manuscript in to a book.

Every vote for 99 cent ebooks is a vote for less editing, no proofreading, amateurish layout, and generally even lower quality. And quality has suffered quite a lot in the last few decades as it is.

The future of computing is artificial consciousness, and it will be here within 20 years, and maybe much sooner than that,' says Sawyer.

Yeah, it'll be running on a Linux desktop in my fusion powered flying car in the Mars colony. Good thing they're all just 20 years away.

While it is, no doubt, true that those who do not file stuff can find what they want faster with search than those who do can with their folders, I suspect that those who do file find stuff faster in their folders than those who file stuff would with search.

To each his own. Not everybody benefits from the same methods.

Cost difference is minimal, since all the needed components will run just fine on Windows home. And, in fact, if you know Windows and don't know Linux, and you're not working for free, it's actually cheaper to use Windows because of the time to figure it all out.

Sure those are available, but a stable enough Windows OS to handle it is going to cost him at least a license fee. So, why bother?

I've had rather more trouble with instabality with server versions of Windows than with XP home, myself. Especially the newest version, though that has more to do with trying to do too much on a single box. Windows is only hard to keep running smoothly if you don't know what you're doing.

I know I'll get booed for this, but why use Linux at all? Apache, PHP and MySQL are all available for Windows, and run on any version. I use a Linux distro for my firewalls, but Windows for everything else, including two internal web servers, two mail servers and multiple file servers. Yeah, you can do the same thing with less hardware with Linux, and it's probably a bit more stable, plus less work to keep up to date, but if you know Windows, and don't know Linux, you're better off staying with Windows. You don't really need that much more hardare, mostly RAM, and that's not that expensive these days, and you'll be more secure and stable with an OS you know than something brand new. Plus, it's more likely to work.

(As a side note, I'd be very, very cautious about using XAMPP. It's not intended for a production environment, and it installs in a very insecure state. Plus, last I checked, they were pretty slow about adding new versions of stuff to their package, so things tended to be out of date. You can get all the components - Apache, MysQL, PHP, for free, direct, at the current version, from the people who make them. And while Mercury is a fine mail server, it tends to be updated slowly. Even if you go with XAMPP, use hmailserver for your email instead.)

"We're hoping to reach a whole new audience of people, some of whom will be shocked by graphic images that maybe they didn't anticipate seeing when they went to the PETA triple-X site."

In other words, "We know we're wingnut extremists, and we can only get people to listen to our insane screed if we lie to them about what we're going to say."

Nothing new about that, from PETA.

It successfully discriminates between truth and lies in about two-thirds of cases

So it's even less effective than other "lie detectors" that don't work well enough to use for anything important.

If the world of crime were static and unchanging, this would be a damning indictment of the misuse of modern technology. But it's not; criminals use new technology to become more efficient at committing crime.

To complain about the police using new technology to keep pace with criminals seems, to me, a far more dangerous slippery slope.

If enough people don't go there, the company that runs the mall will go out of business. If that doesn't happen, then, clearly, the majority clearly just don't care. Vent about your pet peeve all you want - you have that right - but don't expect other people to care about stuff they don't care about.