I'm probably missing something obvious, but I have yet to understand why we need to insert a middleman store into the chain between producer and consumer. It seems to me cheaper and more efficient for the publisher of a book (or the author himself) to provide downloads directly.
One benefit I can see is that it gives you a single place to go get books from. I don't have to remember the web sites for 100 authors, or 50 publishers. Instead, I can just remember a single site which aggregates all the books together. Sure, I'll end up paying a higher monetary cost due to the middleman, but presumably the time cost savings is enough to me that it is worthwhile.
It's sort like having an iPhone App Store instead of hundreds of independent software publishers to download from. Another benefit is that the App Store provides common payment processing infrastructure, which keeps the cost of implementing this from being duplicated for every software publisher.
What if Google announced that they killed a kitten for every search done on Google?
I'm pretty sure kittens would be extinct within a matter of seconds if that happened.
From what I've read the fears over this one are that so far it is killing a lot higher percentage than the flu normally kills. This flu also seems to kill a disproportionate number of people in the 20-50 age rage. Normally flu deaths are mostly confined to infants and the elderly.
From a pure numbers standpoint it's not so bad. What's scary is the similarity to earlier flu pandemics. No one's really sure how bad this may get, so people are taking extra precautions.
...giving part of your earnings to the community is an altruistic gesture...
I don't think it's altruism if I can be thrown in jail if I decide not to pay my taxes.
For those who don't already know, the webmail that is built in to Exchange is actually fairly good, and is one of the early web applications to actually use something like AJAX to give you the feeling of using a desktop application.
I think OWA (or whatever it was called at the time) was actually the first AJAX application. A while back, I was talking with someone from the Exchange team, and he said the team developed the XmlHttpRequest object that makes AJAX possible for the purposes of making OWA.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, no one really noticed until Google made GMail.
Not all virtualization requires hardware extensions. In fact, VMware was doing it long before Intel and AMD added virtualization support to their processors. VMware pulled this off by doing dynamic translation, where the virtual machine monitor would transparently rewrite native x86 into virtualized x86 code. For the most part this was just doing a straight copy, and perhaps rewriting some jump addresses. Privileged code that runs in the OS kernel had to be rewritten as something equivalent that would run fine in an unprivileged process.
This really isn't so different from running
This is also how Rosetta worked in Mac OS X to run PPC apps on an x86 processor. XBox 360 does a similar thing to run old XBox games, since the 360 uses a PPC processor but the old XBox was x86.
Sure, you take a performance hit in doing this, but the apps generally get rewritten to run natively eventually, and the ones that don't end up being old enough that they run faster on modern hardware even with the extra translation layer.
I wonder how the answers would have changed if instead of asking "Is X true" they asked "The current mainstream scientific theory holds that X is true." Asking "Is X true" implies "Do you believe that X is true." I know for me, I think I would score fairly well on my general knowledge of mainstream scientific theory. That doesn't imply I believe everything held by the current theories.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.