Invisible wrote:
> Why would people do "work" (especially such mundane work) for a nickle? 

I don't know. Most of it seems to not be from people in third-world 
a-nickel-is-a-lot-of-money countries either.

> Why would companies pay for results which are likely to be garbage 
> anyway? 

You don't pay till you check the results. Or you send the same job out three 
times and make sure all three answers come back similar. Which isn't hard 
when it only costs a nickel to start with.

> How does Amazon make money out of this? 

They take a cut.

> OK, so... it's a message delivery system. 

Yes.

> Where do the messages come 
> from? Where does it deliver them to? What are they for? Why would you 
> pay money for this? etc.

Read the APIs.

> One wonders how a small online shop such as Amazon ends up with such 
> vast computational resources that it can profitably hire out the spare 
> capacity, but still...

Small?  I suppose they started small.  Winter a year ago, they were 
fulfilling 43 orders per second the week before Christmas.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Why is there a chainsaw in DOOM?
   There aren't any trees on Mars.

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