It's probably a number of factors including Hollywood not showing women as the computer hacker in many of their movies (except maybe Hackers)

orly?

FTA: Research in the US and other countries estimates that between 30 to 50 percent of people have met current psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder sometime in their lives. But the brain plays crucial roles in promoting survival and reproduction, so the pressures of evolution should have left our brains resistant to such high rates of malfunction. Mental disorders should generally be rare -- why isn't depression?

Because depression is not, fundamentally, a mental disorder. It is wired into every human brain .. anyone subject to repeated setbacks, social neglect or ostracism, or trapped in an unpleasant situation with no solution will likely begin to suffer depression. The brain 'shuts down' (http://psychweb.cisat.jmu.edu/ToKSystem/My%20ToK%20Papers/BSM%20Final.pdf) so as to minimize emotional risk as well as consumption of resources. If we were pack animals, the animal would remove itself from the pack and thus the safety in numbers, to either starve or be taken by a predator. That way the pack doesn't waste time supporting a 'useless' (at best) or 'parasitic' (at worst) member of the pack.

A better metaphor would be a newsstand that has its own regular delivery systems, tracking people's home and office addresses and dispatching paperboys to distribute them around. So the newsstand would have its own database of subscriber information. And I know for a fact that anyone who sells subscriptions to the Journal or any other newspaper is expected to give subscriber information to the publisher, or the publisher will not let them sell subscriptions on their behalf.

If you can choose to buy individual papers one at a time, sure. But the story specifically mentioned subscribers. These are people who expect to read the publication regularly. These are the people whose demographics are of interest to Murdoch.

FTA: Murdoch acknowledged that the Journal recently negotiated a slightly larger share of the revenues Amazon gets from selling Kindle subscriptions to the paper (emphasis added)

That's a fine argument on its face, but do you really expect all information (name, address, phone) gathered from dead-tree subscribers will ONLY be used for the purposes of distributing the newspaper? I would expect the Journal to treat my personal information with the same privacy policy stipulations as applies to that gathered on behalf of their print newspaper. If they are not, they need to say so in a EULA or whatever.

Also, if you have ever subscribed to a magazine or newspaper online, you will see that they collect LOTS of additional information about you that has nothing to do with simple delivery. They gather that data because they NEED and USE it to distinguish their readers' demographics from those of other publications, which helps them sell advertising, which keeps them in business. If you think you can run a magazine or newspaper solely on subscriptions, you know nothing about the industry.

Murdoch may be a dick, but his expectation of subscriber information from Amazon is not unreasonable. GIving them ultimatums is, but that's another issue.