But, please, give us a more coherent answer on the details he did mention above. I would love to hear it.

I posted a small response below. For a more complete answer, I recommend the following books:

"Why Evolution is True" by Jerry Coyne. His blog has info.

"The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution" by Richard Dawkins.

Enjoy, and please do report back.

I am particularly opposed to those who spout pseudo-scientific arguments against evolution because promoting ignorance is very dangerous, especially in a country like the United States where a significant fraction of the population is scientifically illiterate.

Mims chose to answer the question about evolution. So it's certainly relevant to the situation.

OK. Evolution is not"random". Evolution happens through natural selection which is about the least random process you can imagine. The mechanism for organisms to change is in fact random mutation, but by far the majority of mutations are either neutral or non-adaptive and die out. So those few random mutations that are adaptive survive and propagate. This may, to people like Mims, make them seem magical, but to most biologists they're just common sense.

Mims writes: "The evolution of these complex molecules, which had to exist in the earliest cells, is so improbable..."

Um, no, it's not. If enough random things happen and the beneficial things survive, then not only is the evolution not improbable, it's almost inevitable given enough time. Mims is intelligent enough to write a simulation tool to prove this for himself.

Sorry for harping on the topic, but pseudo-science is dangerous. It's all the more dangerous when an otherwise intelligent scientist or engineer subscribes to it.

I really liked Mims's electronics books, but I can't respect him as a scientist when he misrepresents the theory of evolution and proposes (essentially) intelligent design instead. It's a damn shame.

When everyone has an Android phone, it's quite likely that a lot of new iPhone users had an Android phone. That's because Android is taking over the market, not because a large percentage of Android phone owners are unhappy.

And the number of assholes is way under 1%.

You may be right. But it's also above 0.1%, which in any decent-sized convention is enough to ensure a few assholes. What's more important is that almost all the times, the assholes' assholey behavior towards women is not challenged by the non-assholes present. They tend to just watch.

I base this on having attended a few conventions with female colleagues and observing how they are treated. There's a sufficiently-high number of misogynists in geek culture and a distressingly-high number of apathetic bystanders to make many tech conventions pretty unwelcoming for women.

Publishers aren't Amazon's suppliers: writers are. Publishers are just middle-men who get in the way.

Good luck with self-publishing, then. Having actually had a book published, I appreciate all of the things a publisher does (editing, production, marketing) that I wouldn't be able to do myself.

Squeezing your suppliers' profit margins is never a good long-term strategy. Amazon is not yet powerful enough to completely dictate to publishers; if they band together and reject Amazon, Amazon will soon be left with no worthwhile content.

If Amazon needs more money, it can raise its prices slightly. There are effectively no viable competitors in the online book market and Amazon's prices are very low, so it does have some room to move without annoying its suppliers.

Yes, that's too bad if you buy books, but in the long run it's better for everyone to get a fair share of the profits.

Umm... no.

They could make the car into a plane. Want to stop? Just flip the wings to the flying position and take off. You lose lots of kinetic energy as you ascend; when the speed is reasonable, you glide back down to earth.

Though... I guess the engineering challenges in making a plane that suddenly takes off at 1600km/h are quite substantial.

Hold on for a metre while I think about this... Yes, lazy reporters who get their units wrong should be sprayed with five square metres of water and then shocked with a 20-coulomb current. Maybe then they'll spend the small extra mass needed to do proper research...

The article is really making the point that cloud service providers should use virtualization to provide their services rather than running their cloud offerings on bare-metal physical servers. He's comparing Internap (bare metal) with AWS (virtualization).

Just like I don't get to see your mother's medical records, or your cousin's mental health admissions details or that you didn't pay your cable bill for 3 months in 1999.

My mother's medical records or cousin's mental health admissions details are not public records; they are private medical information. If those ever ended up on the Internet, then yes: I would fight to have them taken down and fight to have Google not return them.

The cable bill case may or may not be a matter of public record, depending on the jurisdiction. If the information should not be in the public domain, then again... I agree with you.

But the plaintiff in this case made no attempt to say that the information about him was not accurate, and AFAIK he didn't dispute that it's a matter of public record. He just didn't like the information.

Many of us on this side have been able to request information be corrected or deleted from data controllers for like 25 years

If the plaintiff successfully got the information corrected or deleted from the official public record, then I would be 100% behind his fight to get Google not to serve it up in a search result.

But he didn't do that. He just didn't want Google serving up search results to information he didn't like. Not untrue information; not information that should have been deleted... just information he didn't like.

If it was easy for Scientology to do these things, why don't you show me some examples of it being done?

How Scientology changed the internet.

There ya go.