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.

First of all, it's not necessarily true that newspapers publish intensely personal information only about public servants and celebrities. I've read plenty of stories with personal information about "average guys".

Secondly, why should public servants and celebrities be any less entitled to privacy than anyone else?

Scientology is not a person

You are not thinking creatively enough. :) In the USA, corporations have many of the rights of a person. And the Scientologists could easily find creative lawyers who could reasonably claim that the anti-Scientology material names names and is therefore hurting particular people.

Can you think of some compelling reason for Google to inform anyone on the planet that searches for some ordinary person's name that they had financial problems and couldn't pay their mortgage in the 90s? Or that they had an embarrassing illness? That they were sexually assaulted?

If these things are a matter of public record, then Google should serve them up in a search. If they were not a matter of public record and someone posted them maliciously, maybe you'd have a point.

The problem is that once we start allowing people to block things about themselves they don't like, the whole system is opened up for tremendous abuse. In this case, the public interest in not altering historical facts should take precedence over individuals' dislike of those facts.

The material the plaintiff in this case wanted removed was not owned by him. It was simply the fact that at some point in the past, his home had been foreclosed --- a matter of public record.

Why should personal info appear on internet when it was never your intention to put it there?

It wasn't personal information; it was public information. And you might as well ask: Why should newspapers be allowed to report anything about you? Let's face it, some newspapers (tabloids, for example) publish intensely personal information about people and while many find it distasteful, no-one is suggesting that the tabloids should be censored.