Slashdot Mirror

here's an article about how humans are designed precisely for very very long-distance running.
No other animals I know of can run 100 miles in under 36 hours. The link has lots of discussion of indigenous people who regularly ran down wild animals to exhaustion and ate them.
Most tribes who did this used relays rather than doing it individually, but there are people who have done it. There's even a book about it, called Running After Antelope about some marathon runners who try to run down antelope in Wyoming. That's probably the hardest animal there is to try this with (aside from, y'know, polar bears or tigers) because antelope regularly run 30 miles in an hour. (It's depressing to be riding a bike through Wyoming and get passed by a bunch of antelope, one of whom is lame and is only running on three legs -- and still going twice your speed.)

Planting fake data reminds me of one of the tricks in The Cuckoo's Egg. Hmm... that book is about a computer security breach quite a few years ago.

You joke, but Harold Bloom wrote in The Book of J that he believes that the original author of the oldest parts of the Hebrew bible was a woman.

Scott Carrier made a very interesting argument that humans are exceptional distance runners a decade or so ago on This American Life. It wasn't exactly a scientific analysis, but after interviewing some biologists and trying to chase down antelope (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Running-After-Antelope-Scott-Carrier/dp/1582431116), he concluded that humans actually aren't all that good at it.

For a good take on the subject of church and sex and the people in between, read the funny (and eye-opening) novel by David Lodge: How Far Can You Go?

Apache or MySQL will never enter a "vault" like The Lion King or Sleeping Beauty

Since when is The REAL Lion King or Sleeping Beauty in a vault? A sales moratorium on Disney's fork of a story doesn't affect other forks.

Apache or MySQL will never enter a "vault" like The Lion King or Sleeping Beauty

Since when is The REAL Lion King or Sleeping Beauty in a vault? A sales moratorium on Disney's fork of a story doesn't affect other forks.

It may not change very quickly right now due to the economy, but I'm pretty sure most new TVs have PC-In and more PCs are coming with HDMI. All you need is a VGA or HDMI cable and an audio cable. It is amazing how many cool things there are to do that most people don't know about that only require one or two cables and equipment they already have. My wife and I watched a live event streamed over the internet using a wireless router, a laptop, a TV, and a receiver. It beat the hell out of watching it on just the laptop and we didn't even have to buy anything extra.

Also, DVI == HDMI.

http://www.amazon.com/DVI-HDMI-Cable-6ft-Male-Male/dp/B0002CZHN6

So really, just about every PC capable of rendering high quality video can be connected to a TV with HDMI. Not to mention a lot of HDTV's have a VGA connection. I mean really, HDTV's make the PC->TV connection trivial. As you said, they're just big monitors. Get a sound card with optical out and you're rocking.

... In Farewell horizontal

.. that this guy was the author of The Crystal Empire:

http://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Empire-L-Neil-Smith/dp/031294070X

That was a horrible book.

But Poor Ballard.. oh well.

Or take a different route.

But its a fact that in my 15+ years as a net and music junkie, I still have not seen one single artist that actually made a career this way.

Well, it's not quite file-sharing, but Oren Lavie jump-started his career using social networks and YouTube. A music video he posted went viral with 5 million views. I don't know how to get download statistics from iTunes, but the "Popularity" bar for the song is full, and the album it's on also seems to have done well. The hard-copy CD is ranked 6,688 on Amazon. Consider that this artist was completely unknown to the public before this -- even in Israel, where he's from.

(As an aside -- I should probably not say this, but I can't help myself -- if your music is anything like your writing, well, then I can guess why you're not doing very well.)

Sailors all over the world use small wind generators to charge their batteries while at anchor.

That doesn't tell me anything if I don't know the size of the battery or the rate of charge.

Sunforce Air X Marine Wind Turbine 12 Volts. 400 Watts at 28 mph. 46" Blades. $750.

It strikes me that anchoring in 28 mph winds would keep you usefully occupied managing other problems.

I feel sorry for Larry Niven. Back in the 1960s and 1970s he was writing works of science fiction (e.g. the Gilm 'The Arm' Hamilton stories in Flatlander ) that suggested that organ transplants were going to be so widespread as a cure that even the most minor crimes would get the death penalty. Instead, it looks like the human race may realize stem cell cures faster than anyone could have imagined. Oh, and Kurzweil suggests we'll all be in robot bodies before the century's end, so those great hard science fiction writers of half a century ago fall even further behind.

Avast, ye Landlubbers. Yarr!!, death by pirate slang! http://www.amazon.com/reader/0451216490?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=sib_dp_pt#reader-link

"By applying the principles in this book, I've enjoyed a 78% increase in my income from plunder."

Even though it makes this stuff look pretty simple in comparison, it still makes me want to dig out my old home made launcher and build a rocket.
 
I remember as a teenager saving up for months to buy the Estes designer's kit. I set up a card table in my room where I designed and built quite a few rockets - nothing that used bigger than a D engine. I'll never forget the night I left a bottle of dope open on the table. Very bizarre dreams that night. Learned to keep the window open when I worked on stuff and to shut everything up when I was done.

Years ago Bruce Sterling pointed out that Louisiana would make a perfect latter day primordial swamp for genetic experimentation.

I for one would love to see Selacamps swimming through the bayou.

Only hybrid humans can save us from this fate and defeat genetically modified politicians.

So it is written.

Care to elaborate?

Yes:

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele-Boldrin/dp/0521879280
http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/

Hugo G.

If that's your reaction to the Tractatus, then you clearly didn't read it very carefully or understand it very well.

No, Wittgenstein really was not a very good writer. Very cryptic and rambling, using very unorthodox authorial techniques that he doesn't explain at length. One thing that's very telling is that reading Wittgenstein's biography is actually very helpful in understanding his work; it's pretty clear that W. fails in giving you a lot of context that you need to more easily understand him.

On the positive side, he often made some really striking analogies.

The future of Ideas - Lawrence Lessig

We in the industry of making things that are easy to duplicate and distribute might have to re-think our business model. Larry makes an excellent case for re-thinking a lot of things in the above book. It's a well worth read.

you're not involved because you might or might not ever pay Amazon

Actually, I absolutely do pay Amazon, just as I would any other hosting provider which I am using bandwidth on. Here, go read.

has nothing to do with how much / GB you are charged on your connection.

Again, this is for my connection, to my EC2 nodes, which are hosted on Amazon -- or to my S3 storage, which is also hosted by Amazon -- therefore, it is Amazon's connection, and it is directly relevant. Amazon is somehow managing to spend less than that amount for their connection, because they are reselling it to me at that amount.

If not, they are playing a very risky game -- for instance, they would be making assumptions about how many times a given file on S3 is accessed, and a particularly popular one could end up costing them a fair amount of money.

I apologize if I wasn't clear, but I did mention that this price per gig is something I am paying to Amazon, and I mentioned it several posts up.

That makes me question the severity of any "defects" that might have existed in any of the goods he returned.

If the faults on the returned laptops were not genuine faults, Amazon's return policy is to charge a 15% fee. Given he returned at least three MacBook Pro's I'm guessing they accepted they were faulty and did not make that charge.

If they form a monastery around the clock it may survive.

There's a book about that idea that I just finished reading. It was both challenging and interesting on many levels.

There is another book that probably predates that with a similar idea called A Canticle For Leibowitz. One of the books that has left a lasting impression on me.

If they form a monastery around the clock it may survive.

There's a book about that idea that I just finished reading. It was both challenging and interesting on many levels.

There is another book that probably predates that with a similar idea called A Canticle For Leibowitz. One of the books that has left a lasting impression on me.

...thought of this before...

Five licenses, less than $200:

http://www.amazon.com/Apple-Version-10-5-6-Leopard-5-User/dp/B000BR0NPO

(and no feature variation betwixt home and work)

How much will 5 upgrades to Windows 7 cost me?

William

I haven't read that book (and now will), but I would also recommend another classic, Fritjof Capra's Web of Life

Generally speaking, according to Gaia theory, the earth is one system, functioning simultaneously at all levels of scale. Those levels are only artificially segmented according to the biases of an observer, and are not atomic but a continuum, with all levels equally interdependent upon and interactive with all other levels. Soil bacteria speeds rock weathering, the chalk shells from dead oceanic algae lie on the sea floor and affect geothermal activity, etc. "We can no longer think of rocks, animals, and plants as being separate. Gaia theory shows us that there is a tight interlocking between the planet's living parts ... and its non-living parts ..." (p104)

So yes, once one has wrapped their head around this concept, it's no surprise that all living systems are interconnected as well, especially those so tightly coupled as to be considered classically symbiotic. We are not just their environment, they are ours, and we share causation.

Personally, I prefer noisy places to silent places. I currently reside part of the year in Finland, and the taciturn nature of the people and the strict noise laws only add to the depression caused by the lack of sunlight and long winters. When I leave Finland for somewhere like Cairo or Hong Kong, it's like rejoining civilization.

Back in the 1960s, Larry Niven (in World of Ptaavs, now collected in Three Books of Known Space ) suggested that the future will get ever noisier, thanks to a rising population and people living closer together in the metropolis, necessitating changes in human evolution. Well, nowadays sound-proofing materials and noise-canceling headphones are getting cheaper and cheaper, so noise is a nuisance that can be overcome.

Which is just the reviewers characterization of the author not a direct quote.

From the Amazon.com 'editorial review':

The spectrum of topics covered includes how to:

* Hook kernel structures on multi-processor systems
* Use a kernel debugger to reverse engineer operating system internals
* Inject call gates to create a back door into Ring-0
* Use detour patches to sidestep group policy
* Modify privilege levels on Windows Vista by altering kernel objects
* Utilize bootkit technology
* Defeat both live incident response and post-mortem forensic analysis [emphasis mine]
* Implement code armoring to protect your deliverables
* Establish covert network channels using the WSK and NDIS 6.0

Those 'editorial reviews' are generally furnished to Amazon by the publisher. Here, the publisher has chosen to (in your words) characterize this book as a 'how to guide' for all the above methods of circumventing weak security. Given the opportunity to describe the book however they may, the publisher did not say, "Here's a book that will help strengthen your security policies."

I'm not saying this book shouldn't exist. I'm saying the guy who wrote it comes off as a scumbag and Slashdot is helping promote his scumbag product. While full disclosure is a great rationale for pressuring corporations into bugfixing, it also becomes a license to harm innocent people. The author of this book seeks to fatten his wallet by propagating information to people interested in causing problems. That's why I think it's sleazy for Slashdot to promote sales of this book.

Seth

This is a great book about how free-living organisms (like ourselves) have evolved alongside parasitic organisms (like bacteria). I found it interesting that the scientists that the author interviewed all look at free-living organisms not as individuals, but as miniature eco-systems for parasites. Several scientists said "I don't see a mouse (or frog, or fish) anymore, I see a bag of parasites." A little gruesome, but true. http://www.amazon.com/Parasite-Rex-Bizarre-Dangerous-Creatures/dp/074320011X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239818586&sr=8-1

I think the argument is deeper than that.

You believe the selfishness comes from specific social structures (kingdoms, religions, corporations) and can be fixed by changing the structures. I believe it comes from the way humans are, so every structure will be abused - the best we can do is get things out in the open.

There's a good book about this, called Conflict of Visions.

You could have read essentially these ideas over 30 years ago in a book called "Lives of a Cell" http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Cell-Notes-Biology-Watcher/dp/0140047433

I just read Good Germs Bad Germs by Jessica Snyder Sachs, a fascinating, accessible and up-to-date account of roughly the same subject matter. Will change your view on bacteria forever.

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Germs-Bad-Survival-Bacterial/dp/0809050633

You did not try to print Chinese, did you.

I've been doing strange character sets in Unix for 20 years. I have the old CJKV which goes into quite a bit of detail about ghostscript producing PDF CFF 1.2 (Chinese). Unix has had this for a long time (well before Windows) and Linux (which is international) inherited from Unix. Seriously this is a non issue if you do things the Unix way.

In fact I would assert this is a strength of Linux. Windows (with its very broken) Unicode fonts unperforms here. Heck Linux (TeX) actually is taking on Hindi which is much much worse than Chinese.

This far I've been told "in extremely cheap machine Linux would make more sense" and "buy more expensive peripherals". Wow.

The Unix on the low end makes sense with things like XFCE or ROX. But you need to be choosing all your hardware to work with Linux. The cheapest color laser HP sells is fully PCL compliant. I wish OEMs would stop up to the plate with all hardware, but they haven't so you have to be a little careful.

OEM's cannot compile for the distributions as every minor-minor (security patch) version *requires* different binary.
The binary on the CD which comes along the peripheral would certainly not work on any up-to-date distribution.
Good? No. Acceptable? IMNSHO no. Preferable? Kernel developers think so.

You are missing the point. You should be getting your computer, your distribution and your DVB card from your OEM. They roll out the security patches to you.
 

If they form a monastery around the clock it may survive.

There's a book about that idea that I just finished reading. It was both challenging and interesting on many levels.

The bean-counters decided it was better to operate off a relatively fixed cost like fuel and have a dependable schedule. The whole story of the 20th century has been "Yeah, you could do this or that but it's just simpler and cheaper to use fossil fuels." Environmentalism won't drive alternative fuels, economics will. If it becomes cheaper to use sail, we'll go back to sail. The cost of fuel will only rise from this point, peak oil is here, so the economics we need for sail should be here now.

Go read Eric Newby's The Last Grain Race. It's a great book, but it's also relevant: it's the story of the author's trip round the world as a sailhand on the last commercial sailing fleet, in 1938.

His ship, the Moshulu , was one of a fleet of grain freighters that sailed from Europe to Australia, loaded grain there, and then sailed back again. They occupied a particular peculiar economic niche; being specialised sailing ships and technically quite simple, they had very fixed costs. As a result, it was feasible for them to stay in port in Australia for several months while small loads of grain trickled in from the farmers. Steamers were unable to do this, as they needed to be constantly trading to offset the fixed costs. Instead, they'd have to rely on warehousing, which would eat into profits.

It also helped that the Moshulu's owners didn't spend much on maintenance; some of Newby's descriptions are terrifying.

On Newby's trip, she made the voyage from Belfast, Ireland to Port Lincoln, Australia in 82 days, which is pretty good. She could do about 17 knots. Apparently she's now a restaurant ship in New York.

Read his book --- it's fantastic.

Cargo ship speeds go up and down with the costs of ship charter and fuel, and with the demands of customers. Read "The Box", a history of shipping containers and the ships that move them.

Right now, the Baltic Dry Index is down to where it was around 2000, after a huge 5x spike last year. So there's a huge glut of available container ship capacity, charters are cheap, and freight rates are way down. So operators have to optimize for low cost at the expense of speed and throughput.

There's also no big demand for speed from the customers. Much of what's being shipped is going into storage anyway. Unsold cars are piling up near ports, filling up storage and spilling over into rented parking lots. That's presumably happening with containerized commodities too, in cases where the buyer can't just cancel the order.

It's one of those things that happens in a depression.

Dependable schedules are one reason, the other big reason is that sails interfere with loading and unloading the boat.

Modern shipping extensively uses cargo containers that are rapidly loaded and unloaded using cranes. This advance has drastically lowered the per-unit costs of shipping freight in the last half-century (check out the book "The Box" for more details).

If adding sails makes it difficult to use a crane to unload containers from the deck of a boat (likely, imo), then it would make the per-unit cost of shipping skyrocket.

Pretty much every study on consumer behaviour in the last years says that the LGBT market is the fastest-growing

Fastest growing != biggest. Lets say it doubled from 2% to 4%. But reactionary populist tripe shrank from 35% to 33%.

Where's the money at?

Yes, it's Amazons favourite excuse as of late. Remember when DRM and Starforce caused a consumer backlash which generated thousands of negative reviews for Spore? Somehow, they all got lost due to a mysterious glitch too!

Every games news site in town reports the selective censoring... and within hours the mysterious glitch is just as mysteriously solved.

let me ask you, what kind of glitch would cause material whose topics are at odds with conservative Christian values not to show up on the main search engine? Not just gay and lesbian titles, but 'Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica' also. Someone at Amazon has been caught with their pants down i'd say...

Sled Driver is pilot-centric.

This seems like a hack to me, assuming it's true of course.

http://pastebin.ca/1390576

Oh hey Owen Thomas! How you doin?

Hay dude. Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here's a nice piece I like to call "how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code".

I really hate reputation systems based on user input. This started a while back on Craigslist, when I was trying to score chicks to do heroin with. My listings like "looking to get tarred and pleasured" and "Searching for a heroine to do the paronym of this sentence's lexical subject" kept getting flagged. The audacity of the San Francisco gay community disgusted me. They would flag my ads down but searching craigslist for "pnp" or "tina" reveals tons of hairy dudes searching for other hairy dudes to do meth with. So I decided to get them back, and cause a few hundred thousand queers some outrage.

I'm logged into Amazon at the time and see it has a "report as inappropriate" feature at the bottom of a page. I do a quick test on a few sets of gay books. I see that I can get them removed from search rankings with an insignificant number of votes.

I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently.

So I script some quick bash.
#!/bin/bash
let count = 1
while true; do
links -dump 'http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=0/?ie=ASCII&rs=1000&keywords=Gay_and_Lesbian&rh=n%3A!1000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AHomosexuality&page='`echo $count`|grep \/dp\/ >> /tmp/amazon
((count++))
done

There's some quick code to grab all the Gay and Lesbian metadata-tagged books on amazon. Then I pull out all the IDs of the given books from those URLs:

cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//

and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every fag book on Amazon.

Now from here it was a matter of getting a lot of people to vote for the books. The thing about the adult reporting function of Amazon was that it was vulnerable to something called "Cross-site request forgery'. This means if I referred someone to the URL of the successful complaint, it would register as a complaint if they were logged in. So now it is a numbers game.

I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites. I show them my idea, and we all agree that it is pretty funny. They put an invisible iframe in their websites to refer people to the complaint URLs which caused huge numbers of visitors to report gay and lesbian items as inappropriate without their knowledge.

I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse. If you ever need a service like that, you can find them in a post like this advertising in the comments:
http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070427/solving-captchas-for-cash/

Then they would log into the accounts, save the cookies in a cookie file and send it to me.

Then I used the cookie files like so to automated-report all the books:

for i in `cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//`; do lynx -cookie_file=/home/avex/cookie1 http://www.amazon.com/ri/product-listing/`echo $i`/;done

The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon.

I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay and outrage across the blogosphere ain't so bad.

The only person to figure it out was dely from Six Apart:

http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html

but he has been ground zero at my work, cleaning up my messes before.

So just letting you know the chain of events. if you choose to report on this, please don't disclose my identity/email address. Thanks!

Anyone remember the massive public protest against the stupid Spore DRM scheme? If you look up the game on Amazon, you can still see the extremely low rating people are giving it.

Well, a couple of weeks later and Amazon had had enough. Even though the concerns about DRM and Starforce were definitely something consumers would want to know before they bought the product, one day the reviews just dissappeared. The cause? A mysterious glitch! Sound familiar? The publicity from game news sites was so bad they put the reviews back up almost instantly.

Kind of proves that Amazon haven't really learned their lesson about what kind of behaviour will and won't be tolerated by the public. How many gay and lesbian customers is this incident going to lose them, I wonder? Was is worth it to appease whoever paid them to do it?

Why does Brokeback Mountain have a sales ranking? It is, I think, one of the best known pro-gay books out there.

It's just that Amazon decided to cordon off adult material into a different section, like many brick and mortar stores.

Search results for Books: Sleeping Beauty. Well, they aren't doing a very good job with that.

How about going to Amazon (they have a website) and looking for yourself? Andrew Sullivan's book, Virtually Normal, which is NOT erotica or adult themed has no ranking.

Same for Same-sex Marriage: A Pro and Con Reader. Which is, as the title suggests, a book concerning the arguments for and against gay marriage.
Same for Love Undetectable.

But his book The Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom, and the Future of the Righ has a ranking, so the delisting is not targeting specific authors, but almost any title that isn't openly hostile to gays has been delisted.

Consider:

101 Frequently Asked Questions About Homosexuality. No sales rank.
What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality. No sales rank.
Homosexuality and Civilization. No sales rank.
When Homosexuality Hits Home: What to Do When a Loved One Says They're Gay. No sales rank.

Some more well-known books:
Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military. No sales rank. This is one of the definitive histories of gays and lesbians in the US military.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Debating the Gay Ban in the Military. No sales rank.
Major Conflict: One Gay Man's Life in the Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell Military. No sales rank.
Dont: A Readers Guide to the Militarys Anti-Gay Policy. No sales rank.

NONE of these have adult themes.

But it's not universal... for example:

A book such as A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Has a sales rank.
Can Homosexuality be Healed?. Has a sales rank.
You Don't Have to be Gay. Has a sales rank.

Now, perhaps there is a perfectly rational explanation, but looking at the evidence, I smell something funny.

How about going to Amazon (they have a website) and looking for yourself? Andrew Sullivan's book, Virtually Normal, which is NOT erotica or adult themed has no ranking.

Same for Same-sex Marriage: A Pro and Con Reader. Which is, as the title suggests, a book concerning the arguments for and against gay marriage.
Same for Love Undetectable.

But his book The Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom, and the Future of the Righ has a ranking, so the delisting is not targeting specific authors, but almost any title that isn't openly hostile to gays has been delisted.

Consider:

101 Frequently Asked Questions About Homosexuality. No sales rank.
What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality. No sales rank.
Homosexuality and Civilization. No sales rank.
When Homosexuality Hits Home: What to Do When a Loved One Says They're Gay. No sales rank.

Some more well-known books:
Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military. No sales rank. This is one of the definitive histories of gays and lesbians in the US military.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Debating the Gay Ban in the Military. No sales rank.
Major Conflict: One Gay Man's Life in the Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell Military. No sales rank.
Dont: A Readers Guide to the Militarys Anti-Gay Policy. No sales rank.

NONE of these have adult themes.

But it's not universal... for example:

A book such as A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Has a sales rank.
Can Homosexuality be Healed?. Has a sales rank.
You Don't Have to be Gay. Has a sales rank.

Now, perhaps there is a perfectly rational explanation, but looking at the evidence, I smell something funny.

How about going to Amazon (they have a website) and looking for yourself? Andrew Sullivan's book, Virtually Normal, which is NOT erotica or adult themed has no ranking.

Same for Same-sex Marriage: A Pro and Con Reader. Which is, as the title suggests, a book concerning the arguments for and against gay marriage.
Same for Love Undetectable.

But his book The Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom, and the Future of the Righ has a ranking, so the delisting is not targeting specific authors, but almost any title that isn't openly hostile to gays has been delisted.

Consider:

101 Frequently Asked Questions About Homosexuality. No sales rank.
What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality. No sales rank.
Homosexuality and Civilization. No sales rank.
When Homosexuality Hits Home: What to Do When a Loved One Says They're Gay. No sales rank.

Some more well-known books:
Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military. No sales rank. This is one of the definitive histories of gays and lesbians in the US military.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Debating the Gay Ban in the Military. No sales rank.
Major Conflict: One Gay Man's Life in the Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell Military. No sales rank.
Dont: A Readers Guide to the Militarys Anti-Gay Policy. No sales rank.

NONE of these have adult themes.

But it's not universal... for example:

A book such as A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Has a sales rank.
Can Homosexuality be Healed?. Has a sales rank.
You Don't Have to be Gay. Has a sales rank.

Now, perhaps there is a perfectly rational explanation, but looking at the evidence, I smell something funny.

How about going to Amazon (they have a website) and looking for yourself? Andrew Sullivan's book, Virtually Normal, which is NOT erotica or adult themed has no ranking.

Same for Same-sex Marriage: A Pro and Con Reader. Which is, as the title suggests, a book concerning the arguments for and against gay marriage.
Same for Love Undetectable.

But his book The Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom, and the Future of the Righ has a ranking, so the delisting is not targeting specific authors, but almost any title that isn't openly hostile to gays has been delisted.

Consider:

101 Frequently Asked Questions About Homosexuality. No sales rank.
What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality. No sales rank.
Homosexuality and Civilization. No sales rank.
When Homosexuality Hits Home: What to Do When a Loved One Says They're Gay. No sales rank.

Some more well-known books:
Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military. No sales rank. This is one of the definitive histories of gays and lesbians in the US military.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Debating the Gay Ban in the Military. No sales rank.
Major Conflict: One Gay Man's Life in the Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell Military. No sales rank.
Dont: A Readers Guide to the Militarys Anti-Gay Policy. No sales rank.

NONE of these have adult themes.

But it's not universal... for example:

A book such as A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Has a sales rank.
Can Homosexuality be Healed?. Has a sales rank.
You Don't Have to be Gay. Has a sales rank.

Now, perhaps there is a perfectly rational explanation, but looking at the evidence, I smell something funny.

How about going to Amazon (they have a website) and looking for yourself? Andrew Sullivan's book, Virtually Normal, which is NOT erotica or adult themed has no ranking.

Same for Same-sex Marriage: A Pro and Con Reader. Which is, as the title suggests, a book concerning the arguments for and against gay marriage.
Same for Love Undetectable.

But his book The Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom, and the Future of the Righ has a ranking, so the delisting is not targeting specific authors, but almost any title that isn't openly hostile to gays has been delisted.

Consider:

101 Frequently Asked Questions About Homosexuality. No sales rank.
What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality. No sales rank.
Homosexuality and Civilization. No sales rank.
When Homosexuality Hits Home: What to Do When a Loved One Says They're Gay. No sales rank.

Some more well-known books:
Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military. No sales rank. This is one of the definitive histories of gays and lesbians in the US military.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Debating the Gay Ban in the Military. No sales rank.
Major Conflict: One Gay Man's Life in the Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell Military. No sales rank.
Dont: A Readers Guide to the Militarys Anti-Gay Policy. No sales rank.

NONE of these have adult themes.

But it's not universal... for example:

A book such as A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Has a sales rank.
Can Homosexuality be Healed?. Has a sales rank.
You Don't Have to be Gay. Has a sales rank.

Now, perhaps there is a perfectly rational explanation, but looking at the evidence, I smell something funny.