Breaking up Google would be a catastrophic disaster for privacy. Google has been good when it comes to protecting the data it has, and has every commercial incentive to continue to do so. Break it up and that data is now available to multiple companies, each of which has no incentive to keep it secret.
Breaking up Amazon? I don't see why. People buy from Amazon because it's a trusted entity and probably the only online store that's achieved that. The issues with Amazon, such as shitty employment conditions, would get worse, not better, if it was broken up into other companies that have to go into a race to the bottom as far as costs go.
What are you achieving by breaking either up that wouldn't be better solved with proper regulation? Nothing. You're removing a trusted retailer and replacing it with four untrustworthy ones, and you're duplicating the number of companies that collect your data. Who benefits? Russian hackers maybe?
Facebook needs to die. The other two can live, but I would like the government step in and say "You can't do that" occasionally. Even if it pisses Rand Paul off. Actually, especially if it pisses Rand Paul off, that's just a bonus.
For iDevices, Apple has a 44% Market share in the US, and its market share across the world as a whole is less than 20%. For computers, it barely scrapes 5%. So while Apple is doing well, it's doing well in a market with healthy competition.
(I don't actually agree that any of these companies need to be broken up, I'm just pointing out Apple doesn't fit the criteria. Google and Amazon have good and bad sides and might need some regulation, but they're not, overall, terrible for the industry. Facebook should be killed with fire, not broken up where it can turn back into itself like the Terminator from Terminator 2.)
That's not true. 24fps became standardized because it was the slowest frame rate at which mouth movements didn't get garbled (note that the cinema standard was 18fps before talkies.)
If you've bought a TV lately you'll note that most suffer from a bug called "soap opera effect" whereby their attempts to show 24fps look terrible because a small insect known as a "Marketing Executive" corrupted the TV's spec and inserted a line about "motion smoothing", something that wasn't noticed until long after the TV was designed, built, and sold to an unwitting customer.
Soap opera effect - where a TV extrapolates the in-between frames of 24fps content to product 60fps content - is noticeable, and wouldn't be if the people could only see in 24fps.
60fps is getting close to the high end of where you think you see perfectly smooth movement, but it isn't the limit. VR systems like the Vive use 90Hz, for example.
Plus look at the level of psychopathy on forums like Slashdot, the complete lack of empathy, and the tendency to get suckered in by hucksters like Elon Musk. Not that politicians are immune from the latter (looking at you Rahm Emanuel, who manages actually to be an example of both), but it's a little less common.
As a group we suck. When Lessig had to give up his run at the last election, I breathed a sigh of relief.
I think good, decent, people who have some organizational skills, have lived in variety of different environments, and who have some experience working within their communities to organize them to solve their problems, probably are the best fit for politics. We don't have many of those types of people. To be honest, very few politicians are like that and the few there are (Obama would spring to mind) tend to get integrated into a system that's screwed up by those that aren't.
But adding techies will just make a bad situation worse. We're not qualified, and worse still we vastly overrate our own skills and qualifications. We would fuck up the government even more than it is already, just... differently.
OK, and your point is what? That because there are hundreds they shouldn't start patching them one by one?
You do realize that if there are a hundred issues, it's highly unlikely Mozilla can put in one line of code, that doesn't break anything, that fixes EVERYTHING, right?
It looks to me as if Mozilla looked for one of the trickier ones to fix (fuzzing the font list would be easy, for example), and spent some time working on it. I'm glad they did. Now for the next fix.
I feel like he was stifling a laugh with every word he wrote. "A *snort* privacy focussed *squeaks as he tries to stifle a laugh* communications platforHAHAHAHAHA!"
Yeah, Zuck, we really believe you're the best people to trust with our privacy. I'm sure Russia or Saudi Arabia will never be able to buy the private feed of any dissidents directly from you. Right. Sure. Whatever you say.
It's about the datasets being used to feed the AI to help it recognize human beings. Your comments, while I'm sure entirely well meant, don't seem to pertain to anything the paper is discussing. I'm not really sure why you posted it or why 5 people thought it was "Insightful".
Probably not, but they know about Valve's promise when they sign up with Steam. Indeed, the promise might be one of the reasons why EA cut ties with Steam and has its own independent, kludgy, crappy, annoying, online system.
The Devs don't own Valve, and they'd only be potential creditors in the event of a shutdown, assuming they weren't paid for the sales of their products.
They've stated it publicly so it's fair to say the liquidators would face more lawsuits and more creditors if they tried to prevent that from happening, and any employees who throw the switch would be protected.
It's worth noting though that the value of the existing contracts is a net negative which is why Steam doesn't provide (many) games for free. A liquidator isn't going to see removal of DRM as throwing away an asset, rather it'll see that as a way for Valve to release its obligations to its customers. The only way DRM would be an asset is if the liquidator thought there was a chance of selling the company as a going concern, but a going concern is, by definition, still in business and therefore will not have turned off DRM.
It is time to either force them to move to their own isolated island or be vaccinated by law
Given it's the kids who don't get vaccinated, not the parents - who are the people who make the decisions for them - I can't see a way to make such a proposal humane and fair.
Conspiracies resonate. That's what it boils down to. Couple the notion that anti-vax is about a conspiracy to harm your child with the extreme fear you get of anything hurting your child during your first child's early years (I found the anxiety almost crippling myself - never enough to refuse to vaccinate on the other hand, and I found myself being furious with one of my wife's friends who started promoting this bullshit to her), and you have a bomb of doubt and uncertainty primed and ready to go off.
I think in some ways it's more surprising it's not more popular than, say, the ludicrous Benghazi or Birth Certificate type conspiracies, because there's no personal investment in either of those two. It doesn't matter if Obama had been an alien from another planet, it was never going to affect me personally. But a conspiracy of giant corporations and the government wanting to hurt my kid just so they can make more money? (Especially in an environment in which this has happened before - such as with tobacco.) I can see why someone would start to seriously worry about the truth of that, and let that worry take them over.
And the front end. Sure, Firefox keeps copying stuff from Chrome, and it's annoying, but there's still enough of a difference in front ends that it's still possible to have a preference.
If Chrome ever handles large numbers of tabs properly (scrolling makes sense, reducing the size of them so you can't tell any more what tab has what doesn't), and separates the URL bar and search box, I'll accept the two are more or less identical on the front end, and might even switch given Chrome is going to become the defacto standard anyway.
According to Valve, yes. That is, they've promised to disable the DRM if they ever go out of business.
That said, what's the difference between buying a game on DVD, which phones home, and buying it as a download you have a copy of on your own disc? For the most part, not much: at least the latter can be updated to have the DRM turned off I guess.
Firefox is notoriously difficult to use for this purpose.
No, it *was* notoriously difficult to use the technologies that underpin Firefox, although not impossible - Galeon, and early versions of its fork Epiphany (both at one time default GNOME Browsers), used Gecko for example, as did (does? Haven't used OS X in a while) the Mac OS X Browser Camino.
Firefox has more or less undergone a complete rewrite since people started migrating from Gecko, which they were using, to other platforms. So it's hard for me to take seriously a statement that the suite of technologies Firefox uses are "notorious" for anything based upon technical decisions third parties made years ago.
I get pissed enough to respond to many of these idiots too (are they idiots? Or just trolls? The last one though was just plain ridiculous), so I can't really comment.
When I saw this story coming up I had mentally prepared a response for an early post along the lines of "Oh, great to see this on Slashdot. I do hope we apply the same level of healthy skepticism that we do to stories implying women are poorly paid, despite overwhelming evidence of the latter, and already obvious problems with this story", but alas I was busy, so I missed the chance for a legit point to be modded down to -1, Trollbait, because for some reason Slashdot seems to have a surplus of really shitty entitled white men these days.
'Public transit' exists primarily for one purpose: so The Poor can get around in some way other than walking or riding a bike
No, it exists so that people can move efficiently through a city. A real city, I mean, not the shitty "100 strip malls and tiny restaurants surrounded by parking spots intermixed with housing-only suburbs" that many in the US call cities. I mean actual cities.
People who can afford their own personal transportation, will afford it, even if it's slightly a financial burden to them, because the benefits outweigh everything else
You've never driven in a city, have you?
The only people who drive in cities are those who have a terror of actually being near other people, or who have very specific one-off tasks to do that require hauling a large amount of stuff from one place to another. Even when my mother had a car when I was brought up in Britain we used the bus for most journeys. Even if you like driving (why? Moreover, why the fuck does every idiot car advocate think that EVERYONE loves driving?), you won't like doing it in cities.
AmiMojo: why do you bother with these idiots? I mean, this has to be the most stupid response I've seen so far - doesn't grok the concept of analogies (and cannot apparently parse a simple English sentence to determine what is being compared with what), attempts to define "feminist theory" and then gets angry when you use the phrase.
I mean, it takes a special level of stupid to be as dense as grasshoppa but it should have been obvious before you got to this stage.
I suppose you can upgrade it to 10 Pro as with every 10 Home or 10 S product yet.
That's not evident in the article, but we can hope. That said, that generally costs money, and that's kinda the point. If you have to pay $100 to "unlock" your laptop, then it's still a closed laptop by default. You can unlock, for free, the bootloader on a Chromebook and install anything, including Ubuntu (if the hardware is compatible), but it's not a pleasant process.
Or even get the full 10 Home desktop just by clicking in the right control panel.
They don't have a really strong incentive to cripple it more than they do already.
Well, they do. Right now anyone can go into any store, online or brick and mortar or mail order, and buy any software they want and install it. This means two issues: Microsoft is stuck having to support software they have no control over (boohoo, shouldn't havbeen so monopolistic in the 1990s) and Microsoft doesn't get a cut of sales of software.
Microsoft has a solution to that, it's the Microsoft Store. If they can produce a version of the OS that doesn't provide anything other than web and Microsoft Store apps, then they can get a cut of everything and their required level of support drops as they can sandbox more stuff and prevent arbitrary apps from, say, overwriting the registry.
So they do, alas, currently have an incentive to produce a stripped down, locked down, version of Windows, which I believe is what 'S' is intended to be, but this seems to be the missing bit.
Given the penalties for fraud and the hoops you have to jump through to get housing benefit, 4% seems ludicrously high. I appreciate people have ideological problems with giving the poors the ability to have a roof over their heads, but I have a feeling that if the algorithm had found a 50% fraud rate, you'd still be claiming it was too low and would be much higher.
The odd thing is they're doing it at the same time as Google is going in the opposite direction with ChromeOS. I'm running LibreOffice and Atom on my Chromebook, having installed them myself, without needing to put the device in developers mode, thanks to Crostini.
Something tells me this "light GUI" version of Windows isn't going to let you spin up a sandboxed fully integrated Windows VM to run whatever applications you want.
It doesn't sound like that at all. They're not talking about stripping down the underlying OS, just the UI. WINCE was the opposite, it was a lightweight OS that had a full GUI, which in some editions was more or less the same as Windows 95.
Pretty early on we saw problems with USB being a little too universal, as it became obvious that it's a bad idea to allow someone to plug something in that can be both a storage device and a keyboard (it doesn't take much imagination to see how that can be a security problem.)
Now we're upping the ante a little and allowing USB devices direct access to memory (yeah, really, that's PCI's whole dealio, it's literally the only reason PCI exists. And the big deal with this is it's PCI over USB.)
Most zoning in the US means that driving is mandatory throughout most of the US, it's not physically possible to live without a car. If you're going to make licenses more difficult, you need to, first, before you do anything else, legalize high and mid-density mixed use development throughout most of the US so that transit businesses are capable of running with some level of profit and people can walk.
That's not going to happen. Already the car-only cranks are hitting the Reply button to this in order to make some specious argument about how they prefer suburbs so everyone should be forced to live in suburbs because not being forced to live in a suburb is the same thing as being forced to use public transit and anyway everyone really prefers suburbs and (etc.) So right now, there is no legitimate reason to take anyone's license away. As long as it's essentially means you can't be self reliant without a driver's license, which in a small number of cases is a death sentence, you absolutely have to give everyone one, no matter what their past driving behavior is, no matter how stupid they are, no matter how unsuited they are to driving.
Sorry to point it out, but I'm going to point it out until the car-only cranks start to recognize that not only are they full of shit, but their ideology is forcing the most absurd things to happen.
(BTW, if anyone's about to argue "But we already take driver's licenses away...", that's true, but they drive anyway, so literally all you're doing is making people wards of the state in those instances once they get caught.)
That's an argument for a different time. Nobody's arguing that Amazon should be forced not to stock something.
Your comment comparing this to a small bookstore in the south is dubious at best and then handwaving the obvious problem by writing " Just because Amazon is huge doesn't mean they are immune". First, Amazon is actually more protected from such situations, there's no risk of violence for example against them and they wouldn't lose most of their sales as a result of a church run boycott. Secondly, there's a world of difference between criticizing a company for spreading misinformation, and boycotting a company to the point of likely bankruptcy in support of preventing women from getting information about potentially live saving medical care.
Either way, nobody has forced Amazon to do this. People have raised the issue, Amazon has made the entirely reasonable position of agreeing it doesn't want to spread lies and misinformation that'll put people's health at risk. Your segue is misleadingly off-topic.
Slashdot Mirror
Breaking up Google would be a catastrophic disaster for privacy. Google has been good when it comes to protecting the data it has, and has every commercial incentive to continue to do so. Break it up and that data is now available to multiple companies, each of which has no incentive to keep it secret.
Breaking up Amazon? I don't see why. People buy from Amazon because it's a trusted entity and probably the only online store that's achieved that. The issues with Amazon, such as shitty employment conditions, would get worse, not better, if it was broken up into other companies that have to go into a race to the bottom as far as costs go.
What are you achieving by breaking either up that wouldn't be better solved with proper regulation? Nothing. You're removing a trusted retailer and replacing it with four untrustworthy ones, and you're duplicating the number of companies that collect your data. Who benefits? Russian hackers maybe?
Facebook needs to die. The other two can live, but I would like the government step in and say "You can't do that" occasionally. Even if it pisses Rand Paul off. Actually, especially if it pisses Rand Paul off, that's just a bonus.
For iDevices, Apple has a 44% Market share in the US, and its market share across the world as a whole is less than 20%. For computers, it barely scrapes 5%. So while Apple is doing well, it's doing well in a market with healthy competition.
(I don't actually agree that any of these companies need to be broken up, I'm just pointing out Apple doesn't fit the criteria. Google and Amazon have good and bad sides and might need some regulation, but they're not, overall, terrible for the industry. Facebook should be killed with fire, not broken up where it can turn back into itself like the Terminator from Terminator 2.)
That's not true. 24fps became standardized because it was the slowest frame rate at which mouth movements didn't get garbled (note that the cinema standard was 18fps before talkies.)
If you've bought a TV lately you'll note that most suffer from a bug called "soap opera effect" whereby their attempts to show 24fps look terrible because a small insect known as a "Marketing Executive" corrupted the TV's spec and inserted a line about "motion smoothing", something that wasn't noticed until long after the TV was designed, built, and sold to an unwitting customer.
Soap opera effect - where a TV extrapolates the in-between frames of 24fps content to product 60fps content - is noticeable, and wouldn't be if the people could only see in 24fps.
60fps is getting close to the high end of where you think you see perfectly smooth movement, but it isn't the limit. VR systems like the Vive use 90Hz, for example.
Plus look at the level of psychopathy on forums like Slashdot, the complete lack of empathy, and the tendency to get suckered in by hucksters like Elon Musk. Not that politicians are immune from the latter (looking at you Rahm Emanuel, who manages actually to be an example of both), but it's a little less common.
As a group we suck. When Lessig had to give up his run at the last election, I breathed a sigh of relief.
I think good, decent, people who have some organizational skills, have lived in variety of different environments, and who have some experience working within their communities to organize them to solve their problems, probably are the best fit for politics. We don't have many of those types of people. To be honest, very few politicians are like that and the few there are (Obama would spring to mind) tend to get integrated into a system that's screwed up by those that aren't.
But adding techies will just make a bad situation worse. We're not qualified, and worse still we vastly overrate our own skills and qualifications. We would fuck up the government even more than it is already, just... differently.
OK, and your point is what? That because there are hundreds they shouldn't start patching them one by one?
You do realize that if there are a hundred issues, it's highly unlikely Mozilla can put in one line of code, that doesn't break anything, that fixes EVERYTHING, right?
It looks to me as if Mozilla looked for one of the trickier ones to fix (fuzzing the font list would be easy, for example), and spent some time working on it. I'm glad they did. Now for the next fix.
I feel like he was stifling a laugh with every word he wrote. "A *snort* privacy focussed *squeaks as he tries to stifle a laugh* communications platforHAHAHAHAHA!"
Yeah, Zuck, we really believe you're the best people to trust with our privacy. I'm sure Russia or Saudi Arabia will never be able to buy the private feed of any dissidents directly from you. Right. Sure. Whatever you say.
It's about the datasets being used to feed the AI to help it recognize human beings. Your comments, while I'm sure entirely well meant, don't seem to pertain to anything the paper is discussing. I'm not really sure why you posted it or why 5 people thought it was "Insightful".
Probably not, but they know about Valve's promise when they sign up with Steam. Indeed, the promise might be one of the reasons why EA cut ties with Steam and has its own independent, kludgy, crappy, annoying, online system.
The Devs don't own Valve, and they'd only be potential creditors in the event of a shutdown, assuming they weren't paid for the sales of their products.
They've stated it publicly so it's fair to say the liquidators would face more lawsuits and more creditors if they tried to prevent that from happening, and any employees who throw the switch would be protected.
It's worth noting though that the value of the existing contracts is a net negative which is why Steam doesn't provide (many) games for free. A liquidator isn't going to see removal of DRM as throwing away an asset, rather it'll see that as a way for Valve to release its obligations to its customers. The only way DRM would be an asset is if the liquidator thought there was a chance of selling the company as a going concern, but a going concern is, by definition, still in business and therefore will not have turned off DRM.
Given it's the kids who don't get vaccinated, not the parents - who are the people who make the decisions for them - I can't see a way to make such a proposal humane and fair.
Conspiracies resonate. That's what it boils down to. Couple the notion that anti-vax is about a conspiracy to harm your child with the extreme fear you get of anything hurting your child during your first child's early years (I found the anxiety almost crippling myself - never enough to refuse to vaccinate on the other hand, and I found myself being furious with one of my wife's friends who started promoting this bullshit to her), and you have a bomb of doubt and uncertainty primed and ready to go off.
I think in some ways it's more surprising it's not more popular than, say, the ludicrous Benghazi or Birth Certificate type conspiracies, because there's no personal investment in either of those two. It doesn't matter if Obama had been an alien from another planet, it was never going to affect me personally. But a conspiracy of giant corporations and the government wanting to hurt my kid just so they can make more money? (Especially in an environment in which this has happened before - such as with tobacco.) I can see why someone would start to seriously worry about the truth of that, and let that worry take them over.
And the front end. Sure, Firefox keeps copying stuff from Chrome, and it's annoying, but there's still enough of a difference in front ends that it's still possible to have a preference.
If Chrome ever handles large numbers of tabs properly (scrolling makes sense, reducing the size of them so you can't tell any more what tab has what doesn't), and separates the URL bar and search box, I'll accept the two are more or less identical on the front end, and might even switch given Chrome is going to become the defacto standard anyway.
According to Valve, yes. That is, they've promised to disable the DRM if they ever go out of business.
That said, what's the difference between buying a game on DVD, which phones home, and buying it as a download you have a copy of on your own disc? For the most part, not much: at least the latter can be updated to have the DRM turned off I guess.
No, it *was* notoriously difficult to use the technologies that underpin Firefox, although not impossible - Galeon, and early versions of its fork Epiphany (both at one time default GNOME Browsers), used Gecko for example, as did (does? Haven't used OS X in a while) the Mac OS X Browser Camino.
Firefox has more or less undergone a complete rewrite since people started migrating from Gecko, which they were using, to other platforms. So it's hard for me to take seriously a statement that the suite of technologies Firefox uses are "notorious" for anything based upon technical decisions third parties made years ago.
Where does it say anything about rentals here? I was under the impression this is using Steam's model, not Adobe's.
If it's Steam's, then great. If it's not, then, urgh, can't see anyone buying it to be honest.
I get pissed enough to respond to many of these idiots too (are they idiots? Or just trolls? The last one though was just plain ridiculous), so I can't really comment.
When I saw this story coming up I had mentally prepared a response for an early post along the lines of "Oh, great to see this on Slashdot. I do hope we apply the same level of healthy skepticism that we do to stories implying women are poorly paid, despite overwhelming evidence of the latter, and already obvious problems with this story", but alas I was busy, so I missed the chance for a legit point to be modded down to -1, Trollbait, because for some reason Slashdot seems to have a surplus of really shitty entitled white men these days.
No, it exists so that people can move efficiently through a city. A real city, I mean, not the shitty "100 strip malls and tiny restaurants surrounded by parking spots intermixed with housing-only suburbs" that many in the US call cities. I mean actual cities.
You've never driven in a city, have you?
The only people who drive in cities are those who have a terror of actually being near other people, or who have very specific one-off tasks to do that require hauling a large amount of stuff from one place to another. Even when my mother had a car when I was brought up in Britain we used the bus for most journeys. Even if you like driving (why? Moreover, why the fuck does every idiot car advocate think that EVERYONE loves driving?), you won't like doing it in cities.
AmiMojo: why do you bother with these idiots? I mean, this has to be the most stupid response I've seen so far - doesn't grok the concept of analogies (and cannot apparently parse a simple English sentence to determine what is being compared with what), attempts to define "feminist theory" and then gets angry when you use the phrase.
I mean, it takes a special level of stupid to be as dense as grasshoppa but it should have been obvious before you got to this stage.
That's not evident in the article, but we can hope. That said, that generally costs money, and that's kinda the point. If you have to pay $100 to "unlock" your laptop, then it's still a closed laptop by default. You can unlock, for free, the bootloader on a Chromebook and install anything, including Ubuntu (if the hardware is compatible), but it's not a pleasant process.
Well, they do. Right now anyone can go into any store, online or brick and mortar or mail order, and buy any software they want and install it. This means two issues: Microsoft is stuck having to support software they have no control over (boohoo, shouldn't havbeen so monopolistic in the 1990s) and Microsoft doesn't get a cut of sales of software.
Microsoft has a solution to that, it's the Microsoft Store. If they can produce a version of the OS that doesn't provide anything other than web and Microsoft Store apps, then they can get a cut of everything and their required level of support drops as they can sandbox more stuff and prevent arbitrary apps from, say, overwriting the registry.
So they do, alas, currently have an incentive to produce a stripped down, locked down, version of Windows, which I believe is what 'S' is intended to be, but this seems to be the missing bit.
Given the penalties for fraud and the hoops you have to jump through to get housing benefit, 4% seems ludicrously high. I appreciate people have ideological problems with giving the poors the ability to have a roof over their heads, but I have a feeling that if the algorithm had found a 50% fraud rate, you'd still be claiming it was too low and would be much higher.
The odd thing is they're doing it at the same time as Google is going in the opposite direction with ChromeOS. I'm running LibreOffice and Atom on my Chromebook, having installed them myself, without needing to put the device in developers mode, thanks to Crostini.
Something tells me this "light GUI" version of Windows isn't going to let you spin up a sandboxed fully integrated Windows VM to run whatever applications you want.
It doesn't sound like that at all. They're not talking about stripping down the underlying OS, just the UI. WINCE was the opposite, it was a lightweight OS that had a full GUI, which in some editions was more or less the same as Windows 95.
Pretty early on we saw problems with USB being a little too universal, as it became obvious that it's a bad idea to allow someone to plug something in that can be both a storage device and a keyboard (it doesn't take much imagination to see how that can be a security problem.)
Now we're upping the ante a little and allowing USB devices direct access to memory (yeah, really, that's PCI's whole dealio, it's literally the only reason PCI exists. And the big deal with this is it's PCI over USB.)
This is good... why?
Most zoning in the US means that driving is mandatory throughout most of the US, it's not physically possible to live without a car. If you're going to make licenses more difficult, you need to, first, before you do anything else, legalize high and mid-density mixed use development throughout most of the US so that transit businesses are capable of running with some level of profit and people can walk.
That's not going to happen. Already the car-only cranks are hitting the Reply button to this in order to make some specious argument about how they prefer suburbs so everyone should be forced to live in suburbs because not being forced to live in a suburb is the same thing as being forced to use public transit and anyway everyone really prefers suburbs and (etc.) So right now, there is no legitimate reason to take anyone's license away. As long as it's essentially means you can't be self reliant without a driver's license, which in a small number of cases is a death sentence, you absolutely have to give everyone one, no matter what their past driving behavior is, no matter how stupid they are, no matter how unsuited they are to driving.
Sorry to point it out, but I'm going to point it out until the car-only cranks start to recognize that not only are they full of shit, but their ideology is forcing the most absurd things to happen.
(BTW, if anyone's about to argue "But we already take driver's licenses away...", that's true, but they drive anyway, so literally all you're doing is making people wards of the state in those instances once they get caught.)
That's an argument for a different time. Nobody's arguing that Amazon should be forced not to stock something.
Your comment comparing this to a small bookstore in the south is dubious at best and then handwaving the obvious problem by writing " Just because Amazon is huge doesn't mean they are immune". First, Amazon is actually more protected from such situations, there's no risk of violence for example against them and they wouldn't lose most of their sales as a result of a church run boycott. Secondly, there's a world of difference between criticizing a company for spreading misinformation, and boycotting a company to the point of likely bankruptcy in support of preventing women from getting information about potentially live saving medical care.
Either way, nobody has forced Amazon to do this. People have raised the issue, Amazon has made the entirely reasonable position of agreeing it doesn't want to spread lies and misinformation that'll put people's health at risk. Your segue is misleadingly off-topic.