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Yup. I saw an update video here which interestingly enough also details that the FBI *ISN'T* just looking for access to one phone as they currently claim, but that they have court-orders in-progress for twelve other iPhones (unrelated to San-Bernardino).

Yeah...about that:

http://www.fastcompany.com/305...

or you could play the masterpiece, Portal 2. And actually get smarter while you play. So says Stanford et al. http://www.fastcompany.com/303...

The wait for Portal 3 is driving me insane.

or you could play the masterpiece, Portal 2. And actually get smarter while you play. So says Stanford et al. http://www.fastcompany.com/303...

I used to write code for Boeing and have over 400 hours on a real simulator (no motion or window, only mcdus and efis) testing out my software. I used to tell people that I was a test pilot. Really ;)

Most of the software was written mechanically translating the sdd into code. They write the right stuff is a very good description of the process. See also DO-178B

She's dead, man. Let her go.

The Fall Of Perl, The Web's Most Promising Language http://www.fastcompany.com/302...
5 Programming Languages Marked for Death http://insights.dice.com/2014/...
Perl is Dead. Long live Perl. http://archive.oreilly.com/pub...

Meta-troll: Mod me a troll. Do it! Do it! Waste your shiny mod point to make my dream come true.

I would love to know the first cryptographically secure e-commerce transaction outside of a testbed environment. If something similar to the August 11, 1994 https: transaction occurred prior to that date, that would be worth contacting the author about. By similar, I mean a transaction in which the buyer used a cryptographically secure method to provide payment information directly to the seller, vs. using a non-secure method like email to provide payment information, using an intermediary like CompuServe or the Post Office ("cash on delivery") to manage the payment, or providing direct payment through some other means such as via telephone-voice-call/dialup-modem-direct-to-the-vendor/dedicated-data-line-direct-to-the-vendor/fax/mail/in-person/etc.

-----
The article includes some important disclaimers not found in the summary:

* The 1971 ARPANET transaction "technically didn't count because money wasn't exchanged online: they only used the network to arrange a meeting place."

* The 1984 Videotext transation didn't count because the customer "paid for them in cash [at the time of delivery]. That's not exactly e-commerce."

Thanks to those who have already pointed out that you could buy things using Compu$erve (sorry, old habit$ die hard), Quantum Link, etc. and even via a telnet server before 1994.

Those mentioning buying things over BBSs (well, most BBSs anyways) and USENET are probably talking about using the network to arrange a purchase, not to actually conduct the purchase.

I would love to know the first cryptographically secure e-commerce transaction outside of a testbed environment. If something similar to the August 11, 1994 https: transaction occurred prior to that date, that would be worth contacting the author about. By similar, I mean a transaction in which the buyer used a cryptographically secure method to provide payment information directly to the seller, vs. using a non-secure method like email to provide payment information, using an intermediary like CompuServe or the Post Office ("cash on delivery") to manage the payment, or providing direct payment through some other means such as via telephone-voice-call/dialup-modem-direct-to-the-vendor/dedicated-data-line-direct-to-the-vendor/fax/mail/in-person/etc.

-----
The article includes some important disclaimers not found in the summary:

* The 1971 ARPANET transaction "technically didn't count because money wasn't exchanged online: they only used the network to arrange a meeting place."

* The 1984 Videotext transation didn't count because the customer "paid for them in cash [at the time of delivery]. That's not exactly e-commerce."

Thanks to those who have already pointed out that you could buy things using Compu$erve (sorry, old habit$ die hard), Quantum Link, etc. and even via a telnet server before 1994.

Those mentioning buying things over BBSs (well, most BBSs anyways) and USENET are probably talking about using the network to arrange a purchase, not to actually conduct the purchase.

The other thing of course is for a business to actually look at the bottom line and then see what kind of impact a wage increase / treating your employees well would have. Better productivity, lower turnover...

I don't know of any business that runs at 100% efficiency at all levels. It just doesn't happen. And if you are going to have some notion of 'waste' you might as well spend it on your employees.

Where I work right now, they would never think of this. But here's the thing. They spend lots and lots of money on IT projects. It almost seems like they don't care how much something costs... as long as it is accounted for. Which means, they won't spend the extra 20k to keep the best employees or make sure working conditions are right or that employees are knowledge of the product.

But they will spend ungodly amounts of money on a new project or massive numbers of contractors...

In the grand scheme of things, they could spend a lot less money and get better results... but as I've learned, so much of business is not about being efficient, but about accounting for spending.

Like right now, we have an end of year budget we have to spend or we lose it for the next fiscal year. So what do we do we people? We create a project everyone knows is not needed and run with it, and we know it will be cancelled next year.

This is business. My point here is not to rant about how inefficient most business are. It is to point out that actually spending some money on employees doesn't cost very much relative to the amount of waste going on in most companies and could have intangible benefits to productivity, morale, retention, PR...

And lets recall this is not a fast food joint or something. This is a payments company which previously paid its employees around 48k as a minimum. This is common for office style work.

And just for some research. It is not a end all policy.
http://www.fastcompany.com/304...

Apparently, some feel it is unfair as some more talented workers who shoulder more than the load didn't get a greater jump in salary.

Now that he's past 30, I wonder if Zuckerberg will pay attention to it.
http://www.fastcompany.com/303...

Tim O'Reilly said:
"Regulation is not a good in itself. It is a means of achieving public goods. And so far, it is pretty clear that Uber and Lyft (and in particular, the competition between them) are improving the transportation options in American cities. Regulators should be using the opportunity to revisit the old way of doing things rather than trying to make the new conform to outdated rules that no longer serve their purpose."

Yeah, regulation is not the goal , but neither is the goal what he cites- "achieving public goods". That phrase "achieving public goods" sounds like it's conflating "public goods" with "the pubic good". We advance "the public good" when society reforms itself so as to better confer upon ALL our citizens, what Roosevelt called the Four Freedoms: Freedom of speech Freedom of worship Freedom from want Freedom from fear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Delivering goods to the public can be done it plenty of ways including slavery, as the Romans did when they built their cities using slave labor.

We don't want to "achieve public goods" at the permanent impoverishment of any of society's members, including the class of "people who make money driving other people around ". That is what the essay she wrote is about. How can we improve taxi service and make it better while not creating a no-winner but the 1% , dog-eat-dog service?

We COULD have a world in which people work for absolutely ANY wage just to stave off sheer destitution. That's exactly where a perfectly free market goes, fast People who own companies don't NEED to make another 50 million opening another branch the way people applying for jobs NEED to make rent, buy food and eat. One said can always simply wait out the other. It's not a long wait. form of that dynamic is what you are seeing when you read about some company closing their plant in state X or country Y to relocate to more "business friendly" climates. If they don't get just what they want, then they have options including delaying for months or years a chance to make more money for themselves. People have stomachs that are on stricter schedule.

So the problem with Uber and Lyft is it replaces a professional workforce that pays a livable wage (they say) with a throw-away workforce that's on their own, "hey, fuck you". The the executives at these companies are the only ones making money (25-30% of *pre-expense* income) and the pocket money their drivers make after shouldering the burden of maintenance, gas, car insurance etc. etc. etc. etc. is just that- pocket money, $12.50 an hour :

http://www.moneyunder30.com/ho...

http://www.fastcompany.com/304...

We have perfectly good examples of what happens to workers, wages and the distribution of society's wealth when people are forced into no-benefit 1099 "private contractor" status which is what Uber and Lyft want to classify their workers as or worse "part-time temp-worker" status. This is the further Walmartization of the economy, the same cost-shifting from the employer and receiver of the good onto the back of individuals. This is the same bullshit Microsoft tried to pull with their workforce. "I'll call you an independent contractor then I am free of any burden of having to provide you any kind of benefit".

It's not a clever "new business model" for a "new economy" if it can basically be described as making money by paying people less to do deliver the exact same service. That's not even a form of efficiency, since an increase in efficiency would mean doing more with less or fewer people. no Uber and Lyft are just opening the floodgates of the labor pool upon what is otherwise a functioning system.

That would be like letting anyone anywhere in the world m

For the Space Shuttle, this article describes the process pretty well. Of course, the first release of the Shuttle flight software cost half a billion dollars.

Your post reminds me of when someone I know, who was an early staffer on the Obama 2008 campaign, got some tech support with their email. From Chris Hughes.

As long as he gets his cheap jar of pickles, he doesn't care. There is more to value than how much something costs.

Krebs is overloaded by train-wreck picnickers

Noel Biderman CEO of How Low Can We Go, trading as Avid Media.

Some of his demonstrably patent bullshit about their security.

"We have always had the confidentiality of our customers' information foremost in our minds, and have had stringent security measures in place".
Um, encryption - have you heard of it? And PCI - yeah, right, a bus protocol.

The "security" fail company - they would have done better employing CyCura® the "binary ex-situ bioremediation system".

I'm guessing they got confused and deployed this Cycura instead. Which'd explain why alarms didn't go off until after the successful attack. When their teeth started grinding.

Candidate for sociopath of the year award, Joel Eriksson, CTO, Cycura, we will continue to be a leader in the services we provide. "I have worked with leading companies around the world to secure their businesses. I have no doubt, based on the work I and my company are doing, Avid Life Media will continue to be a strong, secure business,".
Continue? Fail. To continue you need to start somewhere.
Secure? Fail.

Makes me wonder if he faked his widely promoted cracking of the Cicada.

This is the most interesting bit
Anyone else see similarities and strangely missing information?

His story.

He certainly he fucked up big time "protecting" his client, and he shouldn't have (because he does seem to have the ability to know how to secure a system).

Curiouser and curiouser. But not so curious I want to follow that rabbit down a hole.

a system composed of people can be debugged in the same manner as code

False.

Actually LEGO was not doing fine before. In 2003-ish it was on the verge of bankruptcy. They did a massive reinvention which included gender-branding and licensing of pop culture. Which in just a few years has turned them back into a juggernaut.

Here's an article but its not the one I'm thinking of. There was a print article in Forbes or something about 2-3 years ago.

http://www.fastcompany.com/304...

http://www.fastcompany.com/1838481/6-leadership-styles-and-when-you-should-use-them
Pacesetting, authoriative, affiliative, coaching, coercive, democratic.

The list of six styles I could find (wikipedia, of course) doesn't mention coercive. Do you have a pointer to a different list?

http://www.fastcompany.com/183...

http://www.educational-busines...

Perhaps the reason you're not sure what they've collaborated on is because they haven't collaborated on anything? You seem very eager to make a connection between MS and FB.

The connection is there, which is why we have the story in the first place. The only question remaining is how long they've had a connection.

"Working together" implies some kind of active collaboration between the two. Holding stock, however, does not always imply that sort of collaboration.

It means they have a relationship. There are plenty of companies Microsoft could have bought stock in, but didn't. There were plenty of investors who wanted to invest in Facebook, but didn't.

Here's another example. For a while, Facebook had some kind of Bing integration, and the Bing bar had some kind of Facebook integration.

The 3D feature was called "dynamic perspective". The heavy battery drain was not actually from the gpu processing/rendering, it was because the feature needed 4 separate cameras (one on each corner of the phone) that had its own access to the facial recognition software.

Interesting read: http://www.fastcompany.com/303...

I'll never understand how groups (Especially NASA) can spend millions, or even BILLIONS on projects like these and not even complete the sorts of rudimentary testing that those of us in the professional software fields have to do every day.

This is not a NASA project, so you've made a stunningly basic error in your first sentence. Not looking too good for attention to detail for someone "in the professional software field".

Regardless, if you want to see how NASA does software, or for anyone even remotely interested in how the best practices for true mission-critical software gets written, you can't find a more interesting story on the creation of space shuttle software:

The right stuff kicks in at T-minus 31 seconds.

As the 120-ton space shuttle sits surrounded by almost 4 million pounds of rocket fuel, exhaling noxious fumes, visibly impatient to defy gravity, its on-board computers take command. Four identical machines, running identical software, pull information from thousands of sensors, make hundreds of milli-second decisions, vote on every decision, check with each other 250 times a second. A fifth computer, with different software, stands by to take control should the other four malfunction.

But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program — each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.

This software is the work of 260 women and men based in an anonymous office building across the street from the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, Texas, southeast of Houston. They work for the "on-board shuttle group," a branch of Lockheed Martin Corps space mission systems division, and their prowess is world renowned: the shuttle software group is one of just four outfits in the world to win the coveted Level 5 ranking of the federal governments Software Engineering Institute (SEI) a measure of the sophistication and reliability of the way they do their work. In fact, the SEI based it [sic] standards in part from watching the on-board shuttle group do its work.

The group writes software this good because that's how good it has to be. Every time it fires up the shuttle, their software is controlling a $4 billion piece of equipment, the lives of a half-dozen astronauts, and the dreams of the nation. Even the smallest error in space can have enormous consequences: the orbiting space shuttle travels at 17,500 miles per hour; a bug that causes a timing problem of just two-thirds of a second puts the space shuttle three miles off course.

Some of my favourite parts begin with the following quote:

The process can be reduced to four simple propositions:

1. The product is only as good as the plan for the product. At the on-board shuttle group, about one-third of the process of writing software happens before anyone writes a line of code. NASA and the Lockheed Martin group agree in the most minute detail about everything the new code is supposed to do — and they commit that understanding to paper, with the kind of specificity and precision usually found in blueprints. Nothing in the specs is changed without agreement and understanding from both sides. And no coder changes a single line of code without specs carefully outlining the change. Take the upgrade of the software to permit the shuttle to navigate with Global Positioning Satellites, a change that involves just 1.5% of the program, or 6,366 lines of code. The specs for that one change run 2,500 pages, a volume thicker than a phone book. The specs for the current program fill 30 volumes and run 40,000 pages.

That is how one writes software. NASA cannot be beaten when lives matter.

Except that this substrate is not being used for Si based semiconductors, but for GaAs instead

Apart from that, there is the whole, emerging, organic and printable semiconductor industry:

http://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/r...
http://www.fastcompany.com/114...

These things are not necessarily meant for servers or even consumer electronics as we know it; there is a huge number of things that different industries are interested in using computer technology for, where things like price, flexibility and low power consumption are crucial factors. Just imagine if it were possible to print something like thousands of largely autonomous computers on stickers for, say, $.01 each; I think this may very well be possible quite soon. In that situation, you want electronics that are bio-degradable.

If you knew your computing sciences history, you'd know that Grace Hopper isn't a cherry picked example. Systems programming was considered women's work for decades.

Lots of women were ignored for their contributions to STEM.

Lots of women are, not surprisingly, leaving STEM because of attitudes like yours.

Who should I believe, you or my lying eyes?

I don't know why the myth that FDA approval costs a billion is floating around here.
You can easy google for that. It seems if it is expensive it is around 140M, which is quite a lot, but not a billion.

http://www.fastcompany.com/146...

Maybe we should also ban cellphones?

No need. Just block the signal. Same effect without the hassle of giving the public the chance to object.

The only problem with that is that widening roads actually does not reduce traffic jams.

Building more roads only causes more traffic.

Finding and squashing this kind of bugs in a huge project is a bitch.

Which is why you should learn to write code that compiles and works correctly on the first try. We know how to do it, computer science wasn't invented yesterday. But thanks to dot-com and startup craze and the desire to churn out pseudo-programmers fast, fast, fast, programming isn't taught correctly.

If you want army style, I suggest this experiment: Teach students to code in a simple text editor and a special compiler that gives them one chance at compiling the program. If the compile fails, it deletes the code and they can start from scratch.

The more monkey-proof, the better.

Only if you hire monkeys to do your programming for you.

This is a very famous article about how to do programming right. Note their error count. Compare it to pretty much everything else on the market.

But programming this way isn't sexy, or macho or whatever else you want to call it. It's real work.

Over millions of users, a fraction of a second can have a major impact on sales.

Eventually they dropped Disney when it was realized the bragging rights were not worth the abuse.

The problem is that- depending upon the contract- the smaller company being screwed over is now in a position where they *can't* pull out of the contract because their large customer has them over a barrel. They've expanded and/or dedicated significant resources to supplying and pleasing that customer they thought would be a cash cow- possibly dropping other markets- and if the large company was to terminate the contract as threatened, they'd then have a massive production operation to fund with no-one to buy the end result.

It's either that quick death, or the slow death of having your margins ruthlessly squeezed beyond a sustainable point.

From another letter in the comments section of that article (from "Mugs"):-

I was once stuck on a train with a colleague ranting about a similar contract. The contract was in the 40s between Woolworth and his grandfather who ran a broom factory. Woolies started off with a small order, gradually increased until they took all the output then drove the price down until the factory went bust.

This was behaviour I was already familiar with relating to Wal-Mart, but it shows you it happened even back then. You can bet your life that in every case, the large customer knew exactly how this was going to play out in advance.

See this:- The Wal-Mart you don't know
And this:- The Man Who Said "No" to Wal-Mart

Eventually they dropped Disney when it was realized the bragging rights were not worth the abuse.

The problem is that- depending upon the contract- the smaller company being screwed over is now in a position where they *can't* pull out of the contract because their large customer has them over a barrel. They've expanded and/or dedicated significant resources to supplying and pleasing that customer they thought would be a cash cow- possibly dropping other markets- and if the large company was to terminate the contract as threatened, they'd then have a massive production operation to fund with no-one to buy the end result.

It's either that quick death, or the slow death of having your margins ruthlessly squeezed beyond a sustainable point.

From another letter in the comments section of that article (from "Mugs"):-

I was once stuck on a train with a colleague ranting about a similar contract. The contract was in the 40s between Woolworth and his grandfather who ran a broom factory. Woolies started off with a small order, gradually increased until they took all the output then drove the price down until the factory went bust.

This was behaviour I was already familiar with relating to Wal-Mart, but it shows you it happened even back then. You can bet your life that in every case, the large customer knew exactly how this was going to play out in advance.

See this:- The Wal-Mart you don't know
And this:- The Man Who Said "No" to Wal-Mart

Ummm... why? You think it's preposterous that software exploits are bought and sold?

"It is common for individuals or companies who discover zero-day attacks to sell them to government agencies for use in cyberwarfare." - Zero-day attack

References:
- Zero-day exploit in Apple’s iOS operating system 'sold for $500,000'
- Nations Buying as Hackers Sell Flaws in Computer Code
- How Spies, Hackers, and the Government Bolster a Booming Software Exploit Market
- Cyberwar’s Gray Market

5 months after because, like I said, they are beholden to shareholders.

Sorry, but 5 months after the fact is a joke. I'm not going to trust security to a group of people that take 5 months after the

Every single breach you linked just happened. This takes time.

Oh really? So then when is Charles Geschke going to be ousted for the Adobe data breach that happened 12 months ago? Do you need me to keep bringing up counterexamples?

The really funny thing is that we, and especially NASA know how to write good software. It is just rarely done because ... no, it's not really that more expensive or slower, at least not as much as you'd think. It's just a lot less sexy.

As is bloody obvious, space system software is programmed by the same cowboy coders as web pages.

Not quite.

On-Board Shuttle Group

one of those autism related charities should be able to front the bill.

Are there autism-related charities capable of putting forth the $150 million typically required to pay for FDA's approval?

And even if there are, I suspect, some of them might not want to to do that — under some legitimate-sounding reason — because it might eliminate their very reason for existing... Just as I would not trust "anti-poverty" politicians to do anything to really eliminate it — thus ending their political careers...

How much did it cost Monsanto to get approval for ritalin?

No idea about this particular case. But an average cost of approval of a new drug is over $150 million. According to the same page, that increases the development cost of an average new drug by about 50%.

Wow. A 15-year climb from bankruptcy to the most valuable company in the world and people still look at every single move Apple makes and say "wow, that's fucking dumb." Isn't it just remotely possible that Tim Cook knows what the fuck he's doing, and that there's a good reason for buying Beats? How 'bout we give it a few weeks, huh? Maybe, just maybe, the guy running Apple knows something you don't, and perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt just this once and see how this plays out before passing judgement?

Sorry, I must be new here.

Besides: every move Apple makes doesn't have to be some earth-shaking road to an innovation unseen since the last amazing thing they did (which everyone shit all over at the time anyway.) If Apple buys Beats or Pepsi or Whirlpool or Nabisco or whoever for $3 billion and they make more than $3 billion off of that in the near future, then it was a good investment, right? Do you know what would make Beats worth $3 billion today? IF IT EARNS $5 BILLION IN THE NEXT FIVE YEARS. And oh, look, that's probably what will happen. (And note that Tim Cook probably has better financial info available than a year-old Fast Company article.) Maybe Tim looked at Dre's books and decided that with Apple's awesome buying power and manufacturing prowess that they could DOUBLE the profit of Beats OVERNIGHT. They might earn that money back by next Christmas.

Kindle had text-to-speech but it may have been killed off by copyright matters:

http://www.fastcompany.com/116...

Or, it may still be in the devices, I don't know, I don't have one. I just remembered there was a big stink about it when they announced the feature years ago.

Netscape Navigator cost $49. Look at this article from 1996: http://www.fastcompany.com/277.... Back when Netscape had as dominant a marketshare as IE later had. Note how the author seemed to just assume that a browser than didn't cost any money couldn't be any good.

Nowadays, Netscape Navigator has been forked a couple times and the surviving branch is called Firefox, and at $0 its price went down significantly.

The original IE did not come bundled with the OS, it was a free add-on. There was a version for Windows and a version for Mac at this point.

Fast forward to 1998: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001.... January 1998, you will note. Windows 98, which was the first Windows that bundled IE in it, wouldn't be released until May 1998. So it would be difficult to argue that bundling had anything to do with it.

Later, Opera would follow suit, going from a price of $39 to also offering an ad-supported version in 2000: http://archive.today/201205291.... It only went ad-free 5 years later. At this time, people were getting sick of IE6, since it once was a decent browser (seriously!) but it had been stagnant far too long. However Firefox was starting to rise and it was taking all the people Opera could have gotten.

Color me reluctant, but I have no interest because Sony is notorious for proprietary formats that lock you into their product and I still despise their hostile disposition for customers when they gave us the rootkit scandal.

I wouldn't worry, I have been reading about all these wondrous new data storage breakthroughs for years on Slashdot. Not a one of them has ever made it to market. This is yet another of what I call "Hey, lookie what we can do in a lab." Most of these either turn out to have "problems", are impractical, overly expensive, or never make it to market for other reasons (it's too good, too fast. We can make a lot more money by coming out with smaller improvements first and stretching things out.").

Color me reluctant, but I have no interest because Sony is notorious for proprietary formats that lock you into their product and I still despise their hostile disposition for customers when they gave us the rootkit scandal.

That's because investors don't want to develop a product to compete with something that already exists (and is very well funded) but is having regulatory issues:

we've all made coding mistakes, no matter how experienced we are, so the focus should not be on "who" but more on "what kind of process can we introduce so this does not happen again".

Very true. If you're not familiar with it, you might be interested in looking at "They Write The Right Stuff", an interesting piece about the reliability of software on the Space Shuttle, and the process they built to get there. "The group's most important creation is not the perfect software they write -- it's the process they invented that writes the perfect software."

It can be done, but practical may not be what you would call this. Needed perhaps.

http://www.fastcompany.com/281...

In the particular case linked above, yes, the NSA required physical access to the device. However, the article noted that "a remote version of the exploit is also in the works."

Regardless, there is ample attack area for someone determined to get into a phone (or your computer, or just about any connected device really), and the government pays big money to find exploits before they're publicly known to do just that.

I would be very hesitant about claiming that the NSA couldn't figure out how to root the phone - it likely was just the easiest way for this particular program.

Are (were) these people "passionate" about programming?

http://www.fastcompany.com/281...

I don't know; I wasn't there. I think they were passionate about how their product turned out, but passionate about writing code?

I've known people that were passionate about their "product". They were great to work with when they had a good idea and they got their way, and hell to work with when they had a bad idea, whether or not they got their way. Match one of those up with a boss that has no bs filter, and, well, now you're not having fun anymore.

Another thing about that sort of question. I do believe that a well-run company would look at the psych profiles to see if applicants (and existing workers) are a best fit for their kind of job. But from what little I know about industrial psychology, it is generally worse than useless to just openly ask people that kind of question with one exception. That exception is if the job requires a bs artist or sociopath such as sales.

Anecdote: The best programmer I ever knew was highly productive - one of those people who would sit motionless for 10 minutes and then write nearly perfect and documented code for hours as fast as anyone could type. I mean like 10-20 times as productive as the next best programmer in the shop.
This person would not work after five PM or Saturday except under greatest duress. (Why me? Make the slow people work late; maybe they can catch up.)
This person was a perfectionist about everything but passionate about coding? Oh hell no.

The plastic microparticles will inevitably appear in our honey.

In order to make plastic "Plastic" many types of chemicals were used. Some of the chemicals make the plastic "elastic", while some others make them tough, or heat resistant, or whatever characteristics the end-product form of plastic is supposed to be.

Some of those chemicals, when enter our bodies, can mimic the effect of Estrogen ( http://www.fastcompany.com/173... ) and mess up our body's hormonal balances.

Those insects might be resourceful, but the same estrogen mimicking chemical could also mess up the bee's biology too.

You're right, it is volumetric. I have no idea how the dollars compare.

The figures are from Amazon (via the press), and they're a couple of years old, so I don't know where they stand now. 105 ebooks sold for every 100 pbooks. I've no idea whether they are counting those sold gratis.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1754259/amazon-sells-more-e-books-paper-ones

Also, I don't know whether the expensive ebooks are selling well. I don't recall seeing those expensive ones back when I saw this article, and to be honest I haven't seen them since either because I haven't been looking. I ignore the kindle versions. I can tell you that Baen's ebook pricing has gone up but it's still less than paper.

One reason that I insist on epub (and without DRM) is that I can load an epub up into Sigil and fix many formatting issues. Bad OCR is another matter, but I haven't run inot a lot of that.

Most of the pirating going on is due to "region-encoding" or attempts to censor works or not distribute them in certain countries.

If that were true, you wouldn't see high levels of downloading of US cable shows, movies, and music in the US. Really, MOST pirating/copyright infringement/illegal downloading/whatever term you want to use is driven by a desire to get the content without paying for it. Certainly, there are cases where people use illegal/infringing methods to get content because it's not otherwise offered in their region, but that's not the primary driver. http://www.fastcompany.com/3001351/us-tops-league-bittorrent-users-says-report