Ron Johnson may have succeeded running Apple Stores but that hasn’t translated into success at JCPenney.

Dave Hamilton at TMO has some good thoughts to share on the new “Six Strikes” punishments American ISPs are getting ready to inflict on consumers who download copyrighted content. Make no mistake, this is bad policy. Like, War on Drugs … Continued

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason told employees it was his last day after the company reported abysmal earnings.

AT&T plans to jettison circuit-switching technology with IP-based hardware that will free it from “common carriage” restrictions imposed by the FCC.

Marissa Mayers’ new policy against telecommuters is raising alarms, but what’s behind it?

Twelve South has redesigned its BookBook laptop case to better fit the thinner Retina Display-equipped MacBook Pro.

The official Japanese translation of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography is getting the manga treatment in Japan. Because, well, Japan.

Yahoo says no more telecommuting come June. But are home workers the problem, or how they’re managed?

The Guardian:

The sky-high price of printer ink – measure for measure more expensive than vintage champagne – has been well documented. Less well-known is the fact that the amount of ink in the average cartridge has shrunk dramatically.

A decade ago, the best-selling HP cartridge had 42ml of ink and sold for about £20. Today, the standard printer cartridges made by HP may contain as little as 5ml of ink but sell for about £13.

Cut open a HP inkjet cartridge and you’ll find what is going on.

This is a European report but there’s no reason to believe it’s not the same for cartridges sold here in North America.

Ray Cusick, former BBC designer, passed away this week at age 84.

The Wirecutter:

Google just announced its first premium Chromebook, the Chromebook Pixel. It’s gorgeous. Unfortunately, it’s so expensive that I can’t think of a single person who should get one.

If you have the money to spend on the Pixel and you need the kind of hardware it’s packing, you have so many other better options.

This may be the future of “cloud based” laptops but in the here and now, this is an extravagant machine.

Esquire:

What happened to the America that once was? What happened to the America where kids could spend their snow-days at the local sledding hill, without cell phones in their snow-pants, laughing at their friends’ face-plants, throwing snowballs, and making the same yellow-snow jokes that their grandfathers made when they too were a bunch of rapscallions running through the slush?

That America exists no more in Paxton, Illinois. Because the Paxton Park District’s insurance provider ruled that its sledding hill is too risky. “The insurance would have skyrocketed if someone was hurt,” a parks board member told The Champaign News-Gazette.

One of the commenters said, “The park board ought to be able to erect a sign at the hill that says “Sled at your own risk.” How about NOT suing people because your kid got hurt horsing around, as kids will do? When I was a kid in Canada, I broke my leg playing on a local hill. There was never any discussion of a lawsuit.

A new study shows that the healthiest and best way to deal with unpleasant people is to ignore them.

Rob Enderle opines on why Nvidia’s new offices may be better than Apple’s new offices, and suddenly I am consumed by a craving for human blood.