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.

“Thank God – no backwards compatibility. Now I can exchange all of my old games at Gamestop for a total of $25 in-store credit.”

This pretty much sums it up for me. I think it’s gonna be a long time before I bother to replace the game consoles I’m currently using.

The designer of the Daleks from the BBC’s Doctor Who has died aged 84 after a short illness, his daughter has said.

Former BBC designer Ray Cusick died of heart failure in his sleep on Thursday, Claire Heawood added.

It appears that Amazon’s warehouses are the global book distribution chain’s equivalent of modern day sweatshops. Earlier this week Amazon fired its German security firm after a documentary film crew from ARD tied it to a far right wing group. The film crew revealed that seasonal workers hired by an Amazon subcontractor in Germany, many of whom were previously unemployed, were driven around Germany in buses, housed in poor conditions and kept under constant surveillance by the aforementioned security guards.

I’m guessing the mainstream media won’t see fit to make a big deal out of this like they did with Apple and Foxconn.

[Via Harry Marks]

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.

I’d like to thank Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week with BBEdit.

BBEdit 10.5 from Bare Bones Software — The leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac just keeps getting better. Now with Retina support and many other improvements — download the demo and see for yourself!

I’ve been using the app since 1994.

Good tip. I wonder how often spammers change the number they’re calling from though.

[Via Streakmachine]

Great interview by Des Traynor.

The world’s largest software company said the security intrusion was “similar” to recent ones reported by Apple Inc (NSQ:AAPL) and Facebook Inc (FB.O).

The new BootCamp hits Seattle on March 6 and hits other cities throughout the year.

After helicopters picked him up, medics inspected his injuries. They cut off his clothes and went through his pockets. There, they found his iPhone — with a bullet hole through it. “The medics would come up to me and say, ‘this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.’”

Stubleski wasn’t carrying it for calling or texting. He said he used it as a camera or for music. The doctors told him how lucky he was that the bullet didn’t hit the femoral artery. They said that the iPhone probably changed the trajectory of the bullet, making the wound shallower in his flesh. The protective cover he had on his phone made it so the glass didn’t shatter, making his wounds worse. He and his friends joked they should replace their body armor with iPads.

Great story.

A judge handed outspoken hedge fund manager David Einhorn a victory in his court battle with Apple Inc on Friday, blocking the iPhone maker from moving forward with a shareholder vote on a controversial proposal to limit the company’s ability to issue preferred stock.

It’s going to be an interesting shareholder meeting.

John Paczkowski at AllThingsD:

Yes, this move by Samsung against Apple was a tactical one in a nasty battle in which billions of dollars are at stake. Yes, it’s just business. But it’s ill-conceived. Even leaving aside the ethics of asserting a patent against a feature designed to help the blind, this is unwise. It’s the PR equivalent of punching yourself in the face. Samsung has now identified itself as a company willing to accept the loss of accessibility for the vision-impaired as collateral damage in its battle with Apple. It has made a big public move to make it more difficult for the blind to use computers.

Foss Patents:

I still believe it’s the wrong thing to assert an accessibility-related patent in a dispute like this one. Samsung didn’t assert this German patent in an effort to protect its investment in accessibility. It elected to use an accessibility-related patent as a tactical weapon. Patent protection and enforcement can be justified in certain scenarios. For example, if there are two companies competing in the market for hearing aids, it’s generally legitimate for them to assert accessibility-related patents against each other. I would also support the idea of accessibility patent enforcement in cases of willful infringement, and if Samsung had only requested monetary compensation in this action, it would have made a much better choice than by trying to achieve, through the pursuit of an injunction, the deactivation or (more realistically) degradation of the voiceover functionality Apple provides to its German customers.

Maybe Samsung can find features that help people with other disabilities to attack next.

Very cool.

I’m going to walk you through seven basic adjustments in Aperture 3.4 that will clean up 90 percent of your images: Crop, White Balance, Exposure, Enhance, Highlights & Shadows, Color, and Edge Sharpen.

Great tips from a master: Derrick Story.

Aperture is an underutilized (and probably underpromoted) Apple app for photographers that is enormously useful and really great, and editing isn’t even its strongest suit – it’s a comprehensive photo cataloging tool that really helps you make the most out of whatever you shoot. It goes way beyond what iPhoto can do, and works well with external editors like Photoshop as well.

Some great advice here. Watch the short video with Bruce Swedien, the engineer that mixed Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” — after 91 mixes, the version that went on the album was mix number 2.

When dealing with jerks and trolls both online and off, you have a choice: you can engage and try to get them to see the error of their ways, or you can avoid them, ignore them, and move on with your life. Most of us already know that ignoring jerks is the best way to deal with them, but a new study from Baruch College (CUNY) brings the point home, and explains why it’s better for your health, too.

Of course, if we at The Loop shunned jerks, then there’d be barely anything to report on. But we’re jerks too. Don’t shun us. We crave the attention.

The end result is that while both buildings are amazing in their own right, if you like working in natural light, and in more of a collaborative friendly environment (and I do) then the NVIDIA approach would be better. If you are very personally competitive, want your own private office, and are willing to work your way toward a window for natural light (typically windows come with rank and status) then the Apple building will be the more attractive choice.

Any building without Rob Enderle in it would be the more attractive choice for me.

I don’t care anymore whether people know that Instapaper defined the read-later service and was first to most of its core features. I don’t care anymore whether people know how much Read It Later copied from Instapaper in our early years. You can’t force people to know backstories.

But for Pocket to repeatedly state the opposite — that they were the first service like this, and that Instapaper followed their lead — is over the line, and I won’t sit here quietly and let that go unchallenged.

The man responsible for several leaks on Microsoft’s upcoming console, codenamed Durango, has had his home raided by the Australian police and an FBI agent.

People are so stupid.

I hope Google tells the winners what to do when a company like Google calls and demands a story be changed.

Congrats to the winners.

A couple was arrested after their argument over who was the greatest guitarist of all time became so heated that Motel 6 staff was forced to call the Brook Park police.

Classic.

The primary website for NBC, NBC.com, was breached by hackers and for a few hours visitors may have fallen victim to RedKit malware – a “drive by download” – if they visited or viewed the site.

NPR:

Check out this video of Brooklyn-based songwriter-producer-artist extraordinaire Jonathan Dagan, better known as J.Viewz, playing a beautiful — and just plain awesome — cover of Massive Attack’s 1998 hit “Teardrop” on a variety of fruits and vegetables.

MIND. BLOWN. (thanks to Moeskido for the link!)