I have been a professional software developer for 22 years. Over that time I've worked for 5 different companies, of varying sizes, the largest having maybe 100 employees.

Not once in all these years was there a single female software engineer working for any of those companies. Not a single one.

Anyway, from the single data point that is my personal experience, female software engineers seem to be about as common as unicorns. Even 12% seems way too high a figure.

I don't know why this is, but I think it's a shame.

I guess I'll wade in here with a perspective. I'm someone who has been violently opposed to any DRM in my music files, and never bought a single track from iTunes in my life. I'm also a Kindle owner who happily buys DRM'd books from Amazon all the time. How can this be?

The difference I guess is how I want to consume the two different types of media. I want to be able to play my music again and again, now, and 20 years from now, in my car, on my media player, on my 4 different PCs, and on my living room stereo. DRM basically makes this impossible, or so convoluted as to be impractical.

OTOH, I only want to read a book once. The only place that I want to read my eBook is on my Kindle. I buy a Kindle book, I read it on the Kindle, and I'm done with it. That fact that it's DRM'd never affects me. I don't care that I can't loan it or resell it later, these are just not big concerns for me. I'm willing to give up those things in exchange for the convenience of a lightweight electronic reader.

I'm also aware that Amazon has no choice, just as Apple had no choice when they first introduced iTunes. The DRM requirement is being driven by the publishers. If Amazon wants to get the big publishers on board today, there must be some kind of copy protection in place to satisfy the dinosaurs. Over time, I suspect this will change, just as it did with iTunes.

Didn't anyone notice the date on the article? It's 10 months old. So this throttling policy isn't "new" at all, it's supposedly been in effect already for almost a year.

I've been a Comcast customer the entire time. I frequently exceed the stated limits and have never noticed any throttling.

Your cables should last forever, don't worry about that. It's the electrons that need periodic replacement. A good rule of thumb is once every 3 months, or every 100 GB, whichever comes first.

The extreme fragility of ePaper displays is still somehow eInk's dirty little secret. They are WAY more fragile than typical laptop LCD screens. The Kindle forums are full of stories from people who have broken the screen while doing various benign things, like resting another book on top of it (while the Kindle was still inside its protective cover no less.) I personally cracked my Kindle screen simply by pressing on it lightly.

Unfortunately the Kindle version costs almost as much as the hardcover edition. F that. I'll pay a price for the eBook that reflects that fact that no trees were cut down, no paper milled or printed, and nothing was boxed and shipped to a distributor and then to Amazon.

In the immortal words of George Carlin... have you ever noticed that anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a MANIAC!

Sadly, I think that you are probably right.