..and then you copy the key and have free random parcels forever?

That is the essence of a traditional business death-spiral.

Not my post, but dial-a-bus services existed in the 1980s. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dial-a-bus

and they break guitars.

Remedial math, elementary statistics, and basic algebra are not typically filter courses. In a university context most students who choose to take those courses should be passing.

And that's where everything goes wrong. You know, under "normal and expected conditions" there isn't any dogshit on the sidewalk, but guess what?

Unless of course they're busy with whatever else they do under "normal and expected conditions." Switching attention takes time---there's a reason why sprinters are not chatting on the phone right up until they hear the starting gun.

There's no doubt the tech-industry could use a lot less pimply-teenage-boy-ism. But in this case, no: firing Richards is about on par. If you TFA you'll find she made jokes herself, on twitter (not even an overheard private conversation), about stuffing socks down pants in TSA pat-downs. That's pretty much exactly in the same stratum as the jokes she was complaining about---both childish and sex-related, neither sexist. If one is worth firing, then so is the other (although both firings are over-reactions, to put it mildly).

No, it's not. People accepted physical book prices because they had no way to print them as nicely (yes, that does include the hard/soft-cover, dust-jacket, as well as actual binding, however shitty the glue-binding of current books), and they were willing to attribute some costs to transportation, shelf-stocking/presence, staff in the stores, and so forth. That was made books of value to your average consumer. E-books take that *all* away. The only thing left is a piddly bandwidth cost, and hard to quantify-or-appreciate, mysterious marketing/administration/editing costs. Whether that was actually the bulk of the cost or not doesn't matter---the price of actually printing a book is not the important part here, it's the perception of the price of a printed book. A physical object still seems inherently more valuable than a license to read a book on a device you have to buy separately.

Publishers can whine all they want about how little the physical book costs and how much of the publication cost is really all the other things, but all that does is inform consumers that publishers have been ripping them off for years.

Yes, it's a double-edged sword. On one hand, snooping on what you search for by intermediaries is a bit harder, but on the other hand attributing a specific search to you is now just a bit easier.

anything connected somehow is trackable somehow and eventually will be.

...unless you're clever, like Ronald McDonald or Colonel Sanders, the real identities of which are still mysteries.

Most presenters are not great comedians and should avoid that pattern.

No, the controversy is in how to maximize patient disgust for the technique. It's ok though, I think they found the ideal solution:

As the subject says. It should be http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0047018#