About a year ago, Tor Books, the highly regarded publisher of science fiction and fantasy, announced that they were dropping digital-rights-management protection on all of their ebooks. Now, Julie Crisp of Tor UK has revealed what that decision has meant in terms of ebook piracy: “As it is, we’ve seen no discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles, despite them being DRM-free for nearly a year.” (This, of course, is no surprise to us: we have been publishing our Take Control ebook DRM-free for nearly ten years, with exactly the same results.) Equally heartening to Tor is how much support their authors have for the DRM-free policy.

Ewan Birney and Nick Goldman, two scientists from the European Bioinformatics Institute, have worked out a system to encode text, audio, and other data in DNA. Teaming up with Aligent Technologies, the two encoded all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, an audio clip of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking, and a photograph into a synthesized DNA sample. Though Aligent did the DNA synthesizing work for free, the cost of the DNA synthesis is estimated to have been roughly $12,400 per megabyte. Luckily, prices for DNA synthesis are dropping, and it is estimated that 50 billion megabytes of text, roughly equivalent to everything ever written by humans, could be encoded into a sample that would weigh less than “a granola bar.” This takes the idea of cloning your data to an entirely new level.

On 6 October 1997, Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell Inc., when asked how he would fix the then-struggling Apple Computer, told an audience at the Gartner Symposium that, were he in charge at Apple, he would “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Today, Bloomberg reports that Dell is said to be in buyout talks with private equity firms. Meanwhile, the once-beleaguered Apple has something in the neighborhood of $123 billion in cash and securities on hand, according to its last financial statement.

An “art project to explore distances and heroism in user interface design” from masswerk.at offers a Google search interface as it might have appeared in the days of punch cards and line printers. Between the sound effects and the artfully rendered skeuomorphic interface, you’ll be sweeping chad off the floor.