Oct 20, 2013

iPhone user hates iOS 7 so much that he’s suing Apple over it

iPhone user hates iOS 7 so much that he’s suing Apple over itBrighter colors and flat icons just aren’t for everybody. That said, it seems that iPhone user Mark Menacher hates them much more than anyone else. CNET reports that Menacher has actually filed a suit against Apple in small claims court and is asking the company to let him remove the iOS 7 install file from his iOS devices. Menacher is particularly irked that the upgrade to iOS 7 happened automatically and that he has no way of going back to iOS 6.
“Apple’s disregard for customer preferences in relation to iOS7 is corporate thuggery,” he explained. “Steve Jobs was reportedly rough on company employees in pursuit of happy customers, but Tim Cook apparently cultivates a culture of contempt for customer satisfaction in pursuit of corporate profits. It is a policy that will eventually fail.”
It’s true that iOS 7 can be rather jarring for some longtime iPhone and iPad users when they first install it although many have gotten used to it after using it for a few weeks. For Menacher and those like him, however, it seems that nothing short of a return to the skeuomorphism of old will do.

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Teenager Sells App For $40 Million And Why You Should Care

Yes, this is the kid who made 40 million bucks with an app that summarized things.
Teenager Sells App For $40 Million And Why You Should Care image summly creator nick daloisio1A few months ago an 18 year old kid from England, sold his app for 40 million dollars to Yahoo. Which makes me ask: How many young people do you know that have projects like his? Creating a website? Starting their own blog? Creating an app? (this 12 year old did). Online staffing firm oDesk.com recently surveyed their users on their views of being an employee in the workplace.
  • 72 percent of users at “regular jobs” responded with saying they wanted to be entirely independent.
  • 58 percent identified themselves as entrepreneurs.
The fact of the matter is, everyone is/wants to be an entrepreneur now. The internet changed everything and it now costs virtually nothing to set up a business.
Want to open an online store? Cool. Snap a few pics on your iPhone, open a shopify account, link your Paypal and you could be making those extra bucks to pay off those pesty college loans within a few hours. The consequences are tiny. In fact these days we’re raised with the notion that failing is a good thing. The scarce job market and uncertain economy encourages our generation to do just that bit extra for themselves.
Cloud based devices are changing the way we work. 63% of millenials have smartphone and as a result, we have the opportunity to work with live, real-time collaborative data everywhere we go. Tools like Google Drive and Dropbox allow you to do just that. We can write documents, post a twitter update and have skype calls… all while sitting butt-naked on the toilet with an iPhone. This generation expects the same freedom with their job in the workplace (although maybe not on the office toilet).
Teenager Sells App For $40 Million And Why You Should Care image guy on ipad1Teenager Sells App For $40 Million And Why You Should Care
My message as a member of this new breed to you Generation X’ers, Baby boomers and C-level execs that are working with, or will begin working with millenials in the near future, is to recognize the changes that are happening. Understand these changes and take full advantage so you can attract and keep the very best people on your team.
Give them more independence. For crying out loud, we spend more time alone with the internet than we do talking to people. If you want the best out of them, Let them be entrepreneurial. Let them take some initiative and they’ll reward you for it.

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How the man who inspired 'Memento' changed our understanding of memory

Brain drawing (Wikimedia)
Henry Gustave Molaison was a man who couldn't make memories. Better known to neuroscientists as "HM", the late Molaison suffered from seizures as a young man and struggled to lead a normal life, but things took a dramatic shift after he received a lobotomy in August 1953. Doctors removed large chunks of HM's temporal lobes and most of his hippocampus, on the assumption that these regions were responsible for the patient's neurological problems. The operation did cure HM's seizures, but it left him in a unique case of anterograde amnesia; he could remember his childhood and his personality remained unchanged, but he could not form new memories.
As Steven Shapin writes in a piece for the New Yorker this week, the operation left HM in a constant state of discovery and confusion, but it also gave scientists remarkable new insight into how the brain processes and stores memory.
"The operation could not have been better designed if the intent had been to create a new kind of experimental object that showed where in the brain memory lived," Shapin writes. "Molaison gave scientists a way to map cognitive functions onto brain structures. It became possible to subdivide memory into different types and to locate their cerebral Zip Codes."

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Google’s Kurzweil details his intricate plan for cheating death

Google’s Kurzweil details his intricate plan for cheating deathAs we’ve noted before, Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil devotes a lot of his life to postponing death. Kurzweil, the brilliant 65-year-old inventor and futurist, is dead-set on living long enough to be immortal, although getting himself to that point has proven to be a lot of work in and of itself. In an interview with Maclean’s, Kurzweil reveals how he’s built himself a “bridge” to immortality by making sure his body holds together long enough for life-lengthening technology to really mature.
“In the last two health books I co-wrote, we talk about a bridge to a bridge to a bridge,” he explains “I can never say, ‘I’ve done it, I’ve lived forever,’ because it’s never forever. We’re really talking about being on a path that will get us to the next point. People sometimes ask me, ‘You take a lot of supplements. Do you really think it will make you live hundreds of years?’”
At this point, the Maclean’s interviewer asked Kurzweil how many supplements he takes a day and he replied “about 150.” Kurzweil says that all these supplements are keeping his body healthy enough for him to reach his ultimate goal of living long enough to reach the “nanotech revolution.” At this point Kurzweil says “we can have little robots, sometimes called nanobots, that augment your immune system” and can “be reprogrammed to deal with new pathogens.”
It should be noted that Kurzweil has also predicted in the past that by the late 2020s, we’ll be able to eat as much junk food as we want because we’ll all have nanobots injected into our bodies that will provide us with all the proper nutrients we need while also eliminating all the excess fat we’ll gain.

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Randi Zuckerberg Wants to Teach Children Not to Use Facebook So Much

Marketing Consultant Randi Zuckerberg attends the grand opening celebration of the world's first Nobu Hotel Restaurant and Lounge Caesars Palace on April 28, 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada. There might be some awkward moments around the Zuckerberg family Thanksgiving table this year. Because Randi Zuckerberg, thekaraoke-singingreality-show-producing sister of Facebook CEO Mark, is coming out with a children's book that amounts to a passive-aggressive swipe at the obsessive social-media culture her brother's company helped create.
Randi's book Dot, which goes on sale on November 5, is about a little girl named Dot who can't stop fidgeting with her phone. "Dot loves technology. A LOT. She’s obsessed with her devices (sound familiar?), but with a little push, she’s reminded that life’s a little bit richer when you look up from the screen," Randi writes on her blog.
If it sounds odd that the sister of an Internet mogul whose goal is turning the world into a bunch of Facebook-using smartphone addicts would write a children's book that urges people to put down their phones and experience real life, well, it is. It would be like Mario Batali's sister writing a low-carb cookbook.
Luckily, Randi has also written a book for adults, Dot Complicated, which is coming out at the same time as DotDot Complicated is less a tale about device addiction as it is a memoir — a "personal and professional story with a fresh guide to understanding technology and how it influences and informs our lives online and off," according to the book's website. So she's not totally out of the Zucker-fold.
Still, just to keep her family allegiances intact, she may want to think about writing a sequel to Dot, in which Dot, cut off from the world around her by her parents' draconian no-Facebook rules, is thrust into a depressing spiral of social isolation, and is saved only when a good Samaritan pulls her from her home, Harry Potter–style, and restores her access to Graph Search, enabling her to partake once more in the world's glorious open exchange of personal information.

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