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As amazing as this was, this was touch screen technology at its most basic. Things have become a little more exciting since then.

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Moviegoers were extremely impressed in 2002 with the touch screens used to solve future crimes in Minority Report.  But in 2006, Jefferson Y. Han, a research scientist at NYU blew people’s brains apart when he transformed the concept into reality.  During the annual Technology Entertainment Design conference (TED) in California, Jeff introduced multi-touch interface technology to the world.  On a rear projection drafting table equipped with a multi-touch sensor, he demonstrated how users can manipulate what they see on a computer screen using all ten of their fingers at the same time, shifting items around, expanding, compressing, and rotating images, independently of each other or as an entire unit.  The main difference between Han’s technology and Spielberg’s sci-fi interpretation is the fact that we still have to physically touch the screen, whereas Tom Cruise wore gloves equipped with sensors, but rest assured, people are working on that.

He went on to found the company Perceptive Pixel which would produce and distribute the technology to sectors like medical imaging, mapping, broadcasting, defense and  intelligence.  Anyone watching the 2008 presidential elections witnessed the practicality of multi-touch technology as CNN kept viewers up to date using their “Magic Wall.”

In 2008, Microsoft adopted multi-touch technology to transform an ordinary coffee table into a revolutionary super tool.  With the incredible popularity of the iPod, iPhone, and the most recent addition to the i family,the iPad, Apple  already capitalized on the word “touch” when it came to computer interaction.  There were even April fools jokes about an upcoming iTable.  But as computer screens are reaching furniture-esque proportions, and the jokes are becoming ever more real, Microsoft was wise to capture the spirit of the latest technological trends by calling their latest baby: Surface.

Multi-touch technology combined with surface computing is radically transforming our relationship with computers.  Films like Minority Report, The Matrix: Revolutions and District 9 have all included multi touch interfacing in their predictions for the future, a future we are already beginning to experience today.  The way business meetings take place, the way doctors perform surgeries, the way pilots fly planes (or the way anyone operates any vehicle for that matter), the way you scope out an exotic destination for your next family trip, all will eventually shift towards a more vivid, more dimensional, more fingertip-friendly experience.  Kramer’s going to need to add a new chapter to his book about coffee tables!

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In December 2009, your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to, became publicly available information on Facebook. So, when I began my research for this article, I started by looking at my own privacy settings. After a little digging and clicking, I was alarmed by many of the things about me that were made public. How our information gets classified amidst Facebook’s frequent changes can often be very confusing for users and I seemed to be in the dark about my Facebook privacy.

Privacy used to be an opt-out feature on Facebook, which restricted the visibility of a user’s personal information to just their friends and their “network” (college or school). Now, privacy is opt-in, and the default privacy settings for a Facebook user’s personal information have become very permissive. Too permissive if you ask me.

Matt McKeon a developer at IBM Research’s Center for Social Software, created infographics that illustrate the evolution of Facebook privacy from 2005 until now. Just to give you a visual idea of how much Facebook’s privacy policies have vacillated within five years, I have included McKeon’s graphs for 2005 and for 2010. The concentric rings on the graphs show the groups who can see a given slice of information, if you leave the default settings in place.

2005

2010

When You Share (status updates, photos, links, videos etc..) By Default “Everyone” Can See

Carefully go through your Facebook privacy settings because your Facebook information became completely public unless you’ve specified otherwise. And they’re tricky buggers about it too. Even the “Recommended” subsection will suggest that your status, photos, posts, family and relationships, be public to EVERYONE. And by everyone, they mean family, friends, friends of friends and the whole darn Internet.

To actually check your current privacy settings, you have to click on a little, tiny blue “View Settings” link, which is casually thrown into the last sentence of the Basic Directory Information section on the Choose Your Privacy Settings page.

1. View Settings

2. Basic Directory Information Page

Once I was on the Basic Directory Information page I discovered that anyone searching me on the Internet (because by default anyone CAN search me on the Internet) can see my interests, my hometown, my education, work experience, and who my friends are. You can edit these settings as you see fit. You can also enable or disable the Public Search function by going into the Applications and Websites section of the Choose Your Privacy Settings page, clicking the tiny, little blue link that says Edit Your Settings and disabling the Public Search funciton.

1. Choose Your Privacy Settings: Applications and Websites: Edit your settings

2. Application and Websites page: Public Search

While you’re on the Applications and Websites page, you may also want to check what information about YOU is available to applications, games and websites when your friends use them. Your name, profile picture, gender, networks and user ID (along with any other information you’ve set to everyone) is available to friends’ applications unless you turn off platform applications and websites.

Back on the Choose Your Privacy Settings page, you will find another little, tiny blue link that says Customize Settings.

1. Choose Your Privacy Settings page: Customize Settings

2. Customize Settings Page

This will show you all the things you share (posts, family, relationships, birthday, religious and political views etc…), things others share (photos and videos you’re tagged in, your comments on posts, whose wall posts you can see) and your contact information (phone numbers, IM screen name, address…). I found myself again disheartened to discover that Facebook had already preset these options so that anyone can see them. You should go through each and choose whether or not you want everyone, friends of friends or friends only to have access to this information or even customize it so only you can.

PHOTO PRIVACY

You will find the option to edit your photo album privacy in the Customize Settings page. You will find the tiny, little blue Edit Album Privacy link at the bottom of the Things I Share subsection. Click on it, and you will be taken to a new page which contains your profile pictures and all your photo albums.

1. Choose Your Privacy Settings: Customize Settings page: Edit Album Privacy

At this point, I was pretty well fuming from all orifices when I saw that “Everyone” was again used as the default setting and that I had to manually change the settings so that only my friends could see my pictures. Again, I went through every album and set them so that only my friends could view them. I don’t need strangers falling upon my pictures and finding me in my Tootsie Roll costume from last Halloween.

Posting
Before you post a status update, link or anything else, you can click the lock icon to choose who can see it. You can also go into Block lists and edit your lists of blocked people and applications.

1. Choose Your Privacy Settings Page: Block Lists

2. Block Lists page

This section lets you block people from interacting with you or seeing your information on Facebook. You can also specify friends you want to ignore application invites from, and see a list of the specific applications that you’ve blocked from accessing your information and contacting you.

“The Age of Privacy is Over”

For those who want to be searched and found, those who use Facebook for marketing/business purposes, it’s ideal. For those who are using Facebook to stay in touch with family and friends, like I am, having all this personal information floating around on the World Wide Web is an eerie thought which could potentially be very dangerous. Alas, the longer I’ve been on Facebook, the more geared towards advertisers, marketers and businesses it has become. Facebook believes the future will mark an end to privacy. But is Facebook  creating that future for us?

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Entertainment that will get the whole family to Kinect, according to a CNET review “The idea is to integrate Kinect with Microsoft’s entire living room play.”  The Kinect is capable of simultaneously tracking up to six people, including two active players for motion analysis with a feature extraction of 20 joints per player. Users will be able to control Netflix movies and TV shows through their Xbox Live using simple hand gestures and voice commands. With Kinect, you can also video chat with Windows Live Messenger users, and other Xbox 360 users. Twitter, Facebook and Zune applications are also available with the system.

Kinect is compatible with all Xbox 360 consoles. Some of the games available as of now include Dance Central, Joy Ride, a racing game where you control the steering wheel with your hands, and Kinectimals, a game where kids can raise their very own wild animal and take adventures on a magical island. You can even get in shape with Your Shape: Fitness Evolved. Workouts are created for you based on your specific fitness level. You take fitness classes designed by famous trainers-to-the-stars. As you exercise, you receive specific feedback on your every move.

(Watch Kinect, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved:)

How it Works

Kinect uses a 3-D depth camera to capture the movement of your whole body, and goes as precisely as to track joint-motion. Range camera technology, interprets 3D scene information from a continuously-projected infrared pattern. The image sensor reads the light back as code, which is then translated into data that the game console can use.

The one reported drawback of the system is that it is specifically developed to be used standing up. So if you’re snuggled up watching a movie, or want to nestle yourself into the couch to play a video game, gesture control is greatly reduced. Though the Kinect is a great way to get people off their couch, the technology should work as optimally when you’re sitting as it does when you’re standing. This is a feature Microsoft may want to improve on.

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What is Cyberbullying?

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The National Crime Prevention Council defines cyberbullying as “the use of the Internet, cell phones or other devices to send or post, text or images, intended to hurt or embarrass another person.” Almost half of all American teens have been affected by cyberbullying . In a 2004 survey of 1,500 students between grades 4-8, 58% reported that they had not told their parents or an adult about something mean or hurtful that has happened to them online.

One 2010 study by the Cyberbullying Research Center says that one in five middle-school students have been affected by cyberbullying. A study of Internet harassment in Pediatrics found that physical and Internet bullying peaked in 8th grade but declined by 11th grade.

Tweens are most vulnerable because this is when the frequency and intensity of bullying is at its peak. Confidence is at its lowest, the stress to fit-in at its highest. Peer-pressure and fear of social ostracization, may prevent kids from telling adults if they are getting bullied or sexually harassed online. Experts who study cyberbullying say it can be more damaging to victims than traditional bullying. As tweens are prone to be impulsive, they may engage in more risky behaviors, and in some instances cyberbullying has led to fatal outcomes.

Tragedy can be eye-opening

The notorious case of 13-year-old Megan Meier stirred widespread fear about the dangers of cyberbullying. Meir’s hung herself in her closet after being the target of a cruel MySpace hoax orchestrated by the mother of an ex-friend of Meir’s. They were also neighbours. Ryan Halligan, also 13, took his own life after being encouraged to do so by one of his middle-school peers. He was repeatedly sent instant messages from middle school classmates accusing him of being gay on top of being “threatened, taunted and insulted incessantly”.

Dealing with Cyberbullies: A Group Effort

24/7 responsibility for other people’s children is not what teachers and administrators signed on for. Why should students’ behaviour on weekends be a school’s problem? This is the difficult conundrum schools are faced with when trying to figure out how to deal with cyberbullying. Their responsibilities and level of authority are undefined. The processes for handling cyberbullies are still in the trial and error stages. Moreover, the Internet makes it tricky to prove who the culprits really are. (A recent New York Times article provides personal accounts of how schools are grappling with cyber-bullying.)

So far, the California state legislature passed one of the first laws in the country to deal directly with cyberbullying. This law gives school administrators the authority to suspend or expel students who commit cyberbullying. At least 13 states have passed such laws, including Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina and Washington, with other states also considering similar measures.

Laws do make people’s rights against cyberbullying- and the consequences for it, more clear. But every case is particular, and judges find themselves nonplussed when it comes to  issues concerning school searches (can a principal search a cellphone like they would a locker or a backpack?) and the protection of student speech. Some school administrators have also raised concerns about pedophile accusations if they happen to fall upon an indescent sext message on a student’s cell phone.

Solutions

Internet attorney, Christopher Wolfe, states that schools have a responsibility to protect victims of cyberbullying. “You must have some punishment that is on the books in the school regulations, and you must have rules and regulations about appropriate use of Internet tools.” Schools can provide parents and students with a handbook that details their Internet policy. Anti-bullying committees and groups can also provide a safe-place for victims as well as help raise awareness on the dangers of cyberbullying and the importance of digital responsibility.

Subscription services are also available to help parents monitor their child’s activities on social networks. A NYTimes article outlines some of the major ones. You can track all your child’s online activity, some marked as safe, some as potentially dangerous. Other items are explicitly red-flagged, like a Facebook friend who is considerably older, or a posting with a keyword like “kill” or “suicide.” Filtering or blocking software can be used in schools and at home to prevent teens from accessing social networking Web sites. But don’t put it past your teens to find a way to circumvent the blocking software.

Dr. Parry Aftab, an Internet privacy and security lawyer and executive director of WiredSafety, a group that educates about online safety, says the services are no substitute for good parenting techniques, like frequent conversations about Internet activities.

In the eighties, we were living in a material world, now we are living in a virtual one. In this digital age, we are constantly adapting to new technologies which is why some type of consensus and subsequent education on digital responsibility is a good thing for everybody.

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Carbon Tablet

The creator of this carbon fiber touchscreen tablet PC wanted a Windows 7 touchscreen that could play and stream HD content in an HD resolution. The 13.4″ screen has a resolution of 1366 x 768 and is able to playback 720p content and stream most 720p Flash content. According to the inventor’s blog, almost all Netbooks as well as the iPad have screen resolutions less than 720p (1280 x 720) so they cannot truly playback HD video in an HD resolution. The tablet weighs 3.2 lbs and runs on Windows 7 OS. Instead of using the power-hungry Nvidia Ion, the tablet uses the Atom Z530 with the GMA 500 because of its very low power usage and ability to play HD content.

Windows 95 on iPad

Though we can’t say there is much use in running Windows 95 on an iPad it does bring back old memories (good and bad). The developer managed to fit the 15-year-old operating system running a BOCHS emulator (Bochs is a highly portable open source IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++, that runs on most popular platforms).

Windows 7 on JooJoo Tablet

A modder known as “darkdavy” installed Windows 7 on to a JooJoo Tablet. Using only the JooJoo’s stock hardware, he was able to create a device with “flawless” 720p movie playback. He’s also noted that the only major drawbacks are lack of support for the accelerometer and inbuilt 3G modem.

Zuneboy

This mod made me say “Yay!” The Microsoft Zune 120 was put inside the shell of the original Nintendo Gameboy. As one of the comments on YouTube astutely pointed out, “this is the most awesome anti-theft system ever”.

OS Xbox Pro

Will Urbina built his OS Xbox Pro so he could run Final Cut Pro for his job as a video editor. According to Engadget, the machine is based on an EFI-X “hackintosh” dongle, has a 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550s paired with an NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT card, 8GB of RAM, an 16GB SSD, and four traditional hard drives: one each to boot Windows 7 and OS X, and two 500GB 7,200rpm drives in a RAID0 array for video editing.

Xbox 360 Portable

This is one of Ben Heckendorn‘s latest projects. The Xbox 360 Portable (he calls it portable instead of laptop since you probably won’t play it on your lap) has removable standard Xbox 360 hard drive for easy profile/data swapping, internal wi-fi module and no external antenna (the antenna is strung out inside the unit like other consoles/laptops). It has a full-sized hard-drive and memory card ports to easily transfer data.  Of course if you’re looking to manage a high performance environment you’ll need a hosted sharepoint server.    He has used the Gateway 17755 LCD monitor with a resolution of 1280×720.

Suzuki Xbox 360 Concept Car

Image Source: Xbox-Scene.com
Not exactly a mod, but certainly worth a mention is the Suzuki SXBox. It was unveiled at the 2006 San Diego International Auto Show as part of the company’s new “LIVE Series” designed for “life enthusiasts, adventurers and thrill-seekers”. Equipped with a dashboard-integrated Xbox 360 video game console, it has a close proximity digital projection system to display games or watch HD DVD movies on the interior of the vehicle’s retractable hood, which can be enabled by the push of a button.

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I’ll be spending the whole week here, skipping from seminars to workshops, attending award ceremonies and master classes, trotting over from exhibitions to screening, and networking as well. I will keep you posted throughout the week so you can have a taste of what’s hot and trendy along the French Riviera. Au revoir!

Post from: Sherweb Blog

Contacts: Gwabbit
Price: Free (paid version: $9.99/year)

Say goodbye to cutting and pasting contacts one field at a time from your emails into your address book. Gwabbit automatically scans incoming BlackBerry emails, finds contacts, and transforms them into contact records within your address book. This award-winning technology monitors opened emails, and if they include the signature of the sender, the information is sent to the server for processing. The server then returns the results to the client and if a signature is found, the client prompts the user and asks if the user wants to save the contact information. Gwabbit is compatible with current generation BlackBerry devices with 4.2 OS and higher.

Documents: Documents To Go
Price: $49.99

Documents To Go gives users the ability to view, edit and create Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files and attachments as well as view PDF files all on their BlackBerry smartphones. In a recent study conducted by Brighthand, they found that Documents To Go does a significantly better job of handling Word and Excel documents than  a Pocket PC using Pocket Word and Pocket Excel. Documents To Go includes Slideshow To Go, which supports Microsoft PowerPoint presentations (something Microsoft does not offer in its Pocket Office suite).

Management: Maximizer Mobile CRM Software (Blackberry OS 4.6 or higher)
Price: $229

Maximizer ‘s mobile CRM software is simple to use and manage and gives you real-time wireless access to your entire Maximizer CRM database. This means access to all your business accounts, sales deals, notes, leads, sales opportunities, service cases and schedules all while you’re on- the-go. You can monitor the status of your business and team performance with real-time dashboards and reports on your BlackBerry. It can work as a stand-alone CRM program, or with your company’s desktop and browser-based products.

Finances: Expense Manager
Price: $14.99

Expense Manager by Total Wireless Solutions helps you keep track of your daily expenses. It supports multiple accounts and generates customized expense reports which are then transferred by email or saved to a memory card for integration with Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheets. You can set a monthly budget for each account, category and payment method so not only is it helping you track your expenses, it is also an effective budgeting tool.

Sherweb also offers hosted Blackberry services so that businesses of all sizes can synchronize wirelessly to Outlook and get instant access to e-mails, calendars, notes, tasks and contacts, with encrypted technology that secures all information.

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Robots in Hospitals

In the face of a low birth rate and an ever-aging population, Japanese hospitals are rapidly approaching crisis as they simply don’t have enough nurses to deal with the influx of patients.  You would think an obvious solution would be to encourage emigration, inviting foreign workers to alleviate the pressures on the Japanese staff.  You would think.  This is not the case.  The Japanese actually oppose the idea of immigrant doctors and nurses, as they place high value on an ethnically homogeneous society, to the point where their entrance exams for foreigners are so difficult that even Japanese people wouldn’t pass.  Instead they’ve turned their heads towards robots.

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Hiroshi Ishiguro will most likely be the man to call if your hospital decides to “hire” nurse-bots, as his latest lifelike machine, the Geminoid-F, was presented to the world in Osaka this year.  At over $105 000 a pop, the robot’s rubberized face was designed to imitate human facial expressions, “enabling it to pull off subtle gestures that have thus far been impossible to replicate on a robot. Sly grins, angry glares and totally-fake smiles are all possible now.”  These robots will make perfect nurses.

Robots on the Moon

Also based in Osaka, Japan, the Space Oriented Higashiosaka Leading Association (SOHLA) has promised to place bipedal humanoid robots on the moon by 2015.  The prototype robot under development is called “Maido-kun”, and will cost nearly $11 million to complete.  So why are they putting robots on the moon?  To build a moon base of course.  The creation of Maido-kun is part of a $2.2 billion project to construct a base on the south pole of our moon, and is scheduled to be completed by 2020.

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Space robots will also play a crucial role in the Shimizu Corporation’s plans to build a belt of solar cells around the equator of the moon.  Aptly named The Luna Ring, the project aims to transform sunlight into electricity, a process which could potentially solve our planet’s impending energy crisis.  The robots would perform tasks such as ground leveling and assembling machines and equipment.”

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“Shimizu points out that one of the biggest advantages of the Luna Ring is that, since the Moon has virtually no atmosphere, there is no bad weather or clouds that could inhibit the efficiency of the solar panels. As such, the Luna Ring achieves 24/7 continuous clean energy generation, potentially ending our reliance on limited natural resources.” (source)

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Robots in Your Body

Of all the sci-fi movie attempts to predict the future, who would have thought that Inner Space would eventually hit the bullseye. Okay, well maybe not exactly. We still haven’t figured out how to shrink Dennis Quaid down to microscopic proportions, but scientists have created molecule-sized robots that can be safely injected into human beings.

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Nanobots gained massive international attention when they revolutionized the battle against cancer. Then the Japanese invented the “nanobrain”, a central duroquinone molecule which acts as a docking station for many nanobots, a nano-factory if you will, capable of performing over a 1000 tasks at once. Most recently U.S. scientists have created even smaller robots made from DNA, capable of working together in assembly line fashion to actually build things like gold from the molecule level up.

Robots in the Water

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Man in one way or another has made life extremely precarious for many of our underwater creatures.  Industrial fishing aside, entire schools of fish are being wiped out simply by swimming into polluted waters or into giant underwater turbines.  This is why Maurizio Porfiri, a researcher at Polytechnic Institute of New York University is trying to perfect a robot fish, a fish designed to take the head of the class and to lead schools away from danger.

“But first researchers had to recreate realistic swimming mechanisms. Porfiri designed the robot to swim silently, using ionic polymers that respond to electrical stimulation from a battery to drive the fins. This enables the robot to move in a smooth-yet-jerky, darting fashion like regular fish.  Porfiri’s vision is that future robotic fish won’t need batteries at all. Instead, they will harness energy from small eddies and vibrations in the water.” (source)

Researchers at the Osaka City University have also been hard at work designing robot fish.

With devastating amounts of oil pumping into the ocean as we speak, the sooner we can employ these “savior” fish to prevent millions of fish from swimming to their oily deaths the infinitely better. Every level of the food chain is affected by this disaster, from the plants to the people. Let’s hope our robots can stop the leak at the source.

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Sherweb for instance, is one of the few hosting providers to include advanced protection free of charge with every hosted exchange mailbox. Sherweb protects its clients with its free anti-spam and antivirus technology that combines MailChannels Traffic Control with Cloudmark intelligent content filtering technology. Traffic Control reduces spam at the connection layer by up to 98%. Traffic Control also stops spam based on the reputation of email senders, rather than the content of messages. The Cloudmark spam detection engine is also quite innovative in that it relies on the collective intelligence of 180 million reporting sources from the Cloudmark Global Threat Network. This provides an extremely rapid response to new and mutating threats.

Here are some top reviewed anti-spam programs that will ensure the best protection against unwanted SPAM.

SPAMfighter

SPAMfighter ranked #1 out of 10 spam filter products which were reviewed and compared on Top Ten Reviews. A community-based spam filter allows users to blacklist or whitelist incoming emails. This means that if a particular email address or domain is blacklisted by a certain number of members of the SPAM fighting community, it will be banned forever. Some highlights of this software include protection against phishing, identity theft and other types of email fraud, protection of all the email accounts on your PC as well as recognition of spam sent as pictures.

CA Anti-Spam Software

CA Anti-Spam software, (former Qurb Anti-Spam software, which won PC Magazine Editor’s Choice for three years running), works immediately upon installation following a quick download. CA Anti-Spam automatically builds your whitelist of approved senders by scanning your saved/sent email and has tight integration with Outlook and Outlook Express. You can download the free 15 day trial and if you are happy with the software you can buy it for $29.99.

Email Remover

Email Remover connects to your ISP and retrieves mail header information (sender, subject, date, etc…) letting you pick mail you don’t want to receive and deleting it from the mail server. It will optionally run your regular email client when it’s done so that you can transfer and read the mail you do want. Best of all, it’s free.

Cloudmark Desktop

Though mentioned briefly at the beginning, Cloudmark is specifically for Outlook / Outlook Express users, and relies on the collective opinion of over one million+ users. Cloudmark will inconspicuously work away removing unwanted mail from your Inbox. One of the best features about this product is that it will never delete your genuine personal mail by incorrectly classifying it as spam. The Cloudmark networking approach catches phishing hoaxes as well as spam.

ChoiceMail

With ChoiceMail you can accept and reject emails by domain, IP address, or block email from known spam senders. ChoiceMail assumes everything is spam until you grant permission to let it through. You may find the setup process a little long and tedious at first. Once you’re done however, you will find that this is a worthwhile tool. ChoiceMail has some built-in rules but also allows you to create your own. Overall, the program does an excellent job controlling spam using a permission-based method. This product costs $29.95.

Post from: Sherweb Blog

Cell Phones

Our world has been transformed by these little communication devices, to the point that people think nothing of engaging in a cell phone conversation, whether in a bathroom, a bus, a movie, a date or a restaurant. People will even interrupt sex to pick up a cell phone call. Lest us not forget ringtones; the nail-scratches on a chalkboard of mobile technology. It seems the worse the song is, the louder and more prevalent it is too.

Alarm Clocks

Unless your alarm clock is ready to serve you bacon when you wake up (as the ingenious one shown above does), there really isn’t any fair reason for you to have to peel your eyes open and rise from the comforts of your warm and cozy bed.

Bluetooth Headsets

You’re standing in a grocery line when all of a sudden a shrill voice behind you shouts “Hey! What’s up? How are ya?” You nearly skyrocket through the ceiling, dropping all your items when you realize, the person behind you isn’t talking to you nor to themselves, in fact they are speaking into a contraption they insert into their ear that should only be used when driving.

Laptop Batteries

Techies have long known that official battery-life claims are pretty much worthless. After 12 months, that “full 8 hours of battery-life” lasts more like 3-4 hours, (if you’re lucky) and as a few more months go by, you may only have a few minutes before having to plug in. Rechargeable batteries aren’t much better, losing performance with every charge. Then there are the extreme cases of exploding laptops. There have been many reported cases of cells that have overheated and ruptured into flames.

Sealed Batteries

Why should the life of a product be tied to its internal sealed battery life? Products with sealed batteries (e.g. iPod, iTouch, iPhone) are frustrating in that you are not given the option to change your battery for a fresh one when your music dies.

TV

Perhaps more of a love/hate relationship, televisions provide us hours of distraction and entertainment but we are always the first to complain about its capacity to numb and obscure our humanity.

Remote Controls

Even with universal controls, remotes are always getting lost, unless you are prepared to literally wear your remotes (as shown above).

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