A new Android device is released almost every month from major manufacturers, often leaving consumers with severe cases of buyer’s remorse. Some manufacturers have at least promised to slow down when it comes to releasing smartphones in the future, but mobile technology advances too quickly to sit idle for very long.

Lastly, each carrier and manufacturer is looking to out-do the competition. Rather than marketing devices and services with competitive pricing, these companies fill handsets with unnecessary bloatware and custom user interface skins. The skins are supposed to “enhance” a user’s experience but more often then not, they lead to incompatibilities, error messages, forced closures, poor battery performance and lag.

What happens when the world’s largest advertising business tries to sell productivity software on the side? Beware the Googlighting Stranger. Learn more at http://WhyMicrosoftProductivity.com

Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society. By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness. He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses – which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.

Here’s a great example of a Storify done by one of my writing students that covered yesterday’s March Against Hate at Bridgewater State University, and here’s a not so great Storify done by a reporter covering the same event.

Two shifts (one full day) can produce 300,000 iPad camera modules.

325 people assemble one iPad, taking five days to do it.

10,000 unibody iPad shells can be produced per hour

One person cleans the burrs from these shells by hand, 3,000 per shift

Each shift lasts 12 hours, with two hour-long meal breaks

An average meal costs a worker 70 cents

Workers take a siesta back on the line before returning to work

Workers live in dorms, eight to a room

There are lots of extra-curricular activities, including sports and study (the language lab is stocked with iMacs)

iPhone takes 24 hours to be built.

Of that 6 to 8 hours is spent in “burn-in” to install and test the software and components automatically.

In the ABC report the wage of workers on the line is given as $1.78/hr. 17 hours of labor input would imply $30 labor cost per iPhone.

I’m Robert Scoble, and what I’m about to tell you has not be approved by anyone else

A Macworld article on Mail in Mountain Lion says that RSS reading has been removed from both Mail and Safari.
Obviously that could change — but there’s a good chance it won’t.

The media offer presidents great opportunities to get the message out. But the media also suck the mystery and aura out of the presidency. It’s hard to imagine now, as presidential historian Michael Beschloss reminds us, but when JFK addressed the country during the Cuban missile crisis, the networks went back to normal programming. That meant there was no media mediation, no talking-head commentary interposing itself between the public and the president. Americans were left to come to terms with the president and his words, by themselves.

Mr. Li bought 2.5 kilos of walnut from a street vendor in Zhengzhou city, Henan province on February 15. After he got home and cracked open some of them, he found that inside walnuts were broken concrete chunks. In order to reap more profit, vendors cracked open walnuts that have a thin husk, took out the nutmeat, put concrete nuggets inside and seal the husk with glue. To prevent the concrete nugget from knocking on the husk and making noises, the counterfeiters wrapped it with paper.