If so, you’re not alone. Some 61% of people feel addicted to the Internet and are unable to quit browsing, according to an informal survey.

Opinion pollster SodaHead surveyed 602 visitors to its site Feb. 16. about whether they experience Internet addiction, and found that many people are self-diagnosed addicts.

Women experience addiction more than men, with 64% of women compared with 55% of men reporting the symptoms of addiction.

Interestingly, respondents addicted to other behaviors were less likely to be addicted to the Internet. Only 48% of smokers, compared with 65% of non-smokers, experience addiction. The margin between drinkers and non-drinkers was narrower, with 57% of drinkers and 64% of non-drinkers describing themselves as Internet addicts.

SEE ALSO: Afraid of Losing Your Phone? You May Have Nomophobia, Like Half the Population

Among respondents who felt addicted, teenagers between 13 and 17 were worst off, with 73% reporting addiction. As respondents get older, they reported subsequently less addiction, with the exception of those 65 and over, who feel more addicted than their counterparts between 45 and 64.

The poll found that the Internet users who spend the most time online were the least likely to be Internet addicts. Those between 45 and 54, on average, spend the most time each week online, reporting almost 40 hours of browsing each week. Teens, who feel the most addicted spend the least amount of time online, reporting only 22.3 hours per week of use.

Do you consider yourself an Internet addict? How many hours do you spend online each week? Let us know in the comments.

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, alex-mit

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Peter Gentenaar isn’t any ordinary paper artist. He creates extraordinarily beautiful paper sculptures that have an ethereal quality to them. His exhibition at the abbey church of Saint-Riquier church in northern France proves this point. It’s where he hung more than a 100 paper sculptures in the church’s grand halls. (What a perfect backdrop.)

See more at My Modern Met.

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However, other times a work is created with the initial blessing of copyright, makes its mark on the public, then becomes effectively censored down the line due to licensing restrictions (see: The Wonder Years, Werewolf). This is much more culturally pernicious because it deprives the public of a work already in its lexicon, and the sense of loss is far more palpable as a result. Often, the only way to get the work back in the public’s hands is to perform triage, excise the no-longer-licensed content, and try to be happy with a bastardized version of the work (see: WKRP in Cincinnati, The State).

What’s interesting, however, is how we’ve seen the Internet step up to effectuate cultural preservation, when copyright law stands in the way. I recently picked up a DVD collection of Daria, one of the last good things MTV ever produced. The show had an immense impact on my childhood, in no small part because of how it helped frame pop culture for me with its liberal use of MTV-placed contemporary music, and I was incredibly excited to relive that experience. When I opened up the DVD case, however, I was greeted with the following message:

For those who can’t see the note, it says in the pertinent part:

“So let’s answer the big question right away: 99 percent of the music has been changed, because the cost of licensing the many music bites we used would have made it impossible to release the collection (and for many years did). So no, these aren’t the shows as aired, but more like one of those astronauts in a TWILIGHT ZONE episode who returns from space and his wife can’t figure out what’s changed about him, until it slowly dawns on her that instead of a cool song from 1997 playing when he walks into the room, it’s some tune she’s never heard. Yeah, it’s just like that.”

Needless to say, I was disappointed. As I Googled around for more information, I could see many other fans of the series felt the same, opining that, “when I watch the show without proper music it feels as though one of the main characters is missing,” and “even to those who say they didn’t pay much attention to the music, I think you’ll still sense an absence.” Then I stumbled across something else entirely. Something called “The Daria Restoration Project.”

Essentially, certain Daria fans had taken to combining the high-quality video and spoken audio of the official DVDs with the music that accompanied the original broadcasts, either sourced from old television recordings or by manually inserting the pertinent songs. They’re doing their best to preserve the fidelity of a major piece of culture that is currently only legally available to the public in crippled form.

And of course, their curating efforts are 100% illegal, punishable by hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in fines.

To be sure, copyright owners are supposed to be able to control how their works are used to create new works outside the bounds of ideas and fair use (though we don’t always get that right). However, allowing copyright licensing to prevent the public from accessing the proper versions of culturally-significant media, after their creation and initial publication has already been sanctioned, almost smacks of a marketplace parallel to the European “right of withdrawal.” It not only presents a huge hurdle to the preservation of certain works, but robs the public of the value they placed in that media while it was available to them.

While the Internet is not nearly as “lawless” as many would like us to believe, there are certainly pockets of it where the traditional rule of law is less readily applied. And though this poses a challenge to society in some aspects, there is also undoubted utility in having these pockets able to function in the interest of the public, the proper beneficiaries of copyright law, when the legal state of play so radically conflicts with that interest. As a law student, I’m not happy when I see pirates doing a better job than copyright owners at preserving and spreading culture; after all, the Supreme Court recently noted in its Golan decision that copyright law can serve its core purpose not only by incentivizing the creation of works, but the dissemination of them as well. Yet here we see copyright hurdles completely inhibiting the proper dissemination of legally-created works through economic censorship.

Well, as John Gilmore once said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” So until copyright law manages to untangle itself and properly serve its own fundamental purpose, I’m glad we can rely on pirates to do its job for it.

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The tech IPO market is not going to come roaring back to life, says BI Intelligence analyst Alex Cocotas.

This is the new normal for tech IPOs. We have a few dozen each year, but even in a hot market like this one, we won’t crack 50 in a year.

The reason? Alternative investment options like private equity and private markets have opened up, making the public markets less needed. And, for smaller companies, the high cost of an IPO has made it a less attractive option.

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Retickr is a simple app, when open, a news ticker bar displays and scrolls headlines across your desktop. You can control what types of news you see, specify RSS feeds from Google Reader, and control the speed of ticker. You can also allow the ticker to stay on top of all other windows (which can be distracting unless you have a large screen) or you can hid the ticker when you minimize the app.

The colors, orange, black, and navy can be a bit jarring and the app had a hard time pulling the correct thumbnails and titles of the blogs I follow in Google Reader. It seems Retickr works better with the already-available news sources you can choose from when you set it up.

Retickr’s team, co-founders Travis Truett, Brian Trautschold, Adam Haney, and Jared Houghton bootstrapped the business before raising $150,000 in seed money in 2011. The first version of the app was released in August 2011 and faced some mixed reviews from Apple users on the App Store, saying it negatively affected battery life. The company spent the last six months working on improving the app and released 2.0 today.

A search of the Mac App Store reveals that there aren’t many other apps that do what Retickr does. News Ticker for Mac comes close, but just scrolls headlines across your desktop, and it costs 99 cents (Retickr is free for the foreseeable future). No such extension is available for Chrome, and the closest match for Firefox is RSS Ticker, an add-on that displays headlines from your bookmarked sites in your bookmark toolbar.

Now, the company has raised a first round of institutional funding from the same venture capital firm the gave it its seed round, a small incubator in Tennessee called Lamp Post Group. Retickr hopes to use the money to improve upon its product and expand its team.

Retickr is based in Chattanooga, Tennessee and has a team of six employees. It has raised a total of around $1.65 million in funding.

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Google’s augmented reality eyeglasses are going to include a camera and information pulled from Google’s location-based services, like Maps and Latitude.

Nick Bilton at the New York Times uncovered some new information about the glasses, which were first reported by 9to5Google.

The basic idea is that people will wear the glasses to see a computerized overlay on the world around them — just like the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in The Terminator movies.

Here’s what’s new, according to Bilton’s report.

They’ll cost about the same as a smartphone.

A built-in low-resolution camera will look at what the user is seeing, and overlay information about buildings and nearby friends. Google wants to make sure that customers — and the people being watched — are aware of the privacy implications of this.

It’s being led by Steve Lee, who created Google Latitude, a service that lets Google users check in to locations and keep track of other Latitude users on a map (with everybody’s permission, of course). That service never really took off, and at last year’s Google I/O conference it was pushing Foursquare instead. Sergey Brin is also leading the project, as has been previously reported.

It’s just an experiment, and Google isn’t really thinking of ways to make money from it.

All in all, Project X sounds a lot like what Google Labs used to be — a catch-all for kind of weird and ambitious projects that might someday become actual commercial products. Google shut down Labs earlier this year as part of Larry Page’s streamlining effort.

See also: Sergey Brin Has A Beard!

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In case you haven’t seen it yet, the fourth episode of Kirby Ferguson’s “Everything is a Remix” series went live in mid-February on Ferguson’s site. As in the previous three episodes in the series, Ferguson examines modern attitudes toward “intellectual property” and how these attitudes rather counterintuitively stifle creativity rather than fostering it.

Part 4 of “Everything is a Remix” deals largely with the contentious subject of software patents, a subject we’ve covered many times here at TUAW. According to Ferguson, 62 percent of all patent lawsuits are now over software patents, and he estimates the total wealth “lost” (read: siphoned off from “infringing” companies and individuals towards patent holders and their lawyers) at half a trillion dollars.

Apple has found itself on both sides of the software patent trench warfare, as both target and aggressor. Ferguson makes it pretty obvious that Apple is just as guilty of hypocrisy as everyone else when it comes to software patents; he points out that Steve Jobs from 1996 proudly stated “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas,” while Steve Jobs from 2010 said he was going to “destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product” and was “willing to go thermonuclear war” on Google and its allegedly copycat product.

As Ferguson points out, “When we copy, we justify it. When others copy, we vilify it. Most of us have no problem with copying as long as we’re the ones doing it.”

The question remains, however, where to draw the line between copying as a necessary portion of innovation and copying as an admission of a failure to innovate. Some might say all Samsung has done with its many riffs on Apple’s products is “remix” the iPad and iPhone, but even after viewing Ferguson’s series I’m not wholly convinced of that.

On the other hand, Apple itself has long been accused of “copying” innovations at Xerox PARC for the first Mac OS — something Ferguson himself addressed in an earlier episode of his series — so the demarcation between “remix” and “shameless knockoff” isn’t always easy to find.

Ferguson’s entire series is very well put together, and is itself only possible because of the very “remixing” he discusses. If you haven’t caught the earlier episodes, I’d highly recommend setting aside an hour to watch all four parts back-to-back.

‘Everything is a Remix’ examines software patents originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Those of us who can barely sketch a stick figure family stare in awe when we see a talented artist at work. But this clip is even more engrossing since the camera has been locked to the artist’s tools. More »

Sony makes a patent move for Kinect style controller originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The price of advertising on Facebook could more than double once the Olympics starts in July, if history is any guide.

This chart (below), put together by TBG Digital, shows what happened to the cost-per-click to advertisers who bought space on Facebook before and after the start of the World Cup in 2010—a four-yearly sports event that draws a similar global audience.

The World Cup started on June 11. On the same day, Facebook’s CPC to advertisers jumped to just under $1. A couple of days earlier it languished at about 50 cents. The price plateaued at 60 cents (a 20 percent price hike) for the remainder of the World Cup. The red line is the global CPC, the green line is the U.S.-only price. The data is based on 48 billion impressions served.

TBG Digital is an agency that specializes in placing and serving Facebook advertising.

SEE ALSO:
All The World’s Countries Ranked By Facebook Ad Prices
Zynga Sees Limits To Growth: Sales Flatten As Marketing Costs Double
How The iPad Kicks Kindle’s Butt When It Comes To Ad Traffic

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Zynga Sees Limits To Growth: Sales Flatten As Marketing Costs DoubleAll The World’s Countries Ranked By How Expensive It Is To Advertise There On FacebookSOURCES: Zynga Is About To Lose Its Global Director Of Brand Advertising