Does this all seem like a mysterious and inescapable result to you?  Fortunately there are settings you can tweak to protect yourself against cyber crimes. The bad news is, if those crimes are perpetrated via Facebook, it’s hard to track them down or to defend against them because Facebook is still a bit of a privacy issue in itself.  Here is an infographic about the issue of Facebook spam and cybercrime:

It’s kind of the same experience we have in a real life falling out:  sometimes, the reason we drop others or they drop us boils down to something said or revealed that was offensive to one or the other party.  There can be hundreds of reasons you unfriend someone or they unfriend you.  Let’s take a look at some of the  most common reasons for these (usually temporary, but sometimes permanent) disassociations.

Google, like any company that invests a lot of money and resources to research and development, has been bold enough to innovate.  Often, the result of innovation is epic failure — and Google has not been immune to that.  Check out some great directv deals so you can watch news channels featuring tech coverage to learn more. In the meantime, enjoy the infographic below:

LED’s are an upgraded version of LCD’s. The way the screen is lit makes LED’s cost almost double when compared to LCD’s or plasma’s.
LCD’s are lit with what are called CCFL’s, or cold cathode fluorescent lamps. These are the thin lamps that produce light for LCD screens. The inside of the lights are coated with phosphor, a material that catches energy and turns it into light, the light that we see on the screen.
LED’s (or light emitting diodes) are different than fluorescent tubes. They use considerably less power and don’t illuminate the parts of your screen that are supposed to be dark. For example, when a scene during a movie needs to be black, the LED’s in that area of the screen cut off. No light leaks through, whether the LED lights are across the entire back display of your TV or around the perimeters. An interesting fact is that LED’s were examined by the Department of Energy, and they estimated that by the year 2027, lighting electricity could be reduced by 33% if more people used them.

There is another simpler reason why folks prefer LED lighting to LCD- the occasional headache and eye irritation that occurs as a result of gazing at fluorescent lights too long. Many people (if they are doing late night studying for example) wear dark sunglasses when staring at their computer screen for extended periods of time. The LCD TV screens have this same type of lighting, which is another reason why the upgraded LED TV’s cost so much more.

Plasma TV can show many colors clearer since the technology is made up of thousands of pixels. Many believe that LCD’s are better for displaying digital photos than for watching television or movies. Because of a plasma’s better color saturation capabilities, they display moving images better, creating a much more enjoyable viewing experience. Plasmas also have screens that are typically larger than LCD’s, which is what attracts a large majority of customers from the beginning. These days people want a mini-theater in their homes, something that the rear projection models could never have offered us in the past.

Plasma’s do have disadvantages, one being burn-ins. This is a static image on your screen that develops over time that burns itself into the display. The truth is plasmas aren’t built to hold a fixed image for long periods. Burn-in’s are caused by video games, TV logos, paused movie scenes, or the title menu on your DVD. Even though this and things like it aren’t usually covered in the TV’s warranty, it’s not enough for the sales of our evolving TV technologies to slow down.

The Internet and social media tools brought individual investors the ability to collaborate on trading strategies and share market predictions. The overall global knowledge base is more available than ever before, and these are all advantages that social media has brought to the table for the individual Forex trader. Social media allowed the development of the infrastructure necessary to accommodate the speculators in their bid to compete with institutional players in the foreign exchange market.

The website onlineeducation.net has designed an infographic that is based on a student technology study. Amusingly, when students abstained from using digital devices for 24 hours, they experienced withdrawal symptoms comparable to those experienced by smokers deprived of cigarettes. Slightly less than 40% of students reported that they could not go more than 10 minutes without using a digital device of some kind. These same students felt that their laptops were more important than their text books, and furthermore, students performed better in classes that used social media by an average of about 5 grade points. The infographic is below.  Click to expand.

The Wall Street Journal predicts that Amazon is going to launch an Android tablet featuring a 9-inch screen that automatically links users to Amazon’s growing stash of media content, including Amazon MP3s and its proprietary Cloud Player, and Amazon Instant Video. Industry watchers expect Amazon’s pricing for this new device to be as low as $250 — or half the price for the current low-end configuration of Apple’s iPad 2.

“If Amazon really does get into the tablet market with a less expensive Android tablet this fall, it will be a game changer.”  said Niema Coltsenburg, analyst for SuperiorTinyThings.

Apparently, consumers outside the narrow group surveyed and polled seem to indicate that a sub-$300 priced tablet, and its being from Amazon.com, would be the deciding factors for them in choosing Amazon’s tablet over the iPad.  Still, many only said they would buy it if were less than $250, while still others were drawn to the mythical and unreleased tablet so long as its pricing falls beneath $400.  This is quite a range of responses.

Apple would need to reconsider its current pricing scheme if these predictions turn out to be true.  It is already well known that the iPad2 costs Apple only about $335 to manufacture, yet the entry level model costs $499 with prices topping out at nearly $900.  The profit margins as you can imagine are huge, but Amazon stands to exceed that owing to it’s more strategic and advantageous position as the world’s leading online retailer for a wide variety of products.

Whether it all turns out to be true is still up for grabs, but Apple CEO Steve Jobs today hinted that the long awaited iPhone 5 will indeed be ready to roll in September along with iOS 5.

“Weed, here in North Carolina anyway, is completely illegal. The job I have requires drug testing sometimes so, that’s the big reason I don’t  smoke the stuff,” said a city municipal worker named Josh Timmons.

He freely admits he’s smoked his share of the real  marijuana in his day, but now he’s smoking nothing but mojo.

“It’s very similar to the high of real marijuana when you’re smoking or vaporizing it,” Timmons said. Vaporizing is a technology that has been in place for several decades.  It’s similar to what asthmatics have to do to inhale their medications, but can be done with marijuana and even mojo.

Timmons said it’s everywhere. “It’s really obvious in the club scenes. You’ve got a lot of people on the dance floors under the flashing lights but basically in the dark with their pipes burning the mojo or their vaporizers huffing it out,” he said.

There are different brands of  this bulk herbal incense that people are vaping and smoking.  Spice was one of the first names by which it was known, and spice gold remains a popular kind. It is so widespread that it’s even sold at some convenience stores and gas stations.  Mojo gives the user a marijuana-like high, but unlike real marijuana, it does not have the classic scent, and nor is is currently detectable on most drug screening tests imposed by employers.  This is in the process of changing, however, as tests have been devised in the past few weeks that can identify the fake week ingredients as well as other drugs that are commonly screened for.  This is going to help law enforcement to crack down on synthetic drugs.

Google’s answer to that was the change in its algorithm that is designed to lower the rankings of sites with articles generated by content farms.  This is great for people in general, who need to be able to find the information they’re searching for –and it’s great for Google, under pressure to keep its search clean and unbiased.

So, who is this bad for?  My belief is, nobody.  Everybody wins when farmed content gets pushed down in the rankings, as long as this change spurs a flurry of good writing and the return of unique an helpful information to the top of the ranks.  The only sites that will suffer because of this are the ones that should suffer – the sites that were created for no other reason than to falsely increase SEO by loading up with nonsensical, keyword-stuffed text.

The process of exactly how this useless data will be eliminated from the first pages of search results is something of a mystery for now, but most experts concur that the changes will take place gradually, and it will be difficult to isolate what drives the pattern.  What most people agree on, however, is that the low quality sites will eventually be weeded out.

Let’s face it, the only blogs that are going to survive this are those that solicit higher quality content.  This is going to take some real effort:  those who don’t write all of their own content will have to become more selective about what ends up on the front page.  If it means ditching the current content writers and recruiting more talent, then that’s what will have to take place, and it’s probably going to cost a little more.  But the potential for payoffs has never been better, and the future is looking bright for bloggers to intend to step up competition with high quality posts.

Not only that, but won’t it be nice to Google ADT and get the results you were really looking for?