Fabroa ICS2O

December 10th was the day to remember the late Nelson Mandela. It was a day to commemorate the life of a great man who fought oppression and racism. Unfortunately a few world leaders had seen the memorial as some kind of a joke. The Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Barack Obama the American president and the British Prime Minister David Cameron took a selfie during the ceremony. I find this behavior to be really disrespectful and rude. There kind of actions should not be done by anyone in any circumstance especially world leaders. I think that all three of these people bring their countries shame by showing the manners of the 2nd grader. I hope that these people clean up their act and properly represent their countries.

Today steams family sharing has become available for everyone. Family sharing allows people in a close vicinity to play most of each other's games. Also while a game is being although there are some exceptions like monthly subscription MMO games. I believe that this is a really good and inspiring concept. This allows siblings and friends who come over to you house to play the same games while only one person owning it. This is giving similar freedom you have in console games where you can play together using one disk. Although this is still early and really buggy, I myself tried to share games with my brother and while his computer found my laptop shows "no other local accounts found". All in all being released so recently I am impressed.

Researchers from University of Hawaii and University of Tokyo have teamed up to get a closer look on how sharks behave. The researchers strapped on a bunch of gadgets to a bunch of different sharks. The gadgets are a combination of a GoPro and a sportsband to monitor and video what sharks do in everyday life. The researchers were able to disprove misconceptions on how the animals move. Before, scientists thought that sharks glided effortlessly through the water, but in reality they actually power swim. The researchers also got some footage of the sharks underwater after jumping to catch a pray. The next step for these researchers is to create an ingestible device to get a better understanding of the sharks diet. They hope that this will help people to stop assuming that sharks only eat human limbs like they do in the movies. After watching the video attached to this article, I found it very interesting to see how the sharks moved around the water and to see what they saw when swimming.

Social media has slowly become part of everyone's daily lives. Whether twitter or facebook, social media has shaped our society and has formed a strong bond between people from all over the world. Social media is so powerful that it has also affected politics in nations. The public has a new way of sharing their voice and opinion to the world in political processes. Thanks to social media, Wendy Davis was able to hold a filibuster for 12 hours voting against abortion clinics. Online viewers of the live stream were able to see when the session ended and when the vote was cast. Clay Shirky, a social media theorist, explained that the idea of the live stream played a role in the legislative process and that this phenomenon is not restricted to just the USA. Other political movements, such as the Arab Spring, and the protests in Turkey have also been influenced by social media. I personally think that social media playing a role in politics is a great idea. It allows people who believe they don't have a voice speak their mind and be heard by other supporters of the cause. Social media is everywhere so it was bound at one point to have an influence on things such as politics.

Apparently Flappy Bird was so iconic that people have and are still making different versions of it, like Flappy Doge, Flappy Bert, and even Fall Out Bird, despite the creator, Dong Nguyen, taking it off the App Store and Google Play because he was guilty over it being an addictive game. This fad resulted in thousands of merchandise and imitations, thereby clearly showing that the majority of people still can not get over this game. How I see it, this obsession of Flappy Bird that has possessed the nation is actually very scary because the end of the aftermath does not seem to be near, and also the overbearing attachment to it may cause a lot of problems in terms of relationships and school success.

In September 2012, the Pakistani government passed an order to ban the access to YouTube because of a single video that slashed their control and decisions for their country. Although I'm pretty sure that there are far more offensive videos shared and posted on that site about other countries, their government has decided to to block everyone in their country from potentially seeing that video and went for drastic measures (surprise, surprise). It is not just YouTube that one country has boycotted, but others have requested content take down on Google as well with the threat of banning all of Google if they do not comply. The act of banning these sites may not be such a big deal, but I see it as placing filters, surveillance, censorship and controlling what people see.

Twitter could potentially change our politics in multiple countries for better or for worse. This article describes how twitter has changed the landscape of voting for a president, party, or prime minister. Many countries have adopted twitter as a means of reaching and interacting with their voters. Some examples could be Barack Obama, who has a group of 100 people working on social media for his campaign. Mr. Pinera, the president of Chile has also made it mandatory for all of his cabinet members to get twitter so everyone can interact. Politicians though, have also abused this system by making either very rude tweets to anti-party members or making bland tweets to not offend anyone (causing less followers towards the party.) I would like to call this e-politics, and I believe it is change towards the better. Expanding into the internet for new voters is a genius idea that all parties should add to their campaign.

The Bitcoin and "Coin" are two different virtual currencies with no intrinsic value, but still give the capability to purchase whatever you want as a consumer. Bitcoin is a digital crypto-currency that is ran over the internet. It runs off of bitcoin miners and traders. The currency "coin" however, still uses your countries own currency. It is a beta-project of a credit card, that can hold all of your cards into one. You can have your debit, visa, and mastercard all on the coin. This simplifies purchasing goods because you only need one card that can do many specific things. This article compares the two types of future currency. After reading this article I believe the "Coin" is a safer and more reliable option. It allows us to use actual tangible money, and this money is non-volatile and regulated by the government unlike Bitcoin which goes through many spikes in prices.

in this article, it is stating that MARVEL opened its vault to offer 15 to comic books to iOS and Android users. Marvel is offering this one-time fee of $0.99, a reduced rate, to access the comics during March as a promotion for he company's activities. Marvel Unlimited users can now download up to 12 comics at a time to their personal libary and enable offline reading for on-the-go access. following the month-long promo, fans can continue their subscription to Marvel unlimited for $9.99 a month or $69 for a basic year plan or $99 for the year long premium, Marvel Unlimited Plus, which gives members additional discounts on Marvel products and a first look at Marvel news. Marvel Unlimited is available in the APP Store and Goggle Play Store.   

In this article, it states that the 2014 Sochi winter Olympics were the most tweeted and most mentioned moments, athletes and sports up to date. The most mentioned sports on twitter in order were ice hockey, curling, and figure skating while the most mentioned sport on Facebook in order was ice hockey, figure skating and bobsleigh. In all, 40 million Olympic-related tweets were sent during the games and 45 million different Facebook users were responsible for a combined 120 million posts, comments and likes on Facebook. twitter did break down the top moments on Twitter of the games was USA's win over Russia in men's ice hockey shootout was 72, 630 TPM  while Facebook created a video that showed the most popular sports in each country each day. Canada was mainly talking about Ice hockey with a little figure skating 

Flappy Bird may be dead but Miley Cyrus is not. Once Flappy Bird died everyone jumped on the bandwagon to develop a similar game. Flying Cyrus has been fifth in the App Store since the death of Flappy Bird but Flying Cyrus may be dead soon to. Miley Cyrus's lawyers have been telling the creators of Flying Cyrus to pull the game down. Talo Games (the creators) do not plan on it anytime soon. As for what will happen we will find out in the future.

Social media and politics, tie together very well. The reason for this is that many candidates use social media websites promote their political campaign. Many different sites allow people to different things such as twitter to give out short messages, and youtube to post short or long videos to promote their campaign. Since most young adults are more on the social media rather that reading the newspaper, will be more aware of the political campaign. Also i believe it would be easier for people in politics to communicate with each other.

"Mobile World Congress on Monday, Zuckerberg delineated some of his plans for moving forward with Internet.org, the initiative led by Facebook to bring Internet connectivity to poor countries around the world.  While Zuckerberg touted the altruistic vision of his company's goal to connect the next one billion people, it's important to note that the project isn't just for the sake of bringing basic services to those that don't have it, but rather bringing millions of additional eyeballs to Facebook and its advertisers.  See Also: Hey Facebook! Connecting The World To The Web Isn't Enough "[We are] making it so that we can increase the amount of up-sells to subscriptions when they're using these basic services," Zuckerberg said in his keynote. "They will come to a link that isn't included in the basic services package; a popup that says, ok if you want to consume this, you have to buy this data plan." Facebook is making a long-term promise to both data carriers and advertisers-Zuckerberg said the next one billion people to attain Internet access will not be as affluent as those already on Facebook, thus making it harder to monetize the company's services. Zuckerberg said the social network will subsidize Facebook, Messenger, and other services like weather or basic news and information, and then provide up-sells in applications to deliver the whole package-like a gateway drug. Those up-sells are where carriers and Facebook make money. "The reason why they're not on [the Internet] is they don't know why they would want to get access to it," Zuckerberg said. "[We will show] people why it's rational and good for them to spend the limited money that they have on the Internet." How WhatsApp Fits Into Internet.org Facebook recently spent $19 billion to acquire the mobile messaging application WhatsApp, an application Zuckerberg claims will be one of the few services to amass a billion users in the future. He claimed that, by it

i chose to talk about Siri because i think Siri is a very useful tool. Siri helps me personally and makes not just me but my parent's lives easier to, for example when my parents are driving and the law is you can't use your phone and drive at the same time, Siri helps making a phone call with no hands. Siri also helps you get information more easily, all you have to do is tell Siri what you need and it will search and find the info for you. i also think Siri is good because you can take notes and save contacts more easily for example you tell Siri to make a note it will record what you say and add it to to your notes. This is why i think Siri is a great creation and it makes peoples lives way easier.

This article tells us that people that have maxed out their memory from photos, videos and apps, are now able to purchase a 128GB microSD. SanDisk has said that the card will use faster read and write speed. they also said that they will be updating the memory on the Zone app for android, with adding an additional feature OptiMem, this will allow automatic transfers of older photos and videos to a microSD card. But OptiMem will monitor users. i think that the automatic transfer and monitoring is a good feature because it will save time transferring photos and videos to a SD card, because you will not have to transfer the photos to your computer than to the card. The monitoring is also good because it will inform whenever internal memory falls below predefined threshold, SanDisk said.

Who doesn't know about the very popular video game: Legend of Zelda. If you don't, you are not a gamer. This was probably one of my favorite games growing up as a kid. P

IoSafe

The future is now, and that future is wearable tech. Yet another big player has announced its release date of its 'smart watch', and this time its time for the gaming crowd to be excited. Sony has just announced the release time of their new wearable tech, the SmartBand SWR10, and (in a rare instance), both athletes and smartphone geeks have something to look forward to. The SmartBand is a sleek wrist bracelet that offers features for athletes, Xperia users, and pretty much everyone else with its three major features. The band acts as notifier for phone activity, as well as having non-tech applications, namely various kinds of health monitoring, and something called Lifelog (basically just a facebook feed of your phone... which you can already do with facebook) .While it is good to see a new player enter the smartwatch arena, nothing in this release is new, I would argue the main selling point may be its selling point; price that is. All of the bands features have been done before or can be accomplished by separate 3rd party applications, and you gain nothing by collapsing them to one item. Save its rumoured cheap price of $150, the SmartBand is nothing special, nothing new.

Yota Devices is a smart phone phone company, based in Russia that is making waves in the cell phone community with their innovations in smart phone hardware. The yotaphone was released last year in asia and europe and quickly made a name for itself by offering not only staple specs we have come to expect, but also innovation for the screen. Its front screen operates as anyone would guess, so the real area the phone stands out in is shown when flipped over. The back screen is a low-power e-ink display that in the phones first incarnation was mainly used for display and lacked touchscreen capabilities. Now, however, in the yotaphones upcoming successor: the screen has made the jump to a full touch panel, allowing it be used to answer calls, receive and dismiss notifications and be used to play games that don't require the flashy capabilities of the front screen. This kind of innovation in cellphone technology is of paramount importance and the biggest step forward since the original iphone. The potential is amazing, allowing for new software to utilize the second screen, and making cellphones even more accessible and useful to the smartphone community.

Gigabyte has recently released yet another amazing graphics card. This time it is the ever so popular GTX 780 Ti. The 780 Ti is currently the highest end video card, featuring the absolute best performance, and a budged of which is going to require another wallet. However, this non-reference card (not stock design) features the best a 780 Ti can offer. With it's new super popular windforce cooler, custom PCB (Motherboard) and highest stock clock (speed) of any 780 Ti, this Gigabyte windforce card will surely many the eyes of any enthusiast shine. Capable of an insane stable overclock of 1203GHz this card smashes its competition. It is truly the best of the best, and with a price tag of $810, if your wallet can afford it, you will surely not come across anything better.