Tech & society

If you're the kind of person who likes to waste their iPhone battery by mindlessly tapping the screen over...and over...and over again, then I cannot think of a better way for you to do that but with StuckPixel's The Button-- A Social Experiment. It's everything you'd want in a game--social features, leaderboards, etc.-- except without any of that annoying "gameplay" stuff.

Apple's App Store lately bears a curious resemblance to the American book trade of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. At the time, Congress hadn't gotten around yet to settling copyright law. Often, printers would poach each other's works. Royalties existed in theory rather than practice. Writers, as always, were routinely cheated of their earnings. Noah Webster, the dictionary man, fought for years against publishers who made a fortune on his Blue Back Spellers while he struggled to eke out a living.

Remember when a phone was just a phone? You'd no more give thought to its operating system than you would to the one that your microwave oven ran. Boy, have times changed.