Geekly Update - 21 March 2012

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

"Friends without benefits..." The Pierce County, Washington Sheriff's Department filed bigamy charges against corrections officer Alan O'Neill, after his Facebook activity revealed that he was married to two women.

Netflix Just for Kids became available on the Wii last August. Now those with a PlayStation 3 can turn their kids loose on the service that offers G rated movies and TV shows.

"I read it on Wikipedia, so it must be true." In a nod to the digital juggernaut, Encyclopaedia Britannica will no longer be available in print. First made digital in the 80's, the online version will continue to serve over 100 million users with a website and an app for the iPad/iPhone/touch.

"LOL!" A 45-year-old woman fell into Lake Michigan, apparently because she was texting while walking on the pier.

If you plan to sell your old iPad to help offset the cost of a new one, Amazon is offering a gift card as compensation. If your first generation iPad (16 GB) is in excellent shape, you can expect it to be worth about $240, while a similar iPad 2 can be worth up to $365. (Cough... buyakindlefire, cough...)

Those ads portraying Siri as super-responsive triggered Frank Fazzio to sue Apple for negligent misrepresentation. The suit filed in the U.S. District Court of Northern California claims that current advertising is misleading, false and reasonably likely to deceive. "Duh... isn't that the whole POINT of advertising?"

"It didn't pass the sniff test." Originally designed as the project 'Underheard in NY,' ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty equipped homeless people with 4G WiFi devices in Austin, Texas that offered 15 minutes of internet access for two dollars. The project was widely criticized by non-homeless people.

"What are we talking about here???" Strategy Analytics reports that males prefer smartphones with larger screens, for browsing, watching videos and gaming. They also found that females would settle for smaller screens but, prefer them to be thinner and lighter.

Good news for comic book and graphic novel fans. Barnes & Noble is making its Nook Comics more accessible to all with an Android 3.1 update on Google Play that now includes Dark Horse digital graphic novels, manga and, beginning in June, free digital copies of Marvel comics for those who purchase them in paper for $3.99.

Mozilla released the finalized Firefox 11 browser. New features include Chrome transfer support, add-on synchronization and faster page loading. The ability to consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM remains in place.