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Douglas Engelbart died this week. But his most iconic idea lives on.

The venerable computer mouse, originally prototyped as a pine box with three buttons and metal wheels, was dreamed up by Englebart fifty years ago.

The mouse has been upgraded and re-envisioned — for example, they don’t use wheels or even trackballs anymore. Some have scroll wheels on top, or side buttons.

But the basic idea of moving a thing over here (to control a mouse pointer over there) lives on. Entire generations have grown up using this funky contraption.

We now suddenly find ourselves in a world of superior alternatives — multi-touch user interfaces (of which Android is the leading brand), voice control and dictation and others.

Yet habit and inertia keep us using Englebart’s brilliant but now-obsolete invention.

It’s time to bury the mouse.

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Apple’s iPhone 5 is “the most hated handset” currently available, receiving the most criticism on social networks, reports British tabloid The Daily Mail. Its biggest rival, the Samsung Galaxy S4, is the most loved — receiving just 11% of the complaints.

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An Irish parliamentary committee has dismissed the opportunity to grill Apple and Google over their tax affairs in Ireland, despite requests for a change to the way in which it taxes large multinationals that do business in its country.

The move comes weeks after Apple and Google came under scrutiny for the way in which they use tax “loopholes” or “gimmicks” to avoid paying excessive taxes on international sales. It was revealed that Apple used an Irish subsidiary with zero employees to pay less than 0.05% tax on $78 billion over four years.

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HTC has today announced its unaudited financial results for the second quarter of 2013, and despite help from the widely-praised HTC One, they do not look good. The Taiwanese firm made just NT$1.25 billion ($41 million) after tax from NT$70.7 billion ($2.35 billion) revenue, which is a staggering 83% fall from the same quarter last year.

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Duolingo is the developer behind a smartphone app for Android and iOS that helps users learn new languages for free. It has a great deal of appreciation for its users, so much so that it went out of its way to help one of them create a unique wedding proposal that they’ll never forget.

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