For centuries, people have tried to pinpoint what makes humans unique. The most current scientific theory suggests that three main qualities separate Homo sapiens from other animals: the construction and use of complex tools, the use of symbolic behavior including language, art, and ritual, and the domestication of other plants and animals. However, in a new paper in Current Anthropology, Dr. Pat Shipman suggests a fourth trait unique to humans.

Shipman cites humans' long history of learning about and understanding animals as a unique trait, calling this tendency "the animal connection." She claims that this relationship is the common unifying factor that underlies each of the other three previously recognized human traits, and has played a major role in human evolution over the last 2.6 million years.

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Recently released FCC documents reveal that Sprint is set to launch what appears to be a new case for the iPod touch that would enable 3G networking on the WiFi-only device. Manufactured by ZTE and called the "Peel," the case is essentially a MiFi-like mobile hotspot that snaps on to an iPod touch, giving it a network connection wherever you can get a Sprint 3G signal.

The Peel has its own 3.4Whr lithium ion battery, which is good for about 40hrs of standby time—there's no mention of how long it would last in active use, but our guess is perhaps a few hours. In addition to giving 3G network access to an iPod touch, it can also connect other WiFi devices. It doesn't appear to have a limit to the number of simultaneously connected devices (the manual submitted to the FCC suggests this number is configurable), unlike most mobile hotspots that usually limit connections to four or five. Phone Scoop also notes that the device is only cleared to operate on the slower EV-DO Rev 0 standard, and not the faster Rev A that most current 3G devices use.

We're not exactly sure what to think of the Peel (Apple, Peel, get it?). It seems that if an iPhone really appealed to you, you wouldn't have opted for the iPod touch to begin with. Then again, there are some users who would rather have an iPhone with data but no voice, and on a different network. Depending on the pricing and data options—especially if there is a pay-as-you-go option—it might be a nice complement to an iPod touch. The added utility of being able to connect multiple devices—one clear advantage over an iPhone—is offset somewhat by the slower 3G speeds.

Sprint tried to attract Apple device users with a similar tack when the WiFi-only iPad was released, offering users a free iPad case with a pocket that would fit the carrier's 4G/3G Overdrive mobile hotspot. Still, we're wondering if there are any iPod touch owners out there excited by this news. If you are, let us know in the comments.

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At a Congressional Internet privacy hearing on Tuesday, a group of middle-aged men had some questions about the 'Net. Why was it such a creepy place? How come replying to spammers doesn't get one immediately removed from their e-mail lists? And what is this talk we hear about websites gaining the rights to one's immortal soul?

The creepiness was best summed up by the Senate Commerce Committee's Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), who in his opening statement compared the Internet to a deeply disturbing shopping mall. In this mall, there's "a machine recording every store you enter and every product you look at, and every product you buy. You go into a bookstore. The machine records every book you purchase or peruse. Then, you go to the drugstore. The machine is watching you there, meticulously recording every product you pick up—from the shampoo to the allergy medicine to your personal prescription.

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The latest hole in WiFi security is quite serious, but it's unlikely to cause widespread disruption in the corporate and government networks for which it would have the potential to cause the biggest headaches.

In fact, the exploit continues to demonstrate a lack of any effective method of cracking the WiFi Alliance WPA/WPA2 certified versions of IEEE encryption standards found in WiFi gear of the past seven years. Brute force and dictionary attacks against short passphrases used typically on home and small-business networks are still the only means of key recovery.

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Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner revealed today at the company's annual financial analyst meeting that the first beta of the Internet Explorer 9 Web browser is planned for release in September. This is a little later than expected; leaked documents that emerged last month pointed at an August release date for the beta.

Some apparently authentic screenshots of Internet Explorer 9 have leaked, though perhaps surprisingly, they show few changes from the current version. Microsoft has shipped three platform previews to show off the Internet Explorer 9 engine, but these previews used a simple, bare-bones interface; the company wanted to wait before revealing Internet Explorer 9's look and feel. If the new browser really is just a minor evolution of the old browser's interface, that decision seems a little peculiar.

The new browser is eagerly anticipated, especially by Web developers; Internet Explorer 9 is a big improvement on Internet Explorer 8, with considerably improved standards compliance and functionality. News of the beta is certainly welcome, but there's still a marked contrast between Microsoft's release policy and the more frequent updates of browsers like Firefox and Chrome. For all of its improvements, there's a good chance that Microsoft's browser will have been surpassed by its competition by the time it finally ships.

No release date has been announced, but most believe that the final version will not arrive until 2011.

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When I was 12, using a Performa 600CD, my parents gave me an external trackpad accessory that connected via ADB (a moment of silence for Apple Desktop Bus, please... thank you) for my birthday. The useable surface area was tiny—maybe three-quarters the size of a 3.5" floppy—and clunky, but I thought it was the coolest thing ever... for about five minutes. I soon learned that tracking around your desktop computer to play Oregon Trail and put together school projects in Microsoft Word 6.0 was Serious Business, and the trackpad wasn't cutting it for me. The small surface was annoying, and the precision even worse. I eventually disconnected it and went back to my trusty mouse.

Seventeen years later, I find myself splitting my time between a 27" iMac and a 13" MacBook Pro; instead of Word 6.0, I deal with MacJournal and the Ars CMS, and instead of Oregon Trail, I play various online Scrabble knockoffs. I use a Magic Mouse and the multitouch trackpad that is built into my MacBook Pro. I constantly find myself trying to perform multitouch gestures—ones that only work on Apple's trackpad—on the mouse, and find myself regularly wishing for a better input device on my desktop.

When Apple introduced the Magic Trackpad, a standalone Bluetooth trackpad designed for use with Apple's desktop machines, I was cautiously optimistic. My previous dalliance in trackpad-on-desktop land ended poorly, but a lot has changed in a couple decades. Or has it?

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This week's issue of Science takes a look at work that could help bridge the gap between biomass fuel production and traditional petrochemical engineering. Modern society relies on petrochemicals not only for our primary transportation needs, but also for most of the chemicals and polymers that we use. With the increased focus on using woody and agricultural stock to create biofuels, most notably bioethanol, it is worth asking if these feedstocks can support the rest of our petrochemical needs.

The issue contains a letter that focuses on two papers published this year, one by Bond et al. in Science, and one by Lange et al. in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. The articles look into whether carbohydrates from biorefining processes can be used to create compounds that look and react like more traditional petrochemical feedstocks, which have less oxygen than carbohydrates. If this is possible—or, more importantly, if it is feasible—then biomass could be used as a starting material for our existing petrochemical infrastructure.

The two papers focus on the compound levulinic acid, which is formed, along with formic acid, when six-carbon sugars are reacted with acids. The levulinic acid can undergo a hydrogenation reaction to form γ-valeroactone (GVL), at which point the two papers diverged.

Bond's team proposed a method that would eliminate CO2 from the GVL in water, giving a mixture of isomeric butenes; these can be linked together, or oligimerized, into longer hydrocarbons and be used directly as fuels. As an added bonus, this process is carried out at a pressure where the CO2 could be reused in other reactions or ready made for sequestration without the need for an expensive compression step. 

Lange's team, on the other hand, reacted GVL to form valeric acid (VA) with fairly high completion and selectivity. The VA could then be combined with various alcohols to form Valerate esters. Low molecular weight esters (up to propyl) were found to be suitable gasoline additives, working at 10 to 20 percent by volume. Higher weight esters could act either as a diesel additive or as diesel fuel itself.

The letter acknowledges that there are "technology development" hurdles that must be overcome before either of these processes go into production, let alone steal the spotlight from bioethanol. Even in the face of the challenges, the letter argues that these are promising demonstrations that biofuel stocks can produce intermediates that can be directly inserted into our existing petrochemical plants and processes. The perspective concludes with the hope that such research will spur the use of renewables as a replacement for our limited supply of petrochemical raw materials.

Science, 2010. DOI: 10.1126/science.1191662
Bond et al.: Science, 2010. DOI: 10.1126/science.1184362
Lange et al.: Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2010. DOI: 10.1002/anie.201000655

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The Internet, taken as a sort of buzzing collective, can be hard on games. The Amazon ratings for StarCraft 2 have become a battlefield, with many rating the game based on features that gamers feel should have been included, or trashing the game because it's only one-third of the full release; the Zerg and Protoss sections of the campaign will be released at some point in the future. Looking at Blizzard's history with shipping games, we feel safe assuming that it won't be a matter of months.

The question is a good one: is StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty a hobbled experience, cracked into three parts in order to feed the chubby god of Activision's bottom line? We're still spending hours each day playing the game to get ready for the full review on Sunday, but we have thoughts on the matter we're ready to share now.

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The Information Commissioner's Office has said that Google did not grab "significant" amounts of personal data when photographing the UK with its StreetView cars, and that the information captured is unlikely to include "meaningful personal details" or information that could be linked to an "identifiable person."

In its statement, the ICO said that Google was "wrong" to collect the information, but that ultimately, there was no evidence that the data collected could cause any "individual detriment."

The advertising and search company is being investigated around the world after it emerged that its StreetView cars were recording data from WiFi networks. The company claims that the logging of data was accidental, and that its intent was only to record public information such as access point names and MAC addresses to allow approximate non-GPS-based positioning services.

The ICO said that it would continue to monitor the other investigations into the company to see if they find that Google has broken any data privacy laws—including another investigation in the UK by the Metropolitan Police.

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Mindteck, a company that offers embedded software development and consultancy services, has released power consumption data after testing sleep, idle, low-use, and high-use scenarios of various Windows PCs. The researchers also built a model to estimate cost savings (pictured above) by using a centralized power management policy. What really piqued our interest, though, was that Mindteck looked at the effect of processor chipset drivers on the power consumption (in watts) of Windows XP and Windows 7 with varying driver configurations and older hardware:

As you can see, the results favor Windows 7 in every single scenario. The out-of-box differences are particularly high. For Windows 7, the consumption levels are actually the same as with the updated drivers—this means that Windows 7 is taking care of the chipset drivers, even on older hardware. The same cannot be said for Windows XP, and even with updated drivers (obtained manually), it still performs worse than Windows 7.

The whitepaper actually focuses on explaining how to "maximize the impact of effective power management with Windows 7," but the comparison to Windows XP was included in the appendix. Mindteck Smart Energy analysts quantified power consumption on five basic hardware platforms: a high-end desktop such as those used in engineering design or media processing, both a business desktop and business laptop, a Pentium 4 class business desktop to investigate prior-generation hardware, and a netbook. If you've already rolled out Windows 7 in your company, or are planning to, the 11-page report should help your CIOs and IT managers alike learn about leveraging Windows 7 to implement a comprehensive power management strategy. Check it out at the link below.

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Tabbed browsing has arguably had a significant impact on the way that people use the Web, but the feature hasn't really scaled to accommodate the increasing complexity of the average surfing session. The existing tab management and overflow handling mechanisms that are present in modern browsers are dated and suffer from some fundamental limitations that significantly detract from user productivity.

As more software shifts into the cloud and users increase their reliance on the browser for daily computing tasks, browser tabs will have to evolve from a primitive mechanism for switching between documents into a full-blown task management system. The mainstream browser vendors have been slow to address this issue and haven't applied much innovation to the problem over the past few years. Mozilla has stepped up to plate and is aiming to hit the ball out of the park with some unique and truly compelling improvements to the tab concept.

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Apple is looking into user complaints about hardware and software performance issues reported by iPhone 3G users after upgrading to iOS 4. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is investigating the myriad complaints that have surfaced since the June release of iOS 4.

The major sticking points share a common factor: performance. Complaints are plentiful online—the Apple discussion thread on the issue currently spans 36 pages. According to many, upgrading to iOS 4.0.1 has done little to ameliorate the issue. There is even a humorous spoof of Apple’s iPhone advertisements about exactly what iOS 4 brings to the iPhone 3G. Less-prominent complaints also include the device overheating and general degradation of battery performance.

From the beginning, Apple explained that there would not be feature parity between the older iPhone 3G, the iPhone 3GS, and the iPhone 4. The iPhone 3G has a 412MHz processor versus the 600MHz processor of the 3GS, and a paltry 128MB of RAM versus 256MB on the 3GS and 512MB on the iPhone 4. And remember, one of the selling features of the 3GS was indeed the handset's speed improvements over the older 3G.

At this point, Apple is in an unenviable position: a handset that is performing undesirably with an operating system that the company said would be at least partially supported. Apple could recommend that users downgrade back to iOS 3.1.3, or tell them that older hardware will always have issues running the latest and greatest software; neither of these would be very popular with the 3G-using public. There is also a third option—put even more time and effort into optimizing the OS for a phone that is now two generations old. That's the least likely option in our view.

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LAS VEGAS—In a city filled with slot machines spilling jackpots, it was a "jackpotted" ATM machine that got the most attention Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference, when researcher Barnaby Jack demonstrated two suave hacks against automated teller machines that allowed him to program them to spew out dozens of crisp bills.

The demonstration was greeted with hoots and applause.

In one of the attacks, Jack reprogrammed the ATM remotely over a network, without touching the machine; the second attack required he open the front panel and plug in a USB stick loaded with malware.

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In my 3D modeling and texturing article, I mentioned that a lot of the time involved in 3D texturing is spent dealing with UVs, the coordinate system that all 3D applications use for applying textures to models. It's not a good system because you have to manually create them, like dressing a model with a flat cloth and some scissors, so UV-mapping complex shapes is very tedious. Then you have the problem of seams, especially when bump and displacement maps are involved. And often you have to redo UVs at the end of sculpting because they have been stretched and compressed from the movement of polygons. So you're then forced to bake your textures from a bad-UV model to a good-UV model leaving you with a mountain of cruft of old meshes, new meshes, old textures, new textures. It's just a headache all around.

This is where Ptex comes in. Developed by Brent Burley at Disney Animation Studios, Ptex generated a ton of buzz a couple years ago with its simple promise: no more UVs and no more headaches. It was like someone saying “self-cleaning apartment”—everyone wanted in. With Ptex, textures are parametrically stored per polygonal face and there are no visible seams. 

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Limbo, on the Xbox Live Arcade, is an interesting game that shows just how far you can push the boundaries with a smaller, downloadable release. The title features a young man who suffers innumerable violent deaths through the course of the game, and before the credits roll you're lead to believe that you've accomplished your goal... possibly. Be sure to look over our final thoughts, and if you haven't bought the game yet this may be a good time to jump on board so you can join the conversation. Trust us, it's worth it.

We're going to talk about what the ending means, and some readers are going to give their own opinions after playing the game through to completion. Spoilers? You betcha, so don't read until you've finished the game for yourself.

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Amazon is once again dropping the price of the Kindle, but this time, the Kindle is coming with a makeover as well. The company is introducing a WiFi-only version of the popular e-book reader that will debut at $139, with the WiFi + 3G version remaining at $189. The device will also come with the updated e-ink screen that its bigger brother, the Kindle DX, got earlier this month, and will now come in two colors: graphite and white.

CEO Jeff Bezos told the Wall Street Journal that the company first developed the device for "serious readers," but that the Kindle could reach a much broader audience with the new price points. "People will buy them for their kids," Bezos said. "People won't share Kindles any more."

Amazon's move comes only a month after Barnes & Noble introduced its own WiFi-only model of the Nook that retails for $149. That was the same day Amazon first dropped the Kindle 2 to just $189 (down from $259), meaning that people who bought Kindles between then and late August (preorders start Thursday, and they ship on August 27) will miss out on the higher-contrast e-ink screen and redesigned body. That's right: according to Engadget, the new Kindle will be 21 percent smaller and 15 percent lighter than the previous model and, according to the photo, the keyboard layout got a bit of a redesign as well.

Amazon recently announced that Kindle sales had tripled since the company lowered the price to $189—it's clear that the new WiFi-only version is meant to go after an even wider market and undercut Barnes & Noble at the same time.

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Apple pushed out Safari 5.0.1 on Thursday morning, which includes several bug fixes and enables Safari 5's new extension system by default. Like many geeks, we here at Ars had already enabled extensions via the the debug menu in 5.0, but we ran into numerous performance problems in the 5.0 release. Though there still appear to be a few quirks with some extensions, Apple has definitely addressed the performance issues with this latest update.

With Safari 5.0, loading new extensions sometimes caused performance to slow to a crawl, and often caused beachballs of doom if more than a handful of tabs were open. Disabling the recently installed extensions would eliminate the problem.

Thursday morning, however, I installed Safari 5.0.1 and began installing over a dozen extensions, specifically choosing several that I believed would tax performance if loaded in the 87 tabs I had opened. In addition to installing Twitter, MLB, and several other extensions featured in the newly launched Safari Extensions Gallery, I also enabled extensions that had caused performance problems previously.

With over a dozen extensions installed, including extensions that add toolbars, buttons, status bars, and contextual menu options, Safari kept chugging along without a single performance issue. In fact, only the MLB toolbar caused the fans to ramp up on my aging first-generation MacBook.

Now that the performance issues have been ironed out, however, Apple still needs to put some more work into improving the overall extension system. For instance, loading new extensions will add buttons and toolbars to the current window, but many will only work on newly opened windows. We have also heard reports that some won't work properly until restarting Safari. Repeatedly clicking buttons and toolbars and getting no response is a fairly maddening experience.

And unfortunately, the way the button icons work, your toolbar can quickly fill up with indistinguishable circles and rectangles. Developers have mentioned to Apple that they would like to do more with buttons, such as having color icons, so that may be addressed in a future update.

Still, Safari's extension system offers developers quite a bit of latitude in building additional functionality for Safari. Let us know what your favorite extensions are so far in the comments.

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The Federal Trade Commission announced a milestone this week: its Do Not Call registry has just passed 200 million numbers.

It's quite amazing that any of this came to pass, really. When the registry was being considered back in 2002, telemarketing opposition was fierce, and for obvious reasons. The industry was large, powerful, and willing to be unbelievably annoying. It also saw quite clearly that a tough Do Not Call rule would chop off its business at the knees.

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At the Black Hat security conference today, Microsoft championed a new approach to addressing security issues. The new emphasis is on collaboration between software vendors and security researchers to ensure that customers are kept as safe as possible.

Microsoft likened its approach to Neighborhood Watch schemes—secure computing cannot be achieved with software vendors and researchers all working independently; the landscape is too complex and the attackers are too numerous for this approach to work. Instead, companies must set aside their differences and work together to safeguard customers.

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Much has been made of a recent Facebook "leak" which allegedly disclosed information on over 100 million Facebook users. What some reports have failed to highlight, however, is that the information was already public to begin with.

Security researcher Ron Bowes wrote a Ruby script that downloads information from Facebook's user directory, a searchable index of public profile pages. The directory does not expose a user's entire profile and only exposes information that the user has allowed Facebook to make public. This includes names, profile images, and small sampling of the user's friends. Users can opt out of inclusion in the search, but could potentially still appear on the directory page of a friend who is searchable.

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A New York Supreme Court has dismissed a defamation suit over a private Facebook group that existed primarily for the purpose of mocking a teenaged girl. In the decision, Judge Randy Sue Marber wrote that the group's malicious postings, which were made by a number of teenagers, were clearly not statements of fact—not to mention that they weren't even public.

The case goes back to early 2009 when a New York teenager and her parents sued Facebook and several users (and their parents) for posting mean-spirited comments about her to a private group named "90 Cents Short of a Dollar." The group's postings were not made public, but the contents leaked (let this be a lesson, kids: when trash talking people on the Internet, even your own friends can't be trusted) and the victim, Denise Finkel, was made aware of what her peers were saying about her.

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Free Press is still up in arms over what the reform group calls the Federal Communications Commission's "back room" meetings with big corporations to cut a deal on net neutrality rules.

"Despite public outrage and repeated promises of transparency, the FCC continues to meet behind closed doors with the largest companies to negotiate a secret deal that would short circuit public participation in policymaking that will shape the Internet for a generation," declared Free Press's Josh Silver in a message just sent to us. "The great irony here is that the FCC's 'transparency' policy is part of the negotiations behind closed doors."

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NVIDIA used SIGGRAPH 2010 to unveil the newest versions of its high-end workstation Quadro line. As expected, the line-up is based on Fermi, the company's next-generation graphics architecture, and is available in mobile as well as various internal options for workstations or Quadro Plex systems.

The full roster announced Tuesday includes:

Mobile

Workstation cards

All the workstation cards feature one dual-link DVI and two DisplayPort outputs. At the über-high end is the new Quadro Plex 7000, with 4 dual-link DVI outs, 896 CUDA cores, 12GB of memory, 144GBps bandwidth and a max FSAA of 128x while driving clusters of synced displays.

Aside from the standard Quadro features, the Fermi-based Quadros have some significant differences from the previous generation. There's now full OpenGL 4.1 and DirectX 11 support. The cards also support Shader model 5.0 and sport high-performance, double-precision floats, and ECC memory.

The last two features are mostly for increased accuracy and fault-proofing of GPU-based simulations. While 3D applications are demanding less Quadro-specific support, the rise of GPU-based renderers and increased use of GPUs in science should make the added memory and lower power requirements of the Quadros appealing to a lot of potential users.

We're still waiting to learn about specific cards and price tags from PNY, NVIDIA’s main Quadro manufacturer. Also notably missing from the list is a Mac-compatible Fermi card and, with the new Mac Pros announced Tuesday, it doesn't look like we'll see a GeForce option anytime soon. We'll be speaking with NVIDIA tomorrow, so we'll see if we can dig up some additional details on pricing, shipping, and Mac OS X compatibility.

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If you need a reminder of just how big China is—and just how important the Internet has become there—consider this stat: between them, two Chinese ISPs serve 20 percent of all broadband subscribers in the entire world.

Telegeography has updated its world Internet service provider database and finds that the sheer scale of China dwarfs just about everyone else. China Telecom is the largest ISP in the world, with 55 million subscibers. Second is China Unicom, with just over 40 million.

And both companies continue to grow, even as growth slows significantly in more developed markets. Telegeography notes that each Chinese firm added nine million users in the last year—"equivalent to the entire broadband subscriber base of Verizon."

Every other ISP trails dramatically. Japan's NTT comes in third with 17 million subscribers, and all US providers are smaller still.

"The gap between the top two operators and the world’s remaining broadband service providers will continue to grow rapidly," said TeleGeography Research Director Tania Harvey. "Aside from the two Chinese companies, all of the top ten broadband ISPs operate in mature markets, with high levels of broadband penetration and rapidly slowing subscriber growth."

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The R.A.T. series of mice isn't designed to be subtle. The surface of each model is broken, split, and in many cases adjustable. While it looks like a hot mess in pictures, all it takes is putting your hands on one to understand the method to the madness. In terms of options and features, this is a mouse that offers everything you could ask for—and some things that may have never occurred to you.

Let's take a look at what makes this such a special mouse and how it's designed to fit your preferences... whatever they may be.

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