So, you missed these 5 awesome stories last week

Before we wake up bright and early tomorrow with a new storm of stories for you, here are the five we thought were some of our best this week.

If you want more awesome stories, check out our Editor’s Picks tag — hand-picked stories guaranteed to make you a happier, more well-rounded person. (Happiness and well-roundedness not actually guaranteed. You could be the happiest, most well-rounded person in the world, we don’t know you.)

Hustle and flow: Why RIM believes BlackBerry 10 can beat the competition

BlackBerry 10 is late. Late for its originally scheduled release date, and even later to a mobile revolution that some say has already been won by Google and Apple. But the word “late” doesn’t seem to be in RIM’s lexicon.

How to stop Facebook from using ads with your face on them

Facebook provides a lot of literature on how the network uses your data. But when your face appears in an ad for massive quantities of “personal lubricant,” it’s probably a good time for a refresher on how Facebook advertising works.

The untold story of Kickstarter’s most dedicated backers: Do-gooders or addicts?

The clock is ticking. Hunched over the computer screen, a backer of a popular crowdfunding site hits the refresh button every few seconds to check whether his latest investment, an online game, has hit its target funding amount. Does this sound like a healthy dedication to helping entrepreneurs start companies? The experts believe otherwise; they argue that this is an addiction not too dissimilar to Internet poker or online shopping.

An ugly duckling no more: Why Platform-as-a-Service is poised for huge growth

Platform-as-a-Service is part of the booming cloud computing sector, one area of the cloud that some analysts, companies, and developers have overlooked. But recent research shows that PaaS is no longer the ugly duckling of the cloud industry — and that it’s ready to grow quite a bit during the next few years.

10 predictions about networking and Moore’s Law from Andy Bechtolsheim

Sun Microsystems cofounder and networking guru Andy Bechtholsheim predicted that networking chips — which determine how quickly you can surf the Internet — will keep following the path of progress that it has for decades. Moore’s Law, the prediction in 1965 by Intel’s Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years, is still holding up.

Top image, Facebook truck image, gambling image, via Shutterstock; Clouds image via Flickr; Blackberry image via Jennifer Van Grove/VentureBeat