Bloomberg is reporting that Verizon and Google have reached a deal on how to handle Internet traffic: The compromise as described would restrict Verizon from selectively slowing Internet content that travels over its wires, but wouldn’t apply such limits to Internet use on mobile phones, according to the people, who asked not to be identified before an announcement. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt won’t confirm, but this doesn’t read like much of a denial: “We’re trying...

Who says no one wants to read the full decision? TechCrunch: The final ruling was leaked to Scribd and received over 50,000 hits “in a matter of minutes” according to Scribd Senior Director of Communications Michelle Laird — it’s up to over 125,000 reads as of this writing. CEO Trip Adler says, “a typical viral document gets 100,000 reads in 24 hours, this document has over 100,000 reads in about 24 minutes.” Embeds were temporarily taken down. I just got a fail at the main page.

UPDATE: If you don’t see the full ruling, it’s because the traffic surge has temporarily taken down Scribd embeds. Here is the full 136-page ruling: Background from the LATimes: [U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R.] Walker, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, heard 16 witnesses summoned by opponents of Proposition 8 and two called by proponents during a 2½-week trial in January. Walker’s historic ruling in Perry vs. Schwarzenegger relied heavily on the testimony he heard at...

That Katie Couric couldn’t pronounce Wasilla while preparing for an August 29, 2008 broadcast as seen in this “raw” “leaked” video is EXPLOSIVE breaking news over at Conservatives 4 Palin. And Couric’s question, during a read-through of Sarah Pallin’s kids names — Track and Trig, “where the hell do they get these [names]?…” — is proof of a “disdainful and contemptuous” Couric mocking Palin. C4P says it posted the clip to “expose...

Mark Oppenheimer uses the moment of Amazon reporting that e-books sales have surpassed hardcovers to muse on some things, once public, that our digital culture now hides about us: Remember when you could tell a lot about a guy by what cassette tapes—Journey or the Smiths?—littered the floor of his used station wagon? No more, because now the music of our lives is stored on MP3 players and iPhones. Our important papers live on hard drives or in the computing cloud, and DVDs are becoming obsolete,...

Youth activist and Fillipino Congressman Mong Palatino on those Dancing Prisoners of Cebu: The dance routine was originally conceptualized by prison officers as a form of behavior conditioning. Then it became a money making event. Dancing prisoners are happy since they claim to enjoy more benefits than other non-dancing prisoners. The incentive to dance is not really to practice art but to receive better prison treatment. Dance to impress visitors to generate funds. Dance to eat more regularly and...

Andrew Sullivan points to a live-chat hosted by Atul Gawande on his New Yorker article, Letting Go: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?: The fundamental issue I found … was not the percentage of people at the margin who really do want to spend their last days on a ventilator with a feed tube and dialysis machine, or getting knocked down by a fourth round of chemotherapy with a minuscule chance of helping. Perhaps there ARE more of these folks in America than elsewhere. But...

An important piece in the NYTimes today, After Stroke Scans, Patients Face Serious Health Risks, reads to me like more residue from the deregulatory era. And a triumph of technology salesman over technology training: The overdoses, which began to emerge late last summer, set off an investigation by the Food and Drug Administration into why patients tested with this complex yet lightly regulated technology were bombarded with excessive radiation. After 10 months, the agency has yet to provide a final...

In quotes because it’s more than a mosque and calling it that plays the opposition’s game. Newt Gingrich, a perennial wannabe presidential candidate (who is far too divisive a figure with too many personal skeletons to ever actually be much of one), comments: “The World Trade Center is the largest loss of American life on our soil since the Civil War,” Mr. Gingrich said. “And we have not rebuilt it, which drives people crazy. And in that setting, we are told, why don’t we have...

Samy Liechti was embarrassed to find he was wearing holey and mismatched socks as he took off his shoes at a business tea with Japanese customers in 1994. His humiliation led to an obsession that would not end until, five years later, a business was born. Samy sums up its credo, “A man shouldn’t look for socks, the socks should come to the man.” As crazy an idea as any hatched in the heat of the first dot com bubble, Blacksocks.com was launched in Switzerland for a European clientele....

This could shake up Apple’s world. Dan Frommer thinks not, “it’s probably toast.” Bloomberg: Research In Motion Ltd., maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, plans to introduce a tablet computer in November to compete with Apple Inc.’s iPad, according to two people familiar with the company’s plans. The device will have roughly the same dimensions as the iPad, which has a 9.7-inch diagonal screen, said the two people who wouldn’t be identified because the plans haven’t...

MG Siegler caused a firestorm yesterday when he wrote that the Magic Trackpad signals the end of the mouse: Apple would only say that “we want to offer our users the choice.” They note that plenty of people at Apple have been using the Magic Trackpad alongside the Magic Mouse. “Some operations are better for a mouse, some for a trackpad,” is what I was told. That said, Apple did acknowledge that some users will likely ditch the mouse in favor of this new device. And while Apple is keeping...

Fired from The Washington Post, hired by the Washington Post’s Slate unit. Slate is “editorially independent from the newspaper.” Weigel will be a political reporter: “I’m thrilled to be joining Slate, thrilled to be working with writers I’ve read and respected since logging on to read it meant enduring a symphony of dial-up clicks and hisses,” Weigel told The Upshot. “This is the magazine that invented the sort of journalism I want to do,” he continued....

Paul Graham ponders the acceleration of addictiveness: What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they’re all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating. We wouldn’t want to stop it. It’s the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want....

The Sunday chat shows are offering up their dogmatic balance on the Sherrod case, albeit a balance infused with far more color on their panels than usual. But, Greg Sargent asks, “Do both sides really engage in Breitbart-style tactics? Is all ‘ideological media’ created equal?” His answer, an unequivocal no: Do some left wing commentators say crazy things? Sure. But high-profile commentators on the left, for instance at networks like MSNBC, inarguably hold themselves to a...

Jeffrey Rosen, author of 2000′s The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America, has 7,000 words in the NYTimes Magazine on living in a world where “the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.” The story, The Web Means the End of Forgetting, has been up since Wednesday. It deserves wide discussion. A snippet: Companies like ReputationDefender offer a promising short-term solution for those who can afford it; but tweaking your Google...

Remember the $10 laptop? Vaporware. The same people now promise a $35 touch-screen tablet: Aimed at students, the tablet supports web browsing, video conferencing and word processing, say developers. Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said a manufacturer was being sought for the gadget, which was developed by India’s top IT colleges. An earlier cheap laptop plan by the same ministry came to nothing. The device unveiled on Thursday has no hard disk, using a memory card instead,...

On The Media, new to Georgia Public Broadcasting and already a favorite find of a good many friends, spent an hour last week on the future of newspapers. In support of TMV Assistant Editor David Shraub’s excellent Sherrod-inspired post on the true failings of the journalistic enterprise, a few select quotes… Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and author of the “magisterial” The Wealth of...

Making its way around the left side of the Internets, in the wake that NAACP resolution, from Pittsburgh’s Jasiri X: What if the tea party was black Holding guns like the Black Panther Party was back If Al was Rush Limbaugh and Jesse was Sean Hannity And Tavis was Glenn Beck would they harm they families If Sarah Palin was suddenly Sistah Soaljah Would they leave it with the votes or go and get the soldiers Yall know if the tea party was black The government would have been had the army attack What...

After a 14 hour debate, the Senate voted in favor: The law, which also allows same-sex couples to adopt, had met with fierce opposition from the Catholic Church and other religious groups. The legislation, backed by President Cristina Fernandez’s centre-left government, passed by 33 votes to 27 with three abstentions. David Mixner credits Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner: President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina powerfully and eloquently came out for marriage...

You might remember that in 2004 the Republican Congress gave a willing Bush administration FCC the power to fine TV stations for individual indecent “fleeting expletives” — profanities that get out on the airwaves before they can be bleeped. Fox was fined for Cher dropping the f-bomb during the 2002 Billboard Music Awards, and NBC for Bono doing the same at the 2003 Golden Globes. Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction” could be called a visually...

With Consumer Reports concluding in a report released yesterday that the iPhone 4 antenna problem is a hardware issue, not a software issue as Apple has claimed, Cult of Mac’s Leander Kahney is reporting that a recall Is inevitable: “Apple will be forced to do a recall of this product,” said Professor Matthew Seeger, an expert in crisis communication. “It’s critically important. The brand image is the most important thing Apple has. This is potentially devastating.” Crisis...

The NYTimes reports today on the tactic known as “Stop, Question, Frisk” as practiced in a troubled and dangerous eight block stretch of Brownsville, Brooklyn. Between January 2006 and March 2010, the police made nearly 52,000 stops: These encounters amounted to nearly one stop a year for every one of the 14,000 residents of these blocks. In some instances, people were stopped because the police said they fit the description of a suspect. But the data show that fewer than 9 percent of stops were...

The NYTimes has been on something of a robot kick lately. Today, robot teachers: In a handful of laboratories around the world, computer scientists are developing robots like this one: highly programmed machines that can engage people and teach them simple skills, including household tasks, vocabulary or, as in the case of the boy, playing, elementary imitation and taking turns. So far, the teaching has been very basic, delivered mostly in experimental settings, and the robots are still works in...

Bob Herbert explains that NY governor David Paterson is being pressured by NYC officials including Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to veto a law that would ban the NYC police from maintaining a database of the personal data of those stopped by police for questioning for any or no reason whatsoever. Herbert says it’s an easy call — don’t do it Dave! — but the data he uses to back up his argument is downright damning: Allowing the police to continue accumulating...