The heated Android competition with Apple over the iPhone isn’t stopping the search giant from favoring Macs as it ditches Windows over security concerns. FT reports: “We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,” said one Google employee. “Many people have been moved away from [Windows] PCs, mostly towards Mac OS, following the China hacking attacks,” said another. New hires are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating...

We’ve heard it’s his 9/11 and his Katrina, how about his hostage crisis? George Will on This Week: The danger isn’t that it’s his Katrina, it’s that it’s his Iranian hostage crisis. That happened to Carter in his first and, it turned out, only term. So it wasn’t like Katrina which was sort of beside the point by which time Bush was a spent force anyway… [The Iranian hostage crisis] reinforced perception. People said, “Carter’s well-meaning,...

When Google TV was announced the price wasn’t. It better be cheaper than $99. An Engadget source details the next version of Apple TV: The new architecture of the device will be based directly on the iPhone 4, meaning it will get the same internals, down to that A4 CPU and a limited amount of flash storage — 16GB to be exact — though it will be capable of full 1080p HD (!). The device is said to be quite small with a scarce amount of ports (only the power socket and video out),...

Wikipedia:* According to Professor David Blight of the Yale University History Department, the first memorial day was observed by formerly enslaved black people at the Washington Race Course (today the location of Hampton Park) in Charleston, South Carolina. The race course had been used as a temporary Confederate prison camp in 1865 as well as a mass grave for Union soldiers who died there. Immediately after the cessation of hostilities, formerly enslaved people exhumed the bodies from the mass...

This afternoon I attended an outstanding student presentation of a Community Food Guide they had developed and produced. In the past couple years in the rural area of Georgia where I live there is now a farmers’ market, a community garden, a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture), and a soup kitchen. Our Kroger is quadrupling the space dedicated to organics, and even Walmart now supports local farmers. “It’s almost like a horror film, like ‘Invasion of the Food Snatchers,’ ” – Robert...

WaPo: In a news conference, Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg chalked up recent stumbles to growing pains. He said that engineers and designers had holed up in a conference room in their Palo Alto offices over the past three weeks to work on new privacy settings. “We don’t pretend that we are perfect,” Zuckerberg said in an interview. “We try to build new things, hear feedback and respond with changes to that feedback all the time.” The changes, which...

Not a typo: Where many social movements tend to splinter as time goes on, breaking into various factions representing divergent concerns or tactics, the food movement starts out splintered. Among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food; efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food...

Farhad Manjoo says the new Hotmail is hot to trot: My favorite part of the new Hotmail is the way it lets you efficiently sort through e-mail clutter. There are half a dozen “quick view” buttons built into your inbox—click one and you’ll see all the recent messages containing photos, another for all the mail with attachments, another for online shopping shipping notices, and another for “social updates”—the messages we get every day from sites like Twitter, Facebook...

Speedtest.net owner Ookla has introduced a new service that uses the results of speed tests done each day around the world to create a Net Index. They clock the global broadband speed right now at 7.67 Mbps; the U.S. (#26, dropping to #32 when quality is factored in) is at 10.16 Mbps. The U.S. speed is half that of Japan (#4), but ahead of Russia (#28), Canada (#32), and the UK (#33). It has no city/state in the global top 10. Here are the top 10 U.S. cities w/30-day average speeds: San Jose, Calif....

Over at the Consumerist, a reader finds Best Buy advertising computers at higher than regular prices: In this week’s ad, there is a Dell, sku 9693191, for $649.99. Regular price is $629.99. An HP, sku 9705373, is advertised for $699.99; regular price is $649.99. Last week, a Toshiba, sku 9705221, was advertised for $499.99, this week it’s back to regular price, $479.99. Likewise, a Dell, sku 9693191, was advertised for $649.99 last week, and this week it’s back to its regular price...

In case you missed it, Saturday was Pac-Man‘s 30th birthday. To celebrate, on Friday Google put up its first-ever playable Google doodle: Google doodler Ryan Germick and I made sure to include PAC-MAN’s original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece. We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else...

Millionaire casino executive and former beauty queen Sue Lowden had been the leader in the 12-way primary to determine which Republican will run against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Then she said: I’m telling you that this works… Before we all started having health care, in the olden days our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor… that’s the old days of what people would do to get health care… I’m not backing down from that system. The Democrats...

I’m not a big critic of BP. It’s not that I like BP or hold them harmless. It sounds like the oil giant did some really bad things, cut corners, whatever. It’s my assumption that BP did what ALL oil companies do; no more, no less. This kind of disaster could have been caused by any of them. It’s the system that’s broken. Like the financial crisis we are still living through, the industry was not regulated well. There was not enough regulation; the regulation there...

The CEOs of Sony, Best Buy, Echostar, Adobe, and Logitech were on a panel moderated by Google CEO Eric Schmidt this afternoon to, as expected, introduce Google TV. Each discussed their plans for the product which, naturally, features a search bar on the home screen to find programs. That search will find both web and traditional television offerings (through your antenna, cable or satellite box) without scrolling through unwieldy on-screen TV directories. Google TV is a platform that will also...

Until today, I haven’t been much interested in the topic of Elena Kagan’s sexual orientation. I see sexual identity as self-assigned and distinct from any behavioral practice. So, if a guy, a social conservative clinical psychologist minister, say, rents a boy to carry his luggage and happens to get some massages along the way, he’s not gay! Not even if the nature of those massages falls into the category of homosexual behavior. So I’m happy to accept that the woman is straight....

Said the judge, “I will give you a scaring sentence so that the public be protected from people like you, so that we are not tempted to emulate this horrendous example.” Pink News UK: A gay couple convicted of having homosexual sex in Malawi have received the maximum 14-year jail sentence. Steven Monjeza, 26, and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, 20, were told by a judge they would also serve hard labour as a warning to other gay people in the country. The couple were convicted on Tuesday of unnatural...

On the heels of Monday’s YouTube fifth birthday announcement of two billion video views a day — (nearly double the three broadcast networks combined in primetime — we have today’s Google I/O conference keynote. Google I/O (“Innovation in the Open”) is a 2-day web developer-focused conference to discuss web applications using Google and open web technologies. A headline from the keynote, The Web Is Killing Radio, Newspapers, Magazines, And TV: Today at the Google...

That’s the Guardian UK asking, spurred on by a new study from Brandeis University: White families typically have assets worth $100,000 (£69,000), up from $22,000 in the mid-1980s. African-American families’ assets stand at just $5,000, up from around $2,000. A quarter of black families have no assets at all. The study monitored more than 2,000 families since 1984. “We walk that through essentially a generation and what we see is that the racial wealth gap has galloped, it’s...

YouTube chose to celebrate its fifth birthday today by announcing it has passed two billion video views a day; that’s nearly double the three broadcast networks combined during their “primetime” evening slot. YouTube said it reached the one billion mark in October. The celebration was marked by the launch of the YouTube Five Year channel. There you can upload your story of how YouTube has changed your life for their “My YouTube Story” project. The site has an interactive timeline with...

…if they are convicted of non-murder crimes. CNN & AFP say the decision was 6-3. AP & ABC say 5-4. [My count says 6-3.] All agree the court said locking up teenagers for life without parole if they haven’t killed anyone is cruel and unusual punishment. AFP: “The clause does not permit a juvenile offender to be sentenced to life in prison without parole for a nonhomicide crime,” said the majority opinion. According to the court, there are 129 juvenile non-homicide...

Coming in October with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, the film is a black comedy called The Social Network. Those who have read the script say it will be brutal: Based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, it portrays Zuckerberg as a borderline autistic, entirely ruthless conniver. Nothing sways public opinion like a movie—and this scorcher could counteract the entire body of good press Facebook has received till now. Sorkin’s up-tempo script...

AOL, the internet on training wheels, made the early internet manageable through its subscription only “Walled Garden.” Once we no longer needed training, It was killed off by the Open Web. So what’s Facebook? The service started off as a friends-only space for college students. Now it’s trying to have it both ways — a private club that anyone can join (and search) owned by a natural monopolist eager to reap a monopoly fortune. And happy to sell its users out for...

Danah Boyd‘s SXSW keynote (full text, my excerpts) was all about privacy and focused on two case studies: Google and Facebook. Folks at Google responded with, “we’re trying to fix it, please help us.” Facebook? Nothing! For that, and for their offensive and offending moves since, Boyd has posted an important “rant” examining Facebook and “radical transparency.” Using quotes gleaned from David Kirkpatrick’s soon-to-be-released book, The Facebook Effect, along...

Google has decided to close its online store and the Nexus One will no longer be available as an unlocked carrier-free product. The audacious experiment it represented was a radical break from the existing model of how consumers buy phones. It failed; we don’t want a radical break. GigaOm’s Kevin C. Tofel on lessons learned: There’s a few lessons to be learned in the overall Nexus One experiment. With perhaps 200,000 Nexus One handsets sold since early January, the web store closure...

Guided Tour. Hulu just got a lot better. The new video player has a 25 percent larger viewing area, controls are hidden by default during video viewing, and some have been moved. They’ve also announced that, for the time being, Hulu is sticking with Flash. VP of product, Eugene Wei, says HTML5 video isn’t ready to serve the needs of all its customers. On the backend, there’s adaptive bitrate streaming to automatically downshift the bitrate of the video stream if playback or diminished...