At the very same time Maine voted to repeal same sex marriage, they approved a bill that expands the state’s existing medical marijuana law. With that Maine becomes the third State to License Medical Marijuana Providers: “This is a dramatic step forward, the first time that any state’s voters have authorized the state government to license medical marijuana dispensaries,” said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C., which drafted the initiative...

Check out the Colbert video above. Funny, as always, it’s a strident mocking of the Mormon Church for a gay kiss incident in Salt Lake City last summer. Police handcuffed and cited a gay couple for “kissing and hugging” on the city’s Main Street. That part of the street, it turns out, was bought by the church. Main Street in downtown Salt Lake is church property. Lesbian and Gay people won the culture war long ago; it’s a small, highly motivated minority, frightened by the...

UPDATE: All fixed. —————— A developing story, Gizmodo’s updates: Update 1: Several commenters are reporting that both incoming and outgoing calls are working if routed through Google Voice. Update 2: Many reports that T-Mobile @Home is out as well. Update 3: We got a note from a T-Mobile spokesperson: We’re making good progress restoring voice and messaging service to affected customers. At this time, approximately 5 percent of T-Mobile customers are...

Jonathan Safran Foer (and Michael Pollan) notwithstanding, Nicolette Hahn Niman argues it’s factory farming, not meat eating, that wreaks environmental havoc: In contrast to factory farming, well-managed, non-industrialized animal farming minimizes greenhouse gases and can even benefit the environment. For example, properly timed cattle grazing can increase vegetation by as much as 45 percent, North Dakota State University researchers have found. And grazing by large herbivores (including cattle)...

TechCrunch: Twitter tweeted out a message today about a special Halloween feature if you Tweet “#trick” or “#treat.” It was difficult to figure out at first, but if you tweet either from your Twitter home page (this is key, you can’t enable the feature when you are on a client), your home page background will go “ghoulish” and the avatars on the Tweets on your page will turn into zombies and ghouls. The way to trigger it is by tweeting ONLY “#trick”...

The Mercury News: Google is set to launch a free service for smartphones that will combine GPS navigation, voice-activated search and real-time traffic updates. Other telecommunication companies already offer turn-by-turn navigation systems that talk drivers through a route and run on smart phones, although many are not free, and would not offer the same connectivity to Google’s massive store of data. There is currently no handset on the market that runs Google’s Android 2.0 operating...

From a 3 page statement distributed by the local Catholic Archdiocese on the island of Guam in opposition to Bill 185, which would would allow same-sex couples to enter into legal domestic partnerships: The culture of homosexuality is a culture of self-absorption because it does not value self-sacrifice. It is a glaring example of what John Paul II has called the culture of death. Islamic fundamentalists clearly understand the damage that homosexual behavior inflicts on a culture. That is why they...

Making the rounds in copyleft circles, a Harry Potter themed dinner at a house in West London has been banned by Warner Brothers, because they say it infringes its copyright: Guests would have been led down ‘Diagon Alley’ by the side of the house and been met by a portrait of the “Fat Lady” who would have demanded a password before they could be let in. But the plans were scuppered when Warner Brothers heard about the themed dinner. A letter from their legal and business department...

My partner and I use Google Voice as a single number that rings all our phones (home, both mobile and both offices) so that if a friend is trying to find us, one number does it. Because it’s another number for friends to learn, it hasn’t caught on. Now we can port our existing mobile numbers over to Google Voice. It’s not a full port, Google says they’re still working on that. There are a few less features, but still an amazing service. Google Voice Blog: We’re excited...

Sam Reich’s “Pixar Intro Parody,” written by Sam and Dan, animated by effects superhero Mike Ritchie, scored by music supervillain Carl Sondrol. Pixar Tweets, “careful as it’s not suitable for minors, and probably shouldn’t be viewed at work.” It’s that happy ending that does it in.

On The Media devoted its entire show this week to The Future of the Music Industry. The occasion is the 10 year anniversary of the record industry confrontation of the peer-to-peer file-sharing service, Napster. The hour is guided by public radio and TV reporter Rick Karr. I encourage you to listen to the full program, but today I choose to quote from the piece that looks at sampling. In it OTM producer Jamie York talks to Girl Talk, Hank Shocklee and Duke Law professor James Boyle. Girl Talk is...

While George Lucas may or may not be preparing to unleash another Star Wars trilogy on us, this time in stereoscopic 3D, some of his most re-creative fans had their work included in a fun Star Wars Uncut trailer out this week. Launched in July, the project aims to complete a full user-generated version of the original, dubbed Star Wars: A New Hope. This “biggest fan recreation in the universe” was the brainchild of Casey Pugh. To do it he cut the original Star Wars film into 15 second...

Among those things I am involved with is suicide prevention. A friend in our local coalition forwarded this third and final piece in a fascinating series about predators. The whole series is worth a read, but these final paragraphs are what she highlighted for us: Today, in many parts of the world, the human being most likely to cause your violent death is: you. Yes. You are the person most likely to kill yourself violently and on purpose. Suicide rates have risen dramatically over the past 50 years....

“[I] went and tried to talk to Sarah Palin, and instead she talked to Greta. … But maybe she’ll talk to me now that she has a book deal,” Oprah Winfrey, last December. That was an Andrew Sullivan quote of the day. I’m guessing Palin on Oprah is old news to TMV readers by now. A tit-for-tat; Palin’s book is out the day after her eagerly awaited Nov 16 appearance on the show. Which just happens to fall plumb in the middle of the November sweeps. Pop Watch has five...

On the same day. And just hours ago: Back-to-back deals on Wednesday to make the company’s steady stream of posts available to Microsoft and Google’s search engines may point to a potential new source of cash. How large, however, is not known. The terms of the deals were not disclosed and Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive, said in an interview that revenue was “not the focus of the deals.” Microsoft said it did not plan to put ads on its Twitter search service for now, and Google...

The brand-new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, KAUST, received its founding endowment of $10 billion from the King himself. That makes it among the wealthiest handful of universities on the globe, in the company of Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton. As Stanford is to Silicon Valley, Saudi Arabia hopes KAUST will spur a new Arabian “knowledge economy.” It’s a controlled experiment that they hope will mean a major shift in the world’s academic gravitational field: In...

The New Yorker staff writer was asked in a Time Q&A, “If you were U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan — who has about $5 billion in discretionary funding and a mandate to fix our schools — what would you do?” There’s precious little experimentation in education. Instead there seems to be a desire for greater regimentation, which I think is nonsense. I think we need to try 100 different things. If I were Arne Duncan, I’d think of myself as a venture capitalist,...

At my moving away party, when I left NYC after 28 years to come live in Middle Georgia, my partner and I did a rousing rendition of the “Green Acres” theme song. (I sang Eva/Lisa’s part.) Now it’s my ringtone. Vic Mizzy, the man who wrote it — he also wrote the ‘Addams Family’ theme song — died Saturday at his home in Bel-Air. The LATimes: For his theme song, Mizzy played a harpsichord, which gives the theme its unique flavor. And because the production...

Impressive: According to the Wall Street Journal, the company’s fourth-quarter profit jumped 47 percent “as consumers continued to snap up its iPhones and Macintosh computers.” Surprisingly resilient demand for its laptops and smart phones have carried Apple though the recession. This past quarter, Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones and 3.1 million Macintosh computers. Apple’s CFO called sales of Macintoshes “phenomenal,” and the quarter, Apple’s “most profitable ever.”...

This morning AP reported that the Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws. The NYTimes points to the three-page memo spelling out the policy, but I’m thinking Reason’s Jacob Sullum still believes there’s good reason for legit distributors to worry: [T]he Drug Enforcement Administration can still participate in raids on medical marijuana dispensaries that local officials consider illegal. In Los Angeles...

When I posted kiss the iPhone goodbye I assumed that the rumors of a Verizon iPhone were just that. Rumors. And false. It looks like I may have been mistaken in my assumptions. FoneFrenzy: My sources have confirmed that Apple and Verizon have been testing a CDMA iPhone on Verizon’s 4G LTE network. Yes, you read that correctly, Verizon and Apple have been testing the first 4G phone on Verizon’s 4G network. The tests have been taking place for the last couple of months but with no confirmation...

I don’t know bupkis about physics but they say that if you create a wheel that contains another rapidly spinning wheel, the gyro effect will keep the wheel upright. That’s the idea behind Gyrobike. Ars Technica spoke with CEO Daniella Reichstetter: “Our challenge was not only to develop a front bike wheel with a disk that could do this, but also to find a way to get the disk to spin fast enough to create enough force (gyroscopic precession) that would help stabilize the bike at...

This morning I posted about a soldier from my town who was killed in Afghanistan. I did not know him, though in my few years living here in small-town Georgia, I have met more soldier boys than in the decades I lived in NYC. The post included only the facts and only three people commented. But those three comments spanned the gamut of opinion, from honoring the dead to criticizing the president, to criticizing our presence there. I don’t know what I think we should do in Afghanistan. I wouldn’t...

Fred Wilson calls it “a real competitor to the iPhone” and says he loves the ad (above). The new site DroidDoes.com is a direct attack against the iPhone: Verizon isn’t pulling any punches: it calls out basically every major weakness on the iPhone, from its inability to run background applications to the App Store’s walled garden. The site kicks off with a stream of things that the iPhone can’t do, mimicking the black text-on-white background commonly seen in Apple ads but replacing...

Weekend Edition from my town this morning: In Milledgeville, Ga., hundreds turned out to pay their respects to a small-town hero with a larger-than-life personality. Following two tours of duty in Iraq, Staff Sgt. Alex French IV, a member of Georgia’s 48th Brigade, was killed in a suicide bomb attack Sept. 30 in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. Local coverage from The Macon Telegraph and Union Recorder. Ten other soldiers died in Iraq and Afghanistan that week: Army SGT Titus R Reynolds,...