If you thought it couldn’t get any louder, today the hubbub around the new Google “SuperPhone” (their word, and I like it!) has really just gotten into gear. This first official “Google phone” is prominently featured on the search giant’s famously spartan homepage. (Google did that for the Droid and the G1, too.) The Big Money has a nice critics’ roundup. Search Engine Land’s is a bit more tech-centric. But here’s the skinny… The Nexus One is a thin,...

The ATM card is not the only one with sneaky fees. Those Visa and MasterCard symbols on your bank debit card signify high hidden fees as well. Commentary is swirling around this NYTimes piece: Competition, of course, usually forces prices lower. But for payment networks like Visa and MasterCard, competition in the card business is more about winning over banks that actually issue the cards than consumers who use them. Visa and MasterCard set the fees that merchants must pay the cardholder’s bank....

Last week I was charged $144 in bank fees for four ATM purchases, each under $10 (I will be closing that poorly rated SunTrust account). Among the things that make those fees so painful is that I had hundreds of dollars sitting in another account, and tens of thousands of dollars in unused credit on cards. (I pay credit card balances in full each month). Reporter Bob Sullivan has a new book out, Stop Getting Ripped Off: Why Consumers Get Screwed And How You Can Always Get A Fair Deal. He was Monday’s...

On the Transparency International list, that’s ahead of Barbados, Belgium, and Qatar but behind the UK (only just), Japan, Austria, Ireland, Germany, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Norway, Iceland, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore, Denmark, and the country perceived to be the least corrupt on the globe, New Zealand. The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) score “measures the perceived level of public-sector corruption in 180 countries and territories around...

Michael Pollan’s latest, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, aims to distill all the food activist and author has learned into 64 simple rules: The idea for this book came from a doctor–a couple of them, as a matter of fact. They had read my last book, “In Defense of Food”, which ended with a handful of tips for eating well: simple ways to navigate the treacherous landscape of modern food and the often-confusing science of nutrition. “What I would love is a pamphlet...

In his column today Adam Liptak looks at the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago. And then pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it: A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience have proved that the system cannot reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment is plagued by racial disparities;...

I always wonder what those who hold the view that homosexuality is wrong, a crime against God and nature, want. If it’s really that bad shouldn’t it be punished? It seems to me a binary choice, accept it and hold it to all the rights and obligations of society, or… The title of this post is from Uganda’s minister of ethics and integrity, as quoted in this important NYTimes story on the role of Americans in Uganda’s anti-gay push. That “push” has resulted in...

In the clip above, from the feature documentary Food, Inc., Eldon R. Roth, the founder and owner of Beef Products, Inc. explains, “I’m really a mechanic. That’s really what I am. We design our own machinery.” Roth gets that exactly right. He has no science background but he does hold the patents for over two dozen pieces of equipment and methods used in beef processing. The Grist’s Tom Philpott describes the scene above as straight out of Chaplin’s Modern Times: [A]...

Last night I pointed to Google’s fun little search easter egg countdown to the new year. It’s been updated for New Years Day. Go to Google, leave the search box empty and click on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. You’ll get a cute little animated Happy New Year fireworks. Mashable suggests: Google is increasingly drawing attention to its homepage through more and more custom logos: some argue that these are a counter to Bing.com’s daily photo, which makes the rival search...

For those of us unwilling or unable to brave the wilds of NYC’s Time Square to ring in the New Year, there are at least three good choices for a live video stream… CBS News New Year’s Live Stream: Livestream’s Times Square 2010 Live: Hulu’s Times Square 2010 Stream:

Google has a fun little search easter egg for the new year. Go to Google, leave the search box empty and click on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. In bold blue numbers Google’s counting down to the new year. You will see a count down to the new year in large blue numbers under the search box. That, and the Google New Year logo above, via Search Engine Land’s collection of New Years logos.

HAPPY NEW YEAR’S EVE DAY TMV READERS! “To us the things on cable news seem so freakin’ dumb, And we can only hope that we’re not the only ones… But since they’re still reporting it….we just might be the only ones.” — Lyrics by Hank, Music by Rhett & Link.

We moved from an economy that makes things to an economy that buys things. Bad enough, really, but the BBC says we’re moving on to buying imaginary, er, virtual things: [Venture capitalist Jeremy] Liew, whose firm Lightspeed Venture Partners has invested $10m in virtual goods companies, said the rapid growth of the sector was unprecedented. “We have seen companies go from nothing in the last 18-24 months to tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.” A quote worthy of...

My life-partner, Doug, hails from Athens, GA, 70 miles up the road from where we live now. On Christmas day Doug was shocked and saddened by the death of Athens’ folk singer and songwriter Vic Chesnutt. Death by suicide ends Chesnutt’s heroic and tragic life story: Vic Chesnutt, 45, a singer-songwriter of spare, idiosyncratic folk tunes tinged with melancholy, died Christmas day in Athens, Ga., after an intentional overdose of prescription muscle relaxants, a family spokesman said. Paralyzed...

How will this go over with air travelers? New rules imposed by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration also limit on-board activities by customers and crew in U.S. airspace that may adversely impact on-board service. Among other things, during the final hour of flight customers must remain seated, will not be allowed to access carry-on baggage, or have personal belongings or other items on their laps. LATER, here’s the NYTimes’s story on the new restrictions. James Joyner makes...

Maybe she was mad he held midnight mass 2 hours early: A crazed woman jumped a barrier and rushed at Pope Benedict XVI as he made his way up the aisle at the Vatican to perform the traditional Christmas Eve Mass. The woman was caught by security guards before she could reach the 82-year-old Pope, who was untouched and barely broke stride. [...] The unidentified woman was arrested by the Vatican’s Swiss Guards. Italian media reports said she was mentally ill. Or maybe she was angry that the...

At Forbes, Michael Noer predicts social networking will become fragmented and traffic will drop at ”one-size-fits-all” Facebook. He cites gdgt.com, the “social gadget platform” from the guys behind Engadget and Gizmodo as an example of what comes next. His bold prediction? The very words “social networking” and “social media” will become wildly anachronistic within a very few years. Just as no one, except perhaps Al Gore, cruises the Information Superhighway...

A couple reports from the NYTimes tell the tale… New York is dead last in a study published this month in Science Magazine ranking the happiest places in America. Researchers focused on two sets of information: One was a survey of 1.3 million Americans done over four years by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which asked people about their health and how satisfied they were with their lives. Those self-assessments were stacked against “objective indicators” borrowed from...

Forbe’s Andy Greenberg spoke with One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) designer Yves Behar about an upgrade to the hundred-dollar laptop. Dubbed the XO-3 [photo gallery], it’s targeted for release in 2012: “I wanted to bring the One Laptop Per Child identity to life in this new form,” says Yves Behar, founder of FuseProject, which designed the both the original and the XO-3. “That meant taking the visual complexity away, bringing tactility and friendliness, touch and color.” Behar...

An Inside Higher Ed Quick Take: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has written to Yale University to protest pressure on a student group to change a T-shirt designed to mock Harvard University by quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s analysis that “I think of all Harvard men as sissies.” Concern that forms of “sissy” are insulting to gay people and others led the student group to change plans, although FIRE maintains that university officials strongly encouraged...

Lindsay Graham’s appearing everywhere he can complaining about Nebraska’s sweetheart deal, here on this evening’s All Things Considered: “It’s OK for a senator from any state to advocate for their state. Once the federal government puts money on the table in an appropriate fashion, it’s OK to go get your fair share,” Graham said. “What I don’t think is OK is for a senator to basically agree to a bill that increases taxes on 49 states and say,...

This afternoon Microsoft lost its appeal of a patent claim against Word: The ruling, by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit — which handles many patent and trademark cases — may signal the endgame of a long-running dispute between Microsoft and Toronto-based i4i Ltd. On August 12, a jury in a federal U.S. district court in Texas ruled in favor of i4i Ltd against Microsoft, for infringing a patent relating to the use of XML, or extensible markup language, in the...

City legislators passed the bill 39-20. Mexico City is the first Latin American city to legalize gay marriage. The LATimes: The bill calls for changing the definition of marriage in the city’s civil code. Marriage is currently defined as the union of a man and a woman. The new definition will be “the free uniting of two people.” The change would allow same-sex couples to adopt children, apply for bank loans together, inherit wealth and be included in the insurance policies of their...

You have undoubtedly heard the highlights: Hundreds of 20- and 30-somethings show up for a Twitter fueled snowball fight at 14th and U streets NW in DC on Saturday. All was apparently fun and games until a snowball hit a Hummer driven by an off-duty DC policeman. He pulled his gun. Unsurprisingly, many in the geeky crowd had video cameras. Video was quickly posted to YouTube. One tops Bitly.TV right now. (There you can read a live stream of Tweets about it.) The DC police chief just issued this...

I’ll be seeing it later today, enticed by the words of others. All agree the plot is melodramatic and not particularly exceptional. But those special effects… Razib Khan: The special effects were very good. I have seen special effects of similar quality, but never such quality in such quantity. The detail was striking enough that I assume I stopped thinking of it as “special effects” and more as simply a background canvas. I’m talking more about the landscape, the flora...