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...

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...

Galileo must be rolling over in his grave. So many of the problems* facing modern civilization require a basic of scientific understanding in order to assess alternative policy (read that as “taxes”) options. Far too many Americans lack the foundation to make an informed choice, were they to be inclined to actually research a technical or scientific issue. Here’s why we need to worry....

I’m not a chemist so forgive me for not swallowing hook, line and sinker the Environmental Protection Agency’s findings Monday that the dispersant used by BP in the Gulf of Mexico oil blowout is no more toxic when mixed with oil than the oil alone. The EPA tests were twofold. One was challenging BP’s assertion that the chemical Corexit was less toxic than other dispersants. It wasn’t. The second was...

After the spy fiasco that ended last month with a Cold-War era exchange of agents, Russians are licking their wounds over the outright incompetence of their secret services. But according to this article from Russia’s Vedemosti, since Russia can no longer compete with the likes of the CIA and other Western spy services, the event may herald a welcome change in priority – and provide Moscow with...

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...

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...

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...

BP has conned the federal government and about 93% of the American people that the exploratory oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico is under control. In deed, the well was capped July 15 as a temporary stopgap. BP turned off its submersible cameras. Out of sight. Out of mind. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced the surface slick and underwater oil plumes were hundreds of miles from...

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...

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...

Which are the five countries leading the world in home Internet access? The answer is HERE.

TMV’s fearless leader and Editor-in-Chief Joe Gandelman posted his thoughts earlier today that Democrats might have blown a generational opportunity for long-term political control. I humbly disagree on some points and agree on others – though both of us could be proven wrong. Perhaps we should contact the alleged clairvoyant Madame Olga on the West Side of Cleveland, Ohio for more accurate soothsaying....

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...

When I say “comment here” in the headline, I don’t mean Community Boulevard at District TMV. I have something much more “dangerous” in mind. Today is the first day of the Federal Register’s new website, a little bit of wonk heaven online. The Federal Register publishes federal government notices, proposed administrative rules/regulations, final rules and presidential documents including Executive...

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:...

Yaakov Kirschen, The Jerusalem Post, Dry Bones This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

Peter Galbraith, the former United Nations’ deputy special representative for Afghanistan, raises a pertinent point regarding the White House response to WikiLeaks documents: “The Wikileaks documents, splashed in the Guardian and several other papers, provide useful confirmation of what is readily discerned from public sources: the Afghanistan War is going badly, the Taliban are exceptionally brutal,...

The world media is in a spin. The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel have published a huge cache of secret military files from the whistleblowing website Wikileaks, detailing the war in Afghanistan. Readers can folllow the latest reactions to the Afghanistan war logs here at this Guardian blog. The huge cache of classified papers – posted by Wikileaks as the Afghan War Diary – is one of...

My last post criticizing Constitutional Originalists seemed to have hit a delicate nerve with many TMV readers and other contributors. One commentator noted that my post had no point but was entertaining. Thanks for the left-handed compliment. There was an underlying point that most people missed and might not have appreciated, particularly if they have not read or fully understood some of my other TMV rants...

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...

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...

Many on the extreme right and elsewhere on the political spectrum strongly advocate we return to some imaginary original Constitution, and that we should live by what the original framers thought or intended – as these advocates are only able to decipher. Of course, any political, economic, social or religious ideology expanded via rigid consistency will naturally lead to insanely ludicrous statements and...

NYT’s Op-Ed Columnist, Nicholas D. Kristof, quotes the US federal Bureau of Labor Statistics that “for the first time in American history, men no longer inevitably dominate the labor force. Women were actually the majority of payroll employees for the five months that ended in March.” Does this mean that in the battle of sexes women have finally emerged as the winners? Well…Well…...

I looked at a summary of my TMV posts over the past 2 years and I think I’ve been rehashing some ideas and talking points too often. I also noticed that when I (or other TMV writers) discussed matters of sex, we got the most cross-posts on other blogs and the most reactions from readers. Thus, let’s go back to everyone’s favorite subject: Sex. I certainly hope deep down (and pray as only a Catholic agnostic...