Your weekly news links
February 16, 2012
Consumer-finance watchdog targets debt collectors
WASHINGTON—The nation's new cop on the consumer-finance beat is zeroing in on debt collectors and credit reporting companies. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Thursday that it wants to add debt collectors and credit bureaus to the list of industries that agency officials can supervise in person. The agency has already started supervising payday lenders, mortgage companies and private student lenders. It gained that power last month, after President Barack Obama installed its director. Read more here.
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In New Jersey, gay-marriage supporters and foes await vote
Scores of people gathered in a chilly drizzle outside Trenton's historic statehouse Thursday as lawmakers prepared to vote on a bill that could make New Jersey the eighth state to legalize same-sex marriage.
Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, has vowed to veto the bill if it passes, but that didn't stop opponents of gay marriage from turning out in force.
"The state needs to hear us. It's not just a question of the governor overriding something," said Paula Lerch, a retired teacher from New Jersey. She and others who oppose same-sex marriage said Christie's promised veto was just one step in a battle to put the nation's brakes on the issue. Washington state on Monday became the seventh state to approve gay marriage, when its Catholic governor signed its bill into law. Read more here...
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Hands on: New Mac 'Mountain Lion' OS spotlights sharing
Apple on Thursday previews its next operating system, Mountain Lion, just seven months after its last edition, Lion, came out. (It won't be available to consumers until the summer.)
Short story: It brings much of the iPad experience to laptops and desktops – carrying over features such as the Notes, Reminders, the Game Center app for online gaming and an iMessage app that so far has worked only between Apple's mobile devices.
Read more...
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Apple unveils new Mac OS X Mountain Lion
When Apple launched Mac OS X Lion last July, it brought the Macintosh operating system ever closer to the experience folks had gotten accustomed to on the iPad and iPhone. Now, just seven months later, Apple today unveils OS X Mountain Lion, an early preview version for developers....Read more
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Most Motorola devices won't get Android 4.0 update anytime soon
By Athima Chansanchai
If you own a Motorola phone and are waiting for the upgrade to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, get ready for disappointment: A handful of tablets and phones will be upgraded by this summer, while the hottest models, such as the Droid Bionic or Droid Razr and Razr Maxx, have no slated upgrade rollout dates.
Motorola unveiled the schedule (or lack thereof) in its Owners' Forum under Motorola Android Software Upgrade News. Read more here...
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The Colbert Report' abruptly cancels two show tapings, no date set for return
Sources inside 'The Colbert Report' tell FoxNews.com that the sudden suspension of Colbert's Comedy Central show is due to a family emergency.
Comedy Central refused to comment on that information, other than to say that "due to unforeseen circumstances, the show will air repeat episodes on Wednesday, February 15 and Thursday, February 16."
Read more...
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David Letterman's Top 10 Worst Jeremy Lin puns
Jeremy Lin's out-of-nowhere success story has everybody from fans to sportswriters striving to come up with new and inventive puns on his name.
The young New York Knicks point guard has sparked nationwide "Lin-sanity." He's "Lin-credible" or "Super Lin-tendo."
With the Knicks winning seven straight with him at point guard, you could say like Tim Tebow that "All he does is Lin." Or throw in a Charlie Sheen reference with: "Lin-ning." Read more here...
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Past week's news....
Susan G. Komen reverses course, will keep funding Planned Parenthood
Three days after pulling its funding for cancer screenings from Planned Parenthood, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation on Friday apologized for the decision and reversed course.
"Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer," Nancy G. Brinker, founder and CEO of the foundation, said in a statement. "Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.".....click here to continue the story
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Facebook and Twitter are more addictive than cigarettes or alcohol, study finds
A new study suggests that social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter are more difficult to resist than cigarettes or alcohol.
A team from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business recently conducted an experiment involving 205 people in Wurtzburg, Germany to analyze the addictive properties of social media and other vices.
Read more
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The Virtual Eye
JOSEPH F. NACINO, PHILIPPINES
There's a saying that when elephants dance, the ants get trampled. In the wake of events this January, the Internet has been a hot bed of activity with US legislation pushing for an anti-online piracy bill with SOPA (and its Senate counterpart PIPA). This drew the anger of the Web community worldwide because of how the possible law would affect the World Wide Web and shape the face of the Internet of the future.
Fortunately, through the concerted efforts of a number of big Internet sites such Wikipedia, Facebook and Google and coupled with the rage of the Internet community, the US lawmakers backed down. Unfortunately, a few days later there was the recent arrest of Megaupload founder Kim Schmitz and the shutdown of the massive Megaupload file-sharing site. Ironically, Kim's arrest seemed to be a chilling counterpoint to the Internet's victory over the shelved SOPA/PIPA bills, as if the US government was saying, "We may not have SOPA but we can still take you out."
Read more...
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How Republican opposition derailed SOPA and Protect IP
Ever since GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole claimed that Hollywood produced "nightmares of depravity" that coarsened American culture and made "deviancy" mainstream, movie studios and record labels have enjoyed a spectacularly uneasy relationship with the Republican Party.
Copyright has been the exception to that strife: since the late 1990s, Hollywood-backed proposals to expand copyright law--the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Induce Act, the Pro-IP Act--have all been embraced, or at least not opposed, by Republicans.
Read more...
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