It's a change that raises a number of bigger questions: Will automation completely replace human translation? Are we about to see the end of multilingualism? According to David Bellos, a professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton and Booker Prize-winning translator, that's not likely to happen anytime soon. In his new book, "Is That a Fish in Your Ear?," about process and social meaning of translation, he persuasively argues that human translators are as crucial as ever. At a time when the world seems more globalized and small than ever, they play a central role helping us understand each other and bring art to a broader audience.

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Schmidt spent much of his time before the subcommittee trying to dispel the belief that Google's search dominance makes it, as Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee said with some hostility, "the biggest kingmaker on Earth." This was Google's come-to-Congress moment, and the Senate wasn't going to waste it. Five years ago, Google was just introducing to Washington its first full-time lobbying staffer. But Google is now a major player in Washington, and, as Lee put it, antitrust violations or no, it warranted attention. Initially Google Inc. offered to send the company's chief legal office David Drummond to answer its questions. The senators demanded either Schmidt or CEO Larry Page.

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It's been a long year for Google. In February, European antitrust regulators launched an investigation into whether Google was using its search results to privilege its own services over those of competitors. In June, the Federal Trade Commission started looking into whether Google's relationship with handset manufacturers using the Android operating system improperly promoted Google search. In August, Texas's state attorney general joined the fun. And on Wednesday, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition, and Consumer Rights. The name of the hearing: "The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?"

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Now, the Republican presidential candidate says he’s convinced Google could do something to remedy the issue, if the company wanted to.

“I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” Santorum said. “If you're a responsible business, you don't let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.”

He continued: “To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can't handle but I suspect that's not true.”

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Google will pay $40.00 per share, a 63 percent premium to Motorola's closing price on Friday.

Motorola Mobility was separated from the rest of Motorola in January. The company has remade itself as a maker of smartphones based on Google's Android software, but has struggled against Apple Inc. and Asian smartphone makers.

"Motorola Mobility's total commitment to Android has created a natural fit for our two companies," said Google CEO Larry Page in a statement. "Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers."

The acquisition has the approval of both companies' boards and is expected to close by the end of this year or early 2012. It dwarfs Google's previous biggest deal, the 2008 purchase of DoubleClick for $3.2 billion.

In premarket trading, shares of Motorola Mobility soared 60 percent, or $14.72, to $39.19. Shares of Google, meanwhile, fell $14.68, or 2.6 percent, to $549.95.

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Because we have taught him to be compassionate and take pity on the uncool, he shared a Google+ invitation with me. The moment was the digital equivalent of his preschool days, when he'd arrive home to proudly gift me with a handmade object of unknown utility. "This is lovely," I'd say, my heart swelling as I considered the lump carefully, trying to figure if it looked more like a candy dish or a paper clip holder. "What's it for?"

When I ask the 17-year-old version of that boy what Google+ is for, he says -- texts, actually -- "its pretty sick, there're a lot of cool features thatll be awesome once more people get on. like better chatting and you can really control who sees what."

Alrighty then. Feeling positively hip, I head over, activate my invitation, upload a good-hair-day picture and type in a few simple words for my profile that seem to fit well with the spare, airy Google interface: "Writer, editor, public school advocate, parent, lover, friend, walker of dog." So far, so good.

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Hard-hitting journalism from NBC. Next up: Bigfoot... getting a pedicure??

2. Japanese roller coaster of death

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I stuck with that for a little while. But there were two big problems.

First, I was bombarded with friend requests from people I barely knew or didn't know at all. Why? It soon became clear that large numbers of people weren't approaching Facebook with the reality principle in mind. They were playing the usual online game of racking up big numbers to feel important. "Friend count" was the new "unique visitors."

Then Facebook started to get massive. And consultants and authors started giving us advice about how to use Facebook to brand ourselves. And marketing people began advocating that we use Facebook to sell stuff and, in fact, sell ourselves.

So which was Facebook: a new space for authentic communication between real people -- or a new arena for self-promotion?

I could probably have handled this existential dilemma. And I know it's one that a lot of people simply don't care about. It bugged me, but it was the other Facebook problem that made me not want to use the service at all.

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Opinions on the service run the gamut. Here's a look at key early reaction:

The New York Times' Claire Cain Miller notes that Google's difficulties in the realm of social media have already taken a toll on its status as "entry point" to the Internet, and wonders if Google+ can really help make up for lost time:

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The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the Federal Trade Commission will issue subpoenas "within days."

The FTC is looking into whether Google abuses its Internet search monopoly to extend its dominance into other online markets, such as mapping, comparison shopping and travel. Rivals complain that Google Inc., which handles two out of every three Internet searches in the U.S., manipulates its results to steer users to its own sites and services and bury links to competitors.

Google and the Federal Trade Commission refused to comment Thursday.

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The deal, announced Monday, will let Internet users read, search and copy 250,000 texts published between 1700 and 1870.

The deal applies to works in the library's collection that are no longer covered by copyright restrictions.

Google has similar deals with libraries around the world. Its plan to put millions of copyrighted titles online has been opposed by the publishing industry and is the subject of a legal battle in the United States.

The British Library has a collection of 14 million books and almost 1 million periodicals.

Last year it announced plans to digitize up to 40 million pages of newspapers dating back three and a half centuries.

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"If you can find a good service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn't need to be doing it," Pawlenty will say, according to his prepared remarks.

As Taegan Goddard's Political Wire notes, the Google Test is just a rehashing of former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith's "Yellow Pages Test," which suggested that if the phone book listed three companies that provide a certain service, the city probably should not be in that business.

Of course, expanding Goldsmith's test to the vast expanses of Google is insane -- most of all because you can find pretty much any service on Google. Granted, Pawlenty's proposed test is probably just meme-ready gimmick speak. But let's take him at his word and see what federal programs and services we could do away with, thanks to the Google Test.

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"These allegations are very serious," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters. "We take them seriously. We are looking into them."

She had no comment on reports of China's involvement.

Google said Wednesday that personal Gmail accounts of several hundred people, including senior U.S. government officials, military personnel and political activists, had been exposed. Google traced the origin of the attacks to Jinan, China, the home city of a military vocational school whose computers were linked to a more sophisticated assault on Google's systems 17 months ago. The two attacks are not believed to be linked.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the Obama administration doesn't restrict government employees from using personal Gmail accounts, but does direct workers to use government email for official business. He had no comment on who in the administration may have been affected by the hacking.

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The breach announced Wednesday marks the second time in 17 months that Google has publicly identified China as the home base for a scheme aimed at hijacking information stored on Google's vast network of computers.

This round of attacks isn't believed to be tied to a more sophisticated assault originating from China in late 2009 and early last year. That intrusion went after some of Google's trade secrets and triggered a high-profile battle with China's Communist government over online censorship that has made it more difficult for the company to do business in the world's most populous country.

The latest duplicity appeared to rely on so-called "phishing" scams and other underhanded behavior that hackers frequently use to obtain passwords from people and websites that aren't vigilant about protecting the information.

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It's a vision shared by others. The Internet search and advertising company faces tough competition from cellphone companies and Visa, which all want to play a central role in tying together phones, retailers and banks into a new payment system.

Google said Thursday that it's launching a trial of its payment system in San Francisco and New York in cooperation with MasterCard and Citibank. It is opening it up to consumers in the summer. It then plans to expand across the country.

There has been talk of smart payment systems for years. Google faces the same hurdles that have stifled previous trials. The new Google Wallet will initially work on only one smartphone, the Google Nexus S 4G carried by Sprint Nextel Corp. It will connect only to MasterCard PayPass terminals. There are more than 135,000 of those in U.S. stores and restaurants, but that's only a small fraction of the total number.

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According to The Daily Beast's Dan Lyons, the social media leviathan hired PR firm Burson-Marsteller to pitch anti-Google stories to the media, "urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post."

Here's how the story played out:

Chris Soghoian -- a blogger and PhD candidate who studies privacy and security -- received an email with a pitch. It read:

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To answer that question, Steven Levy turned to the people inside the company itself. As a journalist for Wired and Newsweek, Levy has been covering Google since 1999, and his book "In the Plex" offers a rare glimpse inside Googleplex headquarters, bringing to life the creative minds and quirky personalities of not only founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page but also the employees at one of the world's most sought-after workplaces -- the Googlers, as they're called. Eating at campus restaurants and sitting in on executive meetings, Levy narrates the history of a company that has managed to assimilate itself into the lives and language of Internet users across the globe.

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This isn't the first time Google has come out in support of "It Gets Better": In October, employees for the tech company made their own video for Savage's campaign.

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When I visit my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, I often think about my childhood, stereotypes, our role in society, and why we become who we are. Until the age of 13 I grew up in a black neighborhood with a Jewish stepfather and a Catholic mother. Money was nil for the family; while we weren't necessarily struggling to eat dinner every night, we certainly did not take family vacations very far, eat out at restaurants a lot, or buy new back-to-school clothes. I was often embarrassed, always hesitant to bring a girlfriend home, and totally humiliated when my mother picked me up at school in her rusty, loud Chrysler LeBaron.

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