Most Americans now have mobile phones, and a Nielsen Mobile report last year found that nearly one in five of us have cut the cord, abandoning our landline service entirely. Danny Kessler of Tempe, Arizona, is one of those people, except he has gone the next step: He recently gave up his cell-phone contract too. Kessler’s no hermit: He’s a 27-year-old personal-safety instructor who has to be in touch with his clients.

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Is all this talk about getting consumers to pay for the news they read online really a front for something else?

Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery say their new company, Journalism Online, is first and foremost about giving newspapers an easy way to start charging for subscriptions or soliciting micropayments for individual pieces of content.

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Ars Technica reports: The news that President Obama has formally nominated Julius Genachowski to chair the Federal Communications Commission has been received with something slightly short of euphoria by a large portion of the broadcasting/telecommunications sector. Over the last eight hours Ars Technica has been deluged with statements of pure, unadulterated happiness about the pick (which everybody has known about for months). And they’re coming from all policy directions, too.

“Julius is an outstanding choice for FCC Chairman,” Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge says. “Julius Genachowski is an excellent choice to chair the FCC,” Comcast’s Chairman and CEO Brian L. Roberts told us. “Julius Genachowski is an excellent choice to lead the FCC,” declared Free Press’s Josh Silver shortly after the announcement.

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IBM has a habit of being a beacon during economic calamity. Of course, its earnings yesterday helped everyone feel for at least a moment that the world wasn’t coming to an end. But that pales in comparison to IBM’s feat during the Great Depression. Hopefully, we’ll see more of the same from the company.

I know about this because I wrote a book about the guy who built IBM, Thomas Watson Sr., titled “The Maverick and His Machine.” (Earlier this week, blogger Ed Cone picked up on the connection between IBM then and now.)

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Yeah, it’s silly season, all right.

At a press conference this morning, a top aide to GOP presidential nominee John McCain was asked about the candidate’s computer illiteracy, the subject of a recent attack ad by the Obama campaign.

In response, top aide Douglas Holtz-Eakin waved his BlackBerry at reporters.

“He did this,” Holtz-Eakin said, according to Politico. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

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Bill Gates doesn’t get a lot of credit these days for being a visionary. But when it comes to his relationship with Facebook, he may still be a step ahead of the rest of us. The Sun, a British tabloid, reported this year that Gates had quit his half-hour-a-day Facebook habit, partly because he was getting more than 8,000 “friend” requests daily but also because he was finding “weird fan sites about him.” A Microsoft representative confirms that the boss has gone cold turkey but wouldn’t disclose whether Gates knew of a Facebook group called “Would you have sex with Bill Gates for half of his money?”

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Kevin Maney smacks his head: While you’re lusting over a new iPhone, think about this: Why can’t you watch free, regular, over-the-air TV on your phone? Isn’t that what you really want–not these bastardized TV offerings that you have to pay for, like AT&T’s Mobile TV and Sprint’s MobiTV?

I just got off the phone with Reed Hundt, former chairman of the FCC and now an investor and consultant. He’s involved in a number of companies, but he said the one that’s most exciting right now is Telegent. It has been working for three years to figure out how to make chips that would go in cell phones and allow them to pick up regular local TV signals. “It’s very hard to do,” Hundt says.

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Blaise Zerega misses $4/gallon gasoline: The Segway is a huge success–as a technology product. But even as high gas prices have increased sales, as reported by WSJ today, it’s hard to term it a business success. And for that reason, greentech start-ups and their backers ought to examine what’s gone wrong.

Launched amid enormous hype in 2001, Dean Kamen’s splendid invention has become a textbook example of how hard it is to challenge the energy and transportation industries. Relying on an electrical charge and with a 25-mile range, the Segway seemed a perfect solution for short commutes and errands around town. Not so fast.

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In Microsoft’s never-ending search to bloat its software with bells and whistles of questionable use, the company now wants to add touch-screen capabilities to Windows. Raise your hand if you’ve been dying to navigate on your laptop by touching the screen? Anybody? Anyone at all?

This is the company that has been sure the tablet PC would be a success since 1999. It’s never been more than a computing niche. Yeah, touch-screen makes sense on something you hold in your hand, like an iPhone or Treo. But not-so-much with something that sits on your desk.

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Reports, rumors and innuendos are bouncing around the Web that Google may not want to cut an advertising deal with Yahoo after all. This before there is actually substantiation that Google and Yahoo are crafting an advertising deal, which was something of a rumor and innuendo in the first place, allegedly planted to let Microsoft know that Yahoo had options.

Google is allegedly worried about ticking off Washington officials who might think that if Google is playing ball with Yahoo, Google has become an antitrust violator that must be terminated. As if Google isn’t already close to monopoly power in search. It gets 67% of all searches, and that share keeps growing. Google worrying that a Yahoo deal will push it over the brink in antitrust is like Kim Jong-il worrying that if he puts on a party hat he’ll be considered crazy.

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What do Cliff Stearns, John Shimkus and Fred Upton have in common? They’re all members of the House Telecommunications Subcommittee, and they’ve each publicly accused Google of having “duped” the Federal Communications Commission by “gaming” a recent multibillion-dollar auction of wireless frequencies, shortchanging federal coffers. They also have this in common: Each has received more than $100,000 in campaign contributions over their careers from telephone and cable interests locked in a battle with Google over the use of those frequencies.

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Lots of interesting debate about this week’s Pulitzer Prizes and what they say about the newspaper industry. On Gawker, Nick Denton very smartly says that “the newspapers’ Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge. Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, U.S. newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the Internet.”

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Jordan Golson can’t be happy: Nick Denton has cut the amount of money he gets per thousand page views to $6.50 from $9.75. That’s a 33% pay cut, on a per-page-view basis. What about on an absolute basis?

Well, the page-view rate is set on the basis of the previous quarter’s page views. Total Q4 page views were 9,132,723, while Q1 page views rose 34% to 12,234,604 . The 33% cut matches the 34% rise in page views, right? Er, no.

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