The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has proposed a nationwide ban that prohibits the use of all non-emergency cell phone use in the car.

Currently, only select states have a law in place against cell phone use in automobiles, but the NTSB wants the U.S. government to make the use of personal electronic devices while driving illegal in all 50 states.

Remember when we told you about Apple’s founding contract that was going up for auction? Well, the three-page document just sold for $1.6 million to an unidentified buyer in New York.

The contract was originally owned by Apple’s third co-founder Ronald Wayne, but he sold it in 1994 for only a few thousand dollars. Wayne sold his original 10% share in Apple for $800 and a later payment of $1,500 when he left the company in the early years, which would now be worth $36 billion.

Estimates originally pegged the founding contract as being worth around $150,000.

The Christmas Holidays are coming up, and if you’re a gamer looking for a rare week spent pushing, punching and shooting pixels, we’ve got a great Yuletide bundle for you: the Humble Indie Bundle 4. Not to put to fine a point on it, but it’s a sick deal, some of my very favorite games on the Mac.

As much as I love the holiday season, trying to buy gifts and cards for all of your family and friends isn’t easy. However, there are some things you can do on your Mac and iOS devices that will not only make the process of sending greetings a whole lot easier, but it’ll also ensure no one is forgotten.

Here’s how to send Christmas greetings to all your friends and family the easy way!

Are you hoping to buy some last minute gear from Apple before the holidays, but the check hasn’t quite cleared yet? Apple just announced their holiday shipping deadlines this year. But how late can you push your last minute shopping out to?

American Airlines’ pilots will soon be able to exchange 35 pounds of charts and manuals for a 1.5 iPad. The airline becomes the world’s first to use the Apple tablet in the cockpit and throughout the flight, saving an estimated $1.2 million in fuel annually.

It’s here! After long years of waiting, you can finally – finally – get your hands on a copy of TextMate 2.

Every couple of years, Apple gets a new design fetish in their UIs: brushed aluminum, for example, or that god awful faux leather look Cupertino’s rocking for iCal and Address Book.

Less objectionable than most of Apple’s UI fetishes is the gray linen background we’ve been seeing creep through iOS and Lion over the last year or so, but if you’re sick of drab gray, here’s a colorful way to replace your iOS Notification Center’s gray linen background with a colorful, blurred version of your springboard.

Kids, are you tired of the iPhone and just plain confused by Android? The answer lies in Windows, according to Nokia. If you can stop shaking with laughter long enough, the has-been mobile phone maker is reinventing itself as the hip, with-it and oh so new alternative to Apple’s boring smartphone.

Memories of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs are still pouring in, the latest from Stephen Wolfram, the heart and brain of Siri. Wolfram told British interviewers Jobs “will always be a remarkable inspiration.” The former CEO laid the foundation of Apple’s future growth through “great tenacity and dramatic ultimate growth,” said Wolfram.

Did you miss out on seeing PBS’s fantastic documentary on the life of Steve Jobs when it aired in early November? Well, you’re in lucky: Steve Jobs – One Last Thing is now available on DVD. It’s also free to stream for Amazon Prime members.

Carrier IQ CEO Larry Lenhart and vice president of marketing Andrew Coward have revealed in an interview that despite the company’s assurance that no personal data is recorded by its software, a “bug” did unintentionally collect users’ text messages. What it does collect intentionally — particularly for the Federal Bureau of Investigation — is yet to be clarified, with the FBI refusing to disclose this information.

For only the second time in recent memory, Apple has used its pile of cash to buy a hardware company and threaten survival of another tech industry. Reports say Apple is ready to spend up to $500 million to acquire Anobit, an Israel-based flash memory maker already used in the iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air. It probably didn’t hurt that the purchase could free Apple’s reliance on its courtroom buddy Samsung.

Earlier this week we reviewed the Fanny Wang On-Ear Headphones and concluded they’re a pretty great set of cans. One cool thing about the the Fanny Wang headphones we didn’t mention was that you can order a completely customized pair from the Fanny Wang website. Because we know you guys love a nice set of headphones, we’re giving away one free pair of Custom 2001 Fanny Wang On-Ear headphones to a lucky reader. You can customize them however you want and keep them for yourself, or give the coupon to a friend for the Holidays as a gift.

I’ve never been the best at math, but I’m pretty sure there are almost 1.5 million different color configurations possible, so to determine a winner for this giveaway we’re going to be taking submissions to see who can design the best pair of headphones.

Here’s how to enter:

Founded in 2010, Digitude Innovations is a company based in Virginia that has decided against selling products or services, but chooses instead to sue other companies for patent infringement. Yes, it’s a patent troll. And according to one report, it’s doing all of Apple’s dirty work.

Wall Street analysts can be an odd sort. Apple is seen as a red hot company producing must-have products, yet many observers of the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant are downright wet blankets when it comes to Apple’s future. Monday, a fellow analyst said pessimists predicting Apple will grow -2 percent must live in some alternate universe where up is down and iPhones don’t sell.

If your Mac has a multitouch trackpad, there’s a simple but amazing tweak you can make that could revolutionize the way you use your computer.

Jan-Micheal Cart has made quite a name for himself designing impressive new concepts for the iOS operating system, such as the dynamic icons concept you see above, and an awesome system for implementing widgets which we covered back in May.

However, it seems it’s not just iOS users who have been impressed with Cart’s work. The Apple camp in Cupertino has also picked up on it, and they’ve hired him as an intern.

Just under 18 months after its launch, Apple is set to make more changes to its iAd mobile advertising service in a bid to attract more customers. The Cupertino company is hoping to claw back some of the ground it’s quickly losing to Google’s AdMob service by reducing the initial buy-in to iAd, and changing the way in which advertisers pay.

Apple has expanded the reach of its iTunes Store today by offering music and movie content for the first time across 16 Latin American countries. It has also introduced the new iTunes Match service to users in Brazil, making it the first country outside of the U.S. to gain access to the feature.

This Kickstarter project combines an iPad case with a speaker, hiding the speaker in the case’s front cover. Or rather, the speaker is the front cover.

Apple has issued a firmware update for its professional-grade Thunderbolt Display. Update 1.1 brings minor bug fixes and stability improvements.

Children and Apple stuff mix pretty well — iDevices cap the top three slots on kids’ wishlists, right? So it’s a good bet that there’ll be a bunch of Apple stuff underneath the trees or the Menorah this year. We’ve put together a short list of icing-on-the-cake type gifts — or great follow-ups if you got ’em iDevices last year.

Apple recently requested that Samsung start designing its tablets differently. Why? So as not to infringe on the iPad’s precious design.

What would Samsung’s next tablet look like if Apple had its way? The answer: really, really bad.

There’s so much buzz around Apple and education in the U.S. these days, you’d be forgiven if you assumed there was a “One iPad Per Child” program officially in effect.

Case in point, a school said to have “shunned” Macs in favor of PCs makes news.

Then you read the story, and it turns out that Adam Gerson, tech director for Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in New York City, is a lifelong Apple fan who opted for Microsoft servers after slogging through a decade of trying times while trying to keep a network of Apple servers running smoothly.