Let’s face it: We don’t have a whole lot of options for wireless carriers right at the moment. You could sign up with Verizon, AT&T or Sprint. You could also sign up for T-Mobile and hope for the best. All those companies will provide fairly similar rate plans, especially the big red company and the big blue company.

There’s a war going on all around the world right now. It’s not being fought in the air or on the battlefield. It’s in courtrooms all over the planet and it all has to do with the type of phone you might have in your pocket right now. Also, society is getting less happy, and YouTube tallies a trillion views for 2011.

The news of the death of the proposed wireless mega-deal should not have surprised anyone. But now what? AT&T will have to write a $4 billion check to T-Mobile, a lot less than the $39 billion the deal was expected to net T-Mobile USA and its parent company Deutsche Telekom. And it’s not positive T-Mobile can survive beyond this. Also on the show, a team of British researchers have developed an algorithm for determining which songs are likely to be chart-toppers.

The photo editing software Photoshop is used by millions of people around the world, and has become a major tool for fashion magazines. Now, though, legislators both here in the U.S. and in Europe are trying to police its use, in cases of publishing false or misleading ads. And researchers at Dartmouth have created a program that can detect how much editing has been done on a photo. Also in the show, the Louvre is replacing it old fashion audio tours and some of its docents with a portable 3D gaming consul made by Nintendo.

At first glance, Facebook’s Timeline feature just seems to be another in a long series of redesign elements. But upon examination, it reveals itself to be a fundamental shift in how you present yourself to the world. Also, we have a robot roundup, including a robot who can keep you on your diet and exercise plan, a robot who can let you forget the plan while it makes you sandwiches, and a robot that resembles a spider and rappel on a web and do cartwheels.

The Protester is Time Magazine’s 2011 Person of the Year. It always feels like a bit of a cop-out when Time doesn’t choose a particular person and goes with a concept or a generalization. But in this case, Time might have a point. The Protester, whomever we choose to believe him or her to be, had a big year. There were protests in Africa and the Middle East as well as plenty of protests across the United States as “Occupy” became as much a noun as a verb.

A busy day for technology: The transportation board wants to ban cell phones and driving altogether; unmanned drones are possibly being used to spy on the U.S.; and a camera can now capture light particles.

A pair of mega-reader/mini-tablets undergo some changes. Amazon’s Kindle Fire has only recently started shipping out to customers but already a flood of complaints have been rolling in on its touchscreen, one-click shopping and volume and parental controls. Meanwhile, the latest Nook Color update will essentially give users the capabilities of the Nook tablet — for $50 less. And comedian Louis C.K. skips the middleman in selling his new concert special.

Three different bills going through Congress could actually affect the sites you visit online. The OPEN Act would fight online piracy and the sale of counterfeit goods by going after those sites for trade violations. SOPA and PROTECT IP are aimed at preventing and punishing acts of online piracy and theft of intellectual property. All three could give the United States government the ability to target a website solely because the government claimed it was facilitating somebody else’s act of copyright infringement.