Why did't they do this on Friday evening? That would have given enough time for people to fully understand what this means. Instead, there is going to be a big sell off tomorrow morning. I understand there would be a sell off tomorrow, but maybe not as big. The stock has dropped nearly 20 points in after hours.

http://www.nasdaq.com/quotes/after-hours.aspx

Which is 5%, not a huge amount especially compared to the recent market volatility. This is sort of a test of the efficient market hypothesis: everyone with any knowledge of the situation would have been expecting Jobs to step down sometime in the next few years, so it should be mostly priced into the stock already.

This is a good time to buy.

A friend and I launched a chrome plugin/bookmarklet for recommending songs for turntable.fm at http://www.turntaste.com. It also gives you a list of rooms that are similar to your current room, and shows the top songs played in those rooms.

This reminds me of Radio Shack's Engineering's Mini-Notebook series. I still have a copy of the 555 timer one that was given to me by my high school electronics teacher.

IMAX 3D uses linear polarized light, whereas RealD uses circularly polarized light.

The interesting part of the email was where they said they would enroll you automatically into the DataPro plan. Can they really change your contract without your permission? Would this be grounds of canceling your contract for free? I know that when the iPhone first came out, I was on Sprint, and people would watch for when they would change their contracts and you were allowed to cancel your contract free of charge.

This is covered in section 1.3 of AT&T's Wireless Customer Agreement: http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/legal/index.j...

Basically, being able to get out of your contract without paying an ETF is only possible if they change the price of services to which you subscribe. Since tethering would not be a part of the data plans of the affected iPhone users, this would not apply.

Also, after being enrolled you'd be able to call and/or log in to your account and simply have the tethering option removed without invoking the ETF...

... but by then, you'd be forever bumped off the unlimited data plan.

After reading this, I am struck with the idea that maybe Apple's reluctance to support flash, is not just motivated by the performance issues. That it could also be that the DRM support in flash would mean that companies could just abondon the app model and just use flash (i.e. Netflix or a flash based Amazon ebook reader).

I believe Jobs actually made this point fairly directly, though couched it in terms like "if people start using 3rd party tools to generate cross platform apps, you wind up with crappy apps that don't suit the platform, have undesirable performance characteristics, and fail to take advantage of platform specific features that get added."

Why not just use scroogle (http://scroogle.org/)?

Even if it randomly searches for stuff, the searches are still linked to you, and I would be concerned over what terms it was searching for if my search history were ever subpoenaed. I could images several cases where this could get you into trouble.

Just from the screenshots it looks like it might be a good tool for teaching students learning about pointers.

This is probably one of the best things that's happened for programming education in years! (In addition to a lot of other uses.)

Indeed. Its UI is almost exactly what my professor drew out on the blackboard during the pointers introduction. Still took a while to sink in though.

I always enjoy a puzzle. This reminds me of when I had free time and spent days on notpron.

How far did you get? I personally never put in much effort, I remember getting to level 10

The only problem is that you are assuming continual growth. While they are the cool place to be now, as soon as the become the uncool place to be, then they will be screwed.

If I was facebook, I would be very afraid of this happening. I understand facebook has some patents on the news feed an other minor aspects of facebook, but their basic feature set is somewhat small, but reproducible.

I think that any social platform faces the problem, that people will jump ship to what ever they think is cooler. Look at Myspace, that was hugely popular and suddenly it become the uncool place to be and then everyone and their moms, jumped ship to facebook. History is bound to repeat itself.

yes possible that people will jump ship for the next coolest thing. will everyones moms, dads and grandparents really want to "recreate" their social network and learn a new platform though?

facebook is unique as they are the biggest game in the world with people's real names and real social connections.

Before facebook, people thought their email was their online identity, they had all their friend and relatives in their contacts, why bother register on facebook to recreate all that?

As the consumers become more tech-savvy (old dogs can learn new tricks) and technologies become easier to use, it will be easier for them to switch service. All it takes is the influential people to move (think celebrities, popular friend, active family member, etc) for the others to follow.

Yes of course it is possible and will get easier to transfer services. Question is will the 500MM users do it en-masse? FB would have to screw up pretty big for that to happen in the next 3-5 years, in which time, it MAY be possible to build an enormous multi-billion dollar (or even deca-billion $$) per year profit stream.