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Charles Arthur is an idiot—he appears to be telling people that it’s perfectly all right to violate Apple’s EULA by upgrading straight from Tiger to Snow Leopard and still only paying the $29 upgrade-from-Leopard price, and that since you can get away with purchasing just one copy of the OS and installing it on multiple computers, that you should. No, what surprises me is that this piece of “journalism” apparently got past his editor and got published on the Guardian‘s website. Last I heard, editors are supposed to pay attention to pesky things like laws, or barring that, ethics.

No, I take that back. Maybe he’s not dumb. Maybe he’s just a charlatan. Jesus. (hat tip: George)

They said that “about two months ago,” Steve Jobs received a liver transplant. It is thought to have resulted from a slowly metastasizing tumor—Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004.

Gruber has some doubts about the accuracy and the sourcing of the story, but one thing is clear: Jobs is returning to work within a few weeks. Likely his activity as Apple’s CEO will diminish a bit, but it’s great to hear that he seems to be doing well.

1. Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Make sure to celebrate your Irish heritage today by eating sugar cookies with green sugar sprinkles and drinking green beer.
2. Check out the live coverage of Apple’s iPhone OS 3.0 preview event. The list of new features reads like a most wanted list:
   • Cut, copy and paste. Hallelujah! Also: about damn time.
   • MMS. Again: about damn time.
   • Search in all applications and also across the system. OMG, IFO.
   • This is more for developers, but a Maps API that lets you embed maps into your application. HUGE.

   And they’re not even done yet.

Update 2009/03/17 11:35—Oh, no! Looks like (a) the iPhone OS upgrade is not free for original iPhone owners (i.e. me), and (b) no MMS on the original iPhone. The latter is a huge disappointment. Huge.

and all its assets were purchased by JPMorgan Chase. All I have to say is, if I now have to use the Chase website to do my banking, I’m moving my money elsewhere.

in the last couple of months, chances are you’ve seen these cool print ads for AT&T Wireless’ international roaming plans.

Clever, creative, unusual. My favorites are Zimbabwe and Jamaica—though the ads I’ve seen in the SF BART stations say they are for South Africa and the Bahamas, respectively.

There’s been a new crop of search engines coming up lately, including Powerset, an engine which emphasizes natural-language queries, and Cuil (pronounced “cool”—don’t ask me why), a new search engine launched today that was created by a couple of Google alums. Check ‘em out.

Check out the timeline of its evolution (hat tip). The new logo looks softer and more approachable, but I have to agree with this guy that the icon says “tech start-up” more than it says “discount retailer” (via).

becomes intimately conversant with the dangers of big government, the perils of over-regulation. Which is why, even given the scandalous nature of executive pay in many American companies, whatever we do, we should avoid legislation^† unfairly tying the hands of boards—whose responsibility it is not only to put together fair and competitive compensation packages for talented executives, but also to tie pay to performance—in the same way Californians have, year after year, tied the hands of government to make sound budgetary decisions.

^† Yes, I know they’re talking about Europe, but the issue looms large here as well.

Tell me if this makes sense to you:

“[I]n response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo,” Verizon (the ISP) has announced that it will bar its users from accessing nearly all of Usenet news groups (including the alt.* groups), because Cuomo and his team have found child pornography on 88 groups—out of roughly 100,000.

Groups which will be barred include mozilla.support.firefox, symantec.customerservice.general, us.military and microsoft.public.excel. Yeah, those are really dangerous. Got to protect our children from those. Because when you want to remove a brain tumor, the best way to go about it is to take a sledgehammer to the patient’s skull. (Via Slashdot)