Ars Re-Reviews the Original iPod

Jacqui Cheng:

The original iPod set the stage for a decade’s worth of Apple devices, and although we don’t expect the modern replica of the iPod (the iPod classic) to stay around forever, Apple will undoubtedly continue to use the iPod as an influence when creating newer, even more popular gadgets.

Oh, and if you still have one of these original ones lying around, find a FireWire cable and plug it in. You might be surprised at how well it still works.

Memphis Flyer Backhandedly Implies Jobs Cheated Way to New Liver

John Branston, senior editor at The Memphis Flyer, on Steve Jobs:

As Eason and officials at Methodist Hospital have maintained all along, Isaacson says that Jobs did not “jump the line” to get a transplant. He did, however, register in both California and Tennessee to improve his chances. The donor was a car-accident victim in his mid–20s. As the Flyer reported, Apple attorney George Riley, a former Memphian, made the connection and helped Jobs settle into the house he bought on Morningside Place.

[…]

Jobs’ wife took responsibility for getting him a liver transplant and monitored his position in the Model for End-Stage Liver Disease system (MELD). While the book insists that Jobs did not buy his way to the top of the list, the “60 Minutes” segment has Isaacson recounting how Jobs drove a Mercedes sports car with no license plate and “felt like the normal rules just didn’t apply to him.”

On the liver transplant, at least, this authorized biography may not be the last word.

Implying that Jobs paid his way into a new liver is a pretty shitty thing to do. Writing it this poorly is even worse.

I really expected more of the Flyer.

Shame on You, NASA

Thomas Watkins for the AP:

The elaborate mission to recover a moon rock led NASA agents to one of the most down-to-earth places: a Denny’s restaurant in Riverside County.

But at the end of the sting operation, agents were left holding a speck of lunar dust smaller than a grain of rice and a 74-year-old suspect who was terrified by armed officials.

[…]

The target, Joann Davis, a grandmother who says she was trying to raise money for her sick son, asserts the lunar material was rightfully hers, having been given to her space-engineer husband by Neil Armstrong in the 1970s.

The whole story is just plain terrible.