Opinion & Commentary

Since the news that Steve Jobs passed away this past Wednesday, the reaction from the world has been nothing short of incredible. Mere hours after I heard about it, I received a tearful phone call from my cousin at college, who talked of a 500-person candlelight vigil on campus. There were post-it notes with "Thank You Steve" plastered all over the Apple Store.

The tech world exploded with rumors after former CBS news partner "What's Trending" mistakenly tweeted about Jobs' premature death. The tweet was deleted less than a minute after it had been posted, but the damage had already been done.

In the Microsoft-vs-Google-vs-Microsoft ongoing bash-fest, there's finally been another development. Microsoft's head of communications has responded -- via Twitter -- to a scathing Google blog post.

Once thought to be a dying breed of over-promised innovation, and overvaluation, the Internet I.P.O. is making a comeback.

Bill O'Reilly takes on all those pinheads who think that gravity is enuf. But in a fantasy smackdown with Richard Feynman, who fares better? Videos after the jump.

If I were to equate gadget blogging to some occupation in a slice of modern cinema, the film that most immediately comes to mind is The Human Centipede: First Segment. That 2010 parable, directed by Tom Six, focuses on the misadventures of three people who, through a wacky series of missteps, are each sewn... shall we say... input-to-output to one another. Gadget blogging, you see, is primarily an act of chain digestion.

I start this column with only one aim. I would like to try to impart my love for one of the oldest, and most impenetrable, and aesthetically unattractive, and sociopathic and schizophrenic genres of computer game to a reader who will doubtlessly hate it for all of those exact reasons. I'm talking about rogue-likes, so called because of their ancestry in a progenitor called Rogue. Let's see how I do.

A wintry forest looks picturesque, but slow-motion violence hides in the frame rate.

Slavoj �i�ek says that Wikileaks is hated not because of the secrets it has revealed, but because it exposed the cynicism of a system that has long stopped believing in the values it imagines itself to uphold. It's a problem not only for diplomacy and governance, but for the eroding distinction between public and private life.

G. K. Chesterton: "The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth."