Elmo Keep

Bohner has excised from her blog the Schmidt stand-in, a doctor (like PhD. Schmidt) whose relationship with Bohner ended (like Schmidt) and who had a prototype iPhone to give away (Schmidt used to be on the board of Apple Inc.). Strangelove's past appearances are cataloged here. Also gone: A comparison of Apple CEO Steve Jobs to a "stoned Jesuit priest."

Bohner's blog, once quasi-anonymous, is now linked from the former CNBC and Forbes journalist's professional website (pictured above). It also now includes this disclaimer, atop entries about her recovery from alcohol and drug addiction:

Got that? Any resemblance to "Real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental," no matter who might have been removed from the blog or how much said persons might resemble a certain married Silicon Valley CEO who once dated Kate Bohner.

We're guessing that's a disclaimer Bohner and her blog team will soon be repeating to the fearsome Eric Schmidt lawyers who scared their first site off the internet. And, who knows, maybe Bohner will soon be repeating the same legalese to some publishers as she shops her memoir. As we said from the start, a book version of the blog has been planned since the very beginning. After all, information wants to be free—as Schmidt will normally be the first to tell you. That's why he's kind enough to host thousands of blogs for free on Google's Blogspot service, including the one Bohner's just relaunched.

Elmo Keep

After all, EchoStar was ordered to remotely destroy DVR functionality in its satellite TV boxes after losing a patent case to TiVo. "If the court were to side with Apple and issue an injunction that insists [Google's manufacturer] HTC kill the phone, or at least some of its functionality, they easily could," Prof. Jonathan Zittrain told Bits. Still, most lawyers seem to think the case will be settled. Settled, that is, if Apple CEO Steve Jobs can be persuaded to arrive at one of those compromises the perfectionist so famously dislikes.

To Schmidt's ex-girlfriend Kate Bohner, he's a sometimes lying, bullyingly censorious ex known as Dr. Strangelove. To other critics, he's cavalier and hypocritical about privacy.

To Sundman, he's the guy who patronizingly obstructed access to Sundman's retirement savings when Sundman was unemployed 17 years ago, broke and caring for a very sick child. Sun had required Sundman to relocate to California, only to lay him off six months later. His wife's business had just failed, and his son was suffering seizures after emergency brain surgery.

Sundman didn't blame Schmidt, a higher up at Sun, for any of this, but he did need Schmidt's permission to cash out his 401(k) savings under the retirement plan's "hardship withdrawal" provisions. Sundman met with Schmidt, and was not at all charmed.

From Sundman's recent post to his website Wetmachine:

At the appointed time I go into his office & again relate my tale of woe, telling him how I really really need to touch this money of mine, now that Sun has kicked me in the nuts after first moving me across the country. I'm expecting Eric to grab his pen and sign whatever form he has to sign.

Instead, this smug little prick starts telling me how he understands money-worry because he's building a house and contractors keep going over budget. I swear to God this is a true story. That bastard was in very early at Sun and was, as he sat there, worth tens of millions of dollars. And I'm sitting there with no job, no money, and a child that I don't know from one day to the next whether he's going to live or die, and all I want is for Eric to sign the damn form so I can get my own damn money so that we can move back home to Massachusetts.

So Eric tells me that while he is sympathetic to my plight, he has his fiduciary responsibilities to consider, so I'll have to come back tomorrow to hear his decision after he's had time to think the matter over.

Sundman left the meeting politely and pleasantly and was granted his money the next day. Who knows, maybe Schmidt thought he'd be better protected legally if he thought things through, or needed to check with counsel. But his manner, including the line about his contractors going over budget, had made him an (apparently life-long) enemy: Sundman writes he wanted to "clock... his exalted highness Herr Docktor Scmidt."

And he later made Schmidt an inspiration for the villain in Acts of the Apostles, his well-reviewed novel about Silicon Valley. That was after Sundman made the jump from manager of a technical publications and information architecture team (at Sun) to freelance writer at publications like Salon.

Now, most bosses have an embittered ex-employee or three in their past, no doubt. But Schmidt seems to be grappling with more than his share of unpleasant exes lately; between Sundman and Bohner, Schmidt has faced two unflattering testimonials in the past month, both linked to book projects. It seems the Google CEO is catalyzing the free flow of information even when he would prefer not to. Speaking of which, if you've got a Schmidt story of your own, send it our way. We'd hate to think we were fixating on an unrepresentative sample, here.

(Pics: Via Flickr and Getty Images.)

Simon and Schmidt were together before the married CEO took up with Kate Bohner, and the rumor mill has been churning fast lately with talk of a reunion. The two were spotted together at a store opening in Los Angeles this winter; getting on a private jet in September; and hanging around Fire Island and Aspen this past summer.

Simon, a Burson-Marsteller flack and former Google consultant, hasn't traditionally been shy about tweeting her whereabouts, even when purportedly with Schmidt. She's even been so obvious as to follow Schmidt's tweets from not only her main Twitter account but by making him one of only five people followed by her secondary @momnet account.

Now Simon seems to be on something of a roll. Here's her copying both Schmidt and Wired's Steven Levy on a link, fully two weeks before Levy published a lengthy feature story about Google. How did Simon know Levy was spending time in Schmidt's company, or at least with it? Her work at Burson is focused on Google's arch nemesis Microsoft, after all.

Simon was at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress when Schmidt was at the Barcelona World Congress:

Schmidt was Davos, and not only was Simon at Davos, but hey look what bar the Schmidt "ex" girlfriend chose to tweet from:

Simon, a stated resident of New York whose boss is in Washington DC and who often turns up in Los Angeles, is also interested in the minutiae of city planning in Mountain View, California, where Google's HQ is located. She's just curious like that!

None of this is coincidental, according to a source familiar with the pair who has helped keep us abreast of their movements the past several months. The pair both stayed at the Four Seasons during this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year and were in New York this week, this person said, adding: "They are very much together and she basks in the glory of the attention."

If Bohner's rough experience is anything to go by, Simon had better not bask too openly.

(Pic: Schmidt by AP; Simon by Dave McClure)

And none of the executives "appear in... film... upload... or review" the clip in question, says Google; in fact none are even based in Italy. The company called the Italian ruling "stunning" and "a serious threat to the web in Italy.... Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video" should be held responsible for a privacy violation. In other words, when you want something removed from the internet, you should send your attack dogs after the person who actually made it. And Google executives don't just preach that principle, they live by it.

(Pic: The judge in the Google case, Oscar Magi, in a 2009 AP file photo.)

We flagged the blog on Friday, reporting that Bohner had repeatedly mentioned Schmidt in a blog tied to a planned book about her recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, and predicting Schmidt, who is married, wouldn't be thrilled.

Now the site has been removed from Google's Blogspot, where it was hosted.

Bohner removed the site after threats from Schmidt's lawyers this weekend, according to a source close to the situation.

"When a billionaire threatens you, you get in line," this person said.

It made for a frightening weekend for Bohner, and no wonder: Not only is the former CNBC and Forbes journalist trying to come to terms with her sobriety and past addiction, she doesn't appear to be swimming in the money it would take to mount a plausible legal challenge to a powerful and well-connected tech executive worth $4 billion. A public records search indicates her four-month-old pad in Delray Beach, Florida is the latest in a series of apartments and, according to a sign visible on Google Maps Street View, located in a tidy complex of smallish one- and two-bedroom units.

The nuking of the blog seems especially extreme because Schmidt played such a small part in it. The executive did appear in three different posts (see quotes here), across maybe five paragraphs of text. But Bohner's entries were long; the three most recent averaged more than 30 paragraphs each, which was typical.

Yes, there was the tidbit about Schmidt (aka "Dr. Strangelove") giving Bohner an prototype iPhone, and being a "genuinely caring, concerned boyfriend." But almost everything else was about Bohner's yoga, time in a Buddhist temple in Thailand, friends in recovery and past addictive escapades.

If Schmidt is so concerned about his privacy, why not just ask Bohner to stop mentioning him? His extramarital dalliances, including with Bohner, are hardly fresh news any more; the Google chief is rumored either separated, as we've reported previously, or in an open marriage, as our Bohner-blog source insists. The Google CEO should be more concerned about the release of any fresh details about his sex life. Concerned, that is, assuming he won't take his own advice and avoid having embarrassing secrets in the first place.

Bohner's blog and book project seemed to have really inspired the ex-addict. Her entries were long, but also formed a potential lifeline for other addicts. In other words, they had merit aside from the bits on Eric "Not the Center of the World" Schmidt. So it's too bad they'll be gone. You can read them for a bit longer; they're here, on a Web caching server provided, as fate would have it, by Schmidt's company.

Schmidt parted ways with Bohner last summer, but that hasn't kept him out of what a tipster in his ex-girlfriend's social circle called her "pet project:" a multimedia confessional autobiography, including a Google-hosted blog called "Recovery Girl 007", and eventually a book.

On the blog, Bohner writes about Schmidt, dubbing him "Dr. Strangelove" and disclosing that he gave her a prototype iPhone. She also calls Steve Jobs a "stoned Jesuit preist" (more below). That aside, the intricate online memoir-in-progress primarily details Bohner's recovery from cocaine and alcohol addiction via 12-step programs and yoga.

It's not clear how Bohner is funding the project, which has seen the former CNBC correspondent hire an art director, webmaster and editor, all prominently credited here and at the bottom of this post in what might just be the most crowded masthead ever assembled for a personal Blogspot.

One gossip thinks Schmidt's money is somehow behind the project, but we're not so sure; barely a year ago, when he was still dating Bohner, the married billionare was showering her with little more than love and jewelry, despite an overture for him to put money into the documentary company where Bohner worked. Maybe Bohner's hocked some of those gifts, or is simply relying on savings. It certainly doesn't seem as though she's become reentangled with Schmidt; our tipster wrote that the couple are "hitting it too occasionally for her liking" — which could well mean not at all.

What Bohner has so far detailed of her personal autobiography is certainly rattling stuff of the sort that would pull a caring lover's heartstrings. She writes about snorting cocaine in Hyde Park, London; bingeing on tequila in Los Angeles; sipping brandy at age eight; quitting booze and then relapsing; shaking and heaving at a friend's house when trying to go dry; and getting checked in to a detox center. (It is a "Colonel Stevenson" who introduces Bohner to brandy as a child in Southern Spain. That this same Colonel Stevenson appears on Bohner's more public blog is, along with a pointer from our tipster, how we know the former Donald Trump ghostwriter is also responsible for the Recovery Girl 007 blog.)

We assume Bohner will also eventually give the backstory behind her criminal record. Using her birth day and year, gleaned from her blog, and a public records search, we found she'd been sentenced to just under three years (of probation?) in South Florida (where she now resides) for aggressive assault with a weapon, no intent to kill, in a 2005 Florida incident. In New Jersey she got three years probation for a crime we've not yet determined.

Then there were Bohner's landlord issues in New York City. After two civil filings from a building management company in late 2005 and early 2006, Bohner was forcibly evicted in May 2006, according to a public records search.

Despite repeated attempts, we were not able to elicit any quote or rebuttal from Bohner on her project or background.

On her website, Bohner writes about turning her life around with help from a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, where she worked, and from a popular Los Angeles yoga instructor, Keith Fox.

Schmidt has good reason to hope that turnaround sticks: On Bohner's site, the former business journalist writes repeatedly about the men in her life; it's not hard to imagine Bohner burning an ex who falls out of her good graces. In addition to Schmidt, Bohner's dated author Michael Lewis (to whom she was briefly married) and Lazard executive Steve Langman.

Among the lovers on the Recovery Girl site is someone code-named Dr. Strangelove, who is often in Los Angeles. "Dr." Eric Schmidt holds a Ph.D. as well as a home in Santa Barbara County. Dr. Strangelove and Eric Schmidt are one in the same, as the first of several excerpts below makes clear.

During a trip to the U.S. Virgin Islands (emphasis added):

I haven't thought about Dr. Strangelove in such a long time-I try to sweep all of that data completely under the Persian carpet. That's a lie. I think about him every so often in these fleeting cinematic flashes...I have completely stopped sleeping. My friend Jason is so worried about it that he confiscates my Blackberry... I've been sleeping with my Blackberry just in case Strangelove might send an e-mail. If I was really smart I ditch the Blackberry for the iPhone he gave me – the prototype version. But I have yet to arrive. Stephen Jobs is not St. Stephen. He's just a stoned Jesuit priest lost in his garden. Strangelove still has his stranglehold on me and nothing is new under the sun.

Later in the same post:

The dream is always the same... strolling through winding paths at a government insane asylum in northern Massachusetts.I've been committed-against my will. It is Strangelove, my genuinely caring, concerned boyfriend. He has convinced me, or, he has convinced me that I've convinced him, that I am suicidal. The dream always begins with me walking the grounds of the campus. I look for the cafeterias with the free food. I can't find the line for the free bus back to Santa Monica. I keep pulling on the locked doors.

At the Buddhist temple in Thailand:

How did I get here? There was the phone call. There was the betrayal. Dr. Strangelove had lied about his involvement in it all. And then there were a couple of conversations that followed. And all I remember feeling was that I had to get out of L.A.

After detox in South Florida:

You see I wasn't going to go back to Los Angeles. That part was clear. The L.A . experiment hadn't worked. Game over. Case closed. The work thing had ended when I went to the monastery in Thailand. And the relationship was officially over; Dr. Strangelove was dead. Next chapter.

We'll certainly be reading Bohner's future installments closely. And we're sure Schmidt will, too.

The largest Silicon Valley companies lost more than one in ten black and Hispanic employees from 2000 to 2005, leaving their workforces just 7 percent black and Hispanic, even as their overall employment grew 16 percent, accoring to federal employment data obtained by the San Jose Mercury News. And that's among the 10 companies who allowed the newspaper's Freedom of Information Act Request to clear the Labor Department. One would presume the situation is even worse at stonewalling Apple, Google, Oracle, Yahoo and Applied Materials, though the firms insist they are merely protecting trade secrets. It's entirely possible that Apple CEO Steve Jobs, for example, is hiding a very diverse workforce behind this management team:

(Top pic: DaveMN on Flickr)

Via BlackBook's Chris Mohney—hi weekday boss!—sometime between last night and this morning, Google had the above image up. As blogger Zach Everson noted, "at least he's on the track." The kinda Gothic illustration was—if you haven't been to Google in the last few seconds—changed since then.

Kind of related: the Men's downhill was postponed because of slush on the course after one skier crashed (they're okay). Basically, the Canadian Olympics can't catch a break.

Here are some examples of their pleas:

Google co-founder Brin and search products VP Marissa Mayer helped christen co-worker Orkut's tenth-floor penthouse on San Francisco's Mint Plaza this past weekend, as we reported yesterday. It turns out co-founder Larry Page may have been there too; his model/Ph.D wife Lucy Southworth certainly was. At the time, we couldn't obtain more than one picture of the event, in part because, according to two tipsters with knowledge of the party, social network founder Orkut told guests not to circulate pictures online. That no doubt had something to do with the "several billionaires" reportedly in attendance.

Inevitably, though, some shots have emerged from the dark corners of Facebook, the Google rival that seems to have something of a lock on the world's most interesting information, at least to gossips like us. (Thank you, tipster who emailed us most of these pics.)

It would appear Orkut wasted no time breaking in his "custom-built party loft," complete (we hear) with elevated dance floor, poles, disco balls, dance lights and an indoor waterfall. There were the male and female strippers, who we're told were professionals. There was a male nude that appears to be an ice sculpture (or maybe glass?). There was a shimmery metal see-through curtain thing, like you might see used as a room divider in a lounge. And there was a logo devoted to Orkut and husband Derek Holbrook.

It was an effort befitting Orkut, whose past fabulousness has included opening Prada, going to BFF Mayer's Sex And The City party, staging disco parties, and appearing in more forbidden pictures, sometimes with strippers. Why he wants to keep all this fun a secret is beyond us. Didn't he hear privacy is dead?

Saturday's party:

We're told these adult dancers are professional. And they're in a professional venue: The poles, stage, lights and disco ball are an integral part of Orkut's new penthouse party pad.

Orkut's husband Derek, on the pole. Oh my.

So it looks like either there was a second lady stripper, or a guest decided to join in the fun.

The guest on the left is Mayer's husband Zach Bogue, only recently taken off the market. In other words: He can look, but he can't touch. On the right, Orkut's brother.

The nude (ice?) sculpture, shot one, from Facebook.

The nude (ice?) sculpture, shot two, which we found yesterday on Twitter but weren't sure it was from this party.

Derek & Orkut. Awwwww. Now back to the strippers!

Ya, it's blurry. But you try taking a surreptitious stripper shot at a party you don't want to get thrown out of.

"Dancer for money, do what you want me to do..."

Metal curtain for the full "club" effect.

Hubby Derek with Larry Page's model/Ph.D wife Lucy Southworth, far right.

This guy is Rhett Butler. Like, literally.

The host, center, with two guests: record producer Jimmy Markee (left) and Yelp account executive Eli Zepeda (right) (Names?)

Orkut, in case you've forgotten, is by far the most interesting person to work for the Mountain View, California internet company, where technical skills are valued over all else, resulting in a (mostly) boring army of engineer droids. Orkut's the fun exception.

Sure, the Turkish programmer built Google's also-ran social network, Orkut, a.k.a. "The Facebook of Brazil." But more importantly, the San Francisco partyboy also hired strippers for his previous too-hot-for-the-Web birthday party; been gay-married by his Vogue-errific best friend Marissa Mayer; attended the opening of the local Prada; wore a fabulous sheening suit to the ballet; and is good at making everyone get dressed up and disco.

The Silicon Valley tech scene needs more of this sort of acting out, and the Valley scenesters would seem to agree: We hear Orkut's Saturday party was packed with what techies (inaccurately) call "A Listers," including billionaire Google founder Sergey Brin and very very rich person Mayer (who threw a party of her own the following day, of the Superbowl sort). Here's how one attendee put it:

According to public records of Orkut's holdings, that ten-story-high apartment building would be a posh renovated warehouse at 410 Jessie Street, on San Francisco's newly-remade Mint Plaza. That's directly across the street from the San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper whose misfortunes some have blamed on none other than... Google.

But Orkut's guests didn't come to dance on graves. The disco-lover installed a raised dance floor, complete with poles and special lights, in his two-level penthouse, according to a source with knowledge of the place. There's also some sort of indoor waterfall, we hear. (Orkut declined to discuss his apartment or party on the phone and never sent a promised email reply.)

Pictures from the latest shindig are, alas, few and far between. Despite his direct financial interest in social networking and the free flow of information online, Orkut banned any network distribution of images from his party. we're told. Irony, that. Anyway, in the photo gallery we've mixed in pictures from an apparent pre-party in January as well as of a similar party at a different location last year. Do send us more pics if you have them. We're happy to disseminate the information Googlers refuse to spread themselves.

Apparently from Saturday's event, via friend Jen Liu's Facebook album "house warming & birthday party," uploaded 16 hours ago.

One of the dance poles going up, from a January picture of "orkut's party," again via Liu.

The dance floor again? Again from Liu's "orkut's party" album, January.

Liu and Orkut, ibid.

Orkut at a party in Jan. 2009. Via Facebook.

Orkut, center, with boyfriend Derek Holbrook, right, at a Jan. 2009 party.

Orkut at a Jan. 2009 party.

Quick trip to Brazil via private jet, anyone?

At Burning Man 2009.

What isn't there to enjoy about this?

Seeing as how Apple's commercial game is already far evolved over anything Google's got—this is a spoof of Google's "search stories" campaign—at the very least, they couldn't do too terribly by culling some inspiration, here. It perfectly captures any number of universal Google experiences: shadily searching out How-To information for things pre-established How-To information shouldn't necessarily exist for, the trial-and-error process of using Google and the various misspellings the rest of the world makes with you, the whimsical nature of search results Google will "guess" for you, and finally, the widespread use of Google to search patently innocuous information, which, essentially, is what the internet (and Google) is more or less for. It's witty, it's funny, it's topical, and most important: spot-on. Might as well embrace that shit.

Tesla registered with the SEC on Friday. Buried in the copious paperwork is the name of a very interesting "Series C" and "Series E" stockholder: Amphitheatre LLC. We first flagged this entity as a possible Google front when it invested in a zeppelin company started by Google advisor Esther Dyson. The same zeppelin company was later hired by 23AndMe, the Google-funded and -housed genetic testing firm co-founded by the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Ampitheatre LLC may well have been acquired by Google along with the company INV Tax Group when Google bought its eight-building headquarters at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway and 1200-1500 Crittenden Lane in Mountain View. Ampitheatre LLC and INV Tax Group, then believed affiliated with Goldman Sachs, had been the shell companies that held the buildings.

It's hard to imagine why a real estate holding vehicle is now investing in zeppelins and electric cars if it's not controlled by Google. California records are little help; they show the LLC still registered to "INV Tax Group, 180 Maiden Lane, 40th floor," an address once linked to Goldman Sachs in a building now used by a wide array of companies.

Google's a logical investor, anyway, since its founders are already Tesla customers (see picture of Brin in his Tesla, left, by Zach Graves) and investors. Co-founder Larry Page even reportedly "jet pools" with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Google has an "electric car" section reserved in its parking lot (see picture at top by Tristan Nitot). It wouldn't be the first time Google co-invested with its founders; it followed Brin into his wife's 23AndMe.

Whether the Google honchos had their financial judgment clouded by the fact that they personally made it to the front of Tesla's fiercely competitive waiting list is something for Google shareholders to decide.

In so doing, they might consider another nugget buried in Tesla's S-1: The company has not yet stabilized its notoriously volatile executive ranks. Among the recent departures is general counsel Jonathan Sobel, formerly of Yahoo. Sobel started in September; he was gone by December. One tipster claims friction with Musk was to blame. The bigger question is whether Musk can forge more stable relationships with his co-workers going forward. Only time will tell. We'll be watching, and we bet Google will be, too.

(Top pic: A Tesla parked at Google headquarters, by Tristan Nitot. Second pic: Sergey Brin driving in his Tesla, by Zach Graves.)

Capping months of mounting tension between former allies Google and Apple over competing phones, Jobs called Google's "Don't Be Evil" mantra either "bullshit" or "crap" over the weekend. Now the Googler Diaspora is letting him have it in this FriendFeed thread. "I don't know where people get the idea that competition is evil," writes Paul Buchheit, the ex-Googler who invented "Don't Be Evil," along with Gmail and FriendFeed. One current Googler says he plans to tack up Jobs' "very motivational" quote beside his monitor; another says Jobs myopically "sees all competition as zero-sum." And former Googler Kevin Fox says Apple is worse, "holding Google's iPhone apps in limbo because Apple is afraid they might succeed." Your turn, Apple guys.

(Pic Jobs, center, with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, left, and co-founder Sergey Brin, right, at Macworld, Jan. 2008. Getty Images.)

What I want to know is: Which Apple employee hasn't drank enough Kool-Aid/has the balls to stand up in a room with Jobs, and grill him about Google and Flash? Either way, they got the answers. But how do they stand up on the REALTALK-o-Meter? Graded on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being Sign Language, 10 being REAL TALK.

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there's no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don't be evil mantra: "It's bullshit." Audience roars.

Emphasis mine, though Wired later clears up that Jobs may have said "crap," instead of "bullshit."

REAL TALK-o-Meter: 6 if he said "crap," 7 if he said "bullshit," somewhere in Whitney "Hell to the No" Houston territory. Because any companies in the business of technology telling people they're out to make the World a Better Place are basically full of it, which obviously includes Apple. In fact, aren't most passive-defensive declarative statements bullshit? When someone says "I can't stand stupid people," it's like, why would you say that? Are you insecure about being stupid? How is everyone else stupid? Etc.

About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don't do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it's because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

REAL TALK-o-Meter: A low 3. Yes, he was talking about the Decision Makers of Adobe, but writing an entire company off as "lazy" to your own employees is pretty disingenuous. Is Adobe really not up to speed because their guys are sitting around on beanbag chairs all day, smoking weed and playing Dolphin Olympics on their laptops? No. And is the reason the iPad and iPhone don't support Flash because it's buggy? Might have been taken into consideration, but to speak to it as the primary reason Apple's are crashing at least sounds misleading. So many of the websites you visit every day utilize flash. Why can't Apple's products—among other things—crash less, even if Flash is buggy? Then again, it's Jobs' decision to use Flash or not, REAL TALK. As for HTML5, if by "the world" Jobs means "Apple and whoever follows," he's correct. Which he probably does mean, because he's a computer nerd who's trying to run the universe.

Other notable notes that Wired picked up in the MacRumors forum:

- Apple will deliver aggressive updates to iPhone that Android/Google won't be able to keep up with
- iPad is up there with the iPhone and Mac as the most important products Jobs has been a part of
- Regarding the Lala acquisition, Apple was interested in bringing those people into the iTunes team
- Next iPhone coming is an A+ update
- New Macs for 2010 are going to take Apple to the next level
- Blu-Ray software is a mess, and Apple will wait until sales really start to take off before implementing it.

So, in this grading of the REAL TALK-O-Meter, Steve Jobs gets a 4.25 average, for which he gets nothing. At 8, we'll send him a Golden Shirt Microphone. Any employees who dare question Jobs and still have their testicles fully intact get figureative salutes from people all over who are too afraid to stand up to their power-crazy nerd bosses, and any tipsters who have anything else to say about how REAL the REAL TALK of Steve Jobs is (or the employees who questioned him, for that matter) gets an email address to say it to.

Oh, and as a reminder: this is what REAL TALK looks like.