His fans are literally throwing money at him.

The Chinese artist, activist and Internet sensation Ai Weiwei has collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from fans who want to help him pay back taxes of $2.3 million.

Many are simply throwing the money into his Beijing compound.

“His supporters have folded 100 yuan notes — the equivalent of $15.75 — into paper airplanes that glided into the compound. Others wrapped the money around pieces of fruit and hurled it over the wall,” the LA Times wrote on its World Now blog. “Or more traditionally Chinese, they stuffed it into red envelopes.”

If you’re not one of his 110,000 Twitter followers, you may never have heard of Ai. But the architect who designed the Bird’s Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics in 2008 has become one of China’s most noted political dissidents and online activists.

At the recent PopTech conference in Maine, CNN sat down with Alison Klayman, who spent several years following Ai for an upcoming documentary called “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” to learn more about his fame in China and his mastery of the Internet.

“The truth is I don’t believe it’s his art — in terms of what’s shown in a museum — that may have put him in the position that he’s in,” Klayman said, referring to Ai’s three-month detention, which ended in June, and the fact that he’s been targeted by Chinese authorities as a dissident.

“It’s really about how his life is his art. It’s about his activities, how he gives interviews very freely. He does not self-censor what he thinks,” she said. “It’s also the organizing he’s done online. Part of his art includes underground documentaries that he films with collaborators and posts online for free. They have to do with the questions and conversation that he curates online — first on his blog, until it was shut down, and now on Twitter.”

Ai was able to use the Internet, to a degree, to circumvent authorities, she said.

“In a society where all official media is subject to censorship — from micro-blogs up to party papers — that’s also an incredibly subversive thing to be able to connect to people,” Klayman said. “And the truth is censorship cannot be an all-knowing eye, and people are having very interesting conversations even within the firewall — and on Twitter, which is blocked in China, so people have to use technology to go outside the firewall.”

Ai came late to technology but adopted it with gusto, she said.

“Ai Weiwei never used a computer — never really knew how to type — before 2005,” she said. “And in 2005 he was invited by Sina.com, which is a big Internet company in China, to have a celebrity blog. He was a well-known architect and artist, and he decided to take that on. His father was also a poet, so he was also interested in seeing how his writing chops or his literary chops were. And he immediately was drawn to the medium. He’s always been looking for ways to communicate — and suddenly he saw the Internet.”

Last year, Klayman asked Ai about the biggest paradigm shift in his life.

“His answer to me was the Internet. ‘The Internet is what affected me and has opened up so many doors and has ignited me.’” she said.

“Now, as I’m completing the documentary … I really understand what that means.”

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U.S. regulators approved converting a $4.3 billion telephone subsidy into a program to fund the extension of high-speed Internet services to an estimated 18 million Americans who lack broadband access.

The Federal Communications Commission voted 4 to 0 today to accept Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposal to revamp the subsidy, which supports phone connections in regions where it’s expensive to supply service. The overhaul of the High Cost Program is part of an agency effort, led by Genachowski, to spur economic growth by increasing the availability of high-speed Internet.

“We are taking a system designed for the Alexander Graham Bell era of rotary telephones and modernizing it for the era of Steve Jobs and the Internet future he imagined,” Genachowski said before the vote at an agency meeting in Washington. The expanded broadband may result in “hundreds of thousands of jobs” in rural areas, he said.

In the same vote the FCC lowered the rates that companies charge to connect calls. Together the moves are designed to restructure support for rural companies and relieve pressure on the Universal Service Fund, a broader subsidy program that is financed through a charge on consumers’ long-distance calls.

Traditional landline companies led by No. 1 AT&T Inc. and second-largest Verizon Communications Inc. in July asked the FCC to give existing service providers the first crack at the new broadband subsidies. The plan also was signed by CenturyLink Inc., Fairpoint Communications Inc., Frontier Communications Corp. and Windstream Corp.

Wireless Industry Objections

U.S. Cellular Corp., a Chicago-based wireless carrier, and CTIA-The Wireless Association, in FCC filings before the vote said not enough of the new subsidy would go to mobile broadband. Members of the wireless association, a Washington-based trade group, include the four largest U.S. mobile carriers: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel Corp. and T-Mobile USA Inc.

The agency “rejected” the six-company approach, Mark Cooper, director of research for the Consumer Federation of America, said in an e-mail today.

“For the first time, public funds are being used to ensure that broadband is available at affordable rates,” Cooper said. “This change is long overdue.”

The FCC’s order lets companies levy a new charge on phone subscribers, according to Joel Kelsey, Washington-based political adviser for Free Press, a Florence, Massachusetts- based policy group.

“Asking consumers to pay more into a broken system and letting the industry divvy up the pot will not increase broadband adoption,” Kelsey said in an e-mail. “Prices should be going down, not up.”

Consumer Benefits

The vote won’t raise bills, said FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, a Republican.

“For the vast majority of consumers rates should decline or stay the same,” McDowell said. The commission has three Democrats and one Republican following a resignation.

FCC staff estimates that consumer benefits from the changes will amount to more than $2 billion annually, Genachowski said.

The changes “will help cut the number of Americans bypassed by broadband by up to one half over the following five years,” Genachowski said in an Oct. 6 speech. He said about 18 million Americans live in areas with no access to broadband.

Connect America Fund

Windstream is “anxious” to review the FCC’s order, which has “meaningful differences” from the six-company proposal, Mike Rhoda, senior vice president of government affairs for the carrier based in Little Rock, Arkansas, said in an e-mail.

At issue in today’s vote were the changes to the High Cost Program, which is part of the Universal Service Fund. The new program for supporting high-speed Internet service is to be called the Connect America Fund.

Disbursements from the High Cost Program rose to $4.3 billion in 2010 from $1.7 billion in 1998, according to the Universal Service Administrative Company, the Washington-based non-profit that administers the fund.

The Connect America Fund will be capped at $4.5 billion, about the level of current expenditure, the FCC said in a news release.

Since 2001, costs to consumers have also climbed, from 6.7 percent of long-distance and international calls to about 15 percent, according to the USAC.

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  Streaming LIVE on YouTube – Oct. 26th – 3:00 CST:  Click Here!

Give me your tired, your poor — your Internet-connected masses yearning to see.

Lady Liberty is getting high-tech gifts for her 125th birthday: webcams on her torch that will let viewers gaze out at New York Harbor and read the tablet in her hands or see visitors on the grounds of the island below in real time.

The five torch cams are to be switched on Friday during a ceremony to commemorate the dedication of the Statue of Liberty on Oct. 28, 1886. The ceremony caps a week of events centered around the historic date, including the debut of a major museum exhibition about poet Emma Lazarus, who helped bring the monument renown as the “Mother of Exiles.”

The statue’s webcams will offer views from the torch that have been unavailable to the public since 1916, said Stephen A. Briganti, the president of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation Inc.

“The statue is the most famous symbol in the world,” he said. “Most of the people in the world have seen it, but they have not seen it like this. It will be a visit that so many people, including New Yorkers, have never taken before.”

Through the webcams, Internet users around the world will have four views, including a high-quality, 180-degree stitched panorama of the harbor with stunning views of Ellis and Governors islands. They will be able to watch as ships go by Liberty Island and observe as the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center goes up floor-by-floor in lower Manhattan. They can get a fish-eye look at the torch itself as it glows in the night.

The five cameras, which will be on 24 hours, seven days a week, were donated to the National Park Service by Earthcam Inc., a New Jersey-based company that manages webcams around the world.

The cameras put viewers on the balcony of the torch and high above the crown, said Brian Cury, the founder of Earthcam.

“This is not your dad’s picture of the Statue of Liberty,” he said. “This is not a view from a tourist helicopter. This is unique.”

Friday’s ceremony also will be marked by a water flotilla, actress Sigourney Weaver reading Lazarus’ poem and a naturalization ceremony for 125 candidates for citizenship representing over 40 countries.

The public is invited to attend the ceremony, with ferry service available between Manhattan and Liberty Island. The interior of the statue — from the pedestal down to the museum base — will close after the 125th celebration for up to a year so that stairwells, elevators and mechanical systems can be upgraded. The park itself will remain open to visitors.

The statue, designed by sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, was given by the French government to the U.S. as a token of friendship between the two countries and dedicated by President Grover Cleveland.

And while today it is known as a symbol of liberty for millions of refugees and exiles, initially the famous sonnet by Lazarus in the voice of the statue asking for “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” did not appear on the statue. It was not until 1903 that “The New Colossus” was placed on the pedestal.

Lazarus is the subject of a new exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan, which has views of Lady Liberty. It’s to open Wednesday to coincide with the anniversary of the statue’s dedication.

Curator Melissa Martens said Lazarus was born into the fourth generation of a Jewish family in New York prominent since colonial times. “They were some of the early people to articulate the Jewish experience in dialogue with the challenges of freedom and religious liberty,” she said.

Featuring over 83 original objects from 27 institutions and individuals, “Poet of Exiles” is the first full-fledged artifact exhibit at a major museum to robustly explore the life of Lazarus, from her work as an advocate for immigrants fleeing the Russian pogroms of the early 1880s to her pioneering support for a Jewish homeland.

Lazarus died in 1887 at age 38 from Hodgkin’s disease, never having known her poem would be united with the Statue of Liberty.

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LONDON — Syria is using equipment and software developed by an American company to censor the Internet and conduct surveillance of its citizens, according to data analyzed by technology experts and advocates for Syrian dissidents.

The equipment, developed by California-based Blue Coat Systems, is allegedly being used by Syria’s autocratic government to block access to the Internet and crack down on dissidents who have been protesting against President Bashar al-Assad for nearly eight months, the experts and advocates say.

U.S. officials say they are reviewing reports that Syria’s government is using the company’s products. “The issue of Blue Coat’s technology being used in Syria is one that the State Department is taking very seriously and is very concerned about,” said a State Department official who would discuss the matter only on the condition of anonymity.

A senior administration official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, noted that sanctions restrict U.S. companies from trade with Syria. “Our sanctions provide for some exceptions for certain software,” the official said. “Anything exported that is not covered by exceptions would violate sanctions.”

Blue Coat, based in Sunnyvale, said it has not sold equipment or software to the Syrian government, but a spokesman did not deny that Syria could have obtained the products through a third party.

“Blue Coat does not sell to Syria,” spokesman Steve Schick said in an e-mail. “We comply with U.S. export laws, and we do not allow our partners to sell to embargoed countries.” Sales by U.S. companies to Syria are illegal under sanctions imposed by President George W. Bush in 2004.

Eric King of Privacy International, a London-based nonprofit group that challenges government surveillance, said the company’s products can enable a government to monitor the Internet activity of large numbers of people. “In the wrong hands, Blue Coat technology can all too easily be used as a tool of political control,” he said.

Given the nature of the gray market for surveillance and monitoring equipment, Syria may have acquired the Blue Coat equipment indirectly, according to Pratap Chatterjee of London’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which is probing the allegations.

“A lot of the manufacturers don’t know or don’t want to know who’s buying their technology because they could be subject to fines or prosecution in their countries,” Chatterjee said.

Reports of Syria’s alleged use of Blue Coat products originated with Telecomix, a group founded by Swedish hackers in 2006 that has been providing support to dissidents in the Middle East.

Telecomix released electronic records from the Syria Telecommunications Establishment, which the group said showed that the government was using Blue Coat equipment to prohibit its citizens from browsing certain Web sites and social media. In August, Telecomix activists said they downloaded 54 gigabytes of Syrian telecommunications data that indicated that the Blue Coat technology was being used to filter Internet communications in the country.

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Yesterday was Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday for the month of October. There were a total of eight new security bulletins–not too many, but enough to keep IT admins busy for a while. While most of the vulnerabilities addressed are not imminent threats, security experts are virtually unanimous that patching Internet Explorer should be priority one.

First, let’s take a brief look at the security bulletins Microsoft released for Patch Tuesday:

MS11-075 (Vulnerability in Microsoft Active Accessibility Could Allow Remote Code Execution): Could be exploited to run malicious code from a rogue DLL file.

• MS11-076 (Vulnerability in Windows Media Center Could Allow Remote Code Execution): Addresses a publicly disclosed vulnerability in Windows Media Center that could be used to run malicious code from a rogue DLL file.
• MS11-077 (Vulnerabilities in Windows Kernel-Mode Drivers Could Allow Remote Code Execution): Fixes four different vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, including one that could allow an attacker to execute malicious code by luring someone to open a malicious font file.

• MS11-078 (Vulnerability in .NET Framework and Microsoft Silverlight Could Allow Remote Code Execution): Fixes a critical vulnerability in .NET Framework and Microsoft Silverlight that can be exploited to run malicious code when someone visits a compromised website.
• MS11-079 (Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway Could Cause Remote Code Execution): Resolves five vulnerabilities in Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway, one of which could enable an attacker to execute malicious code by luring the user to visit a compromised website.
• MS11-080 (Vulnerability in Ancillary Function Driver Could Allow Elevation of Privilege): Deals with a possible elevation of privileges vulnerability, but an attacker would have to log on locally to the system using valid credentials, so this presents very little risk.
• MS11-081 (Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer): This month’s Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer addresses eight vulnerabilities, including one which can be used to execute malicious code simply by luring a user to visit a compromised website.
• MS11-082 (Vulnerabilities in Host Integration Server Could Allow Denial of Service): Deals with two vulnerabilities in Host Integration Server that could be used for a denial of service attack.

To average users and many IT admins, the descriptions all sound somewhat ominous, and–to be fair–they are all updates that should be applied if you use the affected products or services. But, only two of the security bulletins (MS11-078 and MS11-081) are rated as Critical by Microsoft, and only one of them is being pushed as a top priority by security experts.

Joshua Talbot, security intelligence manager, Symantec Security Response, says, “Internet Explorer vulnerabilities are very common targets of attackers and it will probably be no different with these. Users and IT departments should patch these right away.”

Paul Henry, security and forensic analyst at Lumension, stresses about MS11-081, “None of the patched issues are related to active exploits; however users are urged to patch this as a high priority.”

Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle, implores, “Patching Internet Explorer should be at the top of everyone’s list.”

Amol Sarwate, Manager of Vulnerability Labs for Qualys, agrees, “The highest priority should be given to MS11-081 which patches a code execution vulnerability in Internet Explorer.”

VMWare’s Jason Miller, and Marcus Carey from Rapid7 also cite updating Internet Explorer as the number one priority from this Patch Tuesday. I think it is safe to say that we have a general consensus on which update is the most urgent.

Make sure you apply all updates that affect your systems as soon as possible. But, if you have testing and patch rollout processes to deal with, make sure you address MS11-081 first.

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Google today launched an “early preview” of Dart, a programming language the company hopes will help Web application programmers overcome shortcomings of JavaScript that Google itself feels acutely.

Programmer and project leader Lars Bak detailed the project in a talk today at the Goto conference in Denmark and in a blog post. Dart is geared for everything from small, unstructured projects to large, complicated efforts–Gmail and Google Docs, for example.

“If we want to focus on making the Web better over time, we have to innovate,” including with new programming languages, Bak said in an interview today.

Google also unveiled a Dart language site that includes open-source tools for writing Dart programs, code samples, and tutorials; libraries of supporting software; the Dart language specification; and forums for discussion.

A month ago, details about Dart raised some hackles about Google’s Web technology tactics when a 2010 internal memo about Dart, then called Dash, surfaced on a mailing list. One tidbit from that memo was that Dart was designed “to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of Web development.”

Google is a big company, though, and others within the company remain strong JavaScript adherents. And Bak, while not denying Google has big ambitions, was quick to proclaim JavaScript alive and well.

“It’s not going to replace JavaScript,” Bak said. “JavaScript is a cornerstone of the Web today, and it will continue to be for a long, long time.”

Bak bristled at some of the complaints about Google’s approach to creating Dart in-house and not through a more collaborative approach.

“I don’t buy the argument that before writing any line of code or designing any features, you put it in a standards committee, because that would just be a lot of screaming,” Bak said. “You have to have coherent design before you start adopting Dart as a standard.”

Making a standard is a goal, though. “It will be fairly lonely to create a standards committee when there’s only us in it. We first have to get the backing of other partners before we can make a standard that’s useful,” he said.

Google is releasing Dart now for the next step in its maturation: outside feedback and participation. “We hope the other browser vendors will be excited,” Bak said, adding that today is the first that Google has shared details about Dart with them or others.

Google is evaluating the best way to integrate Dart directly into its Chrome browser, something Bak is keen on. One reason: it will enable a “snapshotting” technology that dramatically improves a Web app’s startup time. Snapshotting involves taking an application and “serializing” it into a single block of data.

In one test of snapshotting, a 55,000-line Dart program loaded in 60 milliseconds compared to 640 milliseconds without it, Bak said. A conventional JavaScript program would load in comparable time as Dart without snapshotting, he said. “I can see a lot of optimizations that’ll be applicable to Dart” when it’s integrated directly into a browser, he added.

Here is Bak’s quick description of Dart’s design goals:

 • Create a structured yet flexible language for Web programming.

• Make Dart feel familiar and natural to programmers and thus easy to learn.

• Ensure that Dart delivers high performance on all modern Web browsers and environments ranging from small handheld devices to server-side execution.

Dart targets a wide range of development scenarios: from a one-person project without much structure to a large-scale project needing formal types in the code to state programmer intent. To support this wide range of projects, Dart has optional types; this means you can start coding without types and add them later as needed. We believe Dart will be great for writing large web applications.

Dart programs will be able to run within a Dart virtual machine–essentially a layer of software that acts as a computer to execute programs. They’ll also be able to run using a compiler that translates Dart code into JavaScript code for browsers that don’t support Dart, Bak said.

Google’s Chrome browser has served as a vehicle to get the company’s technology such as WebM and SPDY useful for at least a portion of Web users. Though the 2010 Dart/Dash memo said Google planned build Dart support into Chrome, Bak was cautious about making any definite statements beyond saying browser integration brings benefits. It’s notable, though, that Bak led development of Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, so he’s hardly a stranger to the Chrome team or to the challenges of improving Web-app speed.

Building Dart into Chrome could let Google build Dart versions of its advanced Web apps that–if the language lives up to its billing–could be better than those Web apps today.

“Google has a lot fairly big Web applications. That includes Gmail and Docs. I hope many of these apps will be converted into Dart,” Bak said. But he cautioned that this is his personal option, not an explicit plan.

Introducing new programming languages is tough. Though many hope that computing can improve by reforming or replacing languages, the incumbent power of existing languages is strong. Educating thousands or millions of programmers, building developer tools, and creating supporting libraries of code all can take years. As newer languages such as Java, JavaScript, and C# attest, though, it is possible.

Google also is trying to gain a foothold for Go, a programming language geared more for native software that today would most likely be written with C or C++.

Dart is designed to address several shortcomings Google sees with Web programming today, according to the Dart technical overview:

 • Small scripts often evolve into large web applications with no apparent structure–they’re hard to debug and difficult to maintain. In addition, these monolithic apps can’t be split up so that different teams can work on them independently. It’s difficult to be productive when a Web application gets large.

• Scripting languages are popular because their lightweight nature makes it easy to write code quickly. Generally, the contracts with other parts of an application are conveyed in comments rather than in the language structure itself. As a result, it’s difficult for someone other than the author to read and maintain a particular piece of code.

• With existing languages, the developer is forced to make a choice between static and dynamic languages. Traditional static languages require heavyweight toolchains and a coding style that can feel inflexible and overly constrained.

• Developers have not been able to create homogeneous systems that encompass both client and server, except for a few cases such as Node.js and Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

• Different languages and formats entail context switches that are cumbersome and add complexity to the coding process.

The priority right now is to hear what the rest of the world thinks and to get them participating in Dart’s development, Bak said.

“At this point it is mostly the language we are focused on,” he said. “We hope to get positive feedback on the language.”

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Challenges to new U.S. Internet traffic rules will be heard in the federal appeals court in Washington D.C., a court that has previously been skeptical of the Federal Communications Commission’s authority.

A judicial panel that manages multidistrict litigation said on Thursday it had randomly selected the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to hear appeals of the FCC’s “Open Internet” order.

The same appeals court ruled last year that the FCC lacked the authority to stop Comcast Corp (CMCSA.O) from blocking bandwidth-hogging applications on its broadband network, spurring the agency’s rulemaking.

“The FCC is in for a rough legal battle given the past history of net neutrality in the D.C. circuit,” said Medley Global Advisors analyst Jeffrey Silva.

The FCC has repeatedly expressed confidence in the legal foundation backing the rules which are due to take effect Nov. 20. “The FCC stands ready to defend its open Internet order in any court of appeals,” an agency spokesman said on Thursday.

Adopted by a divided FCC last December, the Internet rules seek to balance the interests of consumers and content providers with those who sell access to the Web and often supply their own content.

The rules forbid broadband providers from blocking legal content while leaving flexibility for providers to manage their networks.

Backers of net neutrality rules say big providers could otherwise use their gatekeeper role to discriminate against competitors. Internet providers say they need to be able to manage their networks for all users.

Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) filed suit last week, asking the D.C. appeals court to have the rules thrown out, saying the FCC was “arbitrary” and “capricious” and acted beyond its statutory authority in imposing the rules. [ID:nS1E78T1P1]

Public interest groups have criticized the rules as too weak, saying the FCC was swayed by big industry players including AT&T Inc (T.N) and Comcast Corp (CMCSA.O).

Free Press filed suit last week in the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, challenging provisions in the order that give wireless broadband providers more discretion in managing their networks.

Other suits were also filed in the second, third, fourth and ninth circuits.

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“Start it and stick with it; change the world,” said the legendary entrepreneur. And change the world he did. Sadly, Steve Jobs died at his home on October 5, 2011, surrounded by the love of family. His legacy however, remains not only with family, and with his company Apple.

Steve Jobs’ legacy and genius will be studied and implemented by generations of internet startups to come.

The man whom BoingBoing writer, Xeni Jardin said “democratized technology,” once stated, “design isn’t about the way something looks or feels, design is in the way something works.” Jobs was interested in having Apple connect with consumers; he wanted the Mac to be a consumer PC. He wanted to create products that would help the average person use technology.

As Gizmodo’s editor, Matt Buchanan, stated today in a television interview, because of Jobs, “everyone has a computer in their pocket.” This idea alone—making technology hip and simple for the average person—could be a single lesson for internet startups.

However, Jobs’ vision reveals several indirect messages to internet startups.

Steve Jobs’ Message To Internet Startups

Luck into it. Jobs believed that the longer time you spend developing a product or company, the luckier you become. Asked by Fortune Magazine (in 2000) what he thought of the younger generation of internet startups, Jobs’ response was:

It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: if they don’t really build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up. There were times in the first two years when we could have given up and sold Apple, and it probably would’ve died.

Steal great ideas. “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas,” said Jobs in a 1996 PBS Documentary, Triumph of the Nerds. In fact, in Michael Malone’s, Infinite Loop: How Apple, The World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane, it was allegedly after a visit to Xerox in the summer of 1973, when a programmer from Apple laid the foundation for the Macintosh.

Don’t be intimidated by the competition. During the trying years when Apple struggled and flopped, Microsoft successfully launched Windows. After much vigorous competition, Jobs finally said this at the Boston MacWorld Expo of 1997: “we have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft needs to lose. The era of competition between Microsoft and Apple is over, as far as I’m concerned.” Later, Apple would emerge with innovative products that would change the scope of technology.

Become a change agent. Lance Ulanoff, former editor of PC Magazine, said this about the man he also called friend, “he was written off in the mid 80s and came back as a new man.” Jobs left Apple (by most accounts he was ousted from Apple) to found NeXT software and to work on the animation studio, Pixar. Later, when asked to come back and help Apple rebound, Jobs brought over his NeXT software and his team of visionaries; turning Apple’s 1996 first-quarter loss of $740 million to a third-quarter profit of $30 million.

In a 2005 Stanford commencement speech, he said this about change:

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown of your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

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