Bill Maher‘s public disillusion with President Barack Obama continued on last night’s Real Time, where Maher expressed confusion at the fact that the President was now denouncing technology, a reference to his commencement speech last week asking graduates to give up the “iPads” and “XBoxes.” “What’s with the fuddy-duddy act?” asked Maher, concluding that his newfound confusion was an appeal to the fact that “America conflates out of touch with adorable.”

Apple CEO Steve Jobs – whose…er…job of late it seems is to keep his health issues private and out of public scrutiny – has finally opened up about his long battle with pancreatic cancer and other health problems. The impetus for the sharing? Jobs’ was coming out in support of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s bill to have California drivers decide when they get their license whether or not they’d donate their organs. Currently CA law has it that possible donors can attach the stickers themselves at their convenience.

While networks are still dealing with the fallout from Seth MacFarlane‘s two-week old Family Guy reference to Sarah Palin‘s son with Down’s Syndrome, it might seem a little disingenuous to ask for a harsher assessment of Apple CEO Steve Jobs from last night’s Saturday Night Live sketch. But NBC took no chances with their portrayal of Jobs in their sketch “Undercover Celebrity Boss,” while the other celebs in the segment got skewered. Why?

The New York Times reports that an authorized biography of Steve Jobs is currently underway and in its “early planning stages.” According to the report, the biography is to be written by Walter Isaacson, the head of the Aspen Institute and the author of popular biographies of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin.

I saw the Sport Illustrated demo video long before the iPad was released. It was everything the iPad should have been on Day One. A mind-blowing demonstration of what the future of the magazine could be. The problem is, the iPad cannot do what the demo shows and it should have. Flash is the only current technology that would make that possible.

Sometime Friday, Amazon stopped directly selling all books put out by the publisher Macmillan, due to a disagreement over future pricing of e-books. Let’s be clear, it’s not just that Amazon wasn’t selling Macmillan books on the Kindle. Amazon was no longer directly selling any books from this publisher, though one can still buy them new and used on the website through third-party vendors. This is a dispute with massive consequences for publishers — and it’s not great for Amazon, either. So why did both companies find themselves in this mutually destructive game of chicken?

Since introducing its iPad e-reader on Wednesday, Apple has been absorbing heavy criticism for muffing the naming of the new product. You don’t have to be a Mensa member to have seen that this was just a bad idea, period. Even more damning, though, is that Mad TV actually ran a parody of the iPod called the “iPad”… in 2007! Zennie Abraham mentioned the sketch in his column, and AdFreak dug it up.

Yesterday, the Internet scratched its collective head over the name of the new Apple iPad, because it reminded a lot of us of those handy absorbent paper products that many female gadget-owners use once a month. Did no one tell Steve Jobs? Maybe not — because they were too afraid.

Back on January 13^th, Valleywag, the Silicon Valley subsidiary of Gawker Media, cut the ribbon on a “scavenger hunt” for information about the Apple Tablet, which led to Apple’s rather predictable response of sending Gawker a cease-and-desist letter. As the rumored release date of the Apple Tablet nears (January 27^th, according to numerous sources), so too, it would seem, does the end of Nick Denton’s mad quest to make Steve Jobs get serious about their relationship and sue him already. It promises to be interesting.

After all of the speculation that Barack Obama was going to be Time‘s Person of the Year for the second year in a row, the award went to … Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Since announcing the pick, Time has been sending signals that seem to say that President Obama, who was announced to be a finalist for the award on Monday, but was not really in contention after all:

Time‘s Person of the Year can “Sometimes be surprising, sometimes be controversial, but always interesting,” as Meredith Vieira put it on this morning’s Today Show, where Time managing editor Richard Stengel announced the nominees. The same can be said of the list of finalists. A few were no-brainers (Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke), at least one was puzzling (The Chinese Worker? Really?). And some omissions (i.e. Twitter) may have been the biggest surprises of all:

Last week Fortune magazine picked Apple’s Steve Jobs as the CEO of the decade, and ran this cool cover. Jobs has been the go-to tech dude for business mags and newsweeklies for over 20 years, and it got us thinking about all the covers that he has appeared on. Feast your eyes on these beauties!

Is this a sign that Apple is getting closer to giving Google a real run for its money? Mashable is reporting that Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned today from Apple’s Board of Directors. Mashable notes that there has been increasing talk regarding whether Schmidt’s position on the board was a conflicts of interest now that Apple and Google are more frequently competing in similar markets. In the press release announcing Schmidt’s departure Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirms the speculation.