Yesterday we showed you the kinds of gifts to buy people you hate. Today let's look at the gifts you get from people that you hate. It's a big difference, but if you buy one of these types of gifts, the hatred is justified.

Rapper Lil' Wayne, who is expected to serve eight months of a one-year sentence for illegal gun possession, is now stuck in solitary confinement after guards found headphones and an iPod charger hidden in his jail cell on Rikers Island.

The geeks inside us were excited to hear Barack Obama talk about his presidential gadgets during today's interview on The View. His blackberry isn't any fun and he's considering a switch to the iPhone. He's "got a 'pod, though!"

Since you can't wash your dirty iPod, this how-to teaches you the safest and most effective way to clean off your smudges and finger prints.

Rapper and prison blogger Lil' Wayne was caught with contraband in his cell. An iPod charger! And headphones! He was probably going to use them for awful rapper things like making drugs, so thank God they've been taken away.

We've collected some of our favorite and most memorable Apple ads from the last three decades, so take a trip down memory lane with us as we go through Apple's most iconic TV spots.

[via Soup]

One Wall Street analyst predicts Steve Jobs will show up for Apple's Apple's iPod event next week; others doubt it. The frenzied chatter is just one way people turn into hysterical teenaged girls before these Apple things. Especially online.

Congress is debating whether journalists should be subsidized. But hey, did anyone know that we're already coddling J-school students by letting them take federal loans for iPhones?

In the past, when science fiction writers imagined how machines would be our faithful servants, they mostly envisioned robots performing useful tasks like making breakfast and doing laundry. They had no idea that in the post-millennial age, the finest technological minds would be working tirelessly to provide multiple solutions to a single issue of immeasurable import: How can insentient devices protect us from our embarrassing propensity to drunk dial/email/text?

While Steve Jobs' famed "reality distortion field" transformed, despite all odds, computers, music, movies and cell phones, it is his own body which has proven resistant to his formidable power to reshape the world.

When political candidates concede a campaign, they praise the "long journey" and talk about how much they've "learned." In the same mode, Microsoft's CEO has all but said he's given up on the Zune.

Why did Tony Fadell, the driving force behind the iPod, leave Apple? We know this much: Apple is willing to pay him handsomely not to make a fuss on the way out. Digital Daily notes that he's getting paid $300,000 a year through March 24, 2010. That's a 40 percent paycut from his regular salary of $500,009, but the salary is the least of his post-Apple compensation. according to Apple's 10-K filing. If he keeps his gig as as a "special advisor," doesn't sue Apple, and agrees not to recruit Apple employees to any new venture, he'll get 77,500 shares of Apple stock — currently worth a cool $8.4 million.

The Copyright Royalty Board, an obscure agency which has been thrust into the spotlight thanks to its role in arbitrating rates for digital music distribution, has frozen the price online music stores have to pay to artists and labels at a little over nine cents. The music industry had been lobbying for an increase to around fifteen cents, would likely have erased the notoriously slim margins Apple enjoys at the iTunes Music Store. Not that Apple would have cared, since it's all about the iPod business anyway and the company was ostensibly willing to shut down digital download sales if it didn't get its way.

Samsung has launched a hostile $5.9 billion offer for SanDisk, a rival maker of flash-memory chips, which SanDisk has rejected. Toshiba, which manufactures chips in partnership with SanDisk, is considering a blocking bid. The posturing is typical: SanDisk says the bid undervalues the company, while Samsung executives retort that it is "full and fair." Leave aside the deal theatrics: Why does Samsung want SanDisk?Simple: It needs to bulk up to contend with the might of Apple, one of the largest buyers of flash memory. Samsung has supplied the memory chips for Apple's iPhone since its launch last year. Before then, Samsung sold Apple memory for its iPod line, and continues to do so today. Apple is a huge customer for Samsung — so huge that it can command deep discounts, and tie up an enormous amount of Samsung's manufacturing capability. When Apple first launched its flash-memory iPod Nano, it locked up enough production to keep rivals off the market for months. (Even Samsung and SanDisk tried to launch me-too clones of the Nano, to no effect.) Regulators may block Samsung's SanDisk bid. But they ought to keep an eye on Apple, too. Antitrust cops tend to spend all their time watching for monopolies — sellers who wield undue influence over a market. They should crack open their investment glossaries and look up "monopsony" — the condition that exists when a buyer dominates a market. (Illustration via Apple Insider)

A senior chip design manager from PA Semi, Wei-han Lien, let a little light shine on Apple's plans for future generations of the iPhone and iPod by listing "Manage ARM CPU architecture team for iPhone" as his current gig on LinkedIn (Lien's profile has since been scrubbed from the site). CEO Steve Jobs had already let it be known that new Apple subsidiary would be working on chips for the popular mobile devices, and now we know that they will be basing designs on the same ARM architecture that Samsung licensed for the current batch, though with Apple's own proprietary improvements. PA Semi was known for crafting highly efficient, low-power chips. Other features, such as graphics and video processing and multi-touch controls, can also be embedded directly in CPU. Tighter integration with the surrounding electronics in the entire chipset can also be achieved with a custom design. As for PA Semi's role in supplying defense contractors with the company's famously efficient designs, not to worry — a contractor says he'll be able to provision chips popular in military applications for "four to five years."

Click to viewDespite the fact that Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced no new products at the company's glorified press conference yesterday, the crowd's cheers were as blustery as they ever are at Apple events. But Newsweek's Dan Lyons, who must have bored enough by what was being said on stage to be paying so much more attention to the darkened audience, says he knows the reason why: Much of the crowd was clapping so loud because they were paid to.

Forget all the colorful new iPods on display at Apple's "Let's Rock" event in San Francisco today — Apple investors are more concerned with the guy who's demoing them. Pictures of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, whose health has been much in question lately, show him looking imperiously slim, not dangerously frail. (Photo by Brian Lam/Gizmodo) [Gizmodo Liveblog]

Something we bet Steve Jobs won't be discussing on stage at this morning's iPod event: The third-party developers who create apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch say Apple takes a week or more to approve updates — even bug fixes. Apple also doesn't communicate with the developers to tell them why or how long their updates will be delayed. Fraser Speiers, who developed the Exposure Flickr application for the iPhone, told Macworld:

British engineer Kane Kramer created a device in 1979 called the IXI which could store and play back three and a half minutes of music. He patented the device and even founded a company to sell it. By 1988, funding ran out and he couldn't afford to renew the patents. Improbably, Apple now calls him an inventor of the iPod. The U.K.'s Daily Mail, which first reported the news, says it's the story of a wronged inventor who has never seen a dime from the 163 million iPods sold worldwide. "I can’t even bring myself to buy an iPod for myself," says Kramer, who has closed a legal loophole for Apple, conveniently and cheaply.