"Our own checks this morning also indicate that the Apple authorized resellers in Hong Kong also sold out early in the day, despite the fact that the most important new feature, Siri, does not speak Mandarin."

"What do I have to defend myself against?,” he told the Awl. “It comes down to, you’re fucking stupid and I’m making money off your mistakes. It might sound rough, but how else are you going to learn not to do this again? It’s like you’re playing Russian Roulette like, oh, let’s hope this doesn’t get out."

"It’s a hard-to-resist syllogism: Dirty jobs are available; Americans won’t fill them; thus, Americans are too soft for dirty jobs. Why else would so many unemployed people turn down the opportunity to work during a recession? Of course, there’s an equally compelling obverse. Why should farmers and plant owners expect people to take a back-breaking seasonal job with low pay and no benefits just because they happen to be offering it? If no one wants an available job—especially in extreme times—maybe the fault doesn’t rest entirely with the people turning it down. Maybe the market is inefficient."

"When I attended NYU’s graduate program in computer science in the mid-1990s, the majority of the students in many of my classes were non-Americans, with a great number of them from China. Most Americans did not (and still do not) regard computer science as a glamorous profession; they did not ascribe to it the prestige that they did to fields such as business, law, medicine or the performing arts."

"And I’ll leave you with one of Zuck’s more memorable quotes from the talk, “The biggest risk is not taking any risk…In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks."

"I don’t pretend that I had any idea that I was doing. I always felt like we were so close to dying in the first years, and were afraid that Google was about to build our product and we were going to be screwed, and look how long it took for them to build our product,” he said laughing, referring to Google’s newly launched social product Google ."

"He and his wife now eat out once a month instead of once a week, do no socializing, and eat less expensive foods, such as ground chuck instead of ground sirloin. “My mom was hoping her kids would lead a better life than her, but so far that has not happened,” says Kowal."

"But once you begin expanding your work hours on a regular basis, working “normal” hours starts to look like slacking off. In other words, if you establish a pattern of staying late, your extended hours become the new normal."

"A murmur of happy recognition swept through the crowd. “The first year is easy, you know it’s right in your heart,” continued Mr. Bloomberg. “The last year is easy, you can see the light at end of tunnel. But that middle year, when you keep putting your own money in to cover payroll, can really make you doubt yourself."

"but it’s difficult to believe the laconic, idiosyncratic scene on display in downtown Manhattan last week bears the slightest resemblance to what occurred in Cairo earlier this year. There, people were fighting for their freedom. Zuccotti Park, truth be told, seemed more like a low-energy Manhattan street fair in desperate need of funnel cake and grilled sausages than the world-changing movement Kristof imagines it to be."

"A lot of people saw an opportunity to get rich quickly,” said the Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. “It was a very 1999 mentality."

"The consumers were being told: You will never pay full price again. The merchants were hearing: You are going to get new customers who will stick around and pay full price. Disappointment was inevitable."

"For some reason, [the television and advertising industries] think that as soon as you turn 35, your entire sensibility changes,” he said. “I’m 43, and I still love CollegeHumor. So there’s no explaining it."