A moment of silence, ladies and gentlemen, for whichever poor souls at Time Magazine lost their lives last night when Steve Jobs undoubtedly burst into their domiciles, ripped their hearts from their chests, and wolfed them down while they were still beating. Vegan, shmegan; it's a simple rule of survival in this digital age: "Incur not the Wrath of Steve, for terrible consequences shall befall thee." As far as we know, His Steveness is still picking bits of ATI executive out of his teeth from eighteen months ago. The penalty for ruining his surprises is, as everyone knows all too well, Big Ugly Violent Death.

In case you weren't aware, ATI's little July 2000 press release snafu ("Oops, we told everyone that there are going to be new iMacs two days before the Expo") pales in comparison to Time's massive wreck of a leak ("Oops, we showed everyone the new iMacs the day before the Expo"). As some two hundred faithful viewers informed us during the twelve hours prior to the start of the keynote, Time Canada apparently posted a full LCD iMac cover story on its web site, complete with full-color images, over half a day before Steve was scheduled to unveil his new baby. It was hours before someone at Time was woken up (presumably by the sound of Steve's teeth tearing at his sternum) and yanked the link to the story-- although the article itself remained, and by then the damage was done. This morning copies of those images were plastered all over the web, and copies of the article itself weren't hard to find, either. To make matters worse, the article also mentioned iPhoto, thus killing two surprises with one big, dumb stone.

Apparently Time neglected to pay very close attention to Apple's embargo on talking about the new iMac, because we seriously doubt that Apple forgot to mention, "hey, make sure you don't publish anything on that until after the keynote, okay?" For this grievous transgression, surely scores of Time management types have paid the ultimate price. And given that copies of the print magazine with the new iMac on the cover were available at some newsstands as early as last night, this obviously wasn't just the mistake of some hapless web guy.

We've yet to hear reports that all of Canada has been reduced to a vast smoking hole in the ground, and thus we have to say that we're proud of Steve's restraint. And if the fact that Apple gave a free copy of Time to everyone on the way out of the keynote indicates what we hope it does-- that the company mobilized its troops this morning to run out and buy every copy of Time in San Francisco in a valiant attempt to keep the big announcement under wraps-- well, heck, we're proud of that, too.