Intelligence data doesn't always take the form of form letters like,
"Dear $terrorist, thank you for confirming your location at grid coordinates XXXX YYYY. We will be sure to keep you on our newsletter distribution list, we're so happy you've decided to renew!"
Some of it (lots of it) may be operational communications about things that they're in the process of planning, chatter about the capabilities of the people looking for them, suspicion that person X, Y, and Z might be informants or double-agents, plans for recruiting, information and communication about sources of funding...
It doesn't all take the form of an address book of terrorists and their precise locations. Knowing "what they know about us," "what they're planning," and "what their capabilities are," is all very important info that requires absolutely no specific location data for other people. They can go to ground, but that may already have significantly disrupted ongoing operations, dried up funding sources, and identified new names and places to go look for other leads.
Most people simply aren't a member of the cult and will be doing things contrary to all of the silly remarks made by fanboys.
That may be true. But it's also worth noting that "most people" don't care about alternate audio tracks, subtitle tracks, or any of the other "bonus features" they load on BRDs to make people feel like they've got to re-purchase stuff they already own, or have already seen.
Personally, I don't understand the allure of purchasing movies by the fistful. It has to be an exceptionally good movie for me to want to watch it more than once or twice, and all the bonus features? Meh. Most of them are truly underwhelming. Rentals through Comcast VOD, iTunes, Netflix (Streaming or mail delivery), etc. are all sufficient for me, I'll watch the high-def version if it's available, because I have a tv capable of it, but if it's not available, I'll either find something else to watch, or watch the movie in standard definition. I've never been overly concerned about seeing every odd wrinkle, stray hair, and chipped tooth on Gary Busey - at some point, high-def images can be a bit off-putting.
Funny, I thought that Blu-Ray was just a delivery method. You mean without Blu-Ray, you can't produce a high-def video and, say, upload it to Youtube, or Facebook, or Vimeo or any of the literally dozens of other file-sharing services out there for your family to watch/download from?
I think you've confused "content production" and "content delivery". The macs may lack a single kind of content delivery mechanism out of the box - Blu Ray drives. That does not mean it's impossible - or even marginally more difficult - to produce a high def video and send it to your family. In fact, with online services, you don't have the additional lag of burning and shipping/delivering a disc.
I was an intern too, and yeah, getting paid $15 or so an hour as a college student was pretty great. I worked long hours, and I got paid for them. I did NOT volunteer to write a check back to my company for the privilege of working long hours afterwards, however. You can work very hard, learn a ton, and get lots of great connections while not financing your company's IT operations out of your own pocket.
Let's assume that the laptop of his wastes an hour of his time a day (not outlandish - I've seen laptops at my company literally take 20-30 minutes to boot & login, and 10-15 minutes for Eclipse to reach a usable state on them). Let's also assume that he gets paid $15 an hour. You might as well pile that $75 up each week and put a match to it. Now, consider that hardware depreciates over 3 years, and a new laptop would absolutely be reissued to a new intern when the old internship ends (or if there's an offer, the intern would keep that laptop as their work machine when they convert to full-time). Over the course of 3 years, a laptop that wastes an hour of time a day has cost your company nearly $12,000 dollars in wasted payroll, versus ~2-3k of new hardware costs to give them a modern computer system. Now multiply that by 10, or 20, or 100 "shitty old computers," and tell me you're getting good value for your money by making the intern use old systems that aren't up to the task?
Encouraging an intern to approach the corporate world by saying "Hey, since you won't give me the proper tools to do my job, is it okay if I spend my own money (which you're paying me) to purchase my own?" Is doing him no favors. If your company isn't concerned about wasting your time, then you shouldn't be either, and you certainly shouldn't be paying your own money to "help out" your company if they're to cheap to do it themselves.
If you offer it, they will ride you for all you're worth: "Why don't we just page you using your personal cell phone?" "Great, you can reimburse me a portion of my monthly bill then?" "Oh we can't do that." "Then don't page me on my personal number."
"Why don't you just work from home in the evening?" "Great, will you provide me with the tools and reimburse me for part of my home internet fees?" "Oh we can't do that." "Then I can't work from home."
If you don't set limits on the freeloading your company is allowed to engage in, you're doing yourself a disservice.
To the OP: If the hardware is *legitimately* too old to support your business needs (not your "slashdot reading" needs), then you should build a case for an upgrade or replacement. To do that, figure out how much they're paying you, and how long you'll be paid for as an intern.
Then calculate how much time you're wasting due to a slow computer. And don't just pull numbers out of your ass. Actually time stuff like bootup/login, load times, etc., and ask a co-worker with a modern system if you can do the same with theirs as a baseline, so you can calculate what portion of that time is actually wasted time due to slow/old/bad hardware.
Then, you make you pitch like so: "I'm spending X minutes per day twiddling my thumbs waiting for something to finish running. You're paying me X dollars an hour. A RAM upgrade would cost X dollars, and reduce my wasted daily time by X%." If the cost of the upgrade is more than the amount of time they're paying you for that's legitimately wasted then no, a RAM upgrade doesn't make sense. If the cost of the upgrade is significantly cheaper than the value of the time they're paying you for that's legitimately wasted, then yes, a RAM upgrade makes a lot of sense.
If you can't get management support, then spending your own money and time is foolish, and is just as likely to be unappreciated & met with hostility as it is to be met with cheers of "Way to take the initiative, old chap!"
Tablets are doomed to fail except in vertical markets where consuming data is more common than producing data.
Which is to say, the most common uses the majority of the population puts personal (not "the one I use at work") computers to? I'd love to "fail" by owning a huge chunk of a market that large.
Hint: If you view "hacking the linux kernel" and "writing my own software" to be typical use cases for casual & personal use, you're wrong.
First, you should secure an agreement from your ISP that it's okay for you to behave as an ISP for the public as well, don't you think? They're providing you with service, and the terms of service generally include a statement that it is for use by your household, not "anybody who wants to use it anywhere near your place of residence."
Don't like that agreement? Call them up and negotiate different terms first. Until then, don't complain that your ISP gets annoyed with you when you violate the terms you agreed to with them; Also, don't be surprised if being a commercial provider of internet service to the public costs you a lot more than a residential plan does.
Not entirely. Many of the researchers on faculty have their own spaces dedicated to their grant research. They're not trying to arrange time and space and equipment in the same facilities where a hundred biotech undergrads are running gel electrophoresis for the first time. Some of the highest-end analytical equipment may be shared, but most of the equipment and facilities won't be. The facilities used for teaching is often not all that closely linked to those used by university staff in their research.
It's also worth noting that a copy of "Shakespeare's collected works" and some desks & chairs to sit around discussing Shakespeare in costs a little less than an Electron Microscope, or a fully stocked biology or chemistry lab. If your major requires significantly more expensive tools & materials as part of your studies than a liberal arts program, it's not entirely unreasonable to expect that the course of study would cost more.
No, the right to provide that service if you want without fearing legal repercussion.
If you want the right to provide internet service to third parties, then you should contract to do that with your ISP. Paying for a residential plan, whose agreement typically stipulates that it is for private personal use is why you're going to end up in trouble legally. The assumption is that you are paying for the service as a consumer, not as a reseller/provider in your own - so when somebody on your personal, private, consumer network downloads child porn, yeah, the assumption is going to be that you, as the person buying that personal, private, consumer network, are the one who downloaded it.
Forth poster in this thread to ignore the existence of routers/firmwares which can provide two separate networks, on unrestricted and encrypted, one open and capped.
Not at all - I know they exist, and in fact I have a guest network set up on my home router. Key point: My guest network is also WPA2 encrypted, and I give the password ONLY to people I know and trust - friends, family and business associates who are guests in my home. I fail to see why the EFF wanting a pony means it's my responsibility to provide them with one. Buying the equipment & the service, configuring and administering and maintaining the router, and adjusting caps and accessibility so that it doesn't have a negative impact on my own bandwidth and monthly usage caps requires time and effort that I don't care to spend on the behalf of strangers who will enjoy the benefits of leeching from my service in faceless anonymity.
Which rights, exactly, are we supposed to exercise? The right to have someone else provide us with internet service for free? The right to use technology which the article itself admits does not even exist yet? The right to pay exorbitant overage fees and have shitty internet service for ourselves because somebody decided to download a terabyte of porn or netflix data through our free, open wifi connection?
I just want to make sure I write up the proper placard here. I'd hate to show up to a "We want ponies!" demonstration with a sign that says "Free Tibet!"
You don't need a timestamp for that. You can just number cache batches in the order they were fetched. You know, 1, 2, 3...
Why bother with that, when you already have the timestamp? You need to know the time so you can expire things out of the cache. Using anything else is extra overhead. A few extra instructions not be MUCH overhead, but it's still overhead.
It's a bit shift. Nothing is simpler than a single ARM instruction. If you do that you're working with more like 3/4 of a day, but that's good enough for our purposes here.
It's a bit shift that's unnecessary, because, one last time: you already have the timestamp. Any additional bit shift, calculation, or change you're making to that timestamp requires additional instructions after you retrive the timestamp.
Stay classy.
I'm sorry, did you really think that somebody might conclude you're doing anything but trolling now? You asked "why they needed it." You've received an answer, and you persist in arguing that there's no reason to use the timestamp. You came into this with a predetermined conclusion that you simply wished to soapbox - it would've been far easier (and more honest) for you to simply say "LOL THEY R DUM N I IZ SMRT BCUZ I WUD NEVER DO DAT, NO MATTER WHAT REASON MIGHT EXIST 4 IT."
I don't have the receipt in front of me, but I'm fairly certain it was in the neighborhood of $80-90 for "regular maintenance" - including an oil change, checking/topping off fluids, and tire balancing & alignment. Either way, I consider the time I saved on those tasks to be worth more than the $80 I spent to have someone else do them. I work fairly long hours, and get paid fairly well; I'd much rather have my "spare" time to do things I find more important or fulfilling than changing my oil.
Apparently, I did. Apparently, I ran it on my own data, as well. Apparently, you do not understand the phrase "within 100 miles". Apparently, you also do not understand that the lack of precise location data in the log means that if that's the only evidence against you that leads to your conviction, you're being railroaded and the "iphone log says you were somewhere in the area" is simply a fancy way of dressing up an abuse for political reasons.
Apparently, you don't realize that your attitude is actually legitimizing people who would make the claim that the iPhone's log is some sort of "irrefutable proof of absolute location," and use that "proof" as a pretext for making political rivals disappear. If you're concerned about oppressive governments, you would be clearly and unequivocally stating that this is not "tracking" data, and does not absolutely identify a user's location. It gives a "general area" - and unless you have some other proof that I committed a crime while in that "general area," then any attempt to use my presence in that "general area" as the only evidence to convict me of that crime is a farcical parody of justice. And if your government is the type of government that engages in that, then the existence (or lack) of an iPhone log will make no difference to them if they've decided you're going to prison.
Here's one way the timestamp could be helpful: "Hmm. I don't have any of the towers in range cached. I don't have any clue where I am. I better do two things: 1) Assemble a list of towers & hotspots in range, and query for their locations; 2) Look back at the most recent towers & hotspots in my cache, and assume I'm near them for the purposes of beginning map data retrieval."
Cell network connections are high latency, and not always high speed. Minimizing the time required before you can start displaying usable information to the user is a feature, not a bug. I'm sorry that you're confined to your home, but not all of us must - or wish to - operate under those constraints.
And that's beside the fact that the 'time' function on Unix systems returns epoch seconds, and that it is simpler (and more efficient) programming to not bother with converting and extracting specific dates or other components of the date from that value to use in your cache. Given that you MUST have an 'age' for the entry to expire things out of the cache correctly after 7 days, using the actual value simplifies cache cleaning and cache creation.
It's much easier to implement: if ( (current_time - 604800) > entry.create_time ) { purge(entry) };
Than to sit there saying "Today is Wednesday the 27th of April. Find and purge all entries in the cache that were created before April 20th!", due to the existence of month boundaries, and the simple fact that extra calculation is required every time you do this - making for less efficient software.
If you really can't see any way for timestamps to be helpful, and even desirable, in this application, then you're either trolling, or well out of your depth discussing things you have only the barest understanding of. Trolling is annoying; willful ignorance is sad. Either way, your points have been addressed numerous times.
Once again: The data on the phone is not precise enough to tell "where you met" or "where you were" or "who you were with" with any degree of accuracy or precision.
The point is the same - that somehow some repressive government will use this logged data as a way of saying "your phone says you were within 100 miles of a suspected rebel safe-house on a day that other people were ALSO within 100 miles of that safe-house - you are, therefore, a rebel, and so are they!"
I repeat: If this is the entirety of the data your government is offering as a justification to imprison/execute you, then whether or not they have this data, you're going to end up imprisoned/executed. It simply is not precise enough to place people at a certain point at a certain time, and anybody who is arguing otherwise is, plainly stated, off-their-ass wrong in saying that the data is a log which tracks your movements.
Though I'm sure that repressive governments appreciate the unintended legitimization of this method for repression by the people who are trumpeting about how this data is "tracking" the movements of the phones. After all, "I read it somewhere on the internet that this information tracks the user, and it clearly shows the user at a specific location on a map where the rebels always meet," sounds so much more legitimate and convincing than "I don't like him, because he is my political opponent and wants a democratic society."
If they're only retaining records for a week, then once again, why do you still timestamps?
Perhaps you could try and explain how it's possible to expire data out of the cache when it is more than 7 days old, without some way of knowing when the data was added to the cache? Suggesting that it's possible to only keep 7 days worth of information - without recording the age of each entry - uses a set of assumptions and "logic" that escapes me.
Your initial question was why they needed timestamps to at all. That question has been answered.
If you want to go read the article and see how Apple plans to address your other concerns about the long-term retention of this data now, I'd certainly encourage that.
Slashdot Mirror
Intelligence data doesn't always take the form of form letters like,
"Dear $terrorist, thank you for confirming your location at grid coordinates XXXX YYYY. We will be sure to keep you on our newsletter distribution list, we're so happy you've decided to renew!"
Some of it (lots of it) may be operational communications about things that they're in the process of planning, chatter about the capabilities of the people looking for them, suspicion that person X, Y, and Z might be informants or double-agents, plans for recruiting, information and communication about sources of funding...
It doesn't all take the form of an address book of terrorists and their precise locations. Knowing "what they know about us," "what they're planning," and "what their capabilities are," is all very important info that requires absolutely no specific location data for other people. They can go to ground, but that may already have significantly disrupted ongoing operations, dried up funding sources, and identified new names and places to go look for other leads.
But the $5 wrench will last for years. The $0.10 bullet is single-use.
That may be true. But it's also worth noting that "most people" don't care about alternate audio tracks, subtitle tracks, or any of the other "bonus features" they load on BRDs to make people feel like they've got to re-purchase stuff they already own, or have already seen.
Personally, I don't understand the allure of purchasing movies by the fistful. It has to be an exceptionally good movie for me to want to watch it more than once or twice, and all the bonus features? Meh. Most of them are truly underwhelming. Rentals through Comcast VOD, iTunes, Netflix (Streaming or mail delivery), etc. are all sufficient for me, I'll watch the high-def version if it's available, because I have a tv capable of it, but if it's not available, I'll either find something else to watch, or watch the movie in standard definition. I've never been overly concerned about seeing every odd wrinkle, stray hair, and chipped tooth on Gary Busey - at some point, high-def images can be a bit off-putting.
Funny, I thought that Blu-Ray was just a delivery method. You mean without Blu-Ray, you can't produce a high-def video and, say, upload it to Youtube, or Facebook, or Vimeo or any of the literally dozens of other file-sharing services out there for your family to watch/download from?
I think you've confused "content production" and "content delivery". The macs may lack a single kind of content delivery mechanism out of the box - Blu Ray drives. That does not mean it's impossible - or even marginally more difficult - to produce a high def video and send it to your family. In fact, with online services, you don't have the additional lag of burning and shipping/delivering a disc.
I bet they'd be happy to, as long as you're also willing to pay for Gmail, Google's search engine, and all the other free stuff they give you today.
I was an intern too, and yeah, getting paid $15 or so an hour as a college student was pretty great. I worked long hours, and I got paid for them. I did NOT volunteer to write a check back to my company for the privilege of working long hours afterwards, however. You can work very hard, learn a ton, and get lots of great connections while not financing your company's IT operations out of your own pocket.
Let's assume that the laptop of his wastes an hour of his time a day (not outlandish - I've seen laptops at my company literally take 20-30 minutes to boot & login, and 10-15 minutes for Eclipse to reach a usable state on them). Let's also assume that he gets paid $15 an hour. You might as well pile that $75 up each week and put a match to it. Now, consider that hardware depreciates over 3 years, and a new laptop would absolutely be reissued to a new intern when the old internship ends (or if there's an offer, the intern would keep that laptop as their work machine when they convert to full-time). Over the course of 3 years, a laptop that wastes an hour of time a day has cost your company nearly $12,000 dollars in wasted payroll, versus ~2-3k of new hardware costs to give them a modern computer system. Now multiply that by 10, or 20, or 100 "shitty old computers," and tell me you're getting good value for your money by making the intern use old systems that aren't up to the task?
Encouraging an intern to approach the corporate world by saying "Hey, since you won't give me the proper tools to do my job, is it okay if I spend my own money (which you're paying me) to purchase my own?" Is doing him no favors. If your company isn't concerned about wasting your time, then you shouldn't be either, and you certainly shouldn't be paying your own money to "help out" your company if they're to cheap to do it themselves.
If you offer it, they will ride you for all you're worth:
"Why don't we just page you using your personal cell phone?" "Great, you can reimburse me a portion of my monthly bill then?" "Oh we can't do that." "Then don't page me on my personal number."
"Why don't you just work from home in the evening?" "Great, will you provide me with the tools and reimburse me for part of my home internet fees?" "Oh we can't do that." "Then I can't work from home."
If you don't set limits on the freeloading your company is allowed to engage in, you're doing yourself a disservice.
Nail on the head.
To the OP: If the hardware is *legitimately* too old to support your business needs (not your "slashdot reading" needs), then you should build a case for an upgrade or replacement. To do that, figure out how much they're paying you, and how long you'll be paid for as an intern.
Then calculate how much time you're wasting due to a slow computer. And don't just pull numbers out of your ass. Actually time stuff like bootup/login, load times, etc., and ask a co-worker with a modern system if you can do the same with theirs as a baseline, so you can calculate what portion of that time is actually wasted time due to slow/old/bad hardware.
Then, you make you pitch like so: "I'm spending X minutes per day twiddling my thumbs waiting for something to finish running. You're paying me X dollars an hour. A RAM upgrade would cost X dollars, and reduce my wasted daily time by X%." If the cost of the upgrade is more than the amount of time they're paying you for that's legitimately wasted then no, a RAM upgrade doesn't make sense. If the cost of the upgrade is significantly cheaper than the value of the time they're paying you for that's legitimately wasted, then yes, a RAM upgrade makes a lot of sense.
If you can't get management support, then spending your own money and time is foolish, and is just as likely to be unappreciated & met with hostility as it is to be met with cheers of "Way to take the initiative, old chap!"
Which is to say, the most common uses the majority of the population puts personal (not "the one I use at work") computers to? I'd love to "fail" by owning a huge chunk of a market that large.
Hint: If you view "hacking the linux kernel" and "writing my own software" to be typical use cases for casual & personal use, you're wrong.
First, you should secure an agreement from your ISP that it's okay for you to behave as an ISP for the public as well, don't you think? They're providing you with service, and the terms of service generally include a statement that it is for use by your household, not "anybody who wants to use it anywhere near your place of residence."
Don't like that agreement? Call them up and negotiate different terms first. Until then, don't complain that your ISP gets annoyed with you when you violate the terms you agreed to with them; Also, don't be surprised if being a commercial provider of internet service to the public costs you a lot more than a residential plan does.
Not entirely. Many of the researchers on faculty have their own spaces dedicated to their grant research. They're not trying to arrange time and space and equipment in the same facilities where a hundred biotech undergrads are running gel electrophoresis for the first time. Some of the highest-end analytical equipment may be shared, but most of the equipment and facilities won't be. The facilities used for teaching is often not all that closely linked to those used by university staff in their research.
It's also worth noting that a copy of "Shakespeare's collected works" and some desks & chairs to sit around discussing Shakespeare in costs a little less than an Electron Microscope, or a fully stocked biology or chemistry lab. If your major requires significantly more expensive tools & materials as part of your studies than a liberal arts program, it's not entirely unreasonable to expect that the course of study would cost more.
If you want the right to provide internet service to third parties, then you should contract to do that with your ISP. Paying for a residential plan, whose agreement typically stipulates that it is for private personal use is why you're going to end up in trouble legally. The assumption is that you are paying for the service as a consumer, not as a reseller/provider in your own - so when somebody on your personal, private, consumer network downloads child porn, yeah, the assumption is going to be that you, as the person buying that personal, private, consumer network, are the one who downloaded it.
Not at all - I know they exist, and in fact I have a guest network set up on my home router. Key point: My guest network is also WPA2 encrypted, and I give the password ONLY to people I know and trust - friends, family and business associates who are guests in my home. I fail to see why the EFF wanting a pony means it's my responsibility to provide them with one. Buying the equipment & the service, configuring and administering and maintaining the router, and adjusting caps and accessibility so that it doesn't have a negative impact on my own bandwidth and monthly usage caps requires time and effort that I don't care to spend on the behalf of strangers who will enjoy the benefits of leeching from my service in faceless anonymity.
Which rights, exactly, are we supposed to exercise? The right to have someone else provide us with internet service for free? The right to use technology which the article itself admits does not even exist yet? The right to pay exorbitant overage fees and have shitty internet service for ourselves because somebody decided to download a terabyte of porn or netflix data through our free, open wifi connection?
I just want to make sure I write up the proper placard here. I'd hate to show up to a "We want ponies!" demonstration with a sign that says "Free Tibet!"
Why bother with that, when you already have the timestamp? You need to know the time so you can expire things out of the cache. Using anything else is extra overhead. A few extra instructions not be MUCH overhead, but it's still overhead.
It's a bit shift that's unnecessary, because, one last time: you already have the timestamp. Any additional bit shift, calculation, or change you're making to that timestamp requires additional instructions after you retrive the timestamp.
I'm sorry, did you really think that somebody might conclude you're doing anything but trolling now? You asked "why they needed it." You've received an answer, and you persist in arguing that there's no reason to use the timestamp. You came into this with a predetermined conclusion that you simply wished to soapbox - it would've been far easier (and more honest) for you to simply say "LOL THEY R DUM N I IZ SMRT BCUZ I WUD NEVER DO DAT, NO MATTER WHAT REASON MIGHT EXIST 4 IT."
I don't have the receipt in front of me, but I'm fairly certain it was in the neighborhood of $80-90 for "regular maintenance" - including an oil change, checking/topping off fluids, and tire balancing & alignment. Either way, I consider the time I saved on those tasks to be worth more than the $80 I spent to have someone else do them. I work fairly long hours, and get paid fairly well; I'd much rather have my "spare" time to do things I find more important or fulfilling than changing my oil.
I clearly said that 150C was significantly warmer than a sauna... I thought I was pretty clear about that, so I'm not sure why you seem so confused.
Is this a trick question?
Apparently, I did. Apparently, I ran it on my own data, as well. Apparently, you do not understand the phrase "within 100 miles". Apparently, you also do not understand that the lack of precise location data in the log means that if that's the only evidence against you that leads to your conviction, you're being railroaded and the "iphone log says you were somewhere in the area" is simply a fancy way of dressing up an abuse for political reasons.
Apparently, you don't realize that your attitude is actually legitimizing people who would make the claim that the iPhone's log is some sort of "irrefutable proof of absolute location," and use that "proof" as a pretext for making political rivals disappear. If you're concerned about oppressive governments, you would be clearly and unequivocally stating that this is not "tracking" data, and does not absolutely identify a user's location. It gives a "general area" - and unless you have some other proof that I committed a crime while in that "general area," then any attempt to use my presence in that "general area" as the only evidence to convict me of that crime is a farcical parody of justice. And if your government is the type of government that engages in that, then the existence (or lack) of an iPhone log will make no difference to them if they've decided you're going to prison.
Let's at least try to be honest.
Here's one way the timestamp could be helpful:
"Hmm. I don't have any of the towers in range cached. I don't have any clue where I am. I better do two things:
1) Assemble a list of towers & hotspots in range, and query for their locations;
2) Look back at the most recent towers & hotspots in my cache, and assume I'm near them for the purposes of beginning map data retrieval."
Cell network connections are high latency, and not always high speed. Minimizing the time required before you can start displaying usable information to the user is a feature, not a bug. I'm sorry that you're confined to your home, but not all of us must - or wish to - operate under those constraints.
And that's beside the fact that the 'time' function on Unix systems returns epoch seconds, and that it is simpler (and more efficient) programming to not bother with converting and extracting specific dates or other components of the date from that value to use in your cache. Given that you MUST have an 'age' for the entry to expire things out of the cache correctly after 7 days, using the actual value simplifies cache cleaning and cache creation.
It's much easier to implement:
if ( (current_time - 604800) > entry.create_time ) { purge(entry) };
Than to sit there saying "Today is Wednesday the 27th of April. Find and purge all entries in the cache that were created before April 20th!", due to the existence of month boundaries, and the simple fact that extra calculation is required every time you do this - making for less efficient software.
If you really can't see any way for timestamps to be helpful, and even desirable, in this application, then you're either trolling, or well out of your depth discussing things you have only the barest understanding of. Trolling is annoying; willful ignorance is sad. Either way, your points have been addressed numerous times.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Or do you really think nobody ever travels more than about 3 miles in a single day?
Once again: The data on the phone is not precise enough to tell "where you met" or "where you were" or "who you were with" with any degree of accuracy or precision.
The point is the same - that somehow some repressive government will use this logged data as a way of saying "your phone says you were within 100 miles of a suspected rebel safe-house on a day that other people were ALSO within 100 miles of that safe-house - you are, therefore, a rebel, and so are they!"
I repeat: If this is the entirety of the data your government is offering as a justification to imprison/execute you, then whether or not they have this data, you're going to end up imprisoned/executed. It simply is not precise enough to place people at a certain point at a certain time, and anybody who is arguing otherwise is, plainly stated, off-their-ass wrong in saying that the data is a log which tracks your movements.
Though I'm sure that repressive governments appreciate the unintended legitimization of this method for repression by the people who are trumpeting about how this data is "tracking" the movements of the phones. After all, "I read it somewhere on the internet that this information tracks the user, and it clearly shows the user at a specific location on a map where the rebels always meet," sounds so much more legitimate and convincing than "I don't like him, because he is my political opponent and wants a democratic society."
Perhaps you could try and explain how it's possible to expire data out of the cache when it is more than 7 days old, without some way of knowing when the data was added to the cache? Suggesting that it's possible to only keep 7 days worth of information - without recording the age of each entry - uses a set of assumptions and "logic" that escapes me.
Your initial question was why they needed timestamps to at all. That question has been answered.
If you want to go read the article and see how Apple plans to address your other concerns about the long-term retention of this data now, I'd certainly encourage that.
It's a good thing this database never provided that level of detail and precision then, wouldn't you say?