This data is NOT "tracking the phone's location". It is only enough to show you that "this phone was somewhere inside ~100 miles of a given location."
If you're being executed or imprisoned because "your phone says you were within 100 miles of Tahrir Square on a day that protests against the Egyptian government occurred," then they're simply looking for an "official" reason to put on your execution / imprisonment paperwork. Of course, all of this "The iPhone, it TRACKZ JOO" hysteria simply gives people looking to "disappear" a few political opponents another way of documenting someone's "guilt".
If you're concerned about oppressive governments misusing the data, you wouldn't give them the crutch of saying "It's tracking the phone," and thus lending credibility to a flimsy justification for throwing someone in prison. You'd be very clearly and very strongly stating that that data on the phone has nothing to do with the precise location of the phone, and only provides the most general (regional) indication of the location of the phone at any given point in time. Because, you know, that's actually what it does - not indicate precise-to-the-centimeter location information for the phone.
Well, how about the fact that people often travel more than a few hundred yards in a single day or a single week?
Maybe you're a shut-in, I don't know. But I am pretty sure that people who travel frequently wouldn't appreciate the "excellent location services" that could be offered by an iPhone that always thinks you're in the same place you were yesterday, or last week, and takes a few minutes to locate you every time you move more than a few miles. Seems to sort of defeat the purpose of having a cache in the first place, no? If you're going to do that, might as well just kill the "assisted" part of aGPS and just force the phone to use GPS-only, all the time, no matter how long it takes.
Just a wild, unscientific guess, but I'd say it's because linking to Apple's press release directly means that SecurityWeek doesn't get ad impressions from the slashdotting. The link goes to a SecurityWeek Article by Mike Lennon; TFS submitted by "wiredmikey," whose profile identifies him as "SecurityWeek Editor", and links to SecurityWeek.
Connecting the dots is left as an exercise for the reader.
... so that it can tell which particular towers & wi-fi hotspots you've seen most recently?
The point of the database is to help the iPhone determine its own location more quickly. Having a list of a thousand map coordinates that the iPhone has seen "in the last year, sometime," does very little to facilitate that unless the iPhone can also know which ones it has been in range of recently.
In this case, you would be arguing that they could convict him of downloading child porn solely because he happens to own a router that sits within 100 miles of where the child porn was downloaded. If you're truly suggesting that that's what happened, you're going to need to provide a lot of more of a citation than "ask that guy, you know, the one who got arrested recently."
Think of how easy all those cold cases will be to solve now. Tonight on Law & Order:
DA: "So, you ADMIT that you were within 100 miles of the place where a crime was committed, on the day a crime was committed?" Defendant: "Yes, I suppose I was." DA: "And did YOU rape and murder the deceased? After all, we can place you within 100 miles of the crime at some point on the night it was committed!" Defendant: "No, being somewhere in the general area of the state where a crime was committed doesn't mean that I committed it." DA: "I beg to differ, sir. I beg to differ. Your Honor, I move that we skip the rest of the trial altogether, and simply remand the defendant to Guantanamo Bay." Judge: "Sustained. Bailiff, take the defendant into custody."
It's my understanding that saunas are generally operated between 70 and 100 degrees C. I'd say that 150C is quite a bit hotter than a sauna, even if you're a lobster in a chafing dish.
Which raises the question, why does a database contain Cellphone Tower IDs with geographical locational information? It's going to be utilized for some reason. And those reasons are chilling even to the casual mind.
Let's consider that question for a second. Why would they need it? I can think of performance reasons why caching the tower coordinates would be useful. The iPhone knows it's connected to tower ID "ABC", and also within range of towers DEF and MNO; Now, if it has to go out and look up the coordinates of those towers in some phone company database over the data connection, that could take some time, and be wholly dependent on signal strength, other traffic on the network at the time, etc. etc. Then, once it gets the location of that info, it needs to fire that back to the mapping software, plot the points, download map data around those points... you could be looking at a lot of latency. If you're in an area with cached tower locations, then the phone can start downloading map data immediately, without the intermediate step of "look up towers X, Y, Z, then send those coordinates to the map software, and start downloading data around them." I don't find that thought particularly chilling, though I do concede that there is a *potential* for abuse. At this point, asking questions about what the data is used for, and who has access to it, is reasonable. Freaking out and yelling about how Apple is "tracking our every movement" is not.
Do you remember all the routes you take? Can you remember having to take detours?
I know that the route between my home outside of Boston and a place up in mid-NH where I recently visited comes nowhere near Portland, Maine; At no point during the weekend was I less than 60 miles from Portland, and yet my iPhone log shows me spending quite a bit of time in and around downtown Portland during that weekend.
Likewise, my data from a few days ago, where I was at home - quite literally all day long, shows me having "appeared" at numerous places within a ~75 mile radius of where I live - and literally, 2 of the points are over 100 miles apart, straight-line distance. So either my phone is taking fabulous day-long vacations without me, or the iPhone "tracking database" is wildly inaccurate as a method for determining exactly where I've been, and what my movements are.
Sounds like a job for the pre-crime division! I find it terribly amusing that we're speculating about Apple's possible nefarious use of this technology at some indeterminate point in the future, in a thread labeled "OMG big brother."
No, it is not enough to track you with any real precision. I looked at my own data using the binary that was linked in the earlier article about this - There appears to be very little certainty, other than showing a "general region" of where you were. It's not a running tally of every point you've passed through in the past year. It *appears* to have an approximately ~75-100 mile radius of my actual location, and seems to be more properly a database of the locations of *cell phone towers my phone has connected to*. Even that's fuzzy, because there are points showing up which are absolutely *not* in any location I've visited in recent memory, and points which I haven't come within hundreds of miles of in years.
Certainly enough imprecision that using it as the sole evidence to convict or accuse me of a crime would be laughable.
I will bet another $10,000 that it was not cheaper for him to pay someone else to do the work - it was just easier.
The determination of it being "cheaper" is only true if you place a negligible value on your own time.
Could I change my own oil? Fix my own car? Sure. I have the mechanical aptitude, I know how to use tools, and I probably already own most of the tools to do it. And I certainly *could* spend the time learning how; But in that same time, I could have also said "Here's $80, I need an oil change," and let a guy who has literally changed hundreds or thousands of cars' oil do it with ease & speed of somebody who has... changed hundreds or thousands of cars' oil.
And while he's doing that, I can be doing something I consider more valuable with the time I would have spent learning how to change my oil. I make decent money, but I can't add a second more free time to may day, unless I delegate some of my own tasks & responsibilities to other people, and pay them for their time, while I do other things that I consider more important/valuable.
Those establishments also don't pay straight retail price for the tens or hundreds of oil filters they go through every month, versus my single oil filter every 3 months or so. There's also the cost of waste disposal; an establishment that handles - literally - tens or hundreds of gallons of waste oil every week can negotiate much better prices for safe disposal than I can with my 4 quarts of oil every 3 months or so. Unless you'd suggest that I should just dump waste oil down the drain, or in the regular household trash, in violation of all kinds of local & state laws?
Certainly, it's *easier* to find people when you have a large population to draw from, that was never in question.
Your characterization of mechanics as people who are completely unlikely to have common interests with you says more about why it's difficult to meet people than the fact that you live in a "small town" of 60,000 people. I listed a bunch of different "creative" types, and in that context, I thought it would be obvious that when I say mechanics, I'm talking about people who build and work with mechanical devices - i.e., small engines, power tools, etc., not just "car guys." Find a guy who keeps the neighborhood's lawnmowers running - "small engine repair" - and you're likely to find somebody who enjoys tinkering. Find somebody who rewired his house when he wanted to put in a home theater system, and you're likely to find somebody who enjoys tinkering. Find somebody who builds sheds, birdfeeders, decks, planters, etc., and you're likely to find somebody who enjoys tinkering.
Start a small project, and invite some people from the neighborhood to pitch in. Maybe you'll only get 2 or 3 people to join you, but then you ask them to pass the word around, too. Get in touch with your local schools - maybe some of the kids would love to mess around with an electronics kit. Maybe some of the parents would be interested in helping, too. Communities don't get built through some magical critical mass that requires 2 million or more people, or a population density of 300 people per square kilometer - if you're interested in building things, I can almost guarantee that there are at least a couple other people in your community right now who would also be interested, and probably do their own things on their own in their spare time, regardless of the size of the town you live in.
I'd point out that the "magical" term wasn't used to describe "cut and paste" - in fact, their presentation of "cut and paste" was pretty much "We have cut and paste now." And then they proceeded to show people what they considered to be an elegant way to accomplish cut & paste on a small touchscreen device, along with a host of other "user enhancements" with their 3.0 release.
It's the literati here on Slashdot who have created the myth that Apple billed cut and paste as anything other than "a new feature we've added in iOS 3.0 that we think we've come up with a great interface for."
Apple never described cut & paste as "worthless" or "unnecessary". They did describe it as something they wanted to take time to get right, because the touchscreen interface was different and new. This seems to be their design philosophy: rather than give you a bundle of a hundred half-baked features that'll change repeatedly in future releases, they seem to prefer giving you 40 well-thought-out features that stay pretty consistent and stable over the life of the product, and they reserve the other 60 features as "stuff we may do later, once we've had time to think about the implementation more." (see: copy/paste & multitasking).
This doesn't mean that their designs are always perfect, or even always *good* (cough*magicmouse*cough), but they also don't seem to release "beta" devices, where they throw a million half-finished things into the device and wait to see how things work out in the market.
I bet you could find all kinds of people who build things outside your area of expertise in "Boondock, NH" - carpenters, mechanics, metal workers, artists, sculptors, painters.
Of course if your criteria is that the creativity be limited to "making an array of LEDs flash with an Arduino program", you might be out of luck. But if you want to tinker, and build, and learn new skills, I bet you could find a lot of people building things and making things right in your town, and you could probably pick up some interesting new skills while you're at it. You already know how to program - do you know how to work a lathe, or a blow torch, or a million other tools that you could combine with your Arduino & flashing LEDs to make something truly cool?
I simply pointed out that the GP post was correct: Without Apple, Flash wasn't going anywhere. It would have remained entrenched as a de facto, closed, proprietary standard. Why? Because every other platform has insisted that they support it, despite the fact that Adobe seems incapable of writing a plugin that functions with any semblance of reliability.
"Allowing" flash on Android certainly has nothing to do with it being "open" or "closed." But when you tout "openness" as one of the defining characteristics of your platform, it's oddly incongruous in the next breath to tout your firm commitment to delivering closed, proprietary standards on top of your platform. Isn't this why we're also being asked to conclude that H.264 is bad, and WebM is good? H.264 is far more prevalent, but we're asked to move away from it because it's not free and open, and WebM (allegedly) is free and open?
When the Android platform manager, Andy Rubin, claims that his platform is the very definition of "open", he opens his platform up to a bit of criticism over the very odd choice of saying that openness is good, except where Flash is involved. Lest you've forgotten, Mr. Rubin had this to say about openness:
the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"
Yes, Google profits from data mining your private data, they have no particular interest in giving you ways to lock it up and secure it. They don't profit from DRM at all.
Actually, this part is true. Flash would be far more prevalent without Apple's influence, because the "open" platforms seem bizarrely committed to preserving some other company's proprietary lock-in format.
Actually, coming to say "Hey, nice place you've got here, we're going to move in, hope you don't mind," is also more likely than, "Hey, we're going to come hundreds, thousands, or millions of light years to steal your water and ship it home, because that requires far less energy than simply extracting hydrogen and oxygen from our environment back home!" We're certainly not the only source of elements in the universe.
If they come here for resources, or to feed, they're coming here to stay. Chances are any civilization that has developed the technology to traverse those distances on a civilization-wide scale and has no home to go back to is also going to have no problem exterminating the local vermin that are just infesting that lovely new place they've found.
We have very little compunction against killing, eating, and exterminating other species that we consider "inferior" or "pests"; is there any reason to believe that alien life, if it exists & showed up in orbit, would feel any differently?
Apple didn't open their mouths on this "hidden file". The quote being used was a response to a question from a Congressman last year, around the time that they changed agreements to allow them to collect data around the launch of the iAd product.
Now perhaps their stance is the same on this issue, but if you're reserving judgement until they respond, then you should still be reserving judgement. The quote in the article was talked about extensively here a year ago, so there is no new information coming to light.
Because Apple gets what nobody else seems to: it's not enough to just have a device that does the same thing. That device needs to integrate well with other services - i.e., the App store & the Music store. A lot of people are buying a lot of music through the iTunes store. Sure, you could buy it somewhere else and load it on your ipod, but in the space of about 3 clicks + a password, I can buy that new album from that band I just heard about, or download that new app I read about that I wanted to check out.
There are very few companies that do that task of simplification & stripping down to essentials as well as Apple does, and that can't be ignored as a factor.
Where, and when? Everything I've seen says that the Galaxy Tab was "decent," but certainly didn't make much of a splash, if executives are saying in interviews that they need to "rethink" their pricing and their tablet strategy in the face of the iPad 2. Every review I've read on the Motorola Xoom says that it's more or less a beta-quality device, full of software bugs, crashes, and "we promise we'll get that to you in a future update just as soon as we can" missing features.
We keep hearing about these awesome tablets that will totally beat the pants off the iPad, but when they see the light of day, they turn out to be half-assed "me too" products which should have been refined and bug-fixed for probably another 6 months before they were put in a customer's hands.
so why if the music industries were so for DRM would Amazon and eMusic have been able to bargain for DRM free music stores when Apple, with all it had provided to the music industry couldn't?
Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Apple had the music industry by the balls, and the music industry was willing to get in bed with anybody else who thought they could make something work that would give them leverage to force Apple to let them do variable pricing and other things that Apple had said "no way" to.
Slashdot Mirror
This data is NOT "tracking the phone's location". It is only enough to show you that "this phone was somewhere inside ~100 miles of a given location."
If you're being executed or imprisoned because "your phone says you were within 100 miles of Tahrir Square on a day that protests against the Egyptian government occurred," then they're simply looking for an "official" reason to put on your execution / imprisonment paperwork. Of course, all of this "The iPhone, it TRACKZ JOO" hysteria simply gives people looking to "disappear" a few political opponents another way of documenting someone's "guilt".
If you're concerned about oppressive governments misusing the data, you wouldn't give them the crutch of saying "It's tracking the phone," and thus lending credibility to a flimsy justification for throwing someone in prison. You'd be very clearly and very strongly stating that that data on the phone has nothing to do with the precise location of the phone, and only provides the most general (regional) indication of the location of the phone at any given point in time. Because, you know, that's actually what it does - not indicate precise-to-the-centimeter location information for the phone.
Well, how about the fact that people often travel more than a few hundred yards in a single day or a single week?
Maybe you're a shut-in, I don't know. But I am pretty sure that people who travel frequently wouldn't appreciate the "excellent location services" that could be offered by an iPhone that always thinks you're in the same place you were yesterday, or last week, and takes a few minutes to locate you every time you move more than a few miles. Seems to sort of defeat the purpose of having a cache in the first place, no? If you're going to do that, might as well just kill the "assisted" part of aGPS and just force the phone to use GPS-only, all the time, no matter how long it takes.
Oh, it's not over - where Apple is concerned, it's never over here on Slashdot.
Just a wild, unscientific guess, but I'd say it's because linking to Apple's press release directly means that SecurityWeek doesn't get ad impressions from the slashdotting. The link goes to a SecurityWeek Article by Mike Lennon; TFS submitted by "wiredmikey," whose profile identifies him as "SecurityWeek Editor", and links to SecurityWeek.
Connecting the dots is left as an exercise for the reader.
... so that it can tell which particular towers & wi-fi hotspots you've seen most recently?
The point of the database is to help the iPhone determine its own location more quickly. Having a list of a thousand map coordinates that the iPhone has seen "in the last year, sometime," does very little to facilitate that unless the iPhone can also know which ones it has been in range of recently.
Oh NOES, won't somebody think of the chilluns?!
In this case, you would be arguing that they could convict him of downloading child porn solely because he happens to own a router that sits within 100 miles of where the child porn was downloaded. If you're truly suggesting that that's what happened, you're going to need to provide a lot of more of a citation than "ask that guy, you know, the one who got arrested recently."
Think of how easy all those cold cases will be to solve now. Tonight on Law & Order:
DA: "So, you ADMIT that you were within 100 miles of the place where a crime was committed, on the day a crime was committed?"
Defendant: "Yes, I suppose I was."
DA: "And did YOU rape and murder the deceased? After all, we can place you within 100 miles of the crime at some point on the night it was committed!"
Defendant: "No, being somewhere in the general area of the state where a crime was committed doesn't mean that I committed it."
DA: "I beg to differ, sir. I beg to differ. Your Honor, I move that we skip the rest of the trial altogether, and simply remand the defendant to Guantanamo Bay."
Judge: "Sustained. Bailiff, take the defendant into custody."
TNT: We Know Drama.
It's my understanding that saunas are generally operated between 70 and 100 degrees C. I'd say that 150C is quite a bit hotter than a sauna, even if you're a lobster in a chafing dish.
Let's consider that question for a second. Why would they need it? I can think of performance reasons why caching the tower coordinates would be useful. The iPhone knows it's connected to tower ID "ABC", and also within range of towers DEF and MNO; Now, if it has to go out and look up the coordinates of those towers in some phone company database over the data connection, that could take some time, and be wholly dependent on signal strength, other traffic on the network at the time, etc. etc. Then, once it gets the location of that info, it needs to fire that back to the mapping software, plot the points, download map data around those points... you could be looking at a lot of latency. If you're in an area with cached tower locations, then the phone can start downloading map data immediately, without the intermediate step of "look up towers X, Y, Z, then send those coordinates to the map software, and start downloading data around them." I don't find that thought particularly chilling, though I do concede that there is a *potential* for abuse. At this point, asking questions about what the data is used for, and who has access to it, is reasonable. Freaking out and yelling about how Apple is "tracking our every movement" is not.
I know that the route between my home outside of Boston and a place up in mid-NH where I recently visited comes nowhere near Portland, Maine; At no point during the weekend was I less than 60 miles from Portland, and yet my iPhone log shows me spending quite a bit of time in and around downtown Portland during that weekend.
Likewise, my data from a few days ago, where I was at home - quite literally all day long, shows me having "appeared" at numerous places within a ~75 mile radius of where I live - and literally, 2 of the points are over 100 miles apart, straight-line distance. So either my phone is taking fabulous day-long vacations without me, or the iPhone "tracking database" is wildly inaccurate as a method for determining exactly where I've been, and what my movements are.
You're right - by default. It's worth noting that this data is not accessible if you encrypt your backups.
Sounds like a job for the pre-crime division! I find it terribly amusing that we're speculating about Apple's possible nefarious use of this technology at some indeterminate point in the future, in a thread labeled "OMG big brother."
No, it is not enough to track you with any real precision. I looked at my own data using the binary that was linked in the earlier article about this - There appears to be very little certainty, other than showing a "general region" of where you were. It's not a running tally of every point you've passed through in the past year. It *appears* to have an approximately ~75-100 mile radius of my actual location, and seems to be more properly a database of the locations of *cell phone towers my phone has connected to*. Even that's fuzzy, because there are points showing up which are absolutely *not* in any location I've visited in recent memory, and points which I haven't come within hundreds of miles of in years.
Certainly enough imprecision that using it as the sole evidence to convict or accuse me of a crime would be laughable.
The determination of it being "cheaper" is only true if you place a negligible value on your own time.
Could I change my own oil? Fix my own car? Sure. I have the mechanical aptitude, I know how to use tools, and I probably already own most of the tools to do it. And I certainly *could* spend the time learning how; But in that same time, I could have also said "Here's $80, I need an oil change," and let a guy who has literally changed hundreds or thousands of cars' oil do it with ease & speed of somebody who has... changed hundreds or thousands of cars' oil.
And while he's doing that, I can be doing something I consider more valuable with the time I would have spent learning how to change my oil. I make decent money, but I can't add a second more free time to may day, unless I delegate some of my own tasks & responsibilities to other people, and pay them for their time, while I do other things that I consider more important/valuable.
Those establishments also don't pay straight retail price for the tens or hundreds of oil filters they go through every month, versus my single oil filter every 3 months or so. There's also the cost of waste disposal; an establishment that handles - literally - tens or hundreds of gallons of waste oil every week can negotiate much better prices for safe disposal than I can with my 4 quarts of oil every 3 months or so. Unless you'd suggest that I should just dump waste oil down the drain, or in the regular household trash, in violation of all kinds of local & state laws?
Certainly, it's *easier* to find people when you have a large population to draw from, that was never in question.
Your characterization of mechanics as people who are completely unlikely to have common interests with you says more about why it's difficult to meet people than the fact that you live in a "small town" of 60,000 people. I listed a bunch of different "creative" types, and in that context, I thought it would be obvious that when I say mechanics, I'm talking about people who build and work with mechanical devices - i.e., small engines, power tools, etc., not just "car guys." Find a guy who keeps the neighborhood's lawnmowers running - "small engine repair" - and you're likely to find somebody who enjoys tinkering. Find somebody who rewired his house when he wanted to put in a home theater system, and you're likely to find somebody who enjoys tinkering. Find somebody who builds sheds, birdfeeders, decks, planters, etc., and you're likely to find somebody who enjoys tinkering.
Start a small project, and invite some people from the neighborhood to pitch in. Maybe you'll only get 2 or 3 people to join you, but then you ask them to pass the word around, too. Get in touch with your local schools - maybe some of the kids would love to mess around with an electronics kit. Maybe some of the parents would be interested in helping, too. Communities don't get built through some magical critical mass that requires 2 million or more people, or a population density of 300 people per square kilometer - if you're interested in building things, I can almost guarantee that there are at least a couple other people in your community right now who would also be interested, and probably do their own things on their own in their spare time, regardless of the size of the town you live in.
I'd point out that the "magical" term wasn't used to describe "cut and paste" - in fact, their presentation of "cut and paste" was pretty much "We have cut and paste now." And then they proceeded to show people what they considered to be an elegant way to accomplish cut & paste on a small touchscreen device, along with a host of other "user enhancements" with their 3.0 release.
It's the literati here on Slashdot who have created the myth that Apple billed cut and paste as anything other than "a new feature we've added in iOS 3.0 that we think we've come up with a great interface for."
Apple never described cut & paste as "worthless" or "unnecessary". They did describe it as something they wanted to take time to get right, because the touchscreen interface was different and new. This seems to be their design philosophy: rather than give you a bundle of a hundred half-baked features that'll change repeatedly in future releases, they seem to prefer giving you 40 well-thought-out features that stay pretty consistent and stable over the life of the product, and they reserve the other 60 features as "stuff we may do later, once we've had time to think about the implementation more." (see: copy/paste & multitasking).
This doesn't mean that their designs are always perfect, or even always *good* (cough*magicmouse*cough), but they also don't seem to release "beta" devices, where they throw a million half-finished things into the device and wait to see how things work out in the market.
I bet you could find all kinds of people who build things outside your area of expertise in "Boondock, NH" - carpenters, mechanics, metal workers, artists, sculptors, painters.
Of course if your criteria is that the creativity be limited to "making an array of LEDs flash with an Arduino program", you might be out of luck. But if you want to tinker, and build, and learn new skills, I bet you could find a lot of people building things and making things right in your town, and you could probably pick up some interesting new skills while you're at it. You already know how to program - do you know how to work a lathe, or a blow torch, or a million other tools that you could combine with your Arduino & flashing LEDs to make something truly cool?
Grow up?
I simply pointed out that the GP post was correct: Without Apple, Flash wasn't going anywhere. It would have remained entrenched as a de facto, closed, proprietary standard. Why? Because every other platform has insisted that they support it, despite the fact that Adobe seems incapable of writing a plugin that functions with any semblance of reliability.
"Allowing" flash on Android certainly has nothing to do with it being "open" or "closed." But when you tout "openness" as one of the defining characteristics of your platform, it's oddly incongruous in the next breath to tout your firm commitment to delivering closed, proprietary standards on top of your platform. Isn't this why we're also being asked to conclude that H.264 is bad, and WebM is good? H.264 is far more prevalent, but we're asked to move away from it because it's not free and open, and WebM (allegedly) is free and open?
When the Android platform manager, Andy Rubin, claims that his platform is the very definition of "open", he opens his platform up to a bit of criticism over the very odd choice of saying that openness is good, except where Flash is involved. Lest you've forgotten, Mr. Rubin had this to say about openness:
Yes, Google profits from data mining your private data, they have no particular interest in giving you ways to lock it up and secure it. They don't profit from DRM at all.
Actually, this part is true. Flash would be far more prevalent without Apple's influence, because the "open" platforms seem bizarrely committed to preserving some other company's proprietary lock-in format.
Actually, coming to say "Hey, nice place you've got here, we're going to move in, hope you don't mind," is also more likely than, "Hey, we're going to come hundreds, thousands, or millions of light years to steal your water and ship it home, because that requires far less energy than simply extracting hydrogen and oxygen from our environment back home!" We're certainly not the only source of elements in the universe.
If they come here for resources, or to feed, they're coming here to stay. Chances are any civilization that has developed the technology to traverse those distances on a civilization-wide scale and has no home to go back to is also going to have no problem exterminating the local vermin that are just infesting that lovely new place they've found.
We have very little compunction against killing, eating, and exterminating other species that we consider "inferior" or "pests"; is there any reason to believe that alien life, if it exists & showed up in orbit, would feel any differently?
Maybe the aliens want their Fox News too. It's very popular here on earth, why not Alpha Centauri too?
Apple didn't open their mouths on this "hidden file". The quote being used was a response to a question from a Congressman last year, around the time that they changed agreements to allow them to collect data around the launch of the iAd product.
Now perhaps their stance is the same on this issue, but if you're reserving judgement until they respond, then you should still be reserving judgement. The quote in the article was talked about extensively here a year ago, so there is no new information coming to light.
Because Apple gets what nobody else seems to: it's not enough to just have a device that does the same thing. That device needs to integrate well with other services - i.e., the App store & the Music store. A lot of people are buying a lot of music through the iTunes store. Sure, you could buy it somewhere else and load it on your ipod, but in the space of about 3 clicks + a password, I can buy that new album from that band I just heard about, or download that new app I read about that I wanted to check out.
There are very few companies that do that task of simplification & stripping down to essentials as well as Apple does, and that can't be ignored as a factor.
Where, and when? Everything I've seen says that the Galaxy Tab was "decent," but certainly didn't make much of a splash, if executives are saying in interviews that they need to "rethink" their pricing and their tablet strategy in the face of the iPad 2. Every review I've read on the Motorola Xoom says that it's more or less a beta-quality device, full of software bugs, crashes, and "we promise we'll get that to you in a future update just as soon as we can" missing features.
We keep hearing about these awesome tablets that will totally beat the pants off the iPad, but when they see the light of day, they turn out to be half-assed "me too" products which should have been refined and bug-fixed for probably another 6 months before they were put in a customer's hands.
Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Apple had the music industry by the balls, and the music industry was willing to get in bed with anybody else who thought they could make something work that would give them leverage to force Apple to let them do variable pricing and other things that Apple had said "no way" to.