In particular, check out the part where if you find a trade secret by accident and knowingly disclose it, you are totally (although civilly) fucked.

Read that more carefully. First, the company needs to make reasonable efforts to protect its trade secrets. Second, the person disclosing it needs to know it's a trade secret. Neither of those is obviously the case here.

Please, stop acting like you're an authority on things you clearly know nothing about. Especially when it involves the law.

I may sit on a jury to decide these cases, and so may you. This is a matter every US citizen can reasonably discuss and form their own opinion on.

Trade secrets only survive theft if the company took reasonable precautions. Leaving a trade secret prototype on a public bar stool is not reasonable precautions, so trade secret protection seems lost no matter what.

As for whether keeping the phone constituted "theft" depends on whether the guy called Apple. If he did, it seems to me he made a "reasonable and just effort", and since Apple didn't want their property back, it was his to keep.

You're wrong. This post explains it:

http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2010/lost-and-found-california-law-and-next-generation-iphone

Under California law, lost property over a given value (and a prototype iPhone certainly qualifies), you are obligated to make a credible effort to return it to the owner

He did: he published the fact that he found an iPhone 4G prototype on Gizmodo in great detail, and as soon as Apple called, they got their prototype back.

Neither the finder nor Gizmodo are obligated to respect Apple's trade secrets.

It's only a trade secret violation if Apple communicated the information in circumstances imparting an obligation of confidence. Leaving a phone on a bar stool does not count.

Furthermore, since Apple didn't have GPS tracking on the device, didn't lock the device, didn't provide a return address/phone number, didn't respond to phone calls, and otherwise didn't try to get the prototype back, they took less care with their prototype than many people take with their regular phones. Since Apple didn't take reasonable precautions to protect their information, they probably lose their trade secret even if the phone was obtained illegally.

Apple has a long history of suing people over trade secret violations

Apple lost its trade secret protection when their employee left the phone at the bar. If someone had picked it up and reported on it there and then, Apple would have no legal recourse. It is not the responsibility of the world at large to protect Apple's trade secrets for them. The only thing that could result in a charge here is the fact that Gizmodo paid $5000 for the prototype.

My non-jailbroken iPhone does bluetooth tethering.

Well, and mine doesn't. Other phones on the same carrier do, with monthly rates that are less than the iPhone rates. And that's the point: Apple turns the feature on and off haphazardly in order to cause you to incur hidden and unexpected costs.

And while you might say that carriers "force" Apple to do this, Apple also has turned off the opposite direction: you can't tether an iPod or iPad to another phone. There's no technical reason, they're just betting on the ignorance of users.

the x doesn't cancel the sync as you would expect - it continues as normal.

I think it's doing a backup (and in an inefficient way). So if you cancel it, the transfer of data to the iPhone may have finished, but you may not have a complete backup. Of course, it's hard to tell what is going on, which is a problem in itself.

and trust me, it's not just the pro-Apple mods out in force - there has been some judicious flamebait modding

I don't see what's "judicious" about modding a factual and generally accurate response to a question as "flamebait" just because people don't like the facts.

Mind you, I'm not even saying that the iPhone is bad; it's a decent phone. But people should be aware that it has many limitations and it is expensive.

(Wow, the Apple fanboy and marketing moderation squad is out in full force again. Therefore, I'm just going to repost this. The parent asked what problems some people see with the iPhone and I answered what problems I see. I'm sorry if that causes you discomfort.)

You claim that the iPhone (in your opinion) is worse than Android, and yet give no reasons why you feel that way.

Off the top of my head (I have both):

• Poor integration between apps (only limited ability to move documents between apps).
• No multitasking (partially fixed in iPhone 4.0)
• Requires iTunes to set up and update.
• Google sync cumbersome to set up and doesn't work consistently.
• No Adobe Flash.
• Music and desktop syncing requires physical connection
• Plugging in your iPhone can result in a long "back up" time (half an hour)
• Bad on-screen keyboard (slow, error prone, bad international support).
• Whole categories of applications missing from the store (music players, third party keyboards, etc.)
• No WiFi or Bluetooth tethering on non-jailbroken phones.
• Lack of consistency and UI standards between applications (different ways of invoking menus, configuration, search, canceling, etc.)
• Uninformative error messages for networking and similar functions.
• Low screen resolution.
• Nearly double the price of an Android phone.

You may not care, but many people do. And these aren't just obscure geek-issues.

Don't you think, that the reason iPhones are close to perfect, is because of the super-tight approval process....

No. There are plenty of apps that violate Apple UI conventions, that crash, that leak memory, and that are generally awful. Apple's approval process is there for business and strategic reasons, not as quality control.

iPhones appear "close to perfect" because Apple avoided most of the hard problems in making a modern phone: multitasking, application integration, file management, USB devices, full Bluetooth support, DUN, full over the air synchronization, security and access control for applications, intents and other APIs, etc. They also appear "close to perfect" because it's premium hardware and you pay a premium price for it.

It's a tradeoff that works in the market: Apple is grabbing market share now. In a couple of years, iPhone-like responsiveness will be on sub-$200 Android devices, but then we'll still be stuck with Apple having grabbed a large part of the market and charging a premium.

You see the same thing with iPhone: English input is tolerable (although worse than Android IMO), but international input is awful. Unlike the iPhone, there are a bunch of third party keyboards available for Android that may work better for you.

For integrated messaging, there is a third party widget that integrates it all (Pure Messenger). You may (or may not) like it.

Normally, I'd agree. But iPhone is different for several reasons. First, Apple copied a lot of the technologies on iPhone but markets the device as if they developed it themselves. Second, iPhone is getting popular enough that we're seeing the Windows effect: no matter how much it sucks, you may have to get one just because everybody else has one in order to be able to communicate. Third, and most importantly, Apple has been successful with a business model--locked application store and restricted development tools--that would be very bad if it caught on. Microsoft has already copied that model, but they don't matter much. If other companies switch as well, we're in trouble.

People care about the iPhone because the iPhone is very bad for the mobile phone industry. If you buy one, it affects me negatively.

You claim that the iPhone (in your opinion) is worse than Android, and yet give no reasons why you feel that way.

Off the top of my head (I have both):

• Poor integration between apps.
• No multitasking.
• Requires iTunes to set up and update.
• Google sync cumbersome to set up and doesn't work consistently.
• No Adobe Flash.
• Music and desktop syncing requires physical connection and can take a long time.
• Bad on-screen keyboard (slow, error prone, bad international support).
• Whole categories of applications missing from the store (music players, third party keyboards, etc.)
• No WiFi or Bluetooth tethering.
• Lack of consistency and UI standards between applications.
• Uninformative error messages for networking and similar functions.
• Low screen resolution.
• Nearly double the price of an Android phone.

You may not care, but many people do. And these aren't just obscure geek-issues.

As I understood, the digital sensor is a 6x4.5 sensor,

Sure, for values of "6" and "4.5" that are smaller than 6 and 4.5. And one of the allures of Hasselblad has been that you didn't have to worry about flipping the camera or rotate the back. In fact, HBs simply aren't designed for it.

An optical system is just that: to guide the light. What sensor you use behind it, be it film or digital, places no additional requirements on the optics.

Film sensors are dull, translucent, and non-pixelated. Digital sensors are reflective, use a lenticular array, and are pixelated. The result is that, a digital sensor can show strong purple fringing, ghosting, and light falloff for a lens that looks just fine when used with film. Digital sensors are also quite a bit better than film these days, meaning that lens imperfections that you might only see with specialized films are easily visible with digital.

Now, why is it that people like you feel like they should make authoritative statements about things they obviously know nothing about?

In the context of space exploration, the term "cyborg" has a more specific meaning than merely someone with an implant.

Just use photo sharing for photo sharing, microblogging for microblogging, and chat for chat, preferably provided by competitors so that the data lives in separate worlds. Use different services for public (e.g., Twitter) and private communications (e.g., E-mail). Don't enter full profile information or any sensitive information into any of them.