"I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet." Sounds like Stephen has seen Wall-E too many times. Does he have a five-year-old? Anyway, I doubt we'll be conquered by a race of vacuous, immobile, milkshake-slurping space balloons who aren't interested in anything past their viewscreens.

I've been using Apple machines since I was about 6, and much of my geekiness today is due to the software and hardware tinkering I did with them over the years. I'm pretty disturbed by the direction I see Apple going. iTunes was, I think, the beginning of the end, and the iPad is an unsettling glimpse into the future. Since the iTunes store opened, Apple has gone from being a "computer" company to being a "media" company. The iPad is locked down because of Apple's need to keep the content providers at bay. Now, I know Apple makes a boatload of cash serving all this DRMed content, but really they should have just stuck to geekier pursuits like making nice computers with a slick OS, and left all the intellectual property bullshit to somebody else. I don't have an iPhone, but I wasn't too miffed to learn that it was locked down, because most phones are (I know, I know, the N900). But when I heard they were making a tablet, I pictured a MacBook crammed into tablet form with a cool multitouch version of OS X. So I was disappointed to find that it was this giant iPhone that I'll never be able to run X11 or MacPorts or even Firefox on. I'm hoping that people will realize that they don't need an iPad (despite the reality distortion field that undoubtedly surrounds it) and it will fail miserably, and Apple will go back to the way it was when I was doing Logo on my Apple ][c. Something about Apple's stock prices (like the fact that one share costs about as much as an iPod) tells me that this is unlikely to ever occur.

It's a trap.

Don't raise the ire of a fellow close-knit group of geographically disparate nerds. Internecine geek warfare is bad for all of us.