Great news, Canadians! No, it's not the launch of the Great White North edition of the iTunes Music Store; that's still nowhere to be seen, although widespread rumors peg its unannounced go-live date as Friday of next week. We'll understand if you aren't overly-awed by the prediction; there really isn't much of November left in which Apple can keep its promise, so you're right, it doesn't take a Kreskin to pick the last remaining Friday and run with it. But for what it's worth, MacRumors had reported the November 26th date way back before Apple even made the "sometime in November" announcement, so you can decide for yourself whether or not that counts for anything.

But anyway, while you prepare for the iTMS to loot, pillage, and burn your credit card account (and salt the earth so that nothing will ever grow there again) sometime within the next week and a half, the "great news" to which we referred is that the advent of Canadian Apple retail stores is finally official-- not officially official, mind you, but close enough for journalism, anyway. In other words, there still hasn't been a public announcement from Apple itself, but faithful viewer Cool, eh told us that macosXrumors posted an excerpt from email sent by Apple Canada to its north-of-the-border resellers announcing that "an Apple Branded Retail Store location will be opening in Toronto, mid year 2005"-- and CNET reports that Apple has confirmed that fact to them. In other words, this is as official as it gets without a press release, a Stevenote, or an Apple press contact breaking into your house overnight, strapping you down, and tattooing it across your forehead.

For those of you who may have forgotten, AppleInsider recently reported that Apple's Toronto store-- one of them, at least-- will be in the Yorkdale Shopping Center; since Yorkdale reps had previously also cited a "mid-2005" time frame for an Apple retail store opening (pending the signing of the lease), presumably this is the store to which Apple refers in its reseller memo. Since AI was apparently accurate in that regard, it's worth reminding you that the site also claims that an Apple store will eventually sprout up in the Vaughan Mills Mall, which itself just opened a few weeks ago (well, technically AI said that Apple would be one of the "first anchored tenants," which was clearly not true, but why quibble over minor details?) and that Apple had originally planned to have four Canadian stores open by the end of this year-- so more are almost certainly on the way.

What this all means, of course, is that in six or seven month's time, Canada will have access to pretty much all the same cool Apple stuff that we do here in the U.S., barring some of the promos. (Heck, if the rumors are correct and songs at the Canadian iTMS wind up costing 99 Canadian cents, they'll even be getting cheaper songs than us.) Now, as any Canadian Apple fan knows, that sort of parity between U.S. and Canadian Apple offerings runs counter to the natural order of the universe and will surely collapse upon itself almost immediately. In other words, by the time Canada gets its first taste of Apple retaily goodness, we ought to be getting something brand new and insanely great exclusively here in the States to keep the balance off-center; we don't know what it'll be, but we're hoping it's free money. Or maybe a pony.

Okay, so about all these schools, districts, and states (like Greene County in North Carolina, Henrico County in Virginia, and the entire state of Maine) that took the plunge and leased AirPort-equipped iBooks for all their middle and/or high school students: everyone knew there would be hurdles to clear. The teachers would have to be trained-- not just in integrating the laptops into their lesson plans, but also in basic troubleshooting when things went wrong. And things would go wrong; we all know a Mac can be virtually pain-free to maintain, but when you're talking about dozens, hundreds, or even tens of thousands of Macs, maybe not so much-- especially ones being lugged from classroom to classroom every forty minutes, dragged between home and school in backpacks, and tweaked on the software end by bored teens angling for some Unreal Tournament action.

So: new equipment, new procedures, new rules... no doubt, it was a big adjustment and not without its setbacks and downsides, but overall most people felt that the pros of the iBook programs far outweigh the cons. Of course, most people also didn't realize that one of the cons would be students occasionally being held at gunpoint. Go figure.

Yup, apparently things have gotten a little sketchy around Miramar High School in the Miami area; faithful viewer Ryan McLean tipped us off to a Miami Herald article that describes "a series of armed thefts of Apple iBook computers from students walking to and from school." An attempted robbery on Thursday morning was "the third in as many days, and the eighth time a student had been accosted walking to or from school." In most cases, two men drive up alongside one or more students on foot, one gets out ("often with a gun"), gives the classic "your iBook or your life" spiel, gets back in the car with the goods, and the two drive off. So far eleven iBooks have been stolen outside of the school by robbers threatening violence.

The scary bit is that police had already arrested three people for various other Miramar High iBook thefts and robberies (including one involving a threat with a hammer-- yeek), but obviously "some robbers are still at large." And when the two-guys-with-a-gun-and-a-car finally get nabbed, who's to say someone else won't start accosting students with, say, a chainsaw, or the threat of off-key a cappella show tunes? After all, when you've got a whole high school full of kids and every single one of them is toting a compact and easily-pawned $1,200 laptop, that's pretty much the textbook definition of "easy pickin's." What better way for a bad guy to pick up some quick cash?

In an attempt to keep its students from having gats shoved in their faces every other day, Miramar High recently instituted a policy mandating that students who walk to and from school leave their iBooks at home-- which is why Thursday's incident was only an "attempted robbery" and the creeps left the scene empty-handed. Unfortunately, that policy sort of defeats the purpose of having the iBooks in the first place, so it's not exactly an ideal solution. Perhaps this is an opportunity for Apple to introduce a new and highly profitable line of personal protection products in the education channel; big-city schools would jump at an iBook-iKevlar-iTaser bundle.

You know, at one point we concluded that Bill Gates had to have been stoned to the gills when he declared publicly that spam would be eliminated by January 24th of 2006, but having now heard how much unsolicited commercial email he receives himself, were not sure whether we're more convinced that he was on drugs, or less. Faithful viewer Iain was the first to send us a link to an article in The Guardian which reports that Steve "Fire BAAAAAD!" Ballmer told an audience in Singapore that "Bill receives 4 million pieces of email per day, most of it spam." Ow. Here we thought our couple-hundred-a-day spam intake was bad, but 4 million? That's almost enough to make us feel sorry for the guy-- until we remember that it's Bill Gates we're talking about, here, at which point we wish for 12 million instead.

So here's the thing about the "solving spam by January 2006" prediction: on the one hand, Bill comes off as even more mentally deficient than ever when you learn that he thinks the problem is that easily solved despite being the daily recipient of 4 million messages offering him Cialis at ridiculously low prices. (Ah, spam with a double side order of irony: Gates was a huge investor in Lilly ICOS, the company that got the patent on Viagra overturned in order to make Cialis in the first place; and he's a founder of-- ahem-- "Microsoft.")

Then again, maybe it's not so hard to understand his optimism, since, of those 4 million spam messages, he probably only sees one or two; the rest are filtered out by software and his employees. Yes, employees, and not just a personal secretary: according to Ballmer (as quoted by BBC News), "literally there's a whole department almost that takes care of it." Wow. How hard up for a job do you need to be to work full-time as one of Bill Gates's many spam-sifters?

Now, if Bill never sees all this junk because it never makes it past his crack team of spam-sniffing flunkies, that might explain his obscenely optimistic prediction for spam's expiration date. But at the same time, we can't believe that he isn't at least aware of it on some level. So doesn't it occur to him that needing a department of people (not software filters, mind you, but actual people) to pick out the good bits doesn't bode well for the prospect of quickly finding a feasible large-scale solution to the problem?

On the other hand, assuming he does know about the 4 million messages a day, he's got at least a vague incentive to fix the problem. (He could put his entire anti-spam department to work aerating his topsoil, for example.) And the man does have more money than God, so if anyone's got command of the sheer financial resources to tackle such an intractable problem, we suppose he's the fella. In any case, though, back in January he also said that he'd make "a lot of progress this year" on fighting the problem, and if he's still getting 4 million spam messages a day, we're not sure exactly what sort of progress he could possibly have made-- and it's late November. By our count he's got roughly 431 days to go before he misses his spam-killing deadline altogether. Shall we brew him some nice, strong coffee?