Hey, look, we're back! We know, we know-- we said we'd try to produce the show while on the road in Nevada and Arizona last week, but things didn't quite work out. (You're shocked, we can tell.) As it turns out, it's one thing to have technical access to wireless broadband and a nice new PowerBook, but quite another to wrangle physical access to same when family members have scheduled every minute of your trip down to the sweep of the second hand. Not that we're complaining, mind you, since the Grand Canyon was, well, grand, and Sedona's red rocks are (all together now) red, and there's something indescribably bizarre about seeing London Bridge-- yes, the real, honest-to-beans original London Bridge-- in Lake Havasu, Arizona. And the timing of the unplanned hiatus was such that we could pretend that our sloth was some sort of vague protest of the continued lack of a firm Tiger release date from Apple. You know, kinda like that guy way back when who vowed never to shave until the Cubs won another World Series and was eventually crushed to death under the weight of his own beard.

But after a week of the hardcore tourist thing (and a cross-country red-eye flight with a cranky two-year-old-- wheeee!), we're finally snuggled back into the familiar clutter of the AtAT compound-- and just in time, too, because as you all know, we finally have something momentous to talk about. We speak, of course, of the impending release of a long-awaited and life-changing milestone now officially slated for public consumption on April 29th. Remember that date, for it will live on in legends sung by future generations who will always honor it for what it is: the release date for the movie adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

Oh, and Tiger. That too.

Yeah, see, faithful viewer Jonathan Wallis was the first to confirm that the recent rumors of Tiger having gone gold master were apparently true, since Apple's home page is now trumpeting April 29th as the operating system's official birth date. Apple even kindly includes a running countdown to Tiger Day, just in case you don't feel like doing the math to figure out that it's just 17 days until you get to Dashboard to your little heart's content. So circle those calendars and plan those release parties, because you'll want to celebrate a little extra hard to make up for all those Windows mopes who will be waiting another year for Longhorn (or, at least, for what little of it still remains in the version planned for a 2006 ship date).

Incidentally, Apple finally declaring a Tiger release date means that Great Things Are Afoot for multiple-Mac households, since now, in addition to offering a $35 rebate on the standard edition of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Amazon.com is also accepting preorders for the 5-client Family Pack, which carries a hefty $50 rebate on what is already a pretty sweet deal for anyone looking to Tigerize at least two Macs. If you're not in any particular hurry to put a Tiger in your tank, you can even opt for free ground shipping, and if you order directly from those links we just pimped at you, you also get the bonus karmic satisfaction of stuffing a few bucks down the collective AtAT G-string. What more could you possibly ask for?

And by the way, you're welcome. See, you owe us for this Tiger release date, because while folks like faithful viewer Peter Jetton might concoct wild conspiracy theories about the confluence of Tiger's arrival and that of the Hitchhiker's flick (especially since Douglas Adams was a huge Mac fan, and the original Hitchhiker's trailer clearly lists a May 6th release date-- oooooo!), the truth of the matter is, Tiger's coming on out the 29th solely because we scheduled a meeting that evening just last night. Apple will no doubt be throwing gala release parties at all of its retail stores on Tiger Night much like it did for Night of the Panther, when it offered 10% off all Macs, gave away free and highly eBayable dog tags ("Switch" celebrities not included), and granted all customers a free superpower of their choice. (Why we opted for "Talk To Fish" we'll never know.)

But whatever fun goes down in Retailville on Tiger Night, we'll be holed up at one of the local music schools with an up-and-coming Boston Rock God and his iBook, teaching him Mac OS X geekery in exchange for guitar lessons and groupie points. Which isn't by any means a crappy way to spend an evening, but still, it's pretty darn obvious that Apple was just waiting to schedule Tiger's release for a night on which we'd be otherwise occupied. Curses! Foiled again!

So we did a little poking around upon our return, and from what we can make out, it looks like not much Mac-wise actually happened last week while we were off looking at big rocks and bigger holes in the ground. Seriously, try to think back a bit; remember the hot topics in the Mac media the week before we slipped off the face of the earth? Tiger's release date, the tussle between Apple and a British cybersquatter, and the usual spate of confused blustering one way or the other about Apple's lawsuits against leakers. Imagine our surprise to find that, over a week later, all three topics are still churning away, as if we'd just paused the world on a gigantic TiVo while we spent nine or ten days grabbing a soda from the fridge and are now picking things up right where we left off.

We already covered the Tiger release date (i.e. now there actually is one), so how about we check in on the latest in the Ben Cohen/itunes.co.uk goofiness? The last we'd heard was that Nominet, the UK's domain name registration authority, had decided that ol' Ben was, indeed, a cybersquatter, and so it awarded the itunes.co.uk domain name to Apple, whom it deemed to be the rightful holder of the iTunes trademark. Cohen then got all huffy and decided to get the courts involved; Nominet, he contended, is "biased against small businesses" and unjustly ripped his legitimately registered domain name out of his virtual hands just because Apple has much deeper pockets and much scarier lawyers than he does, so he's "applied to the High Court for a judicial review."

Well, we were already skeptical that Mr. Cohen would be able to sway the High Court with his sob story of representing a wronged "legitimate small British company," considering that despite having been ordered to surrender the domain name by April 13th, he's even now got it redirecting to some completely unrelated-to-iTunes virtual Ponzi scheme that promises free stuff for visiting such "legitimate" sites as 888CasinoOnNet.com and LoopyLotto.com and includes offers to "win a trip to the Bahamas" while also soliciting surfers to enter their PayPal addresses; now we figure he'll be lucky if he avoids being cited for making a High Court judge soil himself after laughing too hard.

See, the New York Times dug up a few more specifics of the case, and Ben's whole clueless-David-vs.-corporate-Goliath pose looks even shakier when you consider the new facts. You know how this guy's whole spiel is that he registered the domain name before Apple's iTunes ever went public? Well, Nominet says that's irrelevant, because what's at issue is what Cohen did with the domain name after he learned about iTunes and the iTunes Music Store. It seems that Cohen "subsequently sent an e-mail message to Napster, a rival music service, in October 2004 asking if it would be interested in buying his iTunes domain" to draw potential iTunes customers to its own service instead. And he admits that he even pointed itunes.co.uk at Napster's servers for two days "just to see what would happen," and only stopped when Apple started warming up its lawyers. That's what caused Nominet to rule Cohen to be a cybersquatter and turn the domain name over to Apple, and we doubt any judge in possession of the facts would buy Cohen's Doe-Eyed Naïf act.

Heck, it must be wearing thin for the media, too. Here's Cohen spouting off his "Aren't I So Innocent?" blather again, accusing Apple of "bully boy" tactics and "trying to push [him] around": "Apple should have asked nicely for the domain, then we would have been more than happy to consider their offer. Instead they tried to intimidate me, which put me in a bad frame of mind." Okay, fine-- except that by Cohen's own admission, before Nominet got involved, Apple wrote to his lawyer and offered to buy the domain name for $5,000; Cohen insisted that five large "would barely have covered [his] legal costs" (apparently in the UK you need at least a half-dozen lawyers on retainer just to transfer a domain name, and thirty or more to file a simple change-of-address form-- who knew?) and demanded roughly 19 times that amount instead. That's when Apple appealed to Nominet to intervene. So, what-- the $5,000 offer didn't count as "asking nicely"? Did Apple forget to curtsy when it made its proposal?

Memo to all High Court judges: make sure you bring extra pants to work until this case is resolved. Just as a precaution, you know.

Meanwhile, the latest development in the Apple-vs.-leakers First Amendment brouhaha has us, quite frankly, baffled-- and considering taking an ESL course, because it's possible that our reading skills aren't anywhere near as adequate as we thought they were. The hot-button topic at hand, as you all know, is protection of anonymous sources; critics of Apple's attempts to learn the identities of the couple dozen leakers it's sued (by subpoenaing the sites' email) claim that this is a cut-and-dried free speech issue, and that if the courts rule in Apple's favor and allow Apple to force online journalists to reveal their sources, then journalists of all shapes and sizes everywhere on the planet will see their confidential anonymous sources dry up overnight, at which point the fourth estate will crash and burn, and the universe as we know it will cease to exist.

Wooooo! Important stuff, right? In fact, it's such an important case that apparently a slew of big-name newspapers has now signed on in solidarity with the Mac sites under fire. Faithful viewer Mac (he swears that's really his name) dished up a BBC News article reporting that "eight US newspapers"-- including heavy hitters like the LA Times, the Mercury News, and the San Francisco Chronicle-- have joined with the Associated Press agency to draft a brief in support of the sites being asked to give up evidence about the identity of the people who leaked them Apple's trade secrets.

This brief says, in part, that "recent corporate scandals involving WorldCom, Enron and the tobacco industry all undoubtedly involved the reporting of information that the companies involved would have preferred to remain unknown to the public," and therefore Mac rumors sites should be able to avoid ratting out the NDA-breaking employees who passed them trade secrets about the Mac mini. Because, as we all know, gross corporate accounting impropriety, knowingly poisoning the world's population, and wanting to keep details about an unannounced product under wraps for competitive reasons are all the exact same thing. Indeed, we're seriously starting to doubt our basic reading comprehension skills, here, because we'd swear that the judge make it crystal clear that, since the trade secrets leaked from Apple didn't expose gross wrongdoing or something else in the "public interest," journalistic protection of the sources' identities doesn't apply and any comparisons to Enron et al are completely spurious.

Maybe the judge never did say that, though, because we can't imagine that eight of California's largest newspapers all somehow missed it. Similarly, various Mac sites continue to assert things like, for example, "in an earlier hearing, Judge Kleinberg declared, in this instance, that bloggers and, by extension, on-line journalists, did not have the same kind of legal protection as mainstream media journalists"-- when, in fact, we were pretty sure the judge explicitly stated that he was declaring no such thing: whether the proprietors of the sites in question are officially "journalists" or not is moot, since his whole point was that "laws governing the right to keep trade secrets confidential covered journalists, too."

So we're going back to "See Jane Run" primers for a while, just to make sure we aren't misunderstanding what the judges are saying as this case moves forward. We'd sure hate to misinterpret some far-reaching ruling about the limits of First Amendment rights as, say, a lunch order for a turkey club on rye and a bag of Fritos. Blimey, this Constitutional interpretation is trickier than we thought!