Florida Python Hunt Captures 68 Invasive Snakes

It's a wrap—the 2013 Python Challenge has nabbed 68 invasive Burmese pythons in Florida, organizers say. And experts are surprised so many of the elusive giants were caught.

Nearly 1,600 people from 38 states—most of them inexperienced hunters—registered for the chance to track down one of the animals, many of which descend from snakes that either escaped or were dumped into the wild.

Since being introduced, these Asian behemoths have flourished in Florida's swamps while also squeezing out local populations of the state's native mammals, especially in the Everglades. (See Everglades pictures.)

To highlight the python problem, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and its partners launched the 2013 Python Challenge, which encouraged registered participants to catch as many pythons as they could between January 12 and February 10 in state wildlife-management areas within the Everglades.

The commission gave cash prizes to those who harvested the most and longest pythons.

Frank Mazzotti, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Florida and scientific leader for the challenge, said before the hunt that he would consider a harvest of 70 animals a success—and 68 is close enough to say the event met its goals.

It's unknown just how many Burmese pythons live in Florida, but catching 68 snakes is an "exceptional" number, added Kenneth Krysko, senior herpetologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

Snakes in the Grass

Finding 68 snakes is impressive, experts say, since it's so hard to find pythons. For one, it's been unusually warm lately in Florida, which means the reptiles—which normally sun themselves to regulate their body temperature—are staying in the brush, making them harder to detect, Krysko said.

On top of that, Burmese pythons are notoriously hard to locate, experts say.

The animals are so well camouflaged that people can stand right next to one and not notice it. "It's rare that you get to see them stretched out—most of the time they're blending in," said Cheryl Millett, a biologist at the Nature Conservancy, a Python Challenge partner.

What's more, the reptiles are ambush hunters, which means they spend much of their time lying in wait in dense vegetation, not moving, she said.

That's why Millett gave the hunters some tips, such as looking along the water's edge, where the snakes like to hang out, and also simply listening for "something big moving through the vegetation."

Even so, catching 68 snakes is "actually is a little more than I expected," said Millett.

No Walk in the Park

Ruben Ramirez, founder of the company Florida Python Hunters, won two prizes in the competition: First place for the most snakes captured—18—and second place for the largest python, which he said was close to 11 feet (3.4 meters) long. The biggest Burmese python caught in Florida, nabbed in 2012, measured 17.7 feet (5.4 meters).

"They're there, but they're not as easy to find as people think," said Ramirez. "You're not going to be stumbling over pythons in Miami." (Related blog post: "What It's Like to Be a Florida Python Hunter.")

All participants, some of whom had never hunted a python before, were trained to identify the difference between a Burmese python and Florida's native snakes, said Millett. No native snakes were accidentally killed, she said.

Hunters were also told to kill the snakes by either putting a bolt or a bullet through their heads, or decapitating them-all humane methods that result "in immediate loss of consciousness and destruction of the brain," according to the Python Challenge website.

Ramirez added that some of the first-time or amateur hunters had different expectations. "I think they were expecting to walk down a canal and see a 10-foot [3-meter], 15-foot [4.5-meter] Burmese python. They thought it'd be a walk in the park."

Stopping the Spread

Completely removing these snakes from the wild isn't easy, and some scientists see the Python Challenge as helping to achieve part of that goal. (Read an opposing view on the Python Challenge: "Opinion: Florida's Great Snake Hunt Is a Cheap Stunt.")

"You're talking about 68 more animals removed from the population that shouldn't be there—that's 68 more mouths that aren't being fed," said the Florida museum's Krysko. (Read about giant Burmese python meals that went bust.)

"I support any kind of event or program that not only informs the general public about introduced species, but also gets the public involved in removing these nonnative animals that don't belong there."

The Nature Conservancy's Millett said the challenge had two positive outcomes: boosting knowledge for both science and the public.

People who didn't want to hunt or touch the snakes could still help, she said, by reporting sightings of exotic species to 888-IVE-GOT-1, through free IveGot1 apps, or www.ivegot1.org.

Millett runs a public-private Nature Conservancy partnership called Python Patrol that the Florida wildlife commission will take on in the fall. The program focuses not only on eradicating invasive pythons but on preventing the snake from moving to ecologically sensitive areas, such as Key West.

Necropsies on the captured snakes will reveal what pythons are eating, and location data from the hunters will help scientists figure out where the snakes are living—valuable data for researchers working to stop their spread.

"This is the most [number of] pythons that have been caught in this short of a period of time in such an extensive area," said the University of Florida's Mazzotti.

"It's an unprecedented sample, and we're going to get a lot of information out of that."

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Arias Says Violent Sex Preceded Killing

Jodi Arias and her ex-boyfriend, Travis Alexander,, had increasingly violent sex in which he tied her to his bed, twisted her arm, bent her over a desk for anal sex, and made sex videos with her in the hours leading up to the stabbing and shooting frenzy that left Alexander dead.

It was a day in which Arias, 32, inched closer to telling the court how the killing of Alexander took place, but after several hours of increasingly emotional testimony the court was adjourned until Wednesday.

In her sixth day on the stand, Arias tearfully described the sex-filled hours that led to Alexander's death on June 4, 2008. She is charged with murder for killing her former boyfriend, but claims she was forced to kill him self-defense. She could face the death penalty if convicted.

"He tied me up, (on) the bed. It's not my favorite but it's not unbearable," Arias told the court.

She said he used a kitchen knife in the bathroom to cut the rope to the proper length, but she didn't remember whether he left the knife in the bathroom or brought it back to the nightstand in the bedroom.

"There are a lot gaps that day... a lot of things I don't remember that day," she said.

Arias and Alexander then took graphic sexual photos of one another and made a sex video, both of which Arias said were Alexander's ideas. Arias has girlish braids in the pictures.

But the mood of the afternoon turned, she said, when Alexander became angry over a scratched computer disk of photos she gave him. He threw the CD and Arias said she became "apprehensive" of his rising temper.

"I know he's getting angry because Napoleon [Alexander's dog] got up and left the room and he always leaves the room when he gets mad." she testified.

"I don't know that I was consciously thinking (of violence) but I was more tense. I stood up, went to walk over to him, to rub his back and make sure he was okay," she said. "But he grabbed me on the upper arms, spun me around and grabbed my right arm and twisted it behind my back, and bent me over the desk, and pressed up against me."

Charlie Leight/Pool/The Arizona Republic/AP Photo

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"I was scared he was going to throw me or something, kick me," she continued. "He pressed his groin up against my butt, did a few thrusts and then started pulling my pants down."

The pair then had anal sex, which Arias said pacified Alexander.

"I was very relieved. I felt like we had avoided catastrophe. It could have led to another fight," she said.

Instead of a fight, Alexander, who was 27 and a devout Mormon, and Arias decide to go upstairs and take more nude photos of one another. Arias said she hoped the photos would satisfy Alexander over his frustration with the scratched CD.

Evidence introduced earlier in the trial show that Alexander was killed while Arias was photographing Alexander in the shower.

Catching Up on the Trial? Check Out ABC News' Jodi Arias Trial Coverage

Timeline of the Jodi Arias Trial

Earlier, Arias explained that she wasn't planning to visit Alexander during her roadtrip from her home in California, but was convinced by him to spontaneously take a detour to his house for sex and to hang out.

"The very last time I called Travis it was kind of like, I don't know how to describe it, he had been very sweet and was guilting me and making me feel bad that I was taking this big trip without going to see him," Arias said this afternoon.

"When I called him last time it was just like all right, I'm going," she said. "(Sex) was our thing at that time. I wasn't going to go there, stay the night and not do that."

Arias' attorney, Kirk Nurmi, asked her repeatedly on the stand if Arias brought a gun or knife with her on the roadtrip and to Alexander's house. She said that she did not.

She also denied a series of allegations made by the prosecution that she dyed her hair, rented an inconspicuous car, borrowed gas cans, turned off her cell phone, and switched money around her bank accounts as she left for Alexander's house because she was planning to murder him when she got there.

Arias said that her hair remained the same color, auburn-brown, throughout May and June, that she rented a car because her own car was not stable enough for highway travel, that she requested a white car instead of a red one because police pull red ones over more often, and that she transferred money to a business banking account for a tax write-off to classify it as a business trip.

The testimony about the road trip and Arias' planning could be key to the jury as they decide whether the killing was pre-meditated, as the prosecution claims. Arias could face the death penalty if convicted of murder with aggravating factors such as pre-meditation.

Arias said that she "didn't sleep at all last night" before testifying about the dramatic incident today. Her comment was stricken from the record.

Arias also described a barrage of threatening text messages sent by Alexander in which he told her he would exact "revenge" on her soon and called her a "sociopath."

She told the court that Alexander's temper would make her "cower."

The messages show a growing discord between the pair in April 2008, less than two months before Arias killed Alexander.

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Biofuel rush is wiping out unique American grasslands

Say goodbye to the grass. The scramble for biofuels is rapidly killing off unique grasslands and pastures in the central US.

Christopher Wright and Michael Wimberly of South Dakota State University in Brookings analysed satellite images of five states in the western corn belt. They found that 530,000 hectares of grassland disappeared under blankets of maize and soya beans between 2006 and 2011. The rate was fastest in South Dakota and Iowa, with as much as 5 per cent of pasture becoming cropland each year.

The trend is being driven by rising demand for the crops, partly through incentives to use them as fuels instead of food.

The switch from meadows to crops is causing a crash in populations of ground-nesting birds. One of the US's most important breeding grounds for wildfowl, an area called the Prairie Pothole Region, is also at risk, with South Dakota's crop fields now within 100 metres of the wetlands. "Half of North American ducks breed here," says Wright.

Bill Henwood of the Temperate Grasslands Conservation Initiative in Vancouver, Canada, says the results are distressing. "Exchanging real environmental impacts for the dubious benefits of biofuels is counterproductive," he says. "Last year's record drought in the corn belt all but wiped out the crops anyway."

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1215404110

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Rugby: All Blacks coach frustrated at Kahui move

WELLINGTON: All Blacks coach Steve Hansen expressed disappointment at Richard Kahui's decision to play in Japan next year, saying he was frustrated the centre never gave him a chance to change his mind.

Kahui announced last week that he would move to Top League club Toshiba Brave Lupus in 2014 after seeing out the Super 15 season with the Waikato Chiefs.

"We were very disappointed with that because he didn't really speak to us, or his agent didn't," Hansen told commercial radio. "I always find that a bit frustrating."

Hansen said he would have appreciated an opportunity to put a counter-offer to Kahui, who was a key member of New Zealand's World Cup-winning team in 2011 and helped the Waikato Chiefs to the Super 15 title last year.

Kahui said last week that he decided to play in Japan to secure his future after a string of shoulder injuries, which has restricted him to just 17 Tests since his international debut in 2008.

The 27-year-old will not be eligible to play for the All Blacks while in Japan but has canvassed the possibility of returning to his homeland in 2015 so he can help New Zealand defend its World Cup title in England.

Hansen said Kahui was taking a gamble as there was no guarantee an up-and-coming centre would not cement a spot in his absence.

"He's talked about coming back, but he, like everybody else, takes a big risk when they leave because there're other people here who have got talent," he said.

"But he's weighed that up and believes he can come back. Hopefully, he does and hopefully he comes back and plays to the level that can get him selected."

- AFP/al

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Google doodle does circles around Copernicus' birthday

Google doodle of Copernicus' model of the universe.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Steven Musil/CNET)

Google is invoking the name Copernicus again, but this time it's not a joke.

The Web giant is celebrating the 540th birthday of the Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who changed the way people look at the universe with a doodle. Nicolaus Copernicus, who was born in 1473, is perhaps best known his heliocentric theory, which asserted that the sun, and not the Earth, was at the center of our universe.

The doodle is a representation of Copernicus' model for the solar system -- a golden sun encircled by six planets on stylized plane.

In an effort to improve the calendar, the Catholic church appealed to Copernicus in 1514. His heliocentric theory was central to "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" ("On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres"), which Copernicus finished in 1530. The theory challenged the long-held belief that the Earth was the stationary center of the universe with other planets, including the sun and moon, rotating around it.

"De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" was published in 1543, shortly before Copernicus died on May 24 at age 70. (Legend has it the first copy was placed in his hands the day he died.) After centuries of searching, his grave was located in 2005, allowing his remains to be re-interred under a tombstone that bears a representation of Copernicus' model of the solar system.

In what is widely regarded as one of the greatest Internet hoaxes, Google borrowed the great astronomer's name in 2004 in a recruiting effort for the Copernicus Center -- its new "lunar hosting and research center." The Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering (G.C.H.E.E.S.E.) was described as a research center for high-density high-delivery hosting (HiDeHiDeHo).

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Confirmed: Dogs Sneak Food When People Aren't Looking

Many dog owners will swear their pups are up to something when out of view of watchful eyes. Shoes go missing, couches have mysterious teeth marks, and food disappears. They seem to disregard the word "no."

Now, a new study suggests dogs might understand people even better than we thought. (Related: "Animal Minds.")

The research shows that domestic dogs, when told not to snatch a piece of food, are more likely to disobey the command in a dark room than in a lit room.

This suggests that man's best friend is capable of understanding a human's point of view, said study leader Juliane Kaminski, a psychologist at the U.K.'s University of Portmouth.

"The one thing we can say is that dogs really have specialized skills in reading human communication," she said. "This is special in dogs." (Read "How to Build a Dog.")

Sneaky Canines

Kaminski and colleagues recruited 84 dogs, all of which were more than a year old, motivated by food, and comfortable with both strangers and dark rooms.

The team then set up experiments in which a person commanded a dog not to take a piece of food on the floor and repeated the commands in a room with different lighting scenarios ranging from fully lit to fully dark.

They found that the dogs were four times as likely to steal the food—and steal it more quickly—when the room was dark. (Take our dog quiz.)

"We were thinking what affected the dog was whether they saw the human, but seeing the human or not didn't affect the behavior," said Kaminski, whose study was published recently in the journal Animal Cognition.

Instead, she said, the dog's behavior depended on whether the food was in the light or not, suggesting that the dog made its decision based on whether the human could see them approaching the food.

"In a general sense, [Kaminski] and other researchers are interested in whether the dog has a theory of mind," said Alexandra Horowitz, head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard University, who was not involved in the new study.

Something that all normal adult humans have, theory of mind is "an understanding that others have different perspective, knowledge, feelings than we do," said Horowitz, also the author of Inside of a Dog.

Smarter Than We Think

While research has previously been focused on our closer relatives—chimpanzees and bonobos—interest in dog cognition is increasing, thanks in part to owners wanting to know what their dogs are thinking. (Pictures: How smart are these animals?)

"The study of dog cognition suddenly began about 15 years ago," Horowitz said.

Part of the reason for that, said Brian Hare, director of the Duke Canine Cognition Lab and author of The Genius of Dogs, is that "science thought dogs were unremarkable."

But "dogs have a genius—years ago we didn't know what that was," said Hare, who was not involved in the new research. (See pictures of the the evolution of dogs, from wolf to woof.)

Many of the new dog studies are variations on research done with chimpanzees, bonobos, and even young children. Animal-cognition researchers are looking into dogs' ability to imitate, solve problems, or navigate social environments.

So just how much does your dog understand? It's much more than you—and science—probably thought.

Selectively bred as companions for thousands of years, dogs are especially attuned to human emotions—and, study leader Kaminski said, are better at reading human cues than even our closest mammalian relatives.

"There has been a physiological change in dogs because of domestication," Duke's Hare added. "Dogs want to bond with us in ways other species don't." (Related: "Dogs' Brains Reorganized by Breeding.")

While research reveals more and more insight into the minds of our furry best friends, Kaminski said, "We still don't know just how smart they are."

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Obama's Speech on Guns Doesn't Stop Ill. Killing

A Chicago teenager was shot and killed Friday only hours after her sister attended President Obama's speech on the city's rampant gun violence.
Janay McFarlane, 18, was killed while walking with a friend during a visit to her dad, Herbert McFarlane, in North Chicago.

"All this gun violence going on, you never think it would be your child," he told ABC's Chicago station WLS. "This is the hardest thing for me in my life."

Herbert McFarlane told WLS that the loss of Janay is especially hard because she leaves behind a 3-month old son, who likes to wear an "I love Mommy" shirt. The shooting occurred in Lake County, a northern suburb miles from the epicenter of the gun violence on the city's South Side.

"I'm in Lake County to get away from violence and now it happened in Lake County where I moved to," he told WLS.

McFarlane and her child spent time both in Lake County and on the South Side where her mother lives.

Janay Proudmommie Mcfarlane/Facebook

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Only hours before McFarlane was shot and killed, President Obama returned to his hometown to speak on the South Side at a Hyde Park high school. McFarlane's sister, Destini Warren, 14, sat behind the president during the speech.

More than 500 people were shot and killed here last year, and this year the situation has worsened with the most deadly January the city has seen in over a decade. The shooting death of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year old who performed in Washington, D.C. at events connected to the president's inauguration last month, garnered national attention.

"Too many of our children are being taken away from us," Obama said in Hyde Park, with McFarlane's sister in the audience.

"Last year there were 443 murders with a firearm on the streets of this city, and 65 of those victims were 18 and under," he said. "So that's the equivalent of a Newtown every four months." He was referring to Newtown, Conn., where 20 first graders were gunned down by Adam Lanza along with seven adults.

Only hours later in Chicago, another 18-year old was shot and killed.

"I felt like someone took a knife and stabbed me in the heart, and a piece of my heart I will never get back," Angela Blakely, Janay McFarlane's mother, told WLS.

North Chicago Police on Sunday reportedly questioned two people in connection to McFarlane's death. Her family said McFarlane was an unintended target of the shooting.

Messages left by ABC News with the North Chicago Police Department and the Lake County Coroner's Office went unreturned Monday.

Another Chicago teenager, Frances Colon, was also shot and killed Friday just hours after she had told her father that she saw President Obama's helicopter fly over her neighborhood.

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Wiping out top predators messes up the climate

Wiping out top predators like lions, wolves and sharks is tragic, bad for ecosystems – and can make climate change worse. Mass extinctions of the big beasts of the jungles, grasslands and oceans could already be adding to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Trisha Atwood of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, studied the effect of removing predator fish from ponds and rivers in Canada and Costa Rica. Across a range of ecosystems, climates and predators, she found a consistent pattern: carbon dioxide emissions typically increased more than tenfold after the predators were removed.

"It looks like predators in many types of ecosystems – marine and terrestrial as well as freshwater – can play a very big role in global climate change," she told New Scientist.

The widespread and dramatic ecological impacts of the loss of top predators are well known. In the ensuing "trophic cascade", the vanished top predator's prey proliferate, which in turn puts pressure on the species that the prey eats, and so on down the food chain. In this way, changes at the top of a food chain destabilise the balance of populations right the way down.

But the geochemical impacts of trophic cascades, including any impact on emissions from ecosystems, are much less well known. Atwood's study of freshwater ecosystems showed how changes to species at the bottom of the food chain, such as photosynthesising algae, following the removal of a top predator dramatically increased the flow of CO₂ from the ecosystem to the atmosphere.

The effect will not always be to increase CO₂ emissions, however – sometimes the loss of top predators could decrease emissions, she says. "But we show that something so seemingly unrelated, like fishing all the trout from a pond or removing sharks from the ocean, could have big consequences for greenhouse-gas dynamics."

Help from kelp

Other recent studies have hinted at similar effects. Last October, Christopher Wilmers of the University of California, Santa Cruz, reported how the disappearance of sea otters is linked with increased CO₂ emissions from North American coastlines (Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, doi.org/khz). With no otters eating them, sea urchins thrive and eat out kelp forests – often known as the "rainforests of the oceans" – resulting in major CO₂ releases.

Global climate models do not take such impacts into account yet. Atwood says they could be major, as freshwater emissions may be on a par with the influence of deforestation, which is thought responsible for around 15 per cent of human-caused CO₂ emissions.

Environmentalists will herald the findings as further evidence that it is vital to protect pristine habitats and the charismatic species at the top of their food chains. But there is a dark side. A recent study found that some island ecosystems around New Zealand store 40 per cent more carbon than others because of their top predators – invading rats that are wiping out seabird colonies. Rats, it seems, are good for the climate (Biology Letters, doi.org/bbmtw9).

Journal reference: Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/NGEO1734

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Motor Racing: Early-bird sales of F1 Singapore GP tickets

SINGAPORE: Fans of the Formula One Singapore Grand Prix can buy tickets from Wednesday, with 65,000 general three-day tickets on sale for the early birds.

They will enjoy significant savings and new initiatives for the sixth instalment of the world's only Formula One night race on 20, 21 and 22 September.

As in previous years, race promoter Singapore GP will release the tickets in two phases: the early-bird phase from 20 February to 30 April, and the regular phase from 1 May.

About 85 per cent of the ticket categories on offer are priced the same or lower than in 2012.

Fans can look forward to savings of up to 30 per cent if they buy early as a group under the Group Booking Special scheme.

In response to popular demand, Singapore GP is offering an additional combination package for spectators to explore different parts of the Circuit Park on each of the three days.

Fans can opt for the new Zone 1 Walkabout combination package that consists of a Pit Grandstand ticket for both Friday and Saturday, as well as a Sunday Premier Walkabout ticket at only S$688 during the early-bird phase.

The Turn 1, Padang and Bay combination packages will still be available from S$398 to S$788 at early-bird price.

Following the sell-out success of the Turn 3 Premier Grandstand last year, an additional Premier Grandstand has been launched.

It offers spectators the chance to witness possible overtaking opportunities at the Memorial (Turn 7) up-close.

Tickets are priced at S$1,598 for the Turn 7 Premier Grandstand @ Stamford and S$2,128 for the Turn 3 Premier Grandstand.

- CNA/ir

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Why Google's stores shouldn't look so much like Apple stores

Is this really different enough?

(Credit:
Crave CNET UK)

Some engineers have never dated a real person.

They've tried to, but it's hard for them to appreciate that real people don't necessarily use data to make decisions -- especially when it comes to love.

Perhaps their most embarrassing moments come when they try to mimic what non-engineers do in order to make themselves more attractive.

This mirrors some of the little issues that the Google brand has had over the years in becoming, well, human.

When you've spent you life believing that facts are everything, it's hard to imagine that people might prefer, oh, rounded corners or that ephemeral thing sometimes known as taste.

Google has made progress through some of its advertising. The "Jess Time" ad for Chrome was one of the very best tech ads of the 2012.

Yet when Google has wandered into retail, it has either believed that all you need is online or that an offline store ought to look rather like Apple's.

This is something against which Microsoft also struggles. It was almost comical when one Microsoft employee explained to me that its store looked -- at first glance -- a lot like the Apple store because the company used the same design firm.

This week, rumors surfaced that Google wants to make the next step in coming toward humanity by having its own shopping-mall retail presence.

The evidence so far from its pop-up stores -- as the picture above shows -- is that Google isn't thinking different. Or, at least, different enough.

If it fully intends to come out to the people -- to be itself-- then instead of having nice, clean retail staff in blue T-shirts (what brand does that remind you of?), it should embrace its true heart.

It should have real house-trained nerds, replete with bedhead and bad taste clothing, there for all to see. Yes, you could have nice, normal members of staff there to translate for them.

But the purpose of a retail store isn't merely to sell. It's to create street theater. Apple has its own version. Google must find its own too.

Instead of the now almost cliched clean lines and permanent white, it should make its stores look like excitable, sophisticated college playrooms, where books about dragons and vast Hulk hands are lying about and episodes of "Star Trek" and "Game of Thrones" are playing on huge screens.

More Technically Incorrect

It should expose itself fully as a brand that came out of nerdomania by parading its nerdomanic tendencies for all to see and making it lovable.

You might think this marginally insane. You might think that I am suffering from delusions of brandy.

Yet "The Big Bang Theory" has proved to be one of the most popular TV shows, not because the nerds are hidden away, but because they are in full view, with a beautiful counterpoint in a real person called Penny.

Imagine taking your kids, your lover, or your granny into a Google store and having them actually enjoy learning something about, say, comic books or Hermann von Helmholtz.

Imagine walking in and one of the Google nerds has dressed as The Flash, Batman, or Wonder Woman for the day, yet still finds a way to sell you a fascinating
Nexus 7.

In fact, wouldn't it be an excellent human resources idea, as well as a stimulus to make more uplifting products, if every Google engineer had to spend a certain period working in a Google retail store?

Mountain View should surely mine the more lofty, fantastic elements of its reality in order to create something unique and dramatic.

Otherwise, its stores might simply be accused of being Apple rip-offs.

And you know where that will ultimately end up. Yes, in front of Judge Lucy Koh.

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