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There are a few red faces over at the Veteran’s Affairs Department headquarters in Washington. The day after they unboxed iPads for a pilot program, one of the tablet computers was already missing.

The iPad had not been issued to an employee and did not have any apps or information loaded on it, according to VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker.

It sounds as if the thief seized an opportunity: Baker said that if the iPad had been formatted, the $50 million department-developed cyber security app would’ve been able to find it.  The data service plan was cancelled as soon as it was discovered missing. Security footage hasn’t yielded any info about the theft that included another 21 computers.

Blog Next Gov reported the iPads will be loaded with an app of patient records as well as other apps. Those records will be downloaded only by doctors in encrypted form.

The hiccup is a small one in a 1,000 iPad-deployment. Baker said that while there are currently only 500 Apple devices (iPads and iPhones) in use at the VA, he expects the number of iPads to mushroom to a thousand and eventually tens of thousands. The VA has plans to roll out 100,000 tablet computers (Android and Apple) and in line with the U.S. CIO’s recently unveiled “Future First” plan to move to cloud computing.

Via Next Gov

Spotted by 9to5Mac, artist Guilherme M. Schasiepen has posted a gallery of concept iTV images. The images depict a multi-touch TV set with 3D that doesn’t require glasses.

Color us skeptical, but the idea of a touch-screen television seems absolutely unrealistic. This concept is still pretty gorgeous, however.

Last week’s three-month minimum delay to their Xeon-class Sandy Bridge processors may be the final nail in the Mac Pro coffin, inside sources are now reporting.

Apple is finally unveiling its seamless glass cube entrance to the Fifth Avenue store on Friday, according to MacRumors. Apple’s Fifth Avenue retail store is one of the most recognized Apple stores in the world and a main tourist attraction in New York City.

$6.6. million in renovations to the Fifth Avenue store will finally be revealed to the public on Friday, November 4th. Since June, there have been a series of temporary walls hiding the work that has now been done to the glass cube entrance of the store.

What’s this? Looks like a unibody MacBook Air, right? Don’t bet a kidney on it: Shenzhen’s Evil Confederacy of Mad Scientist Cloners have managed to almost perfectly rip off the feel of Apple’s bestselling MacBook Air, including unibody enclosure, for under half the price of Apple’s ultraportable.

And you know what? For a piece-of-$%@! netbook dumped into a MacBook Air-like shell, it’s not a bad machine for the sub-$500 price.

Last night, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates was on ABC News to discuss continuing foreign aid as well as his philanthropy work. During the interview, he was asked about Steve Jobs’s less than kind words about him in Walter Isaacson’s bio: specifically, the part where Jobs (unfairly) says that Bill Gates had no original ideas and got rich just by ripping other people off.

Gates’s response is gracious enough. He says that Steve Jobs and he had a long history with each other, and their relationship as colleagues-turned-competitors was complicated, but that he doesn’t fault Steve for anything he said about him.

For me, though, the weird part is when Bill Gates says he helped create the original Mac. Maybe Gates doesn’t spend all his time ripping off other people’s ideas, but he sure seems to like ripping off posthumous credit for them.

Over the weekend, Apple launched three new iPhone 4S ads: one for the iPhone 4S’s incredible new 8MP camera and iOS 5’s Photo Editing abilities, one for iCloud and one for Siri. They all really speak for themselves, but even so, this is Apple advertising at its finest.

You can find the other two ads embedded below.

Apple’s massive new solar farm and their next-gen spaceship campus will boost the tech giant’s 2012 expense to $8 billion — a 73% hike over this year, one analyst told investors Monday.

When I, through sheer exertion of will, lift this moribund pile of musky flab out of the desk chair to which it transhumanistically is trying to absorb, put on my sweatbands and take myself out for a wheezing, gasping “jog”, RunKeeper is my preferred app for tracking the whole ordeal.

The free app is already pretty great. It uses your iPhone’s GPS sensors to track your running speed, distance and route; additionally, it allows you to program different run templates, calculate calories burned and share your favorite runs with other users.

But today’s update makes RunKeeper even better, with a host of new features that widen the distance between all the other jog-tracking apps out there.

Today is Halloween. So here’s a last-minute Halloween themed iOS app that runs on the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.  It can turn your next scary party into a real spooktacular or you can use it to enhance the fun while passing out loads of candy to all the little ghosts and goblins that visit.

I discovered this Halloween app treat last year and I had a blast with it then and I will later tonight. It is worth a look if you haven’t seen it.

This has been all over the place today, but if you’re stuck for a Halloween costume idea and have two iPad 2s lying around, here’s a great suggestion: just initiate a FaceTime call between your iPads, duct tape them to your torso, pull on a ripped hoodie and smear fake blood all over yourself. It’ll look like someone shot a cannonball right through you!

Don’t like your Halloween costume to be so gory? If you’re a fan of Valve Software’s incredible Portal series, you can follow the instructions above and instead of using fake blood. surround the two holes with an orange and blue border. Voila! You’ve been hit with a teleporter gun!

Up until now, Apple’s Siri voice-recognition system has been shown in a humorous light. However, what if Siri could save your life? People remaking next-generation 911 services see Siri as the voice of emergency victims, not just a locator of the nearest sushi joint.

This weekend broke news that Apple was already hard at work on OS X 10.8, so it would be natural to assume that in the next version of OS X, Cupertino will bring even more iOS functionality to their desktop operating system: stuff like Airplay and iMessages.

Nope. But don’t be too disappointed. AirPlay and iMessages are reportedly coming to OS X 10.7 Lion, instead.

It may sound like something out of an Isaac Asimov novel or a James Cameron film, but the parent company of iPhone maker Foxconn is working to build an “empire of robots” to replace over a million Chinese workers.

The official Apple Store app is already a useful tool if you have to sally forth into meat space, allowing you to schedule appointment times at your local Genius Bar, reserve items for pickup at your local Apple Store and the like.

Come November 3rd, though, the Apple Store iOS app is set to gain some cool new functionality: the ability to check your own purchases out at Apple’s physical retail locations.

(Photo by Chrissy Polcino, used with thanks under Creative Commons license.)

So here’s former Oasis megastar Noel Gallagher, quoted in The Mirror this weekend:

I just want a basic 1994 Nokia mobile. I can keep it in my back pocket and just do the basics with it – phone and text. What would I need a camera on it for? iPhones are for Cockneys and ****s. And they are far too big.

It’s not clear to us exactly which insult The Mirror decided to blank out with asterisks, but feel free to use your imagination on that.

The days of students lugging around massive backpacks loaded with heavy textbooks are numbered. According to a new poll of educational IT directors, signs are strong that within the next five years, all U.S. schools could adopt tablets, many as a replacement for textbooks. The good news for Apple is that in education circles (as with most consumers) the only tablet worth considering is the iPad.

It’s been three years since the last major design refresh of the MacBook Pro, and we’ve been hearing whispers for almost a year that the next major update would see Apple’s professional line of laptops take on some of the characteristics of the MacBook Air line: slimmer profiles, ubiquitous SSDs, no optical drives.

If those updates sound swell to you, good news. Inside sources say Apple’s already working on the skinnier MacBook Pro, and the new LCD displays have already been developed.

If you’d asked me to bet on it, I would have said that OS X 10.7 Lion would be the last iteration of the Big Cat family. After all, where else is there to go? All of OS X’s releases have been named after successively bigger cats, and with Lion, Apple finally reached the biggest cat of them all.

Apparently, though, Apple envisions at least one more version of OS X before retiring the Big Cat OS once and for all. MacRumors reports that Apple is already testing OS X 10.8 internally.

Any bets on what the next version of OS X will be called? There aren’t any bigger cats, at least not without dipping a toe into cryptozoology, which would be awesome. I still favor ‘Manticore.’

I’ve been a bit quiet lately while considering the possible reasons why my new iPhone 4S has the worst battery life of any iPhone I’ve ever owned. Normally by now I would have written some battery troubleshooting tips to share with all of you. However, this time around the problem is anything but normal and the usual tips aren’t helping. So I’ve been quiet about this.

I cannot say the same thing about Apple’s discussion forums since the conversation about battery life there is reaching epic proportions and the conversation is rather loud.

It might be about to get a lot quieter with this tip, which seems to be working for me.

Mona Simpson, Steve Jobs’s sister, published her eulogy for her brother in The New York Times today. The piece is the most touching, intimate tribute to Steve we’ve seen since his passing.

The most wonderful time of the year isn’t Christmas, it’s Halloween. No other day on the calendar gives you an excuse to dress up like Han Solo and go out on the prowl in search of the sexiest version of Princess Leia you can find. A lot of our readers decided to celebrate Halloween with a tribute to their favorite computer company, so we asked our Twitter followers to tweet us pics their Apple inspired Halloween costumes and jack o’-lanterns.

If you have a picture of your Apple themed costume or jack o’ lantern and would like for us to include it in the gallery, tweet it over to us @cultofmac

Here are some of the best pictures from last night:

This could be fake, but it certainly looks real to us: iPhone hackers chpwn and Steve Troughton say they’ve gotten Siri working on the iPhone 4 and fourth-gen iPod touch, and they’ve got video to prove it. So it is possible. Sadly, though, both hackers say that whatever method they used for exploit is not for public release any time soon, so the rest of us poor suckers will just have to keep twiddling our thumbs.

According to 9to5Mac, Apple has purchased its second 3D mapping company called C3 Technologies. Apple bought a company called Poly9 last summer that also specializes in 3D mapping technology.

Rumors have said for years that Apple is working to drastically improve its iOS Maps application with in-house features and improvements. The purchase of C3 Technologies suggests that Apple is working to bring revolutionary 3D technology and hi-quality image rendering to its Maps app on the iOS platform.

Trident’s new A.M.S. iPhone 4/S case is edgy. And maybe dangerous. It’s probably what Q would give Bond to protect his iPhone, except it doesn’t come equipped with rocket launchers or a laser.