Though if this is for a fic, a hearing aid sized 2nd hidden battery that let the phone be tracked for 20 minutes after the main battery was removed could be a plot point.

I seem to remember privacy experts saying software that turns your gps back on when you turn it off, provided your phone is still on definitely exists and is used by police and intelligence agencies. Don't remember about the rest.

If you turn off your GPS does your phone still use GPS to give your location when you call 911?

eta: Phones are required to have GPS to assist the 911 folks in finding you.

Incidentally -the backup battery thing is really unlikely. The infrastructure to develop it is expensive, continuing expense to keep up the infrastructure is expensive but unlike software only things the marginal cost to add it a particular phone is expensive too. And if you know far enough in advance you want to do a backup battery to a particular phone the odds are you are looking for long term patterns. Xtra 20 minutes or so of tracking is least likely to be worth it in the case where you have it in place. All the rest is pretty much software only -meaning that once you have the expensive infrastructure in place the marginal additional cost of using it on a particular phone is close to zero. Whereas the backup battery in cell phone idea has few economies of scale in deployment. So unlikely that anyone will develop it and deploy the expensive infrastructure in the first place.

As my BIL used to say, the only safe cell phone is one not in the room. He used to be part of security for a General on Camp Pendleton. There are signs about no cell phones past this point. He was quite fond of confiscating and throwing said phones. Apparently, the General was amused by it as well.

That was more for listening in than GPS, dunno about GPS.

I can't remember where, but I've definitely seen "if you take the SIM card out the GPS stays on so let's track the suspect that way" used as a plot point. So it's at least true on TV?

I'm pretty sure that the laws of physics ensure that a cell phone with no battery can't be tracked. Leaving aside my unlikely backup battery idea.

Can anyone recommend a good external Blu-Ray drive I can plug into my laptop? Also, is WinXP up to running a Blu-Ray drive? I'm using my old XP desktop as my media machine.

Does everyone know you can watch the Apple event thing live? All you need is an OSX or iOS device--just go to Apple.com (Safari only).

It starts in 11 minutes.

...Aaaaand it looks like their servers are overwhelmed.

Ok, I want an Apple Watch.