They're dominating the market, but it's not a monopoly (any more, now that there are more competitors).
If you play the game, you have to play by the rules. Nobody forces anybody to use the AppStore. It's the developer's decision (I know because I do play this game). But if you want to distribute your app through it you have to obey to Apple's rules, it's their playground.
You can always use Cydia instead or serve a different platform (Android, Nokia, RIM, WP7) if you don't like Apple or the AppStore.
Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant "idiot".
— Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic
All kidding aside, Objective-C isn't the sort of language people use because they want to. Rather, they use it because it's what Apple says they can use.
Back in the NeXT days, we used it because it was far better than anything else out there. But that was 20 years ago. Times have changed, and we have better programming languages available to us. Even with Objective-C 2.0, it's still somewhat of a relic.
Well, over the past 20 years I've played around with a lot of languages and a lot of environments and I do enjoy writing in Objective-C. It makes a few neat things that I like easy, like Duck Typing and delegates. But more than the language I enjoy Apple's APIs. They are very consistent and nicely done. I know it wasn't always like this, and there are still a few dark corners if you really dig into non-common areas, but all in all it really is fun to use. More fun than most C++ APIs, IMHO, and to me also more fun than
One thing in particular that I like is that due to a few Objective-C language features you can often avoid creating yet another subclass of something, thanks to Duck Typing.
Now they even added support for C blocks allowing easy anonymous callback functions, which enables a few more neat programming patterns. My favorite scripting language is Ruby and Objective-C is the compiled language that comes closest to it allowing me to make use of design patterns that I learned to love via Ruby.
People don't want them here in Europe, either, at least on the countryside. People don't care about them in the cities, I think. At least I never heard somebody even talking about these towers here in Munich, except if the reception is bad.
There was a very funny story a few weeks back here in Germany (I'm citing off the top of my head, maybe I don't get it 100% correct, sorry for that): A company erected a new cell tower and people began to complain about health issues like headaches that they directly blamed to the tower. After a few weeks there was some kind of meeting between the people and company officials where the people demanded that the tower gets switched off immediately because of their health problems. Turned out the company switched the tower off three weeks before said meeting due to some technical problems
Maybe I miss something, but where exactly in my posting did I state that we have a constitution ?
BTW, just looked it up, the law in question is StGB 86a "Verwenden von Kennzeichen verfassungswidriger Organisationen", which is where the term "verfassungsfeindliche Symbole" stems from which I translated with "anti-constitutional" symbols (using quotes exactly because we don't have a constitution).
We want to keep right-winged people to from glorifying the Nazi time and we want to keep them from using their symbols, if possible.
In other words you want to restrict their freedom of political expression because you find their ideals abhorrent. You can justify it any way that you wish but it's still censorship. Personally I find the notion of censoring a Nazi to be as offensive as his political goals if not more so -- because we ought to know better.
I absolutely agree that trying to outlaw "thoughts" or symbols is absolutely useless and that it is censorship. But it seems you missed my point. The point was that this law is there for historic reasons and can't go away since it's a very sensitive issue here. If you propose to kick that law people would suspect you're far right-winged and that's a serious accusation here. And so most politician wouldn't vote to change it, fearing to lose voters over this issue.
A committee is a group that keeps the minutes and loses hours. -- Milton Berle