Don't care. I don't use Apple. Android does what I want the way I want. If Apple's iOS did it, I'd buy it. The end.

If your electronics are lasting less than three years, you're buying shite electronics. I carry a Nexus One - it's lasted two years because I don't get it wet and take care of it, and despite a few drops on concrete here and there, has operated wonderfully for two years - the only reason I would upgrade at this point is to get a newer version of Android.

There are a few agencies.

Better Business Bureau has a small amount of clout, but is a membership agency; moreover, membership is not compulsory. There are other mmebership agencies that do similar things for its members, that are proprietary to certain functions: Automobile Association of America (AAA, or "Triple A") does things along the lines of hotels, mechanics, that sort of thing, that are held to certain standards (members join for roadside assistance benefits and discounts, among other things; businesses join for promotional reasons as a sort of franchise). Thing is, though, that's about all I know about. Other organizations exist such as EFF and ACLU, but those are more for protection of Internet rights and general civil rights, respectively, and are more concerned with government action.

In the governments, you have your attorney generals, your consumer protection bureaus, and then you have courts, be they small claim (typically less than US$5000, some variance), or courts that oversee larger judgement cases.

Overall, that's kind of how it works in the US. I wish we had a non-gov agency that did things like thi, though.

Hmm... how would one go about forming one?

Shower. Just because you work from home doesn't mean you can get in a bad habit of not washing up.

1) You cannot prove a negative in this way. Absence of evidence, here, is not evidence of absence.

2) You cannot prove that which is spiritual by science.

3) It is futile to argue the point; the only evidence you will find is evidence that there are two people at odds with each other over such a silly disagreement.

Now go get a cup of tea and relax, don't worry about this. Those of us who believe will, those of us who don't believe won't.

They don't. Asking for anything, as near as I can tell, is SOP for service of a warrant - it's to cover all possible bases by a law enforcement agency.

Picking through the details, it's pretty simple. The FBI served Google a warrant for a user.

What they will get out of it is any information on the perpetrator that Google has in their control - so Gmail, Picasa, anything on their servers. This is what a warrant does, and any content provider such as Google will have this in their TOS.

What they *might* get is a replacement account password to access the phone. That's unclear to me. It's in that respect that I don't know how Google will proceed.

What they will NOT get, however, are unlocks, text messages (unless he backs those up into his Gmail account), device passwords, device unlock patterns, or anything that would be used to unlock the device. That's all up to the mobile carrier or (possibly) the device manufacturer - not Google.

And for those who think Google made the device, no, they didn't. Somebody else did. May have been Motorola, LG, HTC, or Samsung, just to name the big four phone makers who put out Android off the top of my head. Google's support ends at the operating system development level, and whatever they have on their network. Demanding of Google whatever's on the mobile network or the device unto itself is like demanding an Amtrak schedule of Pepsico.

He did it because of your response. He knew this would happen. Well, I don't know. But that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Yours would be the most elegant solution, IMHO, in a perfect world.

Bear in mind my solution comes from experience. To answer the question, after (as I explained) the user is told multiple times on how to file a bug, then yes, it is, indeed, the user who is to blame. It's a bit like calling a support desk and telling them nothing more than that your computer doesn't work. (For all the tech knows, the computer is doing nothing more than sitting on the user's couch, watching daytime television, and drinking all of their beer.) Even better, it's like telling your mechanic that your car broke down and it needs to be fixed - but you failed to bring the car to the mechanic, let alone give the symptoms. Ain't nothing the mechanic can do at that point until they can isolate the problem. The user, in these cases, simply has not given the developer the tools needed to locate the bug in an expedient manner so as to get things moving along. Moreover, the blame goes on the person who finds the bug and fails to report in a useful way, not the developer - read on.

Consider the reality of programming. In coder land, you have people who are tasked with writing software, and if all is well, you have people who are tasked with finding initial major bugs in the form of a quality control department. In user land, you have people who expect that software is written correctly the first time every time. The reality, however, is in that, speaking for myself the only time I have ever successfully written a completely bug-free program is by 1) reading from a text and transcribing perfectly (and even then, there've been typos), or 2) writing an endless loop program in Applesoft BASIC as a child, just for kicks. On the other side of that coin, bugs happen - and software developers can't catch them on the dev side. There are seemingly infinite reasons for this to happen, but it boils down to one thing, I suppose: people just are not perfect. This is what beta testing is for - because when you really think of it, if you never get a program out of the clean room, you can't test it in the real world, and it won't be released for years, if ever, as a result of this, and if a user is beta testing a program, they need to be fully aware that stuff will break.

It's not to say that the developers need to write correct code, by any stretch - but as I indicate above, well, shite happens. But "it's broken" doesn't help anybody at all!

All considered, what I suggest here is a quick and dirty solution to an existing problem. It's far from elegant, all considered. But at the end of the day, if I just get user information that tells me something borked, and nothing more, I'm going to need more information. Presumably, what happened, what is supposed t happen, and how to reproduce. When you see plenty of reports that say little more than "that doesn't work", you kind of get to this point, and besides, there is no amount of business savvy, no certifications that can get around the fact that they need this information.

Plain and simple.

Create a page document shows guidelines on how to submit bug reports, and send an email to all users that says that this is where the guidelines for filing bug reports live.

When you get a report that doesn't help, close the report with a referral to said document. This, of course, presumes that your users get email reports on the status of bug reports. If they complain that nothing is getting done, refer them to the page again, with a statement that you require more information for the bug report to be useful.

This said, be clear on what, say, YSOD is. TLAs and ETLAs are meaningless outside of context.

In this, I find it interesting that I found this at comment number 665, which if I'm not mistaken makes mine comment number 666. =D

I guess this turns Apple into a true Mickey Mouse operation.