Your paranoid conspiracy theory requires everyone to be acting in the self interest of some unnamed shady interest that's presumed to be the US Government or forces controlling the US Government.

I'd hate to tell you this but they're not that smart.

I understand that scripting was preexisting functionality (from iOS's UNIX heritage) that Apple made a conscious, deliberate effort to remove

Remove? If you an open up a shell via jailbreaking, you have access to all kinds of scripting. They just don't think it's in the user's best interest to have access to a shell.

Give themselves more control at the expense of the user

right. because that's always the best UX decision

Uh, even if you're free to side load, you can't bring your apps with you to other OSes because other OSes do not support Cocoa Touch and other iOS libraries.

You're still going to have to hope there's ports of your software on other platforms. And if it is written using frameworks that are easily portable, the chances of finding a port are very very high.

If your applications do not support exporting data to other devices, this is not Apple's fault. Applications can export their own data any number of ways(Cloud services, direct bluetooth/wifi file transfer, connect via iTunes and export).

So I'm really not sure what you mean by lock-in then.

The browser would have to trigger the script somehow, the script would have to read the contents of the browser, etc. etc.

You can probably find a scriptable browser in the App store, but I'm shocked you can't understand why this isn't a priority for Apple.

Your analogy is completely wrong.

By "dangerous" I mean, "How badly will this go wrong if I shoot myself in the foot?"

I'm not saying you shouldn't use a screwdriver to pry open paint cans and used to drive screws. I'm saying you shouldn't use a nail gun as a TV remote.

not really? There's IFTTT and all sorts of apps that'll automate based on geofencing. You can tell siri to set up various tasks for you based on geofencing too...

But having a script trigger when a captive portal comes up would mean the script would have to know what's going on in the browser thread when the capture portal detection runs. Plus it's super fiddly and awful UX.

That's only if you don't root. If you do however, you can do whatever the hell you want. Which is kind of dangerous from a consumer device standpoint.

I err with Apple on this one. I don't think that iOS should be giving you the gun in which to shoot your own foot with. Especially on the phone.

The necessary foundation to make scripting work would break process and application isolation.

Making portable OSes more and more like desktop OSes would make them worse, not better.

I've yet looked at my phone and went, "Gee, I wish I could just do this with curl instead of safari."

The only thing that would make iOS even better would be some way to add media from inside apps. Apps can already write to the available movies. Just wish they could add podcasts and music.

(Which is odd because movies are DRMed on the iTunes store, and music is not; but audio is the one place they won't let you fiddle with)

The real legitimate reason to drop PPC support is if the supporting software sucks. There might be more to the Rosetta story than we know.

If you look at Apple's profit statements, the iOS App Store is break-even for them and they're not pushing profitability in that area.

So I really don't think that's why they don't let users break down the walled garden. I think it's because the nature of modern computing, breaking down the walled garden also means breaking down things about iOS that make it so nice. Thread safety, sandboxing, etc kind of break when you've got free reign to run whatever you want on the phone.

Also, who would really want a command line on their *phone*? Are you upset that iOS doesn't support CP/M apps too?

If Agile isn't working for you, you *are* doing it wrong.

"We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more."

Now, this kind of thinking is usually reserved for cults and awfully abusive schemes, but hear me out.

Agile isn't about sprints, planning, etc. it's about understanding the human element of software engineering and understanding how brittle that piece of the equation is. The various things that have sprung up from the agile concept really kind of betray the agile vision. Sprint planning, Kanban Boards, asshole "agile experts" etc.

These things do help, but if you're not communicating like human beings to each other and not caring about the software being shipped but instead getting bogged down in process... well... The problem is that you, your team or someone on your team are/is an asshole(s)

if it was anything i needed for work, I wouldn't have upgraded it. Or I'd run it in a VM.

You do realize A) this was *5* years ago(and I was on an 80 gig disk because fuck it didn't want to upgrade at the time). B) It was a joke of installing an OS and it taking up negative megabytes? I mean it actually happened, but the OS took up negative 1 gig. Actually might be 3 or 4 now that I think about it. But still. When was the last time you installed anything and got disk back?

Dropping PPC on OS X meant when I installed snow leopard I gained like a gig of disk back.

I'm sad I can't Starcraft 1 anymore but whatever

what i find amazing is that in the many years that mobile devices have been common place, no one's yet actually produced evidence that they're being used for nefarious purposes. Just lots of claim and bullshit.

Yes, yes, there's PRISM and god knows what else. But show me a case where the NSA or the CIA or the FBI used a built in backdoor off an off the shelf product.

The obligation to the share holders isn't anything other than what the shareholders want out of the company. With Google's growth leveling off, at this point, keeping the ship afloat and profitable, not growth is what's important.

The whole "obligation to it's shareholders" notion is only true when you're selling the company. Google's probably not going to be sold to anyone anytime soon. so...