Not yet.

Why should you be limited to software bought from them? It's not the 30% I have a problem with.

Not under 'Metro'. That's why they're pushing it so hard.

They're a technology company that pays the bills with advertising. They're into energy, languages, automation, AI, and lots of other areas.

Same with Talk vs. FaceTime/iMessage. Google wants you to use their tools so they can target ads, Apple wants to sell you hardware and time you to their ecosystem. It would be cool for Google to give people the option of paying for the nice open tools with no tracking or information gathering. You can opt out of most of it already though.

As of Windows 8, yes. Guess who made it palatable.

... where instead of innovation, you're told how you can dress and what you are allowed to do. If you manage to make any money, Apple get's 30%. Of course, everyone dresses very nicely.

This is so that under what the police deem extreme circumstances, they can perform a search without a warrant. Kidnapping is a good example. They're taking their chances, as where evidence would be valid if obtained with a warrant, it will not be in most cases. The other solution is to have on-call judges that can give a warrant over the phone. Both of these are open to abuse, but the former allows a bit more time for consideration of the circumstances.

I think post-search judgements will generally throw out any evidence obtained if the judge does not believe there was immediate cause.

Interesting ... when did that start? It sure hasn't semed to make much of a difference so far. People need to spend a lot of money and time in court to show that there's prior art.

Those familiar with your comment history will find that statement quite amusing.

Actually, I originally stopped using Windows completely when I caught it sending information to Microsoft through one of their desktop search services. I can't think of any other reason that data would be of use to them.

They raised prices for me when buying books from sellers that want access to Apples market.

Using a 'favoured nation' policy to force suppliers to charge Apple's cut to non-Apple customers or eat the cost is an abuse of their market position (more-so at the time than now) and should be very illegal.

Yep, it sucks. It's a lot more cross platform that most other proprietary comms, but it's still proprietary and requires a login. I don't want to be stuck using a browser rather than a simple chat client either. This is one of those cases where if people were using the open standard they supported (instead of FaceBook messaging, FaceTime, iMessage, etc), it would probably have been kept.