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Oh how naive! Where have you been all last year
Counter-example: Blizzard's Diablo 3 Directory Jay Wilson
Sigh, I just started playing this game and reading the forums some. You are pretty spot on, but at least recently they have given in a little on some minor issues with the latest patch 1.0.8 coming out. I think some of the developers are pretty sympathetic.
I don't think you know how things work in encryption these days...
You don't need the username/password information to encrypt things. iMessage and most of the communication of short messages between Apple devices and between Apple's cloud and the devices is based on the XMPP system which uses simple S/MIME to encrypt similar to how e-mail encryption works. It's end-to-end encryption. Could Apple build-in something to transfer the private keys from the client to the server and intercept it there - sure - but that would be 1) against the XMPP standard, 2) easily noticed and exploitable, 3) may even be illegal.
Where did you read that iMessage is using the S/MIME Encryption extension to XMPP or that it is using XMPP? I haven't seen anything to suggest this. I suspect this is simply that iMessage is properly using TLS/SSL connections to their servers making snooping difficult. They can probably still snoop by subpoenaing Apple for the records. According to wikipedia and other sources, the protocol is actually a binary protocol based on Apple Push Notification Service.
Use tax is arguably unconstitutional due to the interstate commerce clause, and that is why states do not enforce it. They can wield the moral force of "this is the law" to those that don't know better and get them to put it on their tax returns, but they won't go after those who don't pay because they're afraid to lose. The states' end game has been a federal authorization for the states to collect sales tax because it would put them on much more solid legal ground.
The use tax on the residents within a state by that state is perfectly constitutional according to the Commerce clause because it places the burden of payment equally on everyone in the receiving state. The sales tax charged by one state to a seller in another state is unconstitutional (according to the Commerce clause) because it places the burden on the seller in the other state.
Yeah there is already Use Tax where your home state charges you for stuff you buy outside of the state.
Use taxes are constitutional because they place the burden equally on everyone in the state as opposed to sales tax which would put an unconstitutionally undue burden on the out of state seller (according to the Commerce clause).
I get that the US is up there, France & Germany have a surprising amount of requests, but I'm pretty sure at least France is a firewall country. But Turkey... what? They have 11k legit internet users?
They are right up there w the states at 11k, there is no reference to Turkey anywhere in my knowledge of IT and how it applies to the world, so why would they have so many requests.
I found that curious as well. It may be related to the fact that Turkey has a lot of "laws that limit speech deemed insulting to Turkishness, and expressions of political extremism". They are fairly heavy into Internet censorship as well and even blocked all of YouTube for a long time. There are a lot of topics that aren't allowed to report about and they have ongoing legal proceedings against lots of online journalists.
It would be nice if Evernote's local database was in an open format - if it is, it's not obvious (there is an API, but I haven't investigated to see if there's a way to use it should the cloud side of the service go AWOL tomorrow). It's easy enough to export all of the notes into HTML, though, and doing that from time to time as a backup is probably a good idea.
The Evernote client already has a feature to export all the data from the locally stored notebooks/databases to HTML or to an Evernote XML file (which isn't that hard to parse). This is independent of the cloud export features. It includes notes and attachments. If that isn't enough, it looks like the local database is really just some SQLite DB's, so it wouldn't be that hard to write something to pull the data out directly.
Foxconn just assembles things that Apple designs and ships the parts to them.
I don't think you understand why everyone manufactures in China. When Foxconn needs parts, they put in an order to a company down the street
Foxconn's factories are company towns, inside a city made of companies. Literally, the entire supply chain is there.
While this is partially true, most of the major components (processor, memory, drives, some display screens) are not fabbed in China or at least not mainland China, but Taiwan, Korea and even the US, so the entire supply chain is certainly not there.
Though Apple is exceptionally good at balancing nice and cost.
No, Foxconn is. Sweatshops tend to do that.
Foxconn just assembles things that Apple designs and ships the parts to them. They are close to the last step (maybe *the* last step) in a long supply chain. Apple is exceptionally good at designing products that people want and maximizing their profit on those items. Sometimes that means leaving off a few features but it always means very effective management of their supply chain. I don't think there are many companies in the world with Apple's skills in acquiring and locking up its component supplies. It helps having 10's of billions+ of dollars to throw around. Samsung is also pretty good and getting better.
Apple had plenty of opportunities to improve their navigation app without Google's help. For starters, they could have made it so that the phone wouldn't lock itself when in navigation mode. I can't count the number of seconds I had to take my eyes off of the road to enter my password. Apple: people use this app while operating a vehicle that weighs thousands of pounds - I thought you were the guys that put thought into the user experience of your software. I hope for everyone's safety that this "feature" has been fixed.
The ios6 maps does display and allow navigation while locked. Apple could not implement the turn by turn system without approval from Google as they were under contract. Yes, they could have made some concessions to get Google to do it, but they must have found the concessions unpalatable.
And finally, I'm not trying to troll here, but I can't help but wonder how all of this would be playing out if Google had patented every trivial feature of their map and navigation software like Apple does for all of its apps. That would certainly have made this scenario a hell of a lot more interesting.
There is pretty much zero chance of that as Google hasn't done anything patentable or really original with their mobile navigation app. Nokia had most of these features long before Google and mostly patented them already... and I believe included some of these in their suit against Apple that was already settled and included a cross-license deal.
Eventually, iOS users who don't want to wait for Apple-Google parity will be able to download native a native version of Google's maps
You mean an application that duplicates the functionality of a built-in app?
You really think Apple is going to allow this in the iOS store?
I'm not sure how you got modded up so highly.
Apple now allows apps with duplicate functionality. There are dozens of map apps already in the App Store: Bing, Mapquest, TomTom, AT&T Navigator, TeleNav OpenStreetMap apps even.
Much like there is also a multitude of calendar, mail, note, and calculator apps etc.
If Google wrote the original Maps app for iOS and Apple is going to let them publish a map app, why didn't they just publish the original app? Or, supposing that they for some reason licensed the source to Apple, why didn't they create a new app from scratch? It wouldn't have been hard and they have had plenty of time. Either they don't want to, or Apple won't let them. Apple did refuse to let them publish apps in the past, and only allowed them to publish apps after they received heavy scrutiny from the FTC. What makes you think that the leopard (or mountain lion if you prefer), has changed its spots?
1. Google didn't write the previous IOS maps app. Apple did, they just used Google data.
2. There are many other map applications in the App Store already including ones with turn-by-turn (Bing, TomTom, Mapquest, etc).
Sorry I didn't mean "three hours" I meant "three miles". Being in Portland, OR I have a metric ton of coffee places within three hours of my house...
That's what you get for typing your post from your iPad
Apple spent 7.8 billion dollars on Samsung parts in 2011. Since both its Mac and iOS sales are only increasing that figure likely increased. So for Samsung even a billion dollar loss only amounts to about a 12.5% discount on all gear they sold Apple for a year.
Unfortunately for Samsung, I don't think they see the same profit margins on the component parts as Apple does on the finished product. They might be taking a big loss with that discount.
Life is like an onion: you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep. -- Carl Sandburg