Of course you can choose not to support Apple. You've correctly determined you'll make more money, despite Apple's 30% tax, supporting Apple users.

Apple isn't wedging themselves between your customers and your business. Your business is dependent on another company making hardware and software that you can develop on. You don't have a business that can exist independently. If I make hats, I can sell them, even if no clothing store will stock them or even if no clothing stores exist. You don't have that kind of business.

Yeah, I agree that Microsoft should be able to do this. It's a strategic decision to be locked down or open. Playstation/XBox/Nintendo are locked down. iOS is locked down. Automaker OSes are locked down. It's not like Apple is some crazy exception here, and Android is an alternative that's more popular than iOS. I've never understood why, from a legal perspective, what the game console companies do is legal and what Apple does isn't. The argument that consoles lose money on hardware and make it up on software is a social argument, not a legal one. And while you can argue console makers "just make games," it's a $60B-$70B/year software industry.

Apple makes luxury iPhones that no one needs but lots of people want. It's not a utility, it's not a monopoly. It's just that they extract money from developers that developers don't want to pay. And developers have made the decision that, despite Apple taking 30% from them, it's more important to be on iOS than to forgo it. That's life. And in every single country that has ruled against Apple, no country is willing to say how much profit is too much profit. The world doesn't do that. No one wants to tell Apple, "You can't keep more than 5% from digital sales" because governments don't want to decide that they really can tell industries how much profit is permissible. They want Apple to play ball and lower their fees to levels developers are happy with so that governments don't have to decide. Apple isn't doing it. It's fascinating to watch.

This is the correct and obvious answer. This isn't 1997, when you had to specifically download a browser on a desktop computer when you decided you wanted to try out the information superhighway. Every single phone/tablet/laptop/desktop ships with a built-in browser today, and zero of them ship with Firefox. Every device ships with some version of Chrome or some version of Safari. You have to really, really want Firefox, and even when you do, it's basically for desktop, which is already a smaller market than mobile. Unless Mozilla tries again to create its own mobile platform that will magically compete with Android, it's just going to die a slow death. It doesn't matter how good Firefox is. It doesn't matter how much it listens to its users. Unless 10s of millions of people decide Chrome or Safari doesn't cut it, they'll never even try Firefox.

Exactly. Zoom won because it's OSS.

ESPN3.com (formerly ESPN360.com) has always blocked ISPs that don't pay for the streaming service. It has never been free. For example, if you have Comcast, you can watch the streams. If you have Time Warner, you cannot, since Time Warner doesn't pay for the service. But, they let you log into your ISP account from another network in order to watch the streams, too. So, if you have Comcast at home but not at work, you can still log into ESPN3 with you Comcast account from work and watch the streams.

ESPN has never said this is a free service for anyone who wants to watch. Not sure why this is on Slashdot.

"Cameras are in common use. This doesn't give the cops the right to set one up to look inside your house through a pinhole in your curtains. If they attempt to look inside the house, in any way, with any technology that ever comes up, without a warrant this is a violation of your expectation of privacy and they should be locked up. Not disciplined, but subject to the exact same penalties as if I put a camera in the bathroom of a woman's house."

That's because the police are not allowed to invade your home's curtilage (area directly around the home). Peeking through the curtains invades the two inches directly in front of your window. However, if do not draw your curtains, there's nothing to prevent the police from using a camera with a telescopic lens to spy on you from across the street. As Kyllo noted, the police can fly helicopters in the airspace over your house and use magnifying cameras to take pictures of the top of your greenhouse in order to discover the pot you're growing, despite the fact you've put up ten foot fences around the green house (all without a warrant). Because the police are not invading your curtilage, they're allowed to do it.

Kyllo confronted a different issue: you normally feel like you are protected from invasion of privacy when people don't have technology that defeats your efforts to protect your privacy. Five hundred years ago, if you didn't want someone to spy through your window, you could build a moat. Then the telescopic lens was invented. How do you defeat that? The amazing technology that is curtains. But Scalia was saying that in 2001, most people didn't have thermal imagining scanners, so you didn't have to worry about others scanning your house. It was reasonable to believe that information was private. That's why Kyllo won his case.

To go back to the author of this article's question, yes, the Supreme Court's ruling is still sound. If thermal imaging scanners are in general use by the public today, then you and I do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding our thermal emanations. So, if the police used a thermal imaging device today, the evidence gets admitted (if the technology is in general use).