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First, your weird double-negative statement is nonsensical.
(That they made a clarification) "...does not mean it was not free, or going to be free - or meant to be free..."
Logically there's a finite list of possibilities here; either it was going to be a) free, or b) not free.
Whether or not they clarified it now is irrelevant. It was going to be one of the two.

Second, what it does mean (to a rational mind) is that their message to the marketplace was pretty damn confusing to more people than just me, to the point that MS felt they needed to try to clarify.

In case you're wondering where I got this "crazy" idea, here's an example:
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
From that article, in regard to the 'free Win10 offer': "...Once you have installed Windows 10 and made a note of your product key, itâ(TM)s yours forever. ..."

I'm still trying to figure out how you could parse that it's NOT free, or that that is somehow obvious?

You obviously [blah, blah, dodge, dodge, more attempts to baffle with bullshit]

Your intellect is truly impressive, on the scale of Vizzini.

Read the first paragraph of the first link you referred to

From the link: "The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants ... the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies"

I think the problem is you are conflating two activities. First, Google et. al. knowingly gave them access to some stuff (as the link you mention says). Second, since Google et. al. didn't give them access to everything they wanted, they used technical means to gain additional access which Google quickly scrambled to correct when the leaks made them aware. So NSA was using both front doors and back doors.

Big difference between your claim Google "actively participated" and "the NSA gained access".

Both apply. See above.

You need to workshop your shilling with Mike Rogers before you post - that way you'd look less of a dick

You need to heed your own advice, and to stop using ad hominem attacks when you are challenged.

And as you say, it doesn't flow from politicians, per se. You only have to look at the unproven, but plausible reports of the security services pursuit of Prime Minister Harold Wilson to realise that elected politicians too may be the target if they are suspected by the establishment of deviating too far from the status quo.

You obviously [blah, blah, dodge, dodge, more attempts to baffle with bullshit]

Read the first paragraph of the first link you referred to, then re-read what I wrote (if your lips don't get too sore). Big difference between your claim Google "actively participated" and "the NSA gained access". Confirmation bias much?

You need to workshop your shilling with Mike Rogers before you post - that way you'd look less of a dick when claiming Google, Apple and others co-operated with the NSA, while he happily claims the "backdoors" "don't harm privacy" - and simultaneously "wants front-doors". But you're right, he, and Bruce Shneier, are wrong. Bruce is obviously shilling for the NSA when he claims PRISM is a series of backdoors into Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple. And the moon is made of green cheese.

'cause "infiltration" is the NSA code word for "they let us in through the front door"?? Rogers admitted that concerns about US government infiltration of US companies’ data represented a business risk for US companies, but he suggested that the greater threat was from cyber-attacks..

You obviously prefer reading Google press releases, here is real news instead:
The original NSA document stating seven companies helped with PRISM, one being Google.
[The] presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge

News from today another example of how little Google values privacy.

You Millenial fanboi's are so gullible. Corporations could give two flying fucks about you or your privacy, but you go on defending them.

You should read the judgements handed down by the extradition court judges in their rulings - they assert that all the allegations against Assange in the European Arrest Warrant and extradition request does indeed qualify as rape under UK law. That Telegraph story is based on what Assanges lawyers said, not what is actual fact.

Read the original ruling here: http://www.theguardian.com/media/interactive/2011/nov/02/julian-assange-extradition-full-judgment

In all the challenges made under "dual criminality" (ie, the fact that the offences must be comparable offences under the executing member state as well as the requesting member state), the judges ruled that "dual criminality" was satisfied under UK law and Assanges challenges were dismissed. The rulings in this regard runs from page 15 to page 32 in the rulings PDF.

trolling or no, I'm not making this up:

Marianne Ny, who heads the investigation into accusations of rape, coercion and sexual molestation against Assange, made a formal request to interrogate him in the Ecuadorian embassy...

Ny said she had changed her mind because the statute of limitations on several of the crimes of which Assange is suspected runs out in August 2015.

Stereotypes exists because they reflect natural gender differences. Yes, boys and girls are different. All research show this.

"Research" means nothing to the folks, who confuse the Universe that is with the Universe that should be. And, unlike the former, the latter is malleable and subject to change without notice.

Remember the denunciations — both passionately angry and "scientific" — of people, who suggested, "homosexuality is a choice", for example? We were repeatedly told both in print and in schools, that "gays are born that way" and thus it is both stupid and cruel to blame them for their lifestyle.

And maybe it is — I do not know. But the The Current Truth is changing. And, unlike Ben Carson, nobody yells at Miley Cirus for "adopting a more fluid label to her sexuality". Sexuality, you see, is a "social construct" now (and since 2004!) — and whatever a human actually feels is simply a reflection of "stereotyping" to be broken, and "peer pressure" to be resisted. With pride.

Whichever is true, both can not be true at the same time, but the conflict of these two ideas does not bother their proponents whatsoever, such logical rational beings they are. "Research" my tail...

Giving the best in entertainment news, from Sony to Hurricane Anna. So lame

Give us the good shit on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Then I'll believe they got something.

WikiLeaks Begins Releasing Leaked Saudi Arabia Cables

http://time.com/3928584/wikile...

Why does it even matter?

Because it is fraud.

It's a lot worse than that

Giving the best in entertainment news, from Sony to Hurricane Anna. So lame

Give us the good shit on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Then I'll believe they got something.

The toughest punishment would seem to require the most accurate judgment and as we know lots of prisoners come out free from a death row after DNA evidence was verified. The same evidence that FBI labors apparently fucked up so much that one would think the error was systemic and not sporadic as one would hope. Taken this into account one would be forgiven to think that for crimes of lesser weight the procedures used were more relaxed.
This all is only for failures in the system that are failures also with current law. The whole deal or rot forever system is broken too. Not too mention that US systems are rather brutal - comparing to other countries considered civilized - less apparent violence in all other Western countries. DEA and all he corruption that is associated with it adds to the whole misery as are mandatory minimum sentences. You can look at specific failure points but how about looking at statistics and showing why US has to incarcerate and execute so many?
Tough on crime sells well. US citizens dislike liberals. Every criminal freed from prison that fails to stay straight is a reason to go for maximum. There is a lot of nonsense in US justice and penitentiary systems (as well as in law and law enforcement) and some people supporting this nonsense profit from it while having enough funds and not feel not enough restraint to use the wealth to support own position when law is created/revised. Who can blame them - it is American way....

And as far as the drag queens' complaints, Facebook does in fact 0provide mechanisms, separate from individual pages, for promoting your stage name, band, business, or whatever else you consider your brand. So that is also a stupid non-issue.

You comments do not address the issue where people's real names are flagged as fake.

It's bad enough that official organizations like the census bureau *change* reported demographics and names while doing their surveys, and other official organizations do other similar things without having particular ethnic groups getting singled out because their names are not Western European.

Please get better informed: Here are three of links to get started off with ...

http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
http://lastrealindians.com/fac...
https://www.change.org/p/faceb...

Unicorn blood is well know to stop a person from dying, no matter how sick or injured. Pretty convient that N. Korea just so happens to invent a miracle drug just three years after finding a unicorn.

I know ownership of weapons in America is a highly contentious topic so I fully expect to get modded down aggressively for this post. I want to try out the argument anyway. Please humour me.

Let us imagine two different countries: Macroland and Microland. The governments of the two countries are mostly similar, with two notable exceptions.

The government of Macroland punishes resistance to its rule heavily. It jails approximately 0.7% of its population. Its enforcement troops kill about 60 of its own people each month.

The government of Microland is dramatically less aggressive. It jails only 0.1% of its population, but more importantly, it virtually never kills its own citizens no matter what they did or how strongly they resist the government's rule. It took Microland about a quarter of a century to kill as many people as Macroland did in just one month.

Which country has the most oppressed people? Microland or Macroland?

I think most reasonable people would say that the citizens of the country that kills them the most often are the most heavily oppressed. After all, what's the basic power that lies behind abusive government oppression? What's the basic mechanism governments use to remove people's freedoms? It's violence. The country that dishes out the most against its own people would seem to be the most oppressive.

You have, of course, already figured out that the statistics given above are real. Macroland is the USA. Microland is (just for comparison) the United Kingdom.

Americans have the US Constitution and it is a mighty document. The Constitution has always been a vital part of protecting the freedoms of ordinary Americans from overreach by government. Yet the Constitution is flawed in one terribly dramatic way. By allowing and even encouraging a heavily armed society, it fails to strike any blows for freedom - as police have always had and always will have better access to top grade weaponry and armour. The chances of ordinary US citizens successfully mounting an armed uprising against the government is zero. And yet it simultaneously gives those same police a cast iron excuse for arming themselves to the teeth, as they are expected to enforce the law against an exceptionally dangerous population.

The result is that whilst Americans and British people have very little differences in their levels of freedom, they have enormous differences in their chances of being executed by their own governments ..... or by random mental patients.

I am British and I would like to see the UK adopt a US-style constitution. But not if it included a copy of the second amendment. Real data from today's world seems to suggest it makes no real difference to freedom but does make the world a vastly more dangerous place.

A glaring example of a logical regulation to apply to drones, no exposed blades because this http://www.theguardian.com/mus.... Simple legal requirement that will substantially reduce the potential for harm. Then there is flying over other people's properties without their permission.

The more drones in the hands of idiots the more accidents that will happen, Reasonable regulations are required to limit drones and strictly regulate their use. Want to play with one, keep it within the bounds of your own property, end of story.

I always thought that Moscow was in Russia

***runs off to check an atlas***

Yep, it's still there.

Okay, so you're not happy with specific examples of UK and Germany (for some strange reason), so here's a link to a Guardian article comparing various other countries (for you to arbitrarily discount) http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries/.

Apologies for using facts against you like this.

Vladimir Putin opened "Patriot Park," a Vladimir Putin-themed Soviet military theme park, in order to get children to play with guns.

As they did a lot of work

Drone war: every attack in Pakistan visualised

41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed

Warriors they are not.. They are more like executioners..with dirtier hands..

And people giving them orders, from the POV of the population affected by drone strikes.. How are they different from terrorists ?

As they did a lot of work

Drone war: every attack in Pakistan visualised

41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed

Warriors they are not.. They are more like executioners..with dirtier hands..

And people giving them orders, from the POV of the population affected by drone strikes.. How are they different from terrorists ?

The Guardian has been doing a lot of research on police killing people in the US compared to the rest of the world.
Here's a good summary article:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-...

A few statistics from the article:
Fact: Police in the US have shot and killed more people – in every week this year – than are reportedly shot and killed by German police in an entire year.
Fact: Police in the US fatally shot more people in one month this year than police in Australia officially reported during a span of 19 years.
Fact: Police in Canada average 25 fatal shooting a year. In California, a state just 10% more populous than Canada, police in 2015 have fatally shot nearly three times as many people in just five months.
Fact: Police fired 17 bullets at Antonio Zambrano-Montes, who was “armed” with a rock. That’s nearly three times what police in Finland are reported to have fired during all of 2013.
Fact: In the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.

Businessman/oligarch Denis O'Brien successfully silenced all of Ireland's news media from reporting a speech protected by parliamentary privilege, because part of the speech was covered by an injunction - and almost none of Ireland's news media had the balls to report it, before they were given 'permission' by the court that placed the injunction (at which time, everybody already knew through forums/Facebook etc.).

Sad state of journalism in Ireland. Meanwhile, real journalists like Greenwald, are more than happy enough to tell hyper-litigious oligarchal types, to bugger off.

That's almost as hilarious as the 50 or so the UK has had in its time.

We have 2 new ones under construction in the UK and we only realised after we started building them that we don't actually have any planes to put on the them yet while we wait for our FGR4 replacements and our F-35s from you guys.

> I wonder if there are any statutes of limitations in Sweden

Yes -- "the statute of limitations on several of the crimes of which Assange is suspected runs out in August 2015."

http://www.theguardian.com/med...

There's people in Gitmo for wearing the wrong sort of watch:

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

(clue: It's one of the most common watches in the world.)

And not just one person...there's a whole list!

http://en.wikialpha.org/wiki/L...

Team America, fuck yeah!

You think Assange isn't a fugitive? Yes, he is. He jumped bail in the UK and fled extradition.

Julian Assange: the fugitive

Assange spent 10 days in jail in December 2010, before being bailed to the stately home of a supporter in Suffolk. There, he was free to come and go in daylight hours, yet he says he felt more in captivity then than he does now. "During the period of house arrest, I had an electronic manacle around my leg for 24 hours a day, and for someone who has tried to give others liberty all their adult life, that is absolutely intolerable. And I had to go to the police at a specific time every day – every day – Christmas Day, New Year's Day – for over 550 days in a row." His voice is warming now, barbed with indignation. "One minute late would mean being placed into prison immediately."

Julian Assange supporters ordered to forfeit £93,500 bail money

This gets a little tedious.

You think Assange isn't a fugitive? Yes, he is. He jumped bail in the UK and fled extradition.

Julian Assange: the fugitive

Assange spent 10 days in jail in December 2010, before being bailed to the stately home of a supporter in Suffolk. There, he was free to come and go in daylight hours, yet he says he felt more in captivity then than he does now. "During the period of house arrest, I had an electronic manacle around my leg for 24 hours a day, and for someone who has tried to give others liberty all their adult life, that is absolutely intolerable. And I had to go to the police at a specific time every day – every day – Christmas Day, New Year's Day – for over 550 days in a row." His voice is warming now, barbed with indignation. "One minute late would mean being placed into prison immediately."

Julian Assange supporters ordered to forfeit £93,500 bail money

This gets a little tedious.

You must have skipped this paragraph from the article I referenced:

Early the next morning, Miss W told police, she had gone to buy breakfast before getting back into bed and falling asleep beside Assange. She had awoken to find him having sex with her, she said, but when she asked whether he was wearing a condom he said no. "According to her statement, she said: 'You better not have HIV' and he answered: 'Of course not,' " but "she couldn't be bothered to tell him one more time because she had been going on about the condom all night. She had never had unprotected sex before."

When she awoke she found Assange having sex with her. She was asleep when Assange start having sex. She couldn't have consented.

Q) Sex without consent is what?
A) Rape

Perhaps you should go read a fuller description of events, including the allegation that Assange started having sex with one of the women while she was asleep. (You may recall that sleeping people can't give consent.) It isn't quite so favorable to Assange.

10 days in Sweden: the full allegations against Julian Assange

Jozsef Mindszenty stayed in the US embassy in Budapest for 15 years, 1956-71. But it is a large building. He could walk around, climb stairs, etc. Julian is staying in a small room. Even in prison people are allowed to walk outdoors.

Assange is in that embassy by choice. He could clear this all up by going for questioning, and possibly trial. If he is not guilty, then he goes free. If it turns out that he is found guilty he would likely find his overall circumstances improved in Swedish prison, including opportunities for exercise.

‘Prison is not for punishment in Sweden. We get people into better shape’

As things are Assange is imprisoning himself. It remains to be seen if the Swedish legal system will have a role. Hopefully Assange will not permanently harm his health by his negligence and what is in effect self abuse.

Wait a minute, that was France...

You don't say? What a "surprise" ....

The sordid truth about the oil-for-food scandal

... Far from seeking to protect their lucrative trade ties, the real explanation for the opposition of France and Russia to the war was that both countries' political establishments were deeply implicated in a lucrative scam to divert the profits of the UN's oil-for-food programme into their own private coffers.

From the moment the oil-for-food programme was introduced in 1996, Saddam concentrated all his energies on attempting to subvert it. The complex oil-for-food programme was introduced so that the profits from UN-supervised Iraqi oil sales would pay for essential healthcare supplies. The programme was conceived, it should be remembered, to counter the mounting effectiveness of the propaganda campaign of hard-Left activists such as George Galloway, the former Labour MP, who argued that the wide-ranging UN sanctions introduced following the Gulf war were responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqi children.

But as the ISG report clearly demonstrates, Saddam skilfully worked the system so that the profits were diverted to fund his regime rather than feed his people. An important element of this fraud was that a significant percentage of the funds was diverted to set up a voucher system that could be used to bribe a wide network of international politicians who could be counted upon to do Saddam's bidding.

Between them, France and Russia received 45 per cent of the vouchers, with China coming third. In late 2002 and early 2003, France, Russia and China led the anti-war movement at the UN. In France, the vouchers were given to a number of politicians with close links to Mr Chirac, while in Russia they were paid directly to Mr Putin's private office, providing him with his own ready-made slush fund.

Saddam's clever manipulation of the voucher system was a brilliant success: it not only caused a deep split within the security council, it helped him to make irrelevant the much-vaunted policy of containment that was supposed to prevent him from re-emerging as a dominant force the the Middle East. It also enabled him to fund illicit imports of weapons and the technology needed to resume production of weapons of mass destruction, which was his declared aim once the sanctions had been lifted.

By the way, what did the British government have to say about military action in Syria? Do you recall? Just in case you don't:

Cameron forced to rule out British attack on Syria after MPs reject motion

You should probably reexamine your ideas of virtue in regards to international relations. They don't seem to hold water. In fact they are probably dangerous.

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
https://firstlook.org/theinter...

and from 2009 : http://www.hrw.org/fr/node/818...

This is why, ultimately, people aren't making much money on apps in general. Because they think they can just depend on the Apple model to protect their investment, when Apple really only cares on making money for themselves.

That's why they've made Developers 30 Billion (that's with a "B") Dollars on App Store Apps, and FREELY hosted FREE Apps, too.

Now, let's contrast that with the Google Play Store...

Exactly. See also http://www.theguardian.com/us-... The Guardian (UK newspaper) is the paper that Snowden first contacted; they have been following this story from the begnning. Also, here, from the Guardiam, is an "UPDATE: The Sunday Times has now quietly deleted one of the central, glaring lies in its story: that David Miranda had just met with Snowden in Moscow when he was detained at Heathrow carrying classified documents. By ‘quietly deleted’, I mean just that: they just removed it from their story without any indication or note to their readers that they’ve done so (though it remains in the print edition and thus requires a retraction). That’s indicative of the standard of ‘journalism’ for the article itself. Multiple other falsehoods, and all sorts of shoddy journalistic practices, remain thus far unchanged." The Sunday Times is owned by News Corporation, an organisation with its tentacles deep into the body of UK public life. How do we know that this entire story isn't a "favor" done by News Corp to the UK government ?

What if the claim that the files have been decrypted is false?

That's almost certainly the case. The story reeks of propaganda. For instance, the claim that the UK has some kind of large Russian spy network is rather contradicted by the fact that they only recently started recruiting Russian speakers. Pretty hard to get intel from a country where you don't have any staff that speak the language.

The notion that a "cache of documents" was cracked also sounds like nonsense. None of the Snowden documents have dealt with human intelligence ("HUMINT" as they call it). We're being asked to believe that there's hugely detailed info about British spies in what Snowden leaked, yet, no mention of documents from MI6 has been made up until now? Not even alluded to?

And the Russians and Chinese, working independently, both managed to crack this cache ... at the same time?

And none of the spies that were found after this calamitous event were arrested or deported? Not a single one? Even though when Russian spies were found in the USA they were turned into a media circus and then put in front of a judge?

No way. None of the things we're being asked to believe make even a shred of sense. There's a far, far more plausible explanation that does fit the facts: British intelligence was far, far more reliant on SIGINT for insight into Russia and China than they wanted their bosses to believe. MI6, in particular, is stretched to the limit. We know that they routinely cancel surveillance of people they believe might be dangerous jihadis because they don't have the resources to continue. Lacking Russian language speakers, lacking any real motivation to spy on Russia until very recently, you can see how they might have become super reliant on the very fragile techniques used by GCHQ. Now I absolutely do believe that foreign governments became harder to spy on as a result of Snowden, but this terrible disaster that has afflicted UK intelligence is much more likely to be the result of foreign embassies upgrading their VPNs to non-weak Diffie-Hellman, than the result of moving agents who may or may not even exist.

Do you have any evidence for any of that whatsoever, or is it all just conspiracy theory?

The met's entire budget is £4.1bn, and the price tag on GCHQ's equivalent system was £6bn. Where are the police getting the money for this exactly?

The only evidence of police overuse of phone records is that some providers are giving the police free reign of call logs:

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

That's a far cry though from having their own database that also tracks and compares location data and even links it all up to car number plates, and does so nationally. If they had their own database then they wouldn't even need to partner with 3rd parties to do the job for them in the case of stolen phones like in this scheme:

http://www.nmpcu.police.uk/imm...

You mention innocent people on the DNA database, you realise that's almost a dead horse now right? Yes, the police still retain temporarily the DNA records for some innocent people, but I assure you, there aren't "millions" of people in England (Scotland doesn't allow retention of any innocents DNA) that have been arrested for crimes like rape but not found guilty. There are thousands at best, and their records go after 3 years. Everyone else on there isn't innocent, they've been found guilty. Whilst I don't defend having innocents on there, it's hardly the problem it was under Brown and Blair's increasingly authoritarian police state. You're right that more needs to be done, but crying "millions of innocent people" just makes you sound like a paranoid crackpot because it's patently false nowadays.

I'd be more worried about other things now, like the fact they're building a database of mugshots of innocent people by paying them off £10 at a time for their new electronic lineup system without informing them that those mugshots may be used for other purposes, like development of facial recognition cameras.

There seems little point criticising police over things that are made up when you can criticise the security services and police for things that we know for a fact are not made up and are real actual problems.

I just looked back at digg.com for the first time in a couple years from when it flamed out heroically on it's 2.0 launch. It's not horrible now, there doesn't appear to be too much drama on their front page. Looks like delicio.us Just a abc/cbs style repost of yesterdays "hot web news"

I'm being nitpicky, but it was actually their v4 release that drove everyone away. It was sold two years later for a mere $500k.

Spotify raises $526m. Apple as of earlier this year had $178b in cash reserves. Now obviously Apple isn't going to spend all it's reserves, but you're going to need a lot more than that money to win a fight against Apple.

You're totally right AC. Microsoft is definitely someone consumers can trust with their security:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

A government that does this:

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

is simply no longer interested in the rule of law other than to further their handler's interests.

So, request away! Ask for a pony while you're at it.

I guess you haven't been paying fucking attention

God Damned Face Painting Homer.

True story from Greece (about Golden Dawn): they really got their point across by stabbing a rapper. That'll show them pesky immigrants. Fight the power!

As the Lavabit case demonstrated, any company that didn't cooperate would no longer exist, and the public wouldn't necessarily know why.

This both implicates any still-operating U.S. tech company as a likely co-conspirator with the NSA, and to some extent reduces their culpability: it was either cooperate or die. Of course, we'll never be able to know which companies eagerly jumped in bed with the government, and which ones resisted to the full extent they could, short of being forced out of business and jailed.

Hopefully the NYPD will mace and taser (in that order) anyone asshole that has the audacity to wear racing gear but are not in a race...

If men in tight pants make you feel funny in the swimsuit area, you should learn to enjoy it because it's perfectly natural for many people.

and don't even get me started about bikers that get in the turning lane.

Why not? The roads were built for them, not cars.

Exhibit A: Predator Drone Cost
Exhibit B: Average College Tuition

40,000,000 / 31,231 = 1280.8 people could go to a private college for a year (not semester) on the cost of a single Predator drone.
1,000,000 / 1280.8 = 780.8 Predator drones would be equivalent to the cost of tuition for a million people for one year.
780.8 * 4 = 3123.2 -> 3124 (rounded up) Predator drones could send a million people to a full 4 years of college.

Exhibit C: How Many Predator Drones Does The US Have?

The US had (as of August 2012) 678 drones of all makes and models. Even if they were all Predator drones, that would not be enough (cost-wise) to send a million people to college for even a single year, much less a 4-year full ride. But it's certainly enough to send a million people to a fiery doom, I would imagine. I don't really hear anyone asking for that, though.

The chief executive of Spotify, Daniel Ek, has predicted that the free online music service will help the industry grow to as much as 10 times its current size, in a future where old distinctions between providers break down.

http://www.theguardian.com/tec...

Why rather than shooting him down and demanding citations didn't you use this new fangled technology that the internet has called Google. It turns out that he's exactly right:

http://www.theguardian.com/spo...

Oh wait nevermind, I see you used your "it's not the norm" get out clause, so that no matter how many results turn up (I'll give you a hint if you can't be fucked to use Google still: hundreds) you'll still claim it's not enough to be the norm.

Well done, good argument, congratulations on being full of shit, please continue.

was definately the nsa

http://www.theguardian.com/boo...

it's why the rest of the world stopped buying electronic goods from the us almost overnight.

The nation builders dropped $12 billion in Iraq, and built ISIS. http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

"Apple bashing"? How inarticulate and ultimately blindly supportive of a known repeat bad actor to keep their customers from controlling the iThings they buy. It's hardly far-fetched to see how the company receives bad press. They've made an ugly history for themselves rife with mistreating workers, users, and harming the environment. They found they could get away with non-freedom in software also exploits app developers "mercilessly" as Richard Stallman put it on his reasons why one shouldn't do business with Apple. Apple also uses digital restrictions management on eBooks which is set up so that those eBooks won't work on jailbroken iThings, stuck users with a U2 album and made it hard to delete, censors bitcoin apps for iThings, deauthorized a Wikileaks access application, banned an erotic novel from iTunes because of its cover, left a security hole in iTunes unfixed for 3 years, and more.