But they already are - the Lightning connector was not official when the project began, so how could they offer it?
Presumably they felt their actual offering was "whatever the contemporary connector Apple uses is", given that a device which can only be connected to obsolete devices is.... obsolete.
If they started the project based on rumours of the new connector, or with a plan to include it *without* discussing terms with Apple first, then that was just silly.
Erm, yes, how silly of them to not anticipate that Apple would require licensing for a goddamn power plug. Since when have you had to sign exclusivity agreements to connect a battery to another battery? Can you name any other manufacturer that uses custom authentication chips to prevent people making charging cables? Maybe at the time the Kickstarter project proposal was made, they figured Apple might actually pull its head out of its arse and use the same connector the rest of the world was already standardizing on. Then when the reality turned out to be far worse than they had imagined they realized they'd effectively take peoples money to build a device that wouldn't charge most of their customers iPhones. I think they did exactly the right thing in the circumstance.
This is not necessarily the end of the Edison Junior’s portable power project. Siminoff told me that the team will be re-focusing on a device that supports Android phones and tablets and Apple products as well, if backers wish to use a Lightning-to-USB connector, or an older 30-pin connector. They’ll only build that device, however, if the crowdfunding community wants it.
They want to do that, but they'd be building a different project than what people pledged for. So for obvious reasons they would need to start over.
Yes, in fact, this appears to be something the government is finally getting absolutely right! It kind of amazed me that such a service didn't already exist, but better late than never. Using technology to help improve employment at scale is an obvious and good idea, more of this please!
The law requires exactly what is being done, so much so that the regulators themselves do this (thus setting an example for everyone else). How exactly is this some nefarious plot by website operators, again?
You don't need to be trained. If you hear about this issue and care, you can just search on Google for "how to disable cookies" and get the main browsers help pages right at the top. This isn't exactly rocket science.
As head of the CPS he can't decide what's legal or illegal, just what laws to actually enforce. He obviously thinks the way these laws are being interpreted is absurd and has taken measures to avoid abuse, but a better solution is clearly for the laws to be written more tightly (a lot more tightly). Hopefully this will embarrass the government into fixing the laws.
I think the OPs point was that the way the jury behaved was very questionable in many respects. Their verdict was inconsistent with itself and had to be sent back for them to try again not once but multiple times, if I recall correctly. Also, the foreman pretty much admitted to presenting himself as an expert and telling the jurors things that are simply not true about patent law. Not to mention the general bogosity of the patents themselves.
The question here is, if this case is not re-tried and cannot be appealed, what does that say about the reliability of the US legal system? How could anyone sanely subject their company to a jury trial about patents when the process appears to ignore its own rules of engagement?
I don't believe anyone argued WikiLeaks was involved in illegal business either. In fact it seemed pretty clear that they weren't. WikiLeaks also accepts payments through a charity (based in Iceland).
The risk is they will anyway. Routing payments like that can potentially make you a "money transmitter" which requires absurdly expensive and complex licensing (in the USA at least). If you route money for 3rd parties without having a money transmitter license, you are ipso-facto a money launderer despite no other crime being committed.
At the time this blockade was established, a senior Republican asked Geithner to add Assange/WikiLeaks to the SDN list. Fortunately Geithner refused, which makes it a purely private sector blockade. However you can imagine that had the Republicans been in power at the time, there would have been no such refusal, and it would now be against US law to transact financially with WikiLeaks, including for EFF. I don't think people realize how close WL came to being blacklisted like that.
Erm, I'm a Brit living in Switzerland. I don't think Swiss gun control laws are much like the USAs. For one, in past years they've been changing to come more into line with European norms as part of entering the Schengen zone. But even before that, the Swiss weren't allowed to carry guns around unless they were currently active in the military. Seeing Swiss men wander around with guns in public is common - but they're always in uniform and they're always in groups. Personal guns that are carried around don't really exist and I doubt the police would be very impressed if you had one.
In the UK gun crimes are focused almost exclusively on a small number of highly urban city areas where drug gangs engage in turf wars. Random crazies shooting up schools is thankfully very rare there. Even then, gun crime is far rarer per capita than in the US. Switzerland has far less trouble with drug gangs by the way, partly because of enlightened social policies - the state has an active program of helping addicts by providing them with clean drugs and safe places to consume them under the supervision of doctors.
All spam filters do domain blacklisting. The reason is that the textual content can be randomized for free, but spammers typically want to sell something, which means providing links to their stores. It's much harder to avoid having links in your mail, so it makes sense to measure their spammyness and blacklist. Or at least it used to. The prevalence of link shorteners and hacked websites means it doesn't work as well as it once did.
I suspect there's a rule in Hotmail and Yahoos filters that say something like "if a mail contains a link to a young domain that has never been seen before, and it goes to lots of people, and some of them are marking it as spam, and it hits spamtraps, then it's spam". The act of distributing deliberately fresh domains as censorship evaders would then hit such a rule, especially if you do it at enormous scale via email.
Re: spamtraps, you're still assuming that some malicious entity knows where to find lists of spamtrap addresses. They aren't actually listed anywhere, right? Just scattered around the web waiting for crawlers to find them. So at some point Occams Razor applies.
Anyway, my point is simple. There are lots of safeguards in the big 3s spam filters. Those filters aren't perfect, but 99% of the time people complain, they're actually sending mail people don't want. It's possible this guy has found the perfect storm of edge cases that cause widespread failure - or it's possible that there aren't actually 400k people who want proxies emailed to them.
Once again, what I'm saying is, you're accepting everything the poster says on the assumption it's absolutely true. Spamtrap accounts don't reply to confirmation emails or click on confirmation links - ever. That's the whole point of them. Even if you're a malicious troll who got a list of Hotmail trap accounts from somewhere, how do you get control over them to confirm signup?
The screenshot says more anyway. Judging from what he says the sizes of the mailshots are, it's a fresh IP that hasn't been used before. So the screenshot could have been taken before the reputation degrades. That by itself probably won't help, a new IP that sends links to newly registered domains which have no reputation to huge numbers of users and hits spamtraps is exactly the sort of thing spammers actually do.
Look. It's possible that this guy has done everything totally by the book and somehow has just got unlucky that his behaviour happens to closely match that of actual spammers. Or it's possible that we don't have the full story. Having been on the other side of such stories and investigated cases like these, I think "sender is not following standard mail etiquette" is far more likely than some enormous conspiracy theory against him. After all, plenty of bulk mail senders do just fine.
You assume that this is case, yet the poster provides a link to management data which at least appears to show that your assumption is incorrect
I assume this is the case because, like I said, having actually worked on a large spam filter I've seen this kind of story many times before. These people are always amazed to discover that people are pressing report spam on their wonderful bulk mail. Yet the fact remained that people were doing exactly that. They didn't want the mail.
Look at it this way. This guys screenshot shows Hotmail themselves saying he hit some of their spamtraps. From the SNDS FAQ we can see that "trap hits" means he mailed accounts that don't solicit mail - ever - so we already know his claim that every account is opt in isn't true. What else isn't true?
Pushing the problem onto the 400,000+ individual users instead of dealiing with it at the ISP level is exactly the sort of free market failure tha the poster complains of.
It's not a free market failure at all, these sorts of big webmail spam filters are very effective. If users are seeing false positives they can go and unmark the mail as spam, the system will learn that the user wants that mail and the problem is solved.
Again, deny any version of reality that doesn't align with your assumptions.
My assumption is that this story is much like all the other such stories I've come across - the guy is a spammer and doesn't realize it. This assumption is very, very likely to line up with reality.
Try Switzerland, then. Taxes but low, relative to most countries. Low unemployment. Some of the highest standards of living around. A country of 10 million people. Exports, primarily pharmaceuticals, precision machinery and other high skilled products.
Blah blah blah...... I sent craptons of mail to people who I'm sure want to receive it..... but the system is telling me people don't.... blah blah..... free markets suck.
I have worked on spam filters before. I've heard this story a million times. In case the article poster reads this, here's the blunt reality:
Those half-million people you think really really want new proxy sites all the time? Guess what, many of them don't. They are reporting your mail as spam which is why you're getting blocked (this is domain reputation). You may not understand why, but they are, so deal with it. Expire addresses that signed up a long time ago - some people won't unsubscribe when it's no longer useful for them. Make sure it's a simple, obvious one click operation to unsubscribe, and I mean really one click - not "click, log in, go to preferences" etc. Being able to unsubscribe should be the easiest thing in the world.
If SpamHaus is blacklisting you, they probably think you're sending mail to their spamtraps. Hence the "zero false positives" claim. Are you sure every single address on your list replied to a confirmation mail? All 400,000+ of them? Because it sounds unlikely.
The point is it doesn't matter where they're headquartered at all, that's irrelevant, the point is that wherever they make money they should be paying the applicable taxes.
Except that isn't how the law is written and for good reasons. Ensuring that doesn't happen is the entire point of the EU single market rules - you can be based in one country and sell into all the others without any complicated paperwork. Did you ever see anyone criticize the single market? No, everyone loves it because the benefits of being able to set up a little company and sell to all of the EU is huge, everyone benefits from the trade that results (including governments).
Now what happens if you are willing to pick and choose where you set up shop? Well, you can make your company wherever you want. Most people when they make a small company happen to choose where they already live for convenience reasons, but they don't have to. Companies that are setting up shop in the EU don't have a place they already live, they can pick anywhere, so - surprise - they pick a low tax country. Like Ireland. The people there, by the way, like their low(ish) rates of corporation tax because they correctly conclude that it brings lots of companies to their country and those companies hire staff, often thousands of them, train them, build facilities there etc.
You can't simply close this "loophole" without undoing the entire concept of the single market, which is seen as one of the corner stones of EU integration. Unless you forcibly harmonize tax rates across the entire EU, but then you have a massive loss of sovreignity don't you.
I also disagree with you about tax in general. Corporation tax is just one way amongst many to earn revenue. When companies do things, governments receive income from: the income tax their employees pay, the local taxes paid by the offices, the sales taxes/VAT charged on the goods the companies make/buy, and myriad other taxes on general economic activity. Companies are ultimately just people and assets, both of which are already taxed. I don't think you can say a company is a "parasite" because companies benefit from a stable business environment. You could as well say that the people who build and make up the company benefit, but they already pay the same taxes everyone else does.
The only question you should be asking about corporation tax is - is this the most efficient way to raise the needed revenue? There's an interesting opinion piece on that in The Register (of all places).
Reality check: governments don't just spend money on domestic services. All corporation tax in the UK combined just about pays for the military - just. Alternatively, interest payments, but again, just barely.
I work for Google. Not in the UK but I'm a British citizen. I think it's easy for governments to emotionally manipulate people over tax. Look at those nasty tax avoiding immoral scumbags! Think about all the roads and hospitals they're cheating us out of! They're the reason we have to cut services!!!
But you know what, you could just as easily say, "Corporations are reducing their corporate tax bill. Perhaps this will force the government to spend less on invading other countries. Then they can keep frontline services AND we'll live in a more peaceful world. Win!".
Seriously. When was the last time the so-called Ministory of Defence actually defended the British Isles? World War 2? In recent times it's pissed away billions upon billions of pounds blowing up goat herders in Afghanistan, just to please the Americans. Look at the UK public spending. The government spent 33.5 billion on education (of which around a third is subsidies for university degrees that often lead to no employment), and 45 billion on war. Roads, by the way, were only 3.6 billion of spending but fuel tax receipts last year were 25 billion, so corporation tax rates could be cut to zero and roads would still be easily funded by taxes on those who drive on them!
I think you massively over-estimate the ease of "paying yourself the minimum non-taxable wage and paying the rest out in a manner that doesn't get taxed". That's a huge detail you just glossed over. Besides, what big companies are doing with tax isn't avoiding paying income tax on wages. It's corporation tax, which is very different. If you set up multi-national corporations you have to pick where you'll do business, and for an internet company that can do business almost anywhere, why would you deliberately pick a high tax region over a low tax one, with all else being the same? Do you like funding wars?
The public roads argument is interesting - do employers pay for roads so employees can get to work and so that they can ship and receive goods, or do employees pay for roads so they can get to work and buy the goods others have manufactured/raised/offer? The answer is both.
Roads are cheap, though. In the UK last year the govt spend about 1.5 billion pounds on them, out of a total budget of ~650 billion. The fuel tax income was nearly 3 billion. So, roads are a profit center for the British government. Maybe it's different in the USA.
I didn't say remove taxes on capital gains, I said abolish the concept (ie, charge regular income tax rates on returns on investment instead of the low CG rate).
I think Apples customers probably have a limited tolerance for agenda-driven hoop jumping. They aren't all passive sheep you know - look at the rage over iOS Maps. If Apple rolled boulders down the hill at users who wanted to search the web with Google it'd just make iPhones look even more troublesome than already are.
I just watched a music video for the Indian Debating Society that was advocating civil, reasoned discourse instead of yelling and throwing things.
Oh, good. I think we can all get behind that.
You're right that it makes sense to fund roads via taxes. Governments are natural road builders. However, that doesn't mean it has to be done with corporation taxes. In the UK tax on petrol alone covers the entire spending on roads nearly twice over - when you look at a breakdown of the budget, roads are actually a very small slice of what the British government spends its money on (less than 1%). I imagine it's a bit different in the USA because of lower population density, but I doubt it's orders of magnitude different. Spending on roads (and in fact most other services people think of when they think about tax) is absolutely dwarfed by things like defence and interest payments. In fact if you take all corporation tax in the UK together, it just about (barely) covers the cost of the military!
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably they felt their actual offering was "whatever the contemporary connector Apple uses is", given that a device which can only be connected to obsolete devices is .... obsolete.
Erm, yes, how silly of them to not anticipate that Apple would require licensing for a goddamn power plug. Since when have you had to sign exclusivity agreements to connect a battery to another battery? Can you name any other manufacturer that uses custom authentication chips to prevent people making charging cables? Maybe at the time the Kickstarter project proposal was made, they figured Apple might actually pull its head out of its arse and use the same connector the rest of the world was already standardizing on. Then when the reality turned out to be far worse than they had imagined they realized they'd effectively take peoples money to build a device that wouldn't charge most of their customers iPhones. I think they did exactly the right thing in the circumstance.
RTFA.
They want to do that, but they'd be building a different project than what people pledged for. So for obvious reasons they would need to start over.
Yes, in fact, this appears to be something the government is finally getting absolutely right! It kind of amazed me that such a service didn't already exist, but better late than never. Using technology to help improve employment at scale is an obvious and good idea, more of this please!
The law requires exactly what is being done, so much so that the regulators themselves do this (thus setting an example for everyone else). How exactly is this some nefarious plot by website operators, again?
You don't need to be trained. If you hear about this issue and care, you can just search on Google for "how to disable cookies" and get the main browsers help pages right at the top. This isn't exactly rocket science.
As head of the CPS he can't decide what's legal or illegal, just what laws to actually enforce. He obviously thinks the way these laws are being interpreted is absurd and has taken measures to avoid abuse, but a better solution is clearly for the laws to be written more tightly (a lot more tightly). Hopefully this will embarrass the government into fixing the laws.
I think the OPs point was that the way the jury behaved was very questionable in many respects. Their verdict was inconsistent with itself and had to be sent back for them to try again not once but multiple times, if I recall correctly. Also, the foreman pretty much admitted to presenting himself as an expert and telling the jurors things that are simply not true about patent law. Not to mention the general bogosity of the patents themselves.
The question here is, if this case is not re-tried and cannot be appealed, what does that say about the reliability of the US legal system? How could anyone sanely subject their company to a jury trial about patents when the process appears to ignore its own rules of engagement?
I don't believe anyone argued WikiLeaks was involved in illegal business either. In fact it seemed pretty clear that they weren't. WikiLeaks also accepts payments through a charity (based in Iceland).
The risk is they will anyway. Routing payments like that can potentially make you a "money transmitter" which requires absurdly expensive and complex licensing (in the USA at least). If you route money for 3rd parties without having a money transmitter license, you are ipso-facto a money launderer despite no other crime being committed.
At the time this blockade was established, a senior Republican asked Geithner to add Assange/WikiLeaks to the SDN list. Fortunately Geithner refused, which makes it a purely private sector blockade. However you can imagine that had the Republicans been in power at the time, there would have been no such refusal, and it would now be against US law to transact financially with WikiLeaks, including for EFF. I don't think people realize how close WL came to being blacklisted like that.
Erm, I'm a Brit living in Switzerland. I don't think Swiss gun control laws are much like the USAs. For one, in past years they've been changing to come more into line with European norms as part of entering the Schengen zone. But even before that, the Swiss weren't allowed to carry guns around unless they were currently active in the military. Seeing Swiss men wander around with guns in public is common - but they're always in uniform and they're always in groups. Personal guns that are carried around don't really exist and I doubt the police would be very impressed if you had one.
In the UK gun crimes are focused almost exclusively on a small number of highly urban city areas where drug gangs engage in turf wars. Random crazies shooting up schools is thankfully very rare there. Even then, gun crime is far rarer per capita than in the US. Switzerland has far less trouble with drug gangs by the way, partly because of enlightened social policies - the state has an active program of helping addicts by providing them with clean drugs and safe places to consume them under the supervision of doctors.
All spam filters do domain blacklisting. The reason is that the textual content can be randomized for free, but spammers typically want to sell something, which means providing links to their stores. It's much harder to avoid having links in your mail, so it makes sense to measure their spammyness and blacklist. Or at least it used to. The prevalence of link shorteners and hacked websites means it doesn't work as well as it once did.
I suspect there's a rule in Hotmail and Yahoos filters that say something like "if a mail contains a link to a young domain that has never been seen before, and it goes to lots of people, and some of them are marking it as spam, and it hits spamtraps, then it's spam". The act of distributing deliberately fresh domains as censorship evaders would then hit such a rule, especially if you do it at enormous scale via email.
Re: spamtraps, you're still assuming that some malicious entity knows where to find lists of spamtrap addresses. They aren't actually listed anywhere, right? Just scattered around the web waiting for crawlers to find them. So at some point Occams Razor applies.
Anyway, my point is simple. There are lots of safeguards in the big 3s spam filters. Those filters aren't perfect, but 99% of the time people complain, they're actually sending mail people don't want. It's possible this guy has found the perfect storm of edge cases that cause widespread failure - or it's possible that there aren't actually 400k people who want proxies emailed to them.
Once again, what I'm saying is, you're accepting everything the poster says on the assumption it's absolutely true. Spamtrap accounts don't reply to confirmation emails or click on confirmation links - ever. That's the whole point of them. Even if you're a malicious troll who got a list of Hotmail trap accounts from somewhere, how do you get control over them to confirm signup?
The screenshot says more anyway. Judging from what he says the sizes of the mailshots are, it's a fresh IP that hasn't been used before. So the screenshot could have been taken before the reputation degrades. That by itself probably won't help, a new IP that sends links to newly registered domains which have no reputation to huge numbers of users and hits spamtraps is exactly the sort of thing spammers actually do.
Look. It's possible that this guy has done everything totally by the book and somehow has just got unlucky that his behaviour happens to closely match that of actual spammers. Or it's possible that we don't have the full story. Having been on the other side of such stories and investigated cases like these, I think "sender is not following standard mail etiquette" is far more likely than some enormous conspiracy theory against him. After all, plenty of bulk mail senders do just fine.
I assume this is the case because, like I said, having actually worked on a large spam filter I've seen this kind of story many times before. These people are always amazed to discover that people are pressing report spam on their wonderful bulk mail. Yet the fact remained that people were doing exactly that. They didn't want the mail.
Look at it this way. This guys screenshot shows Hotmail themselves saying he hit some of their spamtraps. From the SNDS FAQ we can see that "trap hits" means he mailed accounts that don't solicit mail - ever - so we already know his claim that every account is opt in isn't true. What else isn't true?
It's not a free market failure at all, these sorts of big webmail spam filters are very effective. If users are seeing false positives they can go and unmark the mail as spam, the system will learn that the user wants that mail and the problem is solved.
My assumption is that this story is much like all the other such stories I've come across - the guy is a spammer and doesn't realize it. This assumption is very, very likely to line up with reality.
Try Switzerland, then. Taxes but low, relative to most countries. Low unemployment. Some of the highest standards of living around. A country of 10 million people. Exports, primarily pharmaceuticals, precision machinery and other high skilled products.
Blah blah blah ...... I sent craptons of mail to people who I'm sure want to receive it ..... but the system is telling me people don't .... blah blah ..... free markets suck.
I have worked on spam filters before. I've heard this story a million times. In case the article poster reads this, here's the blunt reality:
Those half-million people you think really really want new proxy sites all the time? Guess what, many of them don't. They are reporting your mail as spam which is why you're getting blocked (this is domain reputation). You may not understand why, but they are, so deal with it. Expire addresses that signed up a long time ago - some people won't unsubscribe when it's no longer useful for them. Make sure it's a simple, obvious one click operation to unsubscribe, and I mean really one click - not "click, log in, go to preferences" etc. Being able to unsubscribe should be the easiest thing in the world.
If SpamHaus is blacklisting you, they probably think you're sending mail to their spamtraps. Hence the "zero false positives" claim. Are you sure every single address on your list replied to a confirmation mail? All 400,000+ of them? Because it sounds unlikely.
Except that isn't how the law is written and for good reasons. Ensuring that doesn't happen is the entire point of the EU single market rules - you can be based in one country and sell into all the others without any complicated paperwork. Did you ever see anyone criticize the single market? No, everyone loves it because the benefits of being able to set up a little company and sell to all of the EU is huge, everyone benefits from the trade that results (including governments).
Now what happens if you are willing to pick and choose where you set up shop? Well, you can make your company wherever you want. Most people when they make a small company happen to choose where they already live for convenience reasons, but they don't have to. Companies that are setting up shop in the EU don't have a place they already live, they can pick anywhere, so - surprise - they pick a low tax country. Like Ireland. The people there, by the way, like their low(ish) rates of corporation tax because they correctly conclude that it brings lots of companies to their country and those companies hire staff, often thousands of them, train them, build facilities there etc.
You can't simply close this "loophole" without undoing the entire concept of the single market, which is seen as one of the corner stones of EU integration. Unless you forcibly harmonize tax rates across the entire EU, but then you have a massive loss of sovreignity don't you.
I also disagree with you about tax in general. Corporation tax is just one way amongst many to earn revenue. When companies do things, governments receive income from: the income tax their employees pay, the local taxes paid by the offices, the sales taxes/VAT charged on the goods the companies make/buy, and myriad other taxes on general economic activity. Companies are ultimately just people and assets, both of which are already taxed. I don't think you can say a company is a "parasite" because companies benefit from a stable business environment. You could as well say that the people who build and make up the company benefit, but they already pay the same taxes everyone else does.
The only question you should be asking about corporation tax is - is this the most efficient way to raise the needed revenue? There's an interesting opinion piece on that in The Register (of all places).
Reality check: governments don't just spend money on domestic services. All corporation tax in the UK combined just about pays for the military - just. Alternatively, interest payments, but again, just barely.
I work for Google. Not in the UK but I'm a British citizen. I think it's easy for governments to emotionally manipulate people over tax. Look at those nasty tax avoiding immoral scumbags! Think about all the roads and hospitals they're cheating us out of! They're the reason we have to cut services!!!
But you know what, you could just as easily say, "Corporations are reducing their corporate tax bill. Perhaps this will force the government to spend less on invading other countries. Then they can keep frontline services AND we'll live in a more peaceful world. Win!".
Seriously. When was the last time the so-called Ministory of Defence actually defended the British Isles? World War 2? In recent times it's pissed away billions upon billions of pounds blowing up goat herders in Afghanistan, just to please the Americans. Look at the UK public spending. The government spent 33.5 billion on education (of which around a third is subsidies for university degrees that often lead to no employment), and 45 billion on war. Roads, by the way, were only 3.6 billion of spending but fuel tax receipts last year were 25 billion, so corporation tax rates could be cut to zero and roads would still be easily funded by taxes on those who drive on them!
Who is "they"? Do you see Eric Schmidt spending much time lobbying governments over tax?
That is already the case. Governments are bitching because they want to not only tax sales but also profits (that may occur outside their borders).
I think you massively over-estimate the ease of "paying yourself the minimum non-taxable wage and paying the rest out in a manner that doesn't get taxed". That's a huge detail you just glossed over. Besides, what big companies are doing with tax isn't avoiding paying income tax on wages. It's corporation tax, which is very different. If you set up multi-national corporations you have to pick where you'll do business, and for an internet company that can do business almost anywhere, why would you deliberately pick a high tax region over a low tax one, with all else being the same? Do you like funding wars?
Roads are cheap, though. In the UK last year the govt spend about 1.5 billion pounds on them, out of a total budget of ~650 billion. The fuel tax income was nearly 3 billion. So, roads are a profit center for the British government. Maybe it's different in the USA.
I didn't say remove taxes on capital gains, I said abolish the concept (ie, charge regular income tax rates on returns on investment instead of the low CG rate).
I think Apples customers probably have a limited tolerance for agenda-driven hoop jumping. They aren't all passive sheep you know - look at the rage over iOS Maps. If Apple rolled boulders down the hill at users who wanted to search the web with Google it'd just make iPhones look even more troublesome than already are.
Oh, good. I think we can all get behind that.
You're right that it makes sense to fund roads via taxes. Governments are natural road builders. However, that doesn't mean it has to be done with corporation taxes. In the UK tax on petrol alone covers the entire spending on roads nearly twice over - when you look at a breakdown of the budget, roads are actually a very small slice of what the British government spends its money on (less than 1%). I imagine it's a bit different in the USA because of lower population density, but I doubt it's orders of magnitude different. Spending on roads (and in fact most other services people think of when they think about tax) is absolutely dwarfed by things like defence and interest payments. In fact if you take all corporation tax in the UK together, it just about (barely) covers the cost of the military!