steveh

JamesBB said:

The current homicide rate per capita in USA is 5 times higher than Germany...

You are obviously as educated as the rest of the gun lobby...

According to The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's (UNODC) site the Global Study on Homicide:

Intentional homicide rates:  Germany 0.8/100K population; USA 3.8/100K population.

According to those numbers, the US ranks 121 out of 218 countries, Germany ranks 203. The US ranks lower than known highly-violent nations such as Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. The US homicide rate has dropped in half since the early '90s, oddly enough coincident with the widespread adoption of shall-issue carry laws in (now) 37 states. And if you subtract the "contribution" of a small segment of the overall US population, young urban hispanic and black males, the US homicide rate turns out to be almost identical to Canada's rate, about 1.4/100K.

It's something other than guns that's the gating items.

melgross said:

And for these who say that Apple has had a free OS for years, without Ads, again, to be fair, Apple charges for the OS in the price of the computer, which is, after all, an Apple product. Microsoft has nothing comparable other than their tablets. They need to make money of the software, and giving Windows away for free has cost them billions in sales and income.

After all, it's not like computer manufacturers shipping systems with Win10 have to pay licensing fees, which they roll into the price the customer pays.

Wait...

foxface616 said:

I do not support Apple. What if it were your family?  I think once you commit murder, or an act of terror, you shouldn't have the right to privacy. Once again, in America, we put the rights of the criminal first. Of course they don't want you checking out the phone! The iPhones are the new weapons of the century. How many bombs have been detonated by phones? They must be treated like any other piece of evidence by forensics when they are involved in murder.  Why is that so hard to see??

What you seem to be missing here is that it doesn't just affect the (currently dead) terrorists in question. Apple caving in this case would set a precedent that could in the future mean the loss of privacy for everyone, whether or not they had actually committed a crime, or even been accused of committing a crime. Governments in general have demonstrated a very poor record of respecting individual rights, even of their own citizens. This would be far more likely to make things worse for the innocent, which should be the test to pass.

Sir Thomas More's commentary in Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons" sums up the issue pretty well.