Nobody will want to watch video on an iPod.
Nobody will need native apps on an iPhone.
Nobody will need a stylus.
&c

Mullvad allows you to purchase time via cards sold through Amazon. Mullvad has no idea what real person presented the card (user ids are simply strings of digits with no identifying features related to your actual identity). The only direct link to you is your source IP address, but they have no reason to maintain that for billing purposes.

Whether or not an indirect association between the top-up card and you can be traced through Amazon would depend on whether Amazon kept any records of the serial number of the card, and whether Mullvad had any record associating that card with your user ID and your user ID with your IP address.

My local grocery store promotes their house brand and CVS promotes their house brand. Both do so at the expense of competitors’ products. Is that now an antitrust violation??

What happened to consumer choice? There is a phone OS that provides all of this things — Android. Who wants this? Competitors, hackers, advertisers, and developers who don't want to pay for access to the platform Apple has created. I don't hear demands for this from the average Apple user, and when people ask me what device they should buy, I explain the differences between open and a walled garden, and explain why I chose the walled garden.

The problem with allowing sideloading is that if it can be done legitimately, it can be done illegitimately. If sandboxing can be ignored, and not enforced by the OS, then nothing prevents a malicious app/add/message from compromising your device. Making sideloading possible decreases security. Having to allow apps that don't follow the sandboxing rules put the entire phone at risk.

If Android didn't exist, there might be an argument. It does, so those who don't like Apple can use it. That's choice.

That’s true, but nobody is required to be in the business of selling pens and paper, either. Your liberties do not create a requirement that anyone provide the means for you to exercise them.

And your use of insults validates my statements as accurate, else you'd do something other than call names.

Missouri v. Holland where the state argued the treaty could not expand the constitutional powers of the federal government. the state lost. QED

If this were true, then the court would have decided Misouri v Holland in the other direction, as the ruling expanded the powers of the Federal government which is the purview of the states, via amendment. In other words, the US government was given permission to engage in plainly unconstitutional behavior because they signed a treaty saying they could.

If you actually read through that it doesn't contradict what I've said, NOR does it reach an opinion on the actual extent of self-executing treaties. To wit:

a treaty is “to be regarded in courts of justice as equivalent to an act of the legislature, whenever it operates of itself, without the aid of any legislative provision

and

What other treaty provisions need congressional implementation is debatable.

No, they haven't. Reid v. Covert is a plurality decision, so you can only take the narrowest reading from the concurrences as 'law' (as the Supreme Court has said). In that case the narrowest ruling was only that UCMJ cannot be applied to civilians in capital cases. Anything else is not precedent.

If you're relying on Reid v. Covert that's a plurality decision, so you can only take the narrowest reading from the concurrences as 'law' (as the Supreme Court as said). In that case the narrowest ruling was only that UCMJ cannot be applied to civilians in capital cases. Anything else is not precedent.

LOL. Yep, personal insults again. What the individual who cannot marshal any facts relies on. It is the case that the US Supreme Court agrees with me, in several important cases. Yes, there ARE limits, but nobody knows what they are. And that's the very definition of a Constitutional crisis. But, what we do know is that at least in several clear instances, the Supreme Court has ruled that treaties can, and do, expand the meaning of the Constitution and can give to the federal government powers which the Constitution does not.

Insults are the primary proof of a lost argument. Thank you for the admission.

I do understand exactly how treaties work. They are, as the constitution itself says, the 'Supreme Law of the Land' and must be recognized by all judges, anything to the contrary notwithstanding.

The Supreme Court has used treaties to expand federal power. So, as it turns out, a treaty CAN trump the Constitution, at least by adding to it. And honestly, given the Constitution was supposed to give the Feds limited powers, the decision allowing this was an end-run on the Constitution, proving my point.

Actually he could, with the consent of 67 senators. That would create a constitutional crisis. Think the UN Small Arms Treaty (thankfully not ratified). Because of the language of the Constitution, the Supreme Court would decide the issue. That's the problem with the 'supreme law of the land' and is created by the phrase:

any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

Think before YOU post.

Only if YOU have complete control of the keys. If they are managed by anyone but you, then it's perfectly possible. Apple could, for example, in their key bundle in iMessage, insert a third-party key without you knowing about it. That's the price of convenience.

Unless your message/file/whatever is encrypted with software you know to be 'good', and you create the key yourself, then snooping is entirely possible.