apple admits contracting with companys using child labor

At least eleven underage children were discovered to be working last year in three factories which supply Apple.

Apple representatives say the child workers are now no longer being used, or are no longer underage. "In each of the three facilities, we required a review of all employment records for the year as well as a complete analysis of the hiring process to clarify how underage people had been able to gain employment," Apple said, in an annual report on its suppliers.

i love that part about "investigating how they gained employment"
as if to say "those willy children tricked us"!!!!

apple has in recent years been steadily accumulating quite a laundry list of complaints about it's subcontractors.........

Last week, it was reported that 62 workers at a factory that manufactures products for Apple and Nokia had been poisoned by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause muscular degeneration and blur eyesight.

Last year, an employee at Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that is one of Apple's biggest suppliers, committed suicide after being accused of stealing a prototype for the iPhone.

Sun Danyong, 25, was a university graduate working in the logistics department when the prototype went missing. An investigation revealed that the factory's security staff had tortured him, and he subsequently jumped to his death from the 12th floor of his apartment building.

foxconn. f.y.i has been accused by the Chinese labor dept of "inhumane and militant management"

thats right ....apples biggest supplier has been called inhumane ......by...the....Chinese.

and if all that weren't bad enough ,there's this to consider.

in October of 2009, a new application from Apple landed in the U.S. Patent Office. Apple's idea was to program devices to periodically interrupt users with unskippable ads. The ads would temporarily halt performance of the device in order to "compel attention." That on its own is pretty nightmarish but, innovators that they are, Apple found a way to crank it up to that hard-to-reach "Lovecraftian" level.

here's the important part...in their own words

"Apple can further determine whether a user pays attention to the advertisement. The determination can include performing, while the advertisement is presented, an operation that urges the user to respond; and detecting whether the user responds to the performed operation. If the response is inappropriate or nonexistent, the system will go into lock down mode in some form or other until the user complies. In the case of an iPod, the sound could be disconnected rendering it useless until compliance is met. For the iPhone, no calls will be able to be made or received." here is the actual patent if your curious

Apple credits CEO Steven Jobs, Freddy Anzures, Mike Matas, Gregory Christie and Patrick Coffman for patent application 20090265214, originally filed in April 2008.