Daily Cuppa: Religion, the Apple Tax, and a botched burglary

The weekend has come and gone, and while everyone is still talking about the iPhone 5, not everyone is happy about its new Lightning adapter.

It seems like a lot of ZDNet readers are up in arms over the US$30 piece of plastic, which ZDNet contributor Jason O'Grady calls another "Apple tax" and offers as proof that "Apple hates its customers." Hate might be a strong word, but O'Grady does make a pretty interesting observation: Apple actually thought about including the adapter free of charge in pre-orders for the iPhone 5, but then quickly removed the option.

But if you're unaffected or still interested in getting an iPhone 5, we've decided to help you out. Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone have released their plans for the new phone, and we spent part of the weekend putting together a comparison of them.

Google might not be imposing a tax, but it is forgetting about its users running on older machines. Think you can offset your old technology by offloading everything to the cloud? You may want to think again. Google Apps will soon no longer support Internet Explorer 8, and while that's a good thing for encouraging people to upgrade, it also means leaving those who are running Windows XP in the dark. The older operating system doesn't support Internet Explorer 9 and greater, meaning that many features of Google Apps simply won't work anymore.

The web giant is also stuck in the middle of a religious issue for its inaction over the Innocence of Muslims trailer hosted on YouTube. The trailer has sparked global protests and riots, and resulted in the deaths of four American diplomats in Libya. On one hand, Google has said that it won't remove the video, because it fits within its guidelines; but on the other hand, it has blocked the video in Libya, Egypt, and India, and complied with requests from Indonesia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan to have it censored. Right or wrong, it's a sticky place to be.

Perhaps the weekend was all too much for one Los Angeles man, who burgled an Apple store by smashing a car through the shop's glass front. It seemed pretty brazen at first — a smash-and-grab job like something out of a movie — but it gets worse. The car was a luxury BMW, with the damage done to it probably worth more than what was stolen, and then there was that awkward moment where the driver got the vehicle stuck in the store.

But the funniest part? Even though the stolen iPads and iPhones could probably be tracked, he made the police's job easier by leaving his number plate at the scene of the crime.