One week after the launch of the iPad 2, there are still overnight lines for the device.

Friday morning, there were 71 people in line for possible iPad 2s at the Los Gatos Apple store, according to CultofMac.com columnist Mike Elgan.

Mike called neighboring stores, and was told there were similar lines at stores in Santa Clara and Palo Alto.

It’s the same story at Apple’s stores all around the country. Look at the photo of the Waikiki store above. “Still no iPad2!” reports the photographer, Jayson Smith. At the 5th Avenue store in Manhattan, there’s a perpetual line of several hundred hopefuls.

Most are turned away disappointed. All these lines are for “possible” iPads. Although many stores have been getting fresh deliveries of iPad 2s every day, not all do. Still, standing in line seems quicker than ordering online. Shipping for online orders has been pushed back 4-5 weeks.

The Apple Store in Charlotte, NC, gave disappointed customers free Smart Covers when deliveries of iPad 2s failed to arrive, according to AppleBitch.

The store… told customers the previous day that an iPad 2 delivery was due for the following morning. However, when no iPads arrived, the customers in line, around fifty of them, were apparently offered a free Smart Cover by the Manager as an apology for the mis-information.

Some Apple stores have resorted to telling customers there are no stocks right off the bat. At one store in Los Angeles, this is how staff are answering the telephone:

“Hello. This is the Apple Store and no, we don’t have any iPad 2s available,” reports Twitter user SB ARTS TV.

Here’s an astonishing post from Kevin Rose, publishing an (anoymized) email from a friend of his who works for Apple in Japan.

Check out this video of the iPad 2 playing Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade on a 50-inch LG HDTV running at 1080p, thanks to the new iPad HDMI adapter. That’s a ten-dollar game looking just as lurid and beautiful in high-definition as a $60 Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 game.

Apple released the Gold Master of iOS 4.3 to developers this afternoon. The Gold Master release includes the iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS as well as the 3rd and 4th generation iPod touch.

The new AppleTV has been left out in the cold still sporting iOS 4.3 Beta 3 and there is no word on when it’s firmware will go Gold Master.

Registered iOS developers can download these updates as well as a new Gold Master SDK from developer.apple.com.

You can see all the new stuff in iOS 4.3 here.

Let us know if you find anything interesting in the new Gold Master release by leaving a comment.

We’ve received some tidbits of information about the iPad 2 launch tomorrow from an Apple staffer:

• MobileMe is being revamped with cloud storage features.
• The iPad 2 is a ho-hum update. It’s more of a speed bump than a redesign.
• The iPad 3 is the one to get excited about, and it’s on track for release later this year.

Maybe its a need for Silicon Valley to compete with the Oscar ceremony this weekend in Los Angeles. Maybe its just a slow news day. For whatever the reason, people have gone through Apple’s SEC Form 8-K and discovered almost 4.8 million votes against keeping Steve Jobs on the Cupertino, Calif. company’s board of directors.

Although the Apple co-founder kept his chair, a relative unknown outvoted Jobs as perhaps the most popular board member. Despite not appearing all in black or unveiling some of the sexiest technology, Ronald D. Sugar garnered the most share votes for re-election to the Apple board of directors.

We’ve already seen two of the major streaming music subscription services openly revolt in response to Apple’s newly prohibitive in-app purchase guidelines, demanding a 30% cut on all subscriptions, products and services offered through any iOS app. Now smaller devs are starting to pipe up too.

Arc90 — the developers of Readability, a cross-platform Javascript plug-in that enhances online content by simplifying it down to its barest and most readable elements — were developing an iOS subscription app leveraging Instapaper’s technology that would allow them to give 70% of their income to the content producers being read through their service. It was an innovative and practically revolutionary plan to reward authors for their work while enhancing the user’s reading experience by stripping out advertisements, and you can read more about Arc90’s plans for the app in our exclusive interview.

Unfortunately, it now seems that Readability will not be coming to iOS: according to Apple’s tightened restrictions, the Readability app was rejected by Apple for utilizing a subscription system that doesn’t use Apple’s In App Purchase API.

Apple, in other words, wants their 30% cut…. and Arc90 is hopping mad about it, having posted a scathing open letter about the matter on their official blog, in which they accuse Apple of greed and turning their backs on the developers who made iOS such a rich, dynamic and innovative platform to begin with.

The Arc90 blog is being hammered right now, so we’ve posted a copy of their letter after the jump.

In 1997, Apple was in deep financial trouble. Wired published a now-famous cover story: “101 Ways to Save Apple.”

Some of the advice was prescient, some was silly, but it was a fascinating list of suggestions. And what actually happened between now and then is even more interesting.

Here, for the first time, is a really detailed followup to each and every one of Wired‘s 101 suggestions.

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple is working on a “major revamp” of MobileMe, including a “locker” that will stream movies and TV shows to iPhones and iPads.

We’ve learned that Apple is going far beyond this. The company is looking to add a ton of ambitious cloud computing features to MobileMe — possibly in anticipation of a streaming-only iPhone.

Among the many services Apple is working on are:

• A live video-streaming service like Ustream
• A location-based check-in system like Gowalla or Foursquare
• A geo-tagging system codenamed “Tokens” that tags real-world locations, like Facebook Places on steroids.

According to our source, who asked to remain anonymous, Apple is working on a lot of streaming data services and location-aware technologies. It’s not clear when or how these features will be rolled out, but they appear to complement our report that Apple is working on a streaming-only iPhone.

“A ton of ideas were hatched on what they could do, and from what I heard, a lot of their ideas were shelved for a later date in order to focus on a few of them,” said our source.

The main point of performer Mike Daisey’s powerful one-man show about Apple and its Chinese factories is that in China, it’s cheaper to have people make products rather than have machines make those products. As a result, people are treated like machines. They perform the same tasks, day in, day out. They work excessively long hours and if they break down, they are discarded. Most tellingly, if they try to commit suicide, the factory puts up big nets around its buildings to catch them. Nothing about the work or the workplace is changed.

It’s these nets that Apple touts in its just-published Supplier Responsibility report, which details the progress it has made during 2011 in imposing standards on its overseas contractors. The report discusses child labor, factory poisonings and conflict materials. A whole section is devoted to the suicides in 2010 at Foxconn, its largest overseas supplier.