"The difference between Apple and Microsoft is that Apple does not have a monopoly on the desktop; IBM saw to that quite effectively, thank god. "
So you're thanking God for the fact that IBM had a monopoly on computing which ensured that they would be able to sell yet another overpriced and entirely non-innovative product to their then huge number of corporate customers.
"Unfortunately, they also contributed directly to the rise of Microsoft..."
Anybody who remembers IBM during their market dominance period isn't in the least surprised by the fact that a company which was famed among techies for using extremely questionable business practices to sell technologically uninspiring products for high prices to PHBs gave birth to a company that's famed among techies for using extremely questionable business practices to sell technologically uninspiring products to PHBs for high prices.
Note also that IBM didn't prevent Apple from having a monopoly, because computer sales statistics from 1975 to 2005 reveal that they didn't approach having a dominant market share at any time in their history. Their highest aggregate was in 1984 (when the Mac was launched) at 21.82%, with the bast bulk being Apple-II sales, while the Mac alone had 6% of the market. Commodore was Apple's biggest competitor that year, with the Commodore-64 having 39.54% of the market, while IBM PCs and clones had 31.64%. Apple's share dropped to 14.5% the next year (2.6% for Macs), and continued to drop until 1991, when a sales surge took them to 12%. which they sustained for a year, after which it began dropping again, a trend which would continue for many years.
First you say "C++ doesn't have late binding", and then "You don't even mention polymorphism, which is the essence of OO".
Polymorphism, late binding, and dynamic binding are different ways of describing the same thing, so if, as you claim, C++ doesn't have late binding, then it cannot have polymorphism, "the essence of OO".
"it is definitely a property of statically typed languages that once you get something to compile, it's much more likely to do something, as opposed to a language like C"
I think you mean strongly typed rather than statically typed, because C is a statically typed language.
"Thankfully for Virgin's survival I believe they are the same group of people who like to be classified as hipsters and are the 2% Mac owning populous [sic]"
Doctorow alienated Mac hipsters in 2006 by announcing that, after supporting Apple for a long time, he was switching to Ubuntu Linux because Apple still insist on behaving like Apple, so instead of representing the 2% hipster market, he's now playing to the popular and influential 0.16% beard and kaftan sector.
As we all know, an influential figure like Doctorow publicly splitting with Apple was an extremely painful experience for the company, especially its accountants, who had to work overtime to count all the extra money that was rolling in, sometimes with tragic results such as having less time to spend with their families. But Apple's loss was Ubuntu's gain, leading to kaftan wearers predicting that famous celebrities like Doctorow moving to Ubuntu indicated that 2006 was the Year Of Linux On The Desktop.
"the term free software is commonly used as a synonym for open source software"
This is obviously a new definition of the term "commonly used", because if you asked random people on the street what free software was, the majority of those who had any opinion at all would say it was software they don't have to pay for.
Unlike for example the Romance languages, English doesn't have separate words for "free" as in freedom and "free" when applied to other things, so its meaning has to be derived from context, which is _commonly_ applied in the following way:
When describing a person or something people do, it means free as in freedom (free speech, free to leave, free vote, freeman, free market, etc.).
If applied to an item, it indicates not having to pay (free hamburgers, free beer, free X with N purchases of Y, five free Blu Ray movies with every Playstation 3).
Having to explain that this particular meaning of "free" isn't what most would assume from its context and moaning when the press also use common contextual inferences when talking about it should serve as an indicator to those who coined the term that they need a better one, but in typical geek fashion, they arrogantly assume everyone else is wrong instead, and point to Wikipedia articles written by people like themselves as proof.
"So I guess the question was, was the Titanic "safe" by the standards of that time-period?"
It was considerably safer than anything else around when it was launched.
"Would the parts have been considered sub-standard then?"
No. What is termed "brittle fracture" in steel ship hulls continued to be a problem until well into the 1940s, with US-built WWII "liberty ships" being especially prone to it:
"I wonder what the standards/testing were back then"
People didn't know that steel can become brittle at low temperatures then, so testing procedures wouldn't have shown any problems.
"I'd imagine that one positive result of the titanic sinking would have been a stronger focus on such things leading to the present."
The wreck of the Titanic lies in extremely deep water, so nobody knew that brittle steel was a factor in her demise until the 1990s, when technology capable of examining the wreck in detail and retrieving hull plates and rivets from such extreme depths became generally available. Many changes were made as a result of the Titanic's sinking, some of which had a profound effect on safety, but they were obviously based on factors that those investigating the incident could obtain from witness testimonies and ships' logs, which was the only source of information they had.
"Guess you're right with the west country folk, it's just that I've never spoken to any of them because they tend to drive tractors rather than work in oil companies"
Now be fair, they don't all drive tractors. Some of them are unemployed, so they don't get to work with tractors, and can't afford one of their own.
"The desire for privacy is fading fast. Those of us over the age of 25 still care about it for the most part, but the youngest generation doesn't."
That's because people over the age of 25 know that they spent most of their teenage years dressing and looking like a stupid arsehole, acting like a stupid arsehole, and spouting the sort of BS that could only come from the mind of a stupid arsehole. "It's a good thing", they say to themselves, "that I didn't have a way of advertising what a stupid arsehole I was to the rest of the world for eternity, otherwise I'd have been just the sort of stupid arsehole who would use it".
"This can be clearly seen in their wholehearted adoption of myspace and facebook, putting all the intimate details of their personal lives on the web for anyone to see."
A practice they will regret when they're also over 25, and find out why older over 25s are extremely grateful for the fact that such things didn't exist when they were teenagers.
"I predict that, within 30 years, the whole notion of "privacy" as a right will be completely forgotten, simply because the younger generations aren't interested in it."
I reckon that the current situation will last until enough people have found out the hard way why having a permanent and universally accessible record of one's lamest moments, thoughts, and desires is an extremely bad idea. There will of course be a minority of them who still do it, just like there are a minority who use more venerable technologies such as cars to do stupid things, but we'll eventually be in a situation where most will regard putting daft crap about one's self on the Internet as being akin to plastering their town with posters containing a naked picture together with their name, address, phone number, etc.
"So the issue here is a lack of useful larnyx to produce certain vowel sounds.
Since when is language dependent on that? It's just icing."
Agreed in full. Human languages tend to use vowels for certain things because they're a sound we're good at making, but that doesn't mean equally sophisticated ones cannot exist with fewer of them, or even none.
There are many languages that use certain sounds to convey meaning which don't have the same function in Indo-European ones. Thai for example uses rising and falling voice frequencies to make the same word mean something entirely different, while some Polynesian languages use vowel lengths and glottal stops to do the same thing, yet the fact our Indo-European language groups don't attach the same significance to those sounds doesn't prevent them from expressing exactly the same things.
"He had several features that suggested he had Neanderthal genes in his blood. He had a very pronounced brow ridge, the lumbering aspect you would expect of a Neanderthal and solid muscle mass."
The pronounced brow ridge is a feature of acromegaly, which is a common cause of giantism in humans (it's a disorder where the pituitary gland produces excessive amounts of growth hormone). Long, pronounced chins are also common in sufferers.
Note also the Neanderthals didn't lumber, but walked pretty much as we do.
"English people tend not to be great at pronouncing rs"
Unless they come from the West Country or Lancashire, which were still parts of England the last time I looked.
"and they also pronounce ng as ngk, which is extremely annoyingk to me"
"English people" are people who live in England, and England has a wide variety of accents and vernacular vocabularies, so the English don't pronounce anything in a particular way.
They do _now_. Many of today's manufacturers have however been around since the days when there not only wasn't any safety testing at all, but a number of practices which we now know contribute to severe injuries and deaths in accidents were common in the industry.
The Titanic was launched in 1912. There were many cars from a variety of manufacturers on offer that year all over the world, absolutely none of which would pass _any_ modern safety test.
"A better parallel would be if the cars were inadequately built or designed so that in the event they did crash into large stationary objects there was less chance of escape."
A great many of them had a number of design and / or manufacturing flaws which adversely affected passenger safety in collisions. You even cite one yourself:
"The US Ford Pinto, prone to gas tank explosions for example, or maybe a hypothetical airbag with substandard seams that splits on impact."
There were many others that were pretty common at certain points in automotive history which killed and severely injured people, e.g.:
- Sharp protuberances on steering wheels and instrument panels and metal rear-view mirrors screwed in place.
- Windscreens made of normal glass or toughened glass.
- Bodies made without collapsing panels that passed impact forces directly to the passenger compartment.
- Vans made with sliding doors that jammed if distorted slightly, trapping the occupants inside.
- Trucks with engines inside the passenger compartment.
- Vehicle tops which collapsed in rolls, and convertibles designed without roll-bars.
"Carmakers don't claim their cars are un-totallable."
Harland and Wolff didn't say that the Titanic was unsinkable. White Star Lines and several newspaper and magazine articles of the time made that claim, not the shipbuilder.
I often wonder why any car makers are still in business considering how many of their products fail spectacularly when driven into trees, stone walls, large pieces of concrete, and other vehicles.
Another excellent, and more recent example was the hysteria over ritual satanic abuse based on so-called "hidden memories" that certain psychologists and psychiatrists claimed to have recovered from people who they hypnotised. Children were taken away from their families, people got sent to jail, newspaper articles and books were written about the great satanic plot which was so immense and endemic that it had ensnared entire communities in its evil clutches, and police forces in many countries (for this was far from being restricted to the USA) wasted resources digging up bits of land where the sacrificed corpses of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of ritually sacrificed babies were supposed to be buried without ever finding a single piece of physical evidence to back up any of the claims.
The above is a pattern that's been repeated in pogroms throughout history: somebody accuses somebody else of doing nasty things, quite frequently to babies or children (Jews eat babies, witches eat babies and children and make candles out of their fat, etc.); other people start making similar accusations; the authorities react, hysteria grows, and "they" start popping up everywhere that people look, thus proving how massive and deeply entrenched the conspiracy is at every level of society, so those charged with investigating it inevitably start to assume that accusation is proof of guilt, and association with the guilty is also proof of guilt (if that person was an X, and you didn't run and tell the authorities, you must either be an X sympathiser, or another X).
"Just like last time their would be bullet points and number comparisons that tried to make a system look like what Apple offers, but using lower quality components."
The 'clones" weren't using lower quality components when Apple sold their OS and ROMs. They used commodity components and lower margins to undercut Apple in every segment of the Mac market while often offering superior performance, so Apple found themselves in much the same position same as IBM were in when their PC and AT sales were hit by wide-scale cloning, but they didn't have IBM's gigantic corporate user base to help alleviate the situation.
"This means more failures, many of which are blamed on the OS, and tarnishes Apple's brand, while at the same time stealing some of their sales."
I've seen no evidence to suggest that the old Mac clones were less reliable than Apple's own machines, or that people blamed the OS for any failures that occurred with them. The problem was that the Apple which existed in the period between Jobs getting ousted and coming back again was unable to find a way to differentiate its own large range of far from universally wonderful machines from the cheaper and frequently better clones, and the licensing revenues they were earning from those manufacturing them weren't enough to offset the impact they were having on Apple's hardware sales.
It would be even harder for Apple to to differentiate themselves today if they licensed OS X, because they're now selling X86-based PCs that use commodity hardware which other manufacturers can buy off the shelf. It's a better class of commodity hardware than one gets with a budget PC, but it would be extremely difficult to claim that it's objectively better than some of the kit that's available from the likes of Lenovo, Sony, and even HP, who have a higher priced range of business computers that's much better in quality terms than their consumer-oriented offerings.
"Generally, being poor is the result of immorality, not the cause."
And generally, those who are in fortunate positions tend to mistake their own smug and self-righteous prejudices for facts. Furthermore, by writing this, I have conclusively proven that you aren't the only one who can post pieces of utter tripe to/.
"Apple refuses to sell their OS into this market because it monopolized and there is no business case"
It's more likely a case of Jobs remembering what happened the last time Apple offered MacOS to OEMs, who ended up competing with them in the existing Mac market instead of expanding it as Apple had hoped.
"There are hotlines for every manner of anonymous tip, and in some cases (frex, ANY allegation, no matter how spurious, of child or animal abuse) those anonymous tips carry the full force of standard evidence, and are so treated by law enforcement and by the courts."
Voting machines haven't been discredited in the eyes of the partisan organisations that buy them, who reckon that a system which can be tampered with to show that their candidate won irrespective of how people voted is working in precisely the way that they want.
"There are hotlines for every manner of anonymous tip, and in some cases (frex, ANY allegation, no matter how spurious, of child or animal abuse) those anonymous tips carry the full force of standard evidence, and are so treated by law enforcement and by the courts."
There's also the Trial By Media factor, which can completely ruin a person's life by permanently labelling them as a criminal even if they're subsequently found not guilty in a court of law.
"A certain percentage of the US population is black, therefore it is expected that an equivalent percentage of American game developers are too."
It should therefore follow that an equivalent percentage of the US prison population is black, but strangely there seem to be disproportionately more of them. I personally blame this for the famous Crime Gene, which all black people are born with, so both the police and juries automatically know that any black person who is in possession of something that's fairly new and reasonably expensive must have stolen it from a white person, and should therefore be locked away for a long period to ensure that white property is safe.
The same does of course apply to drugs thanks to the Dealing Gene that blacks are also born with. So while it's perfectly acceptable to send a young white person who is caught with a small amount of drugs to a rehabilitation center because they obviously have a problem, possessing the same amount of drugs while being black is evidence of dealing them, possibly to white people who would not otherwise need to waste small portions of their lives in rehabilitation centers. Locking the buggers up for a few years is therefore justified, because taking tawny dealers off the streets is the only way to prevent them from forcing innocent white people to buy and take their junk.
"If they are not, it indicates some sort confounding variable that might (and in this case almost certainly does) indicate some sort of social inequity that needs to be addressed."
It's a simple matter of arithmetic, because every black person who is in jail means one less black person to develop games.
Slashdot Mirror
"The difference between Apple and Microsoft is that Apple does not have a monopoly on the desktop; IBM saw to that quite effectively, thank god. "
So you're thanking God for the fact that IBM had a monopoly on computing which ensured that they would be able to sell yet another overpriced and entirely non-innovative product to their then huge number of corporate customers.
"Unfortunately, they also contributed directly to the rise of Microsoft..."
Anybody who remembers IBM during their market dominance period isn't in the least surprised by the fact that a company which was famed among techies for using extremely questionable business practices to sell technologically uninspiring products for high prices to PHBs gave birth to a company that's famed among techies for using extremely questionable business practices to sell technologically uninspiring products to PHBs for high prices.
Note also that IBM didn't prevent Apple from having a monopoly, because computer sales statistics from 1975 to 2005 reveal that they didn't approach having a dominant market share at any time in their history. Their highest aggregate was in 1984 (when the Mac was launched) at 21.82%, with the bast bulk being Apple-II sales, while the Mac alone had 6% of the market. Commodore was Apple's biggest competitor that year, with the Commodore-64 having 39.54% of the market, while IBM PCs and clones had 31.64%. Apple's share dropped to 14.5% the next year (2.6% for Macs), and continued to drop until 1991, when a sales surge took them to 12%. which they sustained for a year, after which it began dropping again, a trend which would continue for many years.
First you say "C++ doesn't have late binding", and then "You don't even mention polymorphism, which is the essence of OO".
Polymorphism, late binding, and dynamic binding are different ways of describing the same thing, so if, as you claim, C++ doesn't have late binding, then it cannot have polymorphism, "the essence of OO".
"it is definitely a property of statically typed languages that once you get something to compile, it's much more likely to do something, as opposed to a language like C"
I think you mean strongly typed rather than statically typed, because C is a statically typed language.
"Thankfully for Virgin's survival I believe they are the same group of people who like to be classified as hipsters and are the 2% Mac owning populous [sic]"
Doctorow alienated Mac hipsters in 2006 by announcing that, after supporting Apple for a long time, he was switching to Ubuntu Linux because Apple still insist on behaving like Apple, so instead of representing the 2% hipster market, he's now playing to the popular and influential 0.16% beard and kaftan sector.
As we all know, an influential figure like Doctorow publicly splitting with Apple was an extremely painful experience for the company, especially its accountants, who had to work overtime to count all the extra money that was rolling in, sometimes with tragic results such as having less time to spend with their families. But Apple's loss was Ubuntu's gain, leading to kaftan wearers predicting that famous celebrities like Doctorow moving to Ubuntu indicated that 2006 was the Year Of Linux On The Desktop.
"I've just solved the prostitution problem for the US using the same approach"
The US citizen EULA has prohibited prostitution for many years, but acts of sex piracy continue to be a problem.
"the term free software is commonly used as a synonym for open source software"
This is obviously a new definition of the term "commonly used", because if you asked random people on the street what free software was, the majority of those who had any opinion at all would say it was software they don't have to pay for.
Unlike for example the Romance languages, English doesn't have separate words for "free" as in freedom and "free" when applied to other things, so its meaning has to be derived from context, which is _commonly_ applied in the following way:
When describing a person or something people do, it means free as in freedom (free speech, free to leave, free vote, freeman, free market, etc.).
If applied to an item, it indicates not having to pay (free hamburgers, free beer, free X with N purchases of Y, five free Blu Ray movies with every Playstation 3).
Having to explain that this particular meaning of "free" isn't what most would assume from its context and moaning when the press also use common contextual inferences when talking about it should serve as an indicator to those who coined the term that they need a better one, but in typical geek fashion, they arrogantly assume everyone else is wrong instead, and point to Wikipedia articles written by people like themselves as proof.
"So I guess the question was, was the Titanic "safe" by the standards of that time-period?"
It was considerably safer than anything else around when it was launched.
"Would the parts have been considered sub-standard then?"
No. What is termed "brittle fracture" in steel ship hulls continued to be a problem until well into the 1940s, with US-built WWII "liberty ships" being especially prone to it:
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.war.world-war-ii/browse_thread/thread/198c71d65a05e535
http://www.kudzumonthly.com/kudzu/jun02/OldSteel.html
http://shippai.jst.go.jp/en/Detail?fn=0&id=CB1011020&
"I wonder what the standards/testing were back then"
People didn't know that steel can become brittle at low temperatures then, so testing procedures wouldn't have shown any problems.
"I'd imagine that one positive result of the titanic sinking would have been a stronger focus on such things leading to the present."
The wreck of the Titanic lies in extremely deep water, so nobody knew that brittle steel was a factor in her demise until the 1990s, when technology capable of examining the wreck in detail and retrieving hull plates and rivets from such extreme depths became generally available. Many changes were made as a result of the Titanic's sinking, some of which had a profound effect on safety, but they were obviously based on factors that those investigating the incident could obtain from witness testimonies and ships' logs, which was the only source of information they had.
"Guess you're right with the west country folk, it's just that I've never spoken to any of them because they tend to drive tractors rather than work in oil companies"
Now be fair, they don't all drive tractors. Some of them are unemployed, so they don't get to work with tractors, and can't afford one of their own.
"The desire for privacy is fading fast. Those of us over the age of 25 still care about it for the most part, but the youngest generation doesn't."
That's because people over the age of 25 know that they spent most of their teenage years dressing and looking like a stupid arsehole, acting like a stupid arsehole, and spouting the sort of BS that could only come from the mind of a stupid arsehole. "It's a good thing", they say to themselves, "that I didn't have a way of advertising what a stupid arsehole I was to the rest of the world for eternity, otherwise I'd have been just the sort of stupid arsehole who would use it".
"This can be clearly seen in their wholehearted adoption of myspace and facebook, putting all the intimate details of their personal lives on the web for anyone to see."
A practice they will regret when they're also over 25, and find out why older over 25s are extremely grateful for the fact that such things didn't exist when they were teenagers.
"I predict that, within 30 years, the whole notion of "privacy" as a right will be completely forgotten, simply because the younger generations aren't interested in it."
I reckon that the current situation will last until enough people have found out the hard way why having a permanent and universally accessible record of one's lamest moments, thoughts, and desires is an extremely bad idea. There will of course be a minority of them who still do it, just like there are a minority who use more venerable technologies such as cars to do stupid things, but we'll eventually be in a situation where most will regard putting daft crap about one's self on the Internet as being akin to plastering their town with posters containing a naked picture together with their name, address, phone number, etc.
"So the issue here is a lack of useful larnyx to produce certain vowel sounds.
Since when is language dependent on that? It's just icing."
Agreed in full. Human languages tend to use vowels for certain things because they're a sound we're good at making, but that doesn't mean equally sophisticated ones cannot exist with fewer of them, or even none.
There are many languages that use certain sounds to convey meaning which don't have the same function in Indo-European ones. Thai for example uses rising and falling voice frequencies to make the same word mean something entirely different, while some Polynesian languages use vowel lengths and glottal stops to do the same thing, yet the fact our Indo-European language groups don't attach the same significance to those sounds doesn't prevent them from expressing exactly the same things.
"He had several features that suggested he had Neanderthal genes in his blood. He had a very pronounced brow ridge, the lumbering aspect you would expect of a Neanderthal and solid muscle mass."
The pronounced brow ridge is a feature of acromegaly, which is a common cause of giantism in humans (it's a disorder where the pituitary gland produces excessive amounts of growth hormone). Long, pronounced chins are also common in sufferers.
Note also the Neanderthals didn't lumber, but walked pretty much as we do.
"English people tend not to be great at pronouncing rs"
Unless they come from the West Country or Lancashire, which were still parts of England the last time I looked.
"and they also pronounce ng as ngk, which is extremely annoyingk to me"
"English people" are people who live in England, and England has a wide variety of accents and vernacular vocabularies, so the English don't pronounce anything in a particular way.
"For most people it wouldn't matter, but spammers would get charged massively"
Except of course for those who use botnets controlled by compromised servers to send spam, which is most of them nowadays.
"Well, cars do goes through safety testing, etc."
They do _now_. Many of today's manufacturers have however been around since the days when there not only wasn't any safety testing at all, but a number of practices which we now know contribute to severe injuries and deaths in accidents were common in the industry.
The Titanic was launched in 1912. There were many cars from a variety of manufacturers on offer that year all over the world, absolutely none of which would pass _any_ modern safety test.
"A better parallel would be if the cars were inadequately built or designed so that in the event they did crash into large stationary objects there was less chance of escape."
A great many of them had a number of design and / or manufacturing flaws which adversely affected passenger safety in collisions. You even cite one yourself:
"The US Ford Pinto, prone to gas tank explosions for example, or maybe a hypothetical airbag with substandard seams that splits on impact."
There were many others that were pretty common at certain points in automotive history which killed and severely injured people, e.g.:
- Sharp protuberances on steering wheels and instrument panels and metal rear-view mirrors screwed in place.
- Windscreens made of normal glass or toughened glass.
- Bodies made without collapsing panels that passed impact forces directly to the passenger compartment.
- Vans made with sliding doors that jammed if distorted slightly, trapping the occupants inside.
- Trucks with engines inside the passenger compartment.
- Vehicle tops which collapsed in rolls, and convertibles designed without roll-bars.
"Carmakers don't claim their cars are un-totallable."
Harland and Wolff didn't say that the Titanic was unsinkable. White Star Lines and several newspaper and magazine articles of the time made that claim, not the shipbuilder.
I often wonder why any car makers are still in business considering how many of their products fail spectacularly when driven into trees, stone walls, large pieces of concrete, and other vehicles.
I was borned in 1960, then I caught abneeza.
Another excellent, and more recent example was the hysteria over ritual satanic abuse based on so-called "hidden memories" that certain psychologists and psychiatrists claimed to have recovered from people who they hypnotised. Children were taken away from their families, people got sent to jail, newspaper articles and books were written about the great satanic plot which was so immense and endemic that it had ensnared entire communities in its evil clutches, and police forces in many countries (for this was far from being restricted to the USA) wasted resources digging up bits of land where the sacrificed corpses of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of ritually sacrificed babies were supposed to be buried without ever finding a single piece of physical evidence to back up any of the claims.
The above is a pattern that's been repeated in pogroms throughout history: somebody accuses somebody else of doing nasty things, quite frequently to babies or children (Jews eat babies, witches eat babies and children and make candles out of their fat, etc.); other people start making similar accusations; the authorities react, hysteria grows, and "they" start popping up everywhere that people look, thus proving how massive and deeply entrenched the conspiracy is at every level of society, so those charged with investigating it inevitably start to assume that accusation is proof of guilt, and association with the guilty is also proof of guilt (if that person was an X, and you didn't run and tell the authorities, you must either be an X sympathiser, or another X).
"Just like last time their would be bullet points and number comparisons that tried to make a system look like what Apple offers, but using lower quality components."
The 'clones" weren't using lower quality components when Apple sold their OS and ROMs. They used commodity components and lower margins to undercut Apple in every segment of the Mac market while often offering superior performance, so Apple found themselves in much the same position same as IBM were in when their PC and AT sales were hit by wide-scale cloning, but they didn't have IBM's gigantic corporate user base to help alleviate the situation.
"This means more failures, many of which are blamed on the OS, and tarnishes Apple's brand, while at the same time stealing some of their sales."
I've seen no evidence to suggest that the old Mac clones were less reliable than Apple's own machines, or that people blamed the OS for any failures that occurred with them. The problem was that the Apple which existed in the period between Jobs getting ousted and coming back again was unable to find a way to differentiate its own large range of far from universally wonderful machines from the cheaper and frequently better clones, and the licensing revenues they were earning from those manufacturing them weren't enough to offset the impact they were having on Apple's hardware sales.
It would be even harder for Apple to to differentiate themselves today if they licensed OS X, because they're now selling X86-based PCs that use commodity hardware which other manufacturers can buy off the shelf. It's a better class of commodity hardware than one gets with a budget PC, but it would be extremely difficult to claim that it's objectively better than some of the kit that's available from the likes of Lenovo, Sony, and even HP, who have a higher priced range of business computers that's much better in quality terms than their consumer-oriented offerings.
"Generally, being poor is the result of immorality, not the cause."
/.
And generally, those who are in fortunate positions tend to mistake their own smug and self-righteous prejudices for facts. Furthermore, by writing this, I have conclusively proven that you aren't the only one who can post pieces of utter tripe to
"Apple refuses to sell their OS into this market because it monopolized and there is no business case"
It's more likely a case of Jobs remembering what happened the last time Apple offered MacOS to OEMs, who ended up competing with them in the existing Mac market instead of expanding it as Apple had hoped.
"There are hotlines for every manner of anonymous tip, and in some cases (frex, ANY allegation, no matter how spurious, of child or animal abuse) those anonymous tips carry the full force of standard evidence, and are so treated by law enforcement and by the courts."
Voting machines haven't been discredited in the eyes of the partisan organisations that buy them, who reckon that a system which can be tampered with to show that their candidate won irrespective of how people voted is working in precisely the way that they want.
"There are hotlines for every manner of anonymous tip, and in some cases (frex, ANY allegation, no matter how spurious, of child or animal abuse) those anonymous tips carry the full force of standard evidence, and are so treated by law enforcement and by the courts."
There's also the Trial By Media factor, which can completely ruin a person's life by permanently labelling them as a criminal even if they're subsequently found not guilty in a court of law.
"A certain percentage of the US population is black, therefore it is expected that an equivalent percentage of American game developers are too."
It should therefore follow that an equivalent percentage of the US prison population is black, but strangely there seem to be disproportionately more of them. I personally blame this for the famous Crime Gene, which all black people are born with, so both the police and juries automatically know that any black person who is in possession of something that's fairly new and reasonably expensive must have stolen it from a white person, and should therefore be locked away for a long period to ensure that white property is safe.
The same does of course apply to drugs thanks to the Dealing Gene that blacks are also born with. So while it's perfectly acceptable to send a young white person who is caught with a small amount of drugs to a rehabilitation center because they obviously have a problem, possessing the same amount of drugs while being black is evidence of dealing them, possibly to white people who would not otherwise need to waste small portions of their lives in rehabilitation centers. Locking the buggers up for a few years is therefore justified, because taking tawny dealers off the streets is the only way to prevent them from forcing innocent white people to buy and take their junk.
"If they are not, it indicates some sort confounding variable that might (and in this case almost certainly does) indicate some sort of social inequity that needs to be addressed."
It's a simple matter of arithmetic, because every black person who is in jail means one less black person to develop games.