I beg your pardon, but nature is not anthropomorphic and doesn't make decisions. It does encourage trends, as traits are often beneficial for more than one individual and in aggregate. One such trend, exhibited by many humans, is the inclination to categorize and reduce conceptual surface area. This benefits another trend shared by many humans, the ability to use abstract thought. But abstraction, as many nerds should know, is leaky.
One such leak is the conflation of gender with sex. The former is at least partly social, while the latter describes biological traits. This abstraction is sufficient for a majority of people, but frays in a lot of ways, and has enormous dependencies on cultural norms. Nature may influence this, but its influence is refracted through countless prisms of tradition and social expectation, complex structures of direct and entrenched human intervention. Even so, the man/woman social designation of gender is certainly not universal.
Another leak in the abstraction is the conception that sex is rigid and well-defined into two designations. Nature, if it can be anthropomorphized, is far more capricious than that. It's fairly common, as far as biological divergence from trends go, for people to be born intersex. What, would you say, has nature decided for them?
The benefits of categorization, here, are not felt by significant portions of the population. That alone is sufficient reason to consider the faults of abstraction and—let me be absolutely clear to you—keep your damn ignorance out of other people's lives.
the difference between an intern and a slave is the ability to say no.
Did you actually read the passage? One of the slaves was given the opportunity to decline. And did so. And that choice was honored. Obviously the metaphor is, like metaphors, inexact. Obviously the forced laborer will continue to be a forced laborer in the society which permits forced labor, whereas the unpaid intern will continue to be incentivized toward voluntary unpaid labor in a society which permits unpaid labor. There are differences of degree, and even perhaps moral dimensions to one not present in the other. But the reality is that the reasonable expectation is that people perform unpaid labor in both cases.
While a student or graduate could decline unpaid labor, they risk never entering a field related to their studies, and ultimately risk becoming quite literally a slave to their debt in so doing. This is why voluntary slavery is both immoral and illegal, and why it is society's job to dismantle coercive institutions that undermine free choice with the coercive effect of unassailable social structure.
No, computer platform evangelists are the type of people you're interacting with because that is an area of your interest. Most people who use Windows (or any other major platform) don't take such interest and don't interact much with the evangelist type at all.
the left should have made it painfully clear that they didn't care about obama's race at all, and was inconsequential to his candidacy.
Not stating an opinion on race issues isn't the same as combating racism. It's clearly the case that race is still a serious issue in the US, or we wouldn't be having this discussion. That won't go away by deciding not to discuss it.
Instead, they said that if you didn't like him, for any reason, you were inherently racist.
This is just painfully wrong. I'm a leftist. I oppose Obama. I've never once been called racist for that. Not even a little bit. I've been asked if I think it's meaningful or significant that a black person was elected in the US (which I do). I've been challenged on specific opinions I hold about his administration. I've never been called racist for opposing him. And almost everyone I know voted for him.
The reason that so many right-wing opponents of Obama are called racist is because there's been an incredible surge in racist organization in the time since he was nominated and elected, and there's a tremendous amount of overlap between that and the right-wing opponents. I don't think it's entirely fair that a lot of run-of-the-mill conservatives are guilty by association in this, but to be fair the vast majority of the reaction to this has been the sort of defensiveness that you've presented here rather than any kind of meaningful denunciation of racism or even simple attempt to understand why race is an issue for anyone other than old white men. Let me make that as clear as I can: people of color also experience racism, and their experience of it is different from yours. It behooves you to understand that. Even if you are not, yourself, racist.
Guilt by association really isn't fair. But it's also not fair to provide tacit political cover for bigots and claim ignorance when it's used to advance bigotry. Hate-related crimes are and have been on the rise, and white supremacist organizations are stronger than they've been for decades. This isn't an accident.
Don't want to be mistaken for a racist? Spend as much time challenging the racists in your midst as you spend attacking people who aren't as stupid as you think.
You don't know me, and you don't know what I take part in. You're making a lot of assumptions, both about me and about the person you hit with the "that's not the way the world works".
Yeah, someone's dead. Actually, a lot of people get dead because of the way our politics works. It's an enormous challenge to even put a leash on this, much less halt it. And one of the things that destroys efforts to do so is a hostile environment that makes people feel shitty about expressing their ideas. Yeah, maybe getting feelings hurt isn't the end of the world. But it's also not productive. If you actually want people to take action, what are you contributing to that by going internet tough guy? Does it take any more effort to not be a dick to people on the internet just because you can?
Creating a positive environment for discussion can help lead to action. For fuck's sake, creating a positive environment for discussion is a worthy end in itself. Think about it.
That's why we have words like "should". That's what it means! To be but is not.
This kind of tautological realpolitik reasoning is used to bludgeon people away from aspiration, and the effect is to provide manipulative moral support for known harmful policy. The way something is, in itself, is not a defense of the way something is. It's just a statement of fact. It's not insightful. We all know that insofar as people in positions of authority and trust treat other human beings like dirt, by definition that is the way reality plays out. I share the above poster's aspiration to negate that reality. Don't you?
What do you think you're contributing, by belittling aspiration? It's not as if the aspiration is particularly radical or far-flung. It's basically embedded in the philosophical underpinnings of my (and presumably your) society. Do you enjoy the smug satisfaction of waving in others' faces that you're ahead of the curve in accepting and embracing a hostile, corrupt, soul-crushing reality?
I don't even understand why you describe JavaScript as "easy to use". Easy to start using, perhaps. It's probably the same reason PHP is so widely used. Of course wide use means lots of terrible code, most programmers aren't particularly excellent at programming.
JavaScript is highly misunderstood by many programmers, and widely used by people we should properly call non-programmers. Not because of its "ease of use" but because of its wide availability and its position as the front-end web language. Additionally because of widely available, widely used libraries like jQuery that make it simple to do a few things that are simple for non-programmers to reason with. That's not a failing of the language, it's a failing of happenstance.
I've seen some incredible code written in JavaScript. I dare say I've even written some good JS myself. I'm not an idiot, and I quite like the language. There are things I might like to change, but they're few compared to the parts of the language I like. I like it so much, in fact, that I've chosen NodeJS for the biggest project I've ever worked on. It's the best tool for the job, in this case.
But you know... people love to hate JS. I don't want to convince you not to, I really don't care. I don't particularly like being called an idiot as a matter of guilt by association, just as I'm sure you wouldn't like it if I said:
It's possible to write insightful comments on the Internet. Nobody does though, it's just too easy to write crap that works well enough for now. It seems to be the great failing of any "easy to publish" network. Create something simple enough that even an idiot can post their facile opinions on it, and only an idiot will want to.
And I am not saying that, except as a tongue-in-cheek reminder that we all live in a glass house and we might be wise not to throw stones.
First of all, Luddism isn't relevant. Luddites sabotaged industrial equipment out of a pretty clear and direct sense of economic self-interest*, not a sense of skepticism toward technology per se—in other words, anti-globalization protectionism is far more akin to Luddism than skepticism about technological development.
Second of all, everyone should be proud to be labeled "Luddite" in the colloquial sense you're using it. It's a badge of critical thinking. New technological developments are not by definition good, and contrary to modern thinking on the subject technology certainly isn't universally neutral. Some technology is demonstrably, fundamentally harmful. In other words, technology is just like every other product of human activity, and just like every other thing in nature. It's wise to approach new developments, in any of those domains, with skepticism.
* You might argue that this expression of self-interest was short-sighted, but that's a different dispute, one I'd be glad to take on if you're interested.
I'm pretty sure you end up informing against the other prisoner out of paranoid self-interest, even though the obvious intelligent choice is to operate on the assumption that everyone benefits more when you don't.
In terms of the political system working as it should, and the public being listened to, it should be noted that the legalizations in Washington and Colorado were a result of ballot initiatives—direct democracy. To the extent that the initiative process is less compromised than other legislative processes, the result is by definition determined by the public.
Washington and Colorado legalized possession of small amounts, without penalty. I don't know all the details of the Colorado law offhand, but in Washington sales are also legalized. Both states already had medical marijuana, this is legalization for recreational use. At least one other state legalized medical marijuana in the same election.
I think responses like this are missing the forest for the trees in the idea being proposed here.
Let's take a step back. The context of the idea is a dying traditional music industry; most of the old business models are failing. In the old models, there were a number of large marketing and distribution networks who collected the sort of data Keating is asking for, and used that data to inform their marketing and distribution efforts. An organization in the business of successful music sales needs to know the size, makeup and geographical distribution of the audience. As those organizations become increasingly irrelevant, the capacity to make those informed decisions is to some extent decentralized, but also to a large extent in danger of vanishing entirely.
What Keating is asking of "internet radio" (Pandora being a major source of her exposure, but it is really a clarion call to the changing music industry) is to recognize the fact that artists are becoming more and more isolated and atomized, and to create a business model that represents that. If any of the businesses currently "in the game" want to be relevant, they'll allow artists (to the extent they're motivated and willing) to act as their own respective businesses, and do a lot of the work that the old marketing and distribution channels no longer can or want to do.
And it really is a gift to the industry players to publicize the idea this way. The alternative is to build the new model in relative obscurity, grow it and supplant the current players. The idea is about more than data, but that data is central to its success. The real idea, at its core, is that the new model (and she touches on this in her blog post) requires a great deal more individual initiative on the part of artists. And whatever you may think about "whose data is it?" and the fairness of the request, a music industry can't survive if artists fail. A successful, modern music industry would help to foster all of that atomized effort in a productive way. And isn't that, basically, what most of us have been asking for since we saw the writing on the wall for old music business?
Keating and other enterprising artists want a venue to reach their fans. They don't just want this, they require it for commercial success. We, as music fans, require the artists' success for our lives to be enriched by the music. A team of enterprising developers could provide this in a relatively short time (relative, at least, to the pace of the old industry's death), and pretty much steal the show. As Keating says, the new model is supposed to be peripheral sales, the music being the driving force behind those sales. Providing what Keating has asked for is not a concession, it's a recipe for success.
As an artist myself, I've imagined creating a tool of this nature. It's not enough to have a place to upload music files and artwork. It's not even enough to have a couple of form fields to link to the artist's blog. A lot of the elements of a powerful new business model already exist, but they're woefully unintegrated. What artists and fans alike need is a way for everyone to get connected, in a very distinct way from the existing social networks. Artists are businesses in this model, and anyone who empowers them to act in that capacity stands to win the day. And I think we'd all be better off for it.
As a developer, I'm unfortunately indisposed with other work too important to me to pursue a business like this, but I thought it would be helpful to share this perspective in case other developers are reading and want to create the next big thing in music. That thing is: create the tools that artists need to reach their audience. Giving them data lets them adjust their own marketing efforts, their own performance efforts, their own merchandise efforts. Everything else is icing on the cake. These tools are force multipliers, and the more you can accommodate those efforts, the more artists will succeed and the more they'll choose your service. And fans will follow, not just because that's where the music is heading, but also because that service would provide more of what fans want too. Why would I choose the noise of "radio" when there's something better?
No, it doesn't! The mere fact of authority doesn't determine validity. It only determines power. Unless you believe that miscegenation was wrong until the Civil Rights movement changed all that. Or if you believe that being Jewish and existing in nazi Germany was wrong, until the Shoah was ended. Or that it was once wrong to believe that the universe doesn't require a supernatural creator, but is also wrong no longer. Or any number of other formerly prohibited but unquestionably valid thoughts, behaviors, characteristics. (All cases of being no longer wrong depending, of course, upon jurisdiction! Validity is both temporal and geographical? I think not.)
To believe that punishment determines rightness is to believe that power comes from a divine source.
Now, you buried a second claim in your response—that defying authority is stupid. In some cases that may well be true, but in others it may just as well not. It quite depends on what edict you defy, what your values are, what the costs might be and whether they are worth the action having been done.
I should anticipate the stupid claim that I'm assigning some sort of moral equivalency between the parties in TFA and the parties I discussed above, which of course I haven't done and have no intention of doing. Illustrating fallacious reasoning requires no such equivalency. It simply encourages us to consider our arguments more carefully and thoughtfully.
Note that the screenshot I provided is for an external third-party display. No Apple display I'm aware of supports rotation, but the OS does support it for those third-party displays which can be rotated. I expect that the share of Mac users who rotate their non-Apple displays is roughly proportionate to Windows or Linux or other OS users who do the same, but I'm not aware of any data for that. But I doubt the feature would exist if it isn't used.
Argument by punishment (a behavior is wrong because it will be punished) is clearly fallacious. Not that I'm defending Apple, but find a better argument.
Slashdot Mirror
I beg your pardon, but nature is not anthropomorphic and doesn't make decisions. It does encourage trends, as traits are often beneficial for more than one individual and in aggregate. One such trend, exhibited by many humans, is the inclination to categorize and reduce conceptual surface area. This benefits another trend shared by many humans, the ability to use abstract thought. But abstraction, as many nerds should know, is leaky.
One such leak is the conflation of gender with sex. The former is at least partly social, while the latter describes biological traits. This abstraction is sufficient for a majority of people, but frays in a lot of ways, and has enormous dependencies on cultural norms. Nature may influence this, but its influence is refracted through countless prisms of tradition and social expectation, complex structures of direct and entrenched human intervention. Even so, the man/woman social designation of gender is certainly not universal.
Another leak in the abstraction is the conception that sex is rigid and well-defined into two designations. Nature, if it can be anthropomorphized, is far more capricious than that. It's fairly common, as far as biological divergence from trends go, for people to be born intersex. What, would you say, has nature decided for them?
The benefits of categorization, here, are not felt by significant portions of the population. That alone is sufficient reason to consider the faults of abstraction and—let me be absolutely clear to you—keep your damn ignorance out of other people's lives.
the difference between an intern and a slave is the ability to say no.
Did you actually read the passage? One of the slaves was given the opportunity to decline. And did so. And that choice was honored. Obviously the metaphor is, like metaphors, inexact. Obviously the forced laborer will continue to be a forced laborer in the society which permits forced labor, whereas the unpaid intern will continue to be incentivized toward voluntary unpaid labor in a society which permits unpaid labor. There are differences of degree, and even perhaps moral dimensions to one not present in the other. But the reality is that the reasonable expectation is that people perform unpaid labor in both cases.
While a student or graduate could decline unpaid labor, they risk never entering a field related to their studies, and ultimately risk becoming quite literally a slave to their debt in so doing. This is why voluntary slavery is both immoral and illegal, and why it is society's job to dismantle coercive institutions that undermine free choice with the coercive effect of unassailable social structure.
lolwat
No, computer platform evangelists are the type of people you're interacting with because that is an area of your interest. Most people who use Windows (or any other major platform) don't take such interest and don't interact much with the evangelist type at all.
the left should have made it painfully clear that they didn't care about obama's race at all, and was inconsequential to his candidacy.
Not stating an opinion on race issues isn't the same as combating racism. It's clearly the case that race is still a serious issue in the US, or we wouldn't be having this discussion. That won't go away by deciding not to discuss it.
Instead, they said that if you didn't like him, for any reason, you were inherently racist.
This is just painfully wrong. I'm a leftist. I oppose Obama. I've never once been called racist for that. Not even a little bit. I've been asked if I think it's meaningful or significant that a black person was elected in the US (which I do). I've been challenged on specific opinions I hold about his administration. I've never been called racist for opposing him. And almost everyone I know voted for him.
The reason that so many right-wing opponents of Obama are called racist is because there's been an incredible surge in racist organization in the time since he was nominated and elected, and there's a tremendous amount of overlap between that and the right-wing opponents. I don't think it's entirely fair that a lot of run-of-the-mill conservatives are guilty by association in this, but to be fair the vast majority of the reaction to this has been the sort of defensiveness that you've presented here rather than any kind of meaningful denunciation of racism or even simple attempt to understand why race is an issue for anyone other than old white men. Let me make that as clear as I can: people of color also experience racism, and their experience of it is different from yours. It behooves you to understand that. Even if you are not, yourself, racist.
Guilt by association really isn't fair. But it's also not fair to provide tacit political cover for bigots and claim ignorance when it's used to advance bigotry. Hate-related crimes are and have been on the rise, and white supremacist organizations are stronger than they've been for decades. This isn't an accident.
Don't want to be mistaken for a racist? Spend as much time challenging the racists in your midst as you spend attacking people who aren't as stupid as you think.
I haven't looked at the others, but target.com seems fine at first glance on Safari 6.
It doesn't ignore it on Windows either. And I'd recommend testing your sites in Windows FF as well, they're not always quite the same.
I haven't encountered SVG issues in IE10, can you explain more about what was broken?
I would hazard a guess that anyone who consciously cares about user interface is a nerd.
let there %= -2;
You don't know me, and you don't know what I take part in. You're making a lot of assumptions, both about me and about the person you hit with the "that's not the way the world works".
Yeah, someone's dead. Actually, a lot of people get dead because of the way our politics works. It's an enormous challenge to even put a leash on this, much less halt it. And one of the things that destroys efforts to do so is a hostile environment that makes people feel shitty about expressing their ideas. Yeah, maybe getting feelings hurt isn't the end of the world. But it's also not productive. If you actually want people to take action, what are you contributing to that by going internet tough guy? Does it take any more effort to not be a dick to people on the internet just because you can?
Creating a positive environment for discussion can help lead to action. For fuck's sake, creating a positive environment for discussion is a worthy end in itself. Think about it.
You're a piece of work.
Guess what doesn't help aspiration lead to action. Attacking people for expressing their aspirations.
That's why we have words like "should". That's what it means! To be but is not.
This kind of tautological realpolitik reasoning is used to bludgeon people away from aspiration, and the effect is to provide manipulative moral support for known harmful policy. The way something is, in itself, is not a defense of the way something is. It's just a statement of fact. It's not insightful. We all know that insofar as people in positions of authority and trust treat other human beings like dirt, by definition that is the way reality plays out. I share the above poster's aspiration to negate that reality. Don't you?
What do you think you're contributing, by belittling aspiration? It's not as if the aspiration is particularly radical or far-flung. It's basically embedded in the philosophical underpinnings of my (and presumably your) society. Do you enjoy the smug satisfaction of waving in others' faces that you're ahead of the curve in accepting and embracing a hostile, corrupt, soul-crushing reality?
You shouldn't, and don't need to, write Python.
I don't even understand why you describe JavaScript as "easy to use". Easy to start using, perhaps. It's probably the same reason PHP is so widely used. Of course wide use means lots of terrible code, most programmers aren't particularly excellent at programming.
JavaScript is highly misunderstood by many programmers, and widely used by people we should properly call non-programmers. Not because of its "ease of use" but because of its wide availability and its position as the front-end web language. Additionally because of widely available, widely used libraries like jQuery that make it simple to do a few things that are simple for non-programmers to reason with. That's not a failing of the language, it's a failing of happenstance.
I've seen some incredible code written in JavaScript. I dare say I've even written some good JS myself. I'm not an idiot, and I quite like the language. There are things I might like to change, but they're few compared to the parts of the language I like. I like it so much, in fact, that I've chosen NodeJS for the biggest project I've ever worked on. It's the best tool for the job, in this case.
But you know... people love to hate JS. I don't want to convince you not to, I really don't care. I don't particularly like being called an idiot as a matter of guilt by association, just as I'm sure you wouldn't like it if I said:
And I am not saying that, except as a tongue-in-cheek reminder that we all live in a glass house and we might be wise not to throw stones.
You shouldn't, and don't need to, write JavaScript that way either.
First of all, Luddism isn't relevant. Luddites sabotaged industrial equipment out of a pretty clear and direct sense of economic self-interest*, not a sense of skepticism toward technology per se—in other words, anti-globalization protectionism is far more akin to Luddism than skepticism about technological development.
Second of all, everyone should be proud to be labeled "Luddite" in the colloquial sense you're using it. It's a badge of critical thinking. New technological developments are not by definition good, and contrary to modern thinking on the subject technology certainly isn't universally neutral. Some technology is demonstrably, fundamentally harmful. In other words, technology is just like every other product of human activity, and just like every other thing in nature. It's wise to approach new developments, in any of those domains, with skepticism.
* You might argue that this expression of self-interest was short-sighted, but that's a different dispute, one I'd be glad to take on if you're interested.
I'm pretty sure you end up informing against the other prisoner out of paranoid self-interest, even though the obvious intelligent choice is to operate on the assumption that everyone benefits more when you don't.
In terms of the political system working as it should, and the public being listened to, it should be noted that the legalizations in Washington and Colorado were a result of ballot initiatives—direct democracy. To the extent that the initiative process is less compromised than other legislative processes, the result is by definition determined by the public.
Washington and Colorado legalized possession of small amounts, without penalty. I don't know all the details of the Colorado law offhand, but in Washington sales are also legalized. Both states already had medical marijuana, this is legalization for recreational use. At least one other state legalized medical marijuana in the same election.
I think responses like this are missing the forest for the trees in the idea being proposed here.
Let's take a step back. The context of the idea is a dying traditional music industry; most of the old business models are failing. In the old models, there were a number of large marketing and distribution networks who collected the sort of data Keating is asking for, and used that data to inform their marketing and distribution efforts. An organization in the business of successful music sales needs to know the size, makeup and geographical distribution of the audience. As those organizations become increasingly irrelevant, the capacity to make those informed decisions is to some extent decentralized, but also to a large extent in danger of vanishing entirely.
What Keating is asking of "internet radio" (Pandora being a major source of her exposure, but it is really a clarion call to the changing music industry) is to recognize the fact that artists are becoming more and more isolated and atomized, and to create a business model that represents that. If any of the businesses currently "in the game" want to be relevant, they'll allow artists (to the extent they're motivated and willing) to act as their own respective businesses, and do a lot of the work that the old marketing and distribution channels no longer can or want to do.
And it really is a gift to the industry players to publicize the idea this way. The alternative is to build the new model in relative obscurity, grow it and supplant the current players. The idea is about more than data, but that data is central to its success. The real idea, at its core, is that the new model (and she touches on this in her blog post) requires a great deal more individual initiative on the part of artists. And whatever you may think about "whose data is it?" and the fairness of the request, a music industry can't survive if artists fail. A successful, modern music industry would help to foster all of that atomized effort in a productive way. And isn't that, basically, what most of us have been asking for since we saw the writing on the wall for old music business?
Keating and other enterprising artists want a venue to reach their fans. They don't just want this, they require it for commercial success. We, as music fans, require the artists' success for our lives to be enriched by the music. A team of enterprising developers could provide this in a relatively short time (relative, at least, to the pace of the old industry's death), and pretty much steal the show. As Keating says, the new model is supposed to be peripheral sales, the music being the driving force behind those sales. Providing what Keating has asked for is not a concession, it's a recipe for success.
As an artist myself, I've imagined creating a tool of this nature. It's not enough to have a place to upload music files and artwork. It's not even enough to have a couple of form fields to link to the artist's blog. A lot of the elements of a powerful new business model already exist, but they're woefully unintegrated. What artists and fans alike need is a way for everyone to get connected, in a very distinct way from the existing social networks. Artists are businesses in this model, and anyone who empowers them to act in that capacity stands to win the day. And I think we'd all be better off for it.
As a developer, I'm unfortunately indisposed with other work too important to me to pursue a business like this, but I thought it would be helpful to share this perspective in case other developers are reading and want to create the next big thing in music. That thing is: create the tools that artists need to reach their audience. Giving them data lets them adjust their own marketing efforts, their own performance efforts, their own merchandise efforts. Everything else is icing on the cake. These tools are force multipliers, and the more you can accommodate those efforts, the more artists will succeed and the more they'll choose your service. And fans will follow, not just because that's where the music is heading, but also because that service would provide more of what fans want too. Why would I choose the noise of "radio" when there's something better?
No, it doesn't! The mere fact of authority doesn't determine validity. It only determines power. Unless you believe that miscegenation was wrong until the Civil Rights movement changed all that. Or if you believe that being Jewish and existing in nazi Germany was wrong, until the Shoah was ended. Or that it was once wrong to believe that the universe doesn't require a supernatural creator, but is also wrong no longer. Or any number of other formerly prohibited but unquestionably valid thoughts, behaviors, characteristics. (All cases of being no longer wrong depending, of course, upon jurisdiction! Validity is both temporal and geographical? I think not.)
To believe that punishment determines rightness is to believe that power comes from a divine source.
Now, you buried a second claim in your response—that defying authority is stupid. In some cases that may well be true, but in others it may just as well not. It quite depends on what edict you defy, what your values are, what the costs might be and whether they are worth the action having been done.
I should anticipate the stupid claim that I'm assigning some sort of moral equivalency between the parties in TFA and the parties I discussed above, which of course I haven't done and have no intention of doing. Illustrating fallacious reasoning requires no such equivalency. It simply encourages us to consider our arguments more carefully and thoughtfully.
Note that the screenshot I provided is for an external third-party display. No Apple display I'm aware of supports rotation, but the OS does support it for those third-party displays which can be rotated. I expect that the share of Mac users who rotate their non-Apple displays is roughly proportionate to Windows or Linux or other OS users who do the same, but I'm not aware of any data for that. But I doubt the feature would exist if it isn't used.
Argument by punishment (a behavior is wrong because it will be punished) is clearly fallacious. Not that I'm defending Apple, but find a better argument.
All current Macs (OS X) support rotated display for displays that support rotation (no Apple-branded displays, but many from third-party vendors).
http://cl.ly/image/3z37153l2G1S