I have an idea - make this issue solved via direct popular vote. Ranked choice, variants range from “Apple owns your butts” to “Apple should be punished with its monthly margin for failing to deliver hourly orgasms with its devices” to “Apple open sources and PD’s everything or Apple leaves”.

They’ll be interested themselves in making the OS as convenient for normal usage as possible. Including the walled garden part. OK, just a thought experiment.

Nah, just a thorough reproduction of the consequences of that wrong.

Yeah, except their UI design was somehow very overloading. Very nice, especially for 90s, but nausea-inducing purely physically.

They at some point boasted that their stuff can be used without hoops and intentional impediments. In Hypercard and such times.

It seems crazy, but they even paid authors of kinda sci-fi or futuristic stories featuring their hardware.

They made it seem they are almost an anarchist company.

They also, which is even harder to believe now, aimed at advanced usage. As in - “works out of the box” and “even a child can use it” and “everything graphical”, but at the same time in that spirit, which Hotline and KDX and PureData still reminisce. A user-friendly application which is not dumb.

It’s actually useful to see, to understand that modern commercial claims of “user-friendly == dumb” are aimed at nothing else than centralized control and obscure shit under the hood.

And also the guy whose company, in the olden days of Hangouts and Google Wave, many people considered to be “the corporation of good”.

And compared to Facebook, Apple, of course MS, yadda-yadda that was easy to believe.

So - that’s the price of “cool and respectable”.

With all due respect

Buddy, nobody cares about your respect if you can’t make simple choices like this.

No it doesn’t. Sometimes it means Stalin.

They didn’t stop handing out harsh punishments. Just in a highly unpredictable, unequal and arbitrary pattern.

I’ve read someplace that the main difference between modernity and middle ages in legal practice was that in modernity punishments were relatively small, but unavoidable, while in middle ages most criminals avoided punishments, but here and there some poor idiot would be made an example of in a highly disproportionate way, like being quartered for stealing some shit and being rude to a priest.

There are South African official crime stats. That’s an answer to “what stats”.

Neither did you provide any data, somehow in the Internet it’s always only the other side that should do it. That’s an answer to “you haven’t provided any stats”.

I might look up something later, no earlier than Saturday.

If lying does the job …

Well, if you’ve noticed, the punishments have been becoming less and less over many years, unless you are a small-to-medium business or an individual, in that case you have more rules and more punishments.

Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.

Unfortunately others are deciding on web standards mostly. Which makes it hard for it to keep up even if it were trying to be such.

Also Mozilla was kinda that, until it wasn’t - because they decided to go the other way and because apparently they lacked money (doesn’t look like that from their spending, but).

Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big.

That’s not entirely correct. Black and white stones used in voting in someplace antique also have no actual value, but they substitute a vote.

BTC is used as a mechanism of exchange, like a decentralized bank.

Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation.

Would you agree if someone told you that the only thing to resolve some political problem is heavy artillery?

Or would you doubt that the person talking has good idea of the problem and the solutions, offering the bluntest one?

“Regulation” of the “property rights protection” kind is needed. Providing a service presented as a good that doesn’t work without dancing to a certain tune is simply cheating, it’s theft. Providing a “communication platform” augmenting and weighing your words for recommendation system leading to some intended effect is cheating, theft and impersonation at the same time. These should be prosecuted. But that’s not heavy regulation, that’s an update to pretty light regulation.

Maybe also obligation for every big service on the Internet to have global identifiers and provide a global API exposing all its inner entities, be that posts or users or comments or reactions, with those global identifiers. So that you could export all of Facebook to a decentralized cache, for example. That’s heavy regulation, but also pretty reasonable, in line with old approaches to libraries, press and freedom of speech.

It’s not so trivial, different BIOS’es have different hotkeys to enter setup, different functionality, and device drivers are usually provided certainly only for the main OS.

Perhaps legal obligation to provide proper datasheets (easy to do, ye-es? they already certainly have those, ye-es, otherwise how did they make that Windblows\MockOS driver?) for device manufacturers and sellers (cause I the customer shouldn’t care to look for them, everything should be in the box in paper form ; just like all other schematics, if in 1970s you’d tell someone that a complex expensive machine is sold to customers without schematics, people wouldn’t believe you, they’d say you’re nuts, they’d ask where the regulators are sleeping, and they’d wonder how it’s possible to operate a device without schematics), and obligation to not employ various technologies to prevent replacement of onboard devices and loading of unsigned drivers, should exist.

The best part about all this is that such a law could be written so that it equally well applies to a 1970s machine, a today’s machine and whatever they’ll come up with in year 2066.

There are official stats.

You know because they’re all racist over there as like the default position.

I know. This includes everyone in SA seemingly, though, not just whites.

Just informing you that good old USSR had a similar problem, except not just with the military.

It, of course, had planning inefficiency problems, but the reason some stuff costed and was funded orders of magnitude more than the Western alternatives (sometimes being clones of those alternatives) was just that industries producing this stuff were closer to important interests in internal politics. Soviet production lines were not that much less efficient.

But it isn’t wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

Which is also why people active against this will be killed many times before the stream made dry out.

Look up military pricing too, I remeber seeing something about how the military pays $400 for $4 bag of fuses

That “military pricing” is called “corruption”. Despite everyone knowing that it happens in most militaries (or big b2b), it still is that.

Its a complete waste of taxpayer money. Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

I mean, you had a truly magnificent military budget for already 30 years after the nation which was supposed to be the problem solved by it started asking for food aid and falling apart into pieces.

When the funds are provided and it’s certain they won’t have to be used, the tasks existing expand to fill the budget.

The US military budget is so over the top that even things that it achieves are not so significantly different from what Russian military budget with Russian corruption achieves, yet its size utterly dwarfs that.

If US military budget were used as efficiently as that of, say, Poland, US military would have colonized most of the Solar system already. With actual people as colonists.

That’s about that fiscal discipline the Republican party was supposedly in favor of, until it wasn’t.

OK, I live in Russia, so shouldn’t probably blabber too much about US politics.

That wasn’t a thing already? Not a requirement for military orders?

You mean they could ship something into the military without proper documentation and bill it every time maintenance has to be done?

Some things in your land of the free seem to confuse me.

Genocide is too strong a word, but South African white population does have legitimate grievances by now. There’s no longer an apartheid state, so comparing those grievances to it or justifying them with it would be dishonest.