I think those kind of restrictions are common in conspiracy cases. This all sounds like standard procedure except for the "popular among nerds" and "rich guy" angles.

I'm whining about inaccurate summaries. We've always done that here.

Well played!

What's happening is Linux is catching up to where Microsoft was several years ago. Don't let the pretty skin and fast hardware running it fool you. It's still in a primitive state.

Which *could* be a bug in the kernel and that was highly believable a few years ago. More recently, not so much. BSOD are very rare except for hardware errors, driver errors and corrupt system files.

Then what the hell are all the other phones running? Every Android phone comes with a customized version of Android on it, NOTHING comes with stock Android -- not even Google-branded phones. Cyanogenmod is in many was less customized and more like stock Android than almost any version you might find on any Android phone.

There may be a hundred steps, but you named some that aren't necessary such as "development and approval of patents, approval of government agencies."

You want to make something out of (name any substance)? There are only a few special cases where any government approval is required, and patents are NEVER required.

Yes, you can teach yourself to program. You'll join the vast herd of semi-skilled programmers with spotty understanding and no knowledge of what has been done before and better by more skilled programmers. People who followed a more disciplined path will pass by you, because someone clued them in about the dead ends you'll be exploring.

but it's just not working.

If you can't trust them not to cheat the system, you shouldn't be letting them in the clean room at all.

Because setting your own price is legal and colluding with other companies to raise the price isn't.

Nice rant, but,

"Furthermore, I think its dangerous to let this mentality seep into the programming world. What consists of musical talent is entirely subjective, and at the end, affects nothing. Bad music everywhere is a mere annoyance.
"Now imagine if programmers were overpaid, undertalented, super inflated egos, where [b]glaring faults in code could be patched over with a public relations campaign?[/b]"

I don't have to imagine it. I see it. Only the names are brands like Microsoft, Apple, Linux, Snapchat..., not the names of programmers (with rare exceptions).

Seriously, every programmer that believes there are 10X programmers also believes he's one of them.

"There's no easy way to say this: You're eating too much chocolate, all of you."

My dentist has been telling me this for years. So has my wife. Do you think they're seeing each other?

Yes it is. Take the output, put it back into the input and reproduce the original input (scaled).