It is a self-correcting problem - only the time-to-correction variable is in question.

A company that burns itself hot with drugs will find mistakes creeping into its products, workers that burn out and crash in spectacular ways, or simply see a mass exodus from its ranks and a big, fat black-mark with recruiters. It also eventually destroys productivity.

I used to work for a company whose culture could best be described as a boiler-room. No drugs were involved, yet in the space of two years, one of the sysadmins had a literal heart attack, and the lead developer and network engineer both suffered strokes - the network guy recovered fairly quickly and quit, while the developer is still, even today, trying to re-learn that whole talking thing. One of the IT managers suffered so much stress, that he eventually wound up in prison for abusing one of his kids.

Again - no performance-enhancing drugs were involved. It took the global parent company (In Germany) to step in and fix the mess, because it was destroying the company financially (due to turnover, downtime due to sloppy work caused by over-committal, etc) It took the act of publicly firing the company's CEO, a few other board members and the IT Director, and basically hitting the big corporate culture reset button. I was long gone by then (as were many others), but many of my former colleagues who remained behind tell me that things improved vastly, and the company actually has improved by quite a bit since then.

...or worse, someone has a psychotic reaction to over-using a stimulant and decides that he really needs to go postal...

They were likely the only third-party dealer to actually ask.

OWC (Other World Computing)/MacSales is a company specializes on selling Apple-tuned products. It makes perfect sense for them to have tight integration with Apple hardware.

By contrast, pretty much all other HDD manufacturers and resellers make/sell parts for "PCs" - that is, they make stuff that is fairly generic, and if those parts happen to fit a Mac, then okay, but otherwise they really don't concern themselves with that bit.

took all of five seconds...

If Apple has such a huge problem with it, then why did they give OWC a signed kext?

Question I have is, how much of that load time is CPU and how much of it is reading from disk?

Quoted for visibility:

Seriously - even if they did pull something stupid like GP insists, parts have to be replaced somehow, and therein lies the loophole. After all, how else do you think you can currently buy computer readers/chip-programmers/performance-enhancing chips/etc in aftermarket right now?

You'll have to try harder than that for an example, because that's already been defeated very handily.

Oh, and these guys will happily sell you shiny new SSD's with native OSX TRIM support.

(...besides, even without TRIM support there's no real difference for the average user in longevity or performance on an SSD. I've gone without it the whole time I've had mine; by the time the SSD wears out, I'll just go out and buy one twice the size - probably for the same price I paid for the 512GB Crucial SSD that I have shoved into my MBP right now.)

Actually, it doesn't. You just have to know how. All it takes is the skill to pull it off, and the cojones to laugh at the EULA/Warranty warnings.

Some of us have been modifying Apples in ways they definitely weren't built for, and have been doing so for a very long time... (In this instance, the Cube was definitely not built to take on a Radeon 8500, or the horde of other modifications I made to it.)

Seriously - bumping a HDD or RAM on a shiny new MacBook Pro is nothing that a decent soldering iron and top-grade solder can't help you accomplish. Much easier than, say, swapping out a car engine.

Depends on whether or not the reported loss will push him under a tax bracket, open up some loopholes, entitle him to credits...

There's a reason that the US Tax Code is a couple dozen thousands of pages long, you know...

d'oh! I knew I heard a 'whoosh' somewhere...

Oh, it's quite possible... an APG-66 radar kit (usually parked inside the radome of an F-16 jet fighter) can cook a hot dog placed 2' in front of the pitot tube in very short order once you flip it into active mode. That's why they usually point the jet's nose out somewhere big and empty when they test it, and then make damned sure no one walks within 150' of the jet's front during testing.

(hint: both the typical radar unit and microwave oven share one core component in common - a magnetron.)

True - though most states usually sort that out at the unemployment office as either being fired "for cause", or just being fired. The latter means you can collect a check, while (in most states) the former means that you cannot.

You think it's just an American phenomenon... how naive of you.

...not when it's bound good and hard to a closed-source operating system and closed-source tools, it ain't.