We did pretty much single-handedly stop the Chimera invasion in 1949 though.

When I saw the title of the thread I just knew. This behavior is total unacceptable and would be considered anti-competitive if another company did it, but I just knew that this thread would be full of Apple apologists trying to explain that this was OK because Apple. I was right.

What other company would you give a Big Thumbs Up to for refusing to install drivers for third-party hardware because SOME drivers MAY be implemented poorly? Or make it difficult to install a competitor's software? Microsoft? It was a major scandal that they INCLUDED their own software (IE), let alone if they were to actively suppress the competition's.

Not entirely true as a long term downtrend in overall prices (deflation) is a huge drag on an economy as people put off purchases waiting for things to get cheaper. This leads to a lower volume of products being made (and fewer jobs making them) and slower innovation. In the PC world you sometimes see people skipping a generation (or two) of graphics adapters just for that reason, but fortunately not enough to have a real impact. Now imagine that behavior applied to every tangible good that people buy. You have a less "wasteful" society as things aren't thrown away as quickly, but you also have a market in which a new or improved product, after selling through the early adopters, has few buyers and may never get mainstream adoption. No demand for new products means less R&D into making them and slower innovation. Why waste the money?

As far as lower gas and oil prices, that is HUGE. Like $40,000,000,000 huge according to this (and several other) articles:

Falling Gas Prices Could Provide $40 Billion Boost to Economy

Just how big of a boost can lower gas prices provide? Joseph LaVorgna and Brett Ryan, economists at Deutsche Bank, offered one answer in a note to clients Tuesday. “According to our calculations, every one cent annual change in gasoline prices is worth approximately $1 billion in annual U.S. household energy consumption,” he wrote. “The bottom line is that if the current 40 cent decline in energy costs is maintained, then consumer cash flow would improve by roughly $40 billion; this is equivalent to almost three-tenths on annualized GDP growth.”

Just how much of that extra money consumers actually spend on goods and services may depend in part on how confident they are that the economy and job market will continue to improve. But with stagnant wages still holding back consumer spending, every extra dollar will help.

Most people pushing for a higher gas tax to "save the highway fund" really care most about increasing the price of gas for "environmental reasons". If they really just cared about saving the highway fund then they would propose means of funding it that applied the burden either equally on ALL PEOPLE as all people benefit from the highways whether they use them directly or not, or on EVERYONE WHO USES THEM regardless of the type of fuel/batteries they use to motivate their vehicles. This is just the opposite of what they want though. Their true cause is to use the highway fund problems as an excuse to raise the gas tax to punish the troglodytes who still use gasoline-powered cars. Most of these people would be perfectly happy with a low- or no-growth economy since that would slow carbon emission growth.

Slower growth in carbon emissions, gas burning troglodytes punished, electric car owners pay less than their Fair Share for highway use. Win-win-win!

I bet there are quite a few people arguing that this is a Bad Thing here but were all in favor of the New York fiasco of publishing maps to the homes of people with firearms permits, because it was after all, you know, "public record".

Well, of course he did. All national Democrats do. At least the national Democrat party perspective is that everyone between the two coasts (except Chicago) are a bunch of rubes. It's "fly-over country", after all. Nothing there is important except every other November.

Considering that Sarbane-Oxley is supposed to be about financial crimes and that destruction of evidence is already illegal under other statutes, then yes. Charge people under the statute that actually logically applies, not the one that gives the steepest penalties.

This is as stupid as charging two 18-year-olds under RICO laws because there was a "conspiracy" as the two of them drove around looking for someone to buy them liquor.

It is hard. I don't mean to sound flippant, but the comparison to "rocket science" (or rocket surgery) is made for a reason. People forget that sometimes and just take it for granted. I think Science Fiction movies have a lot to do with that. We see how easy it is there and don't realize that IRL how lucky we were that we lost only two Space Shuttles.

Can I get a refund for my Mac OS too?

No. To summarize all of the apologists below, Because Apple.

No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a Boom tomorrow.

So what's so "tomorrow" about change from Lucida to Helvetica, which impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? Is that the definition of "tomorrow" now?

The real answer, of course, is Because Apple Did It.

The rest of the arguments here are an attempt to justify it.

Why stop at 100 MWs? You need...

1.21 gigawatts!

That's only for the PC crowd. This is Linux.

If you've ever used TOR you are.

The 70's called. They want to know what we thought was wrong with their foreign policy.

I think (hope) you mean "fallacy"...