In this realm, success is measured in what the organisms wandering the surface of the world look like after you are dead. It's called "survival of the fittest", and it doesn't care in the slightest what your opinion is of how a person lived their life.

You're not wrong... but, there are scenarios where, for example, a designer comes up with 4 proposed designs, all of which are good, and someone need to make a decision as to which one to go with without any meaningful way to differentiate. This algorithm allows all 4 to be approved as "functional and not embarrassing" and put into place.

And yes, 2 years later, you might decide it's a good idea to hire a designer to freshen things up, and have them deliver you a few more designs. But, with a pattern like this, you don't need to discard the old ones... you can add the new ones in amongst the old and have the algorithm elevate the one that is popular.

But the real gem would be to find out that the design that was least popular 4 years ago is actually in better sync with what is stylish now, more so than the ones you paid for 6 months ago, and have that dusty old design automatically leap to the front of the queue without you even having to think about it.

Yeah, frightening. I think it's trivial for a business that wants to use SSL encryption to pay for an SSL certificate too.

If you used this type of algorithm to rotate a selection of different-but-good style sheets on a website, you'd be able to go past "which one is best at the time the test was devised" and actually build sites that pre-emptively and reactively stay "fashionable", "trendy" and "cool".

If no one else were willing to do it, your comp sci teacher could pick the flavour of LiveCD he likes, pay Verisign $99 to have it signed and be able to do just as he was before. And, he could throw it up on a torrent site and anyone else who downloaded it would be able to boot off it in secure mode. In fact, if you were a serious malware writer, you could probably bypass this obstacle by having your malware signed with a fake identity. All they're really doing through this process is attaching a name to a hunk of code.

The people distributing Arch can sign their releases for $99. The people distributing Debian can sign their releases for $99. Etc, etc. It's a trivial cost for any of the distributions you named to follow in Fedora's footsteps.

On a completely unrelated note... wouldn't it be awesome to see RMS' reaction if all the major GNU/Linux distributions were signed by Microsoft?

Unless I read the article incorrectly, it costs $99 to produce signed binaries. Which is inconvenient if you as an end user want to be able to compile your own stuff and sign it, but it means the folks at CentOS only need to pay $99 to release signed binaries for all their end users.

Considering your sig, I find it funny as hell that you continue to hold faith in your rationalizations despite the rampant evidence that they lead their adherents to extinction.

You see what "they" are doing leads to success, while what "you" are doing leads to extinction, and you accuse "them" of being dumb.

I'm reminded of a quote by Forrest Gump... "Stupid is as stupid does"...

I'm curious... how do you reconcile this image of communism as "looney" with the fact that it keeps ending up associated with superpowers?

The former USSR and China are both pretty effective demonstrations that even if their way of life isn't to your taste, they clearly did SOMETHING right.