By analogy: the fact that a panel might be incompetent to judge opera says exactly nothing about whether the opera was in fact performed well.

It does when you throw in an "evidence suggests the panel is incompetent to judge opera" in at the start.

My fundamental argument was, and is, that the state has not convinced me of its competence to judge drivers.

Based on what ? How _could_ they convince you ?

We don't have a choice about accepting code. We're (currently) structured as an internal service provider, so our responsibility is only the infrastructure. If people can't use that properly, that's not our problem.
The problem is the guy's development methods haven't changed in the thirty years he's been here. So according to him, SANs don't work, virtualisation doesn't work, indeed, any sort of shared infrastructure except network and power, it seems) is just something that makes his performance "inconsistent".
This person can't be moved, retrained, or relocated. They are politically untouchable. A couple of months back we lost tens of millions of dollars because his software fell over (in fairness, probably the biggest outage its ever had) and he barely even got a "please explain". His excuse ? "The new load balancers let too much traffic in, too fast.".
The point here is that while hardware may well be a done deal, there's a lot more work that needs to be done on the software side before there aren't any more problems to solve. Specific to infrastructure, the management tools around most aspects of managing infrastructure are still woeful.

Like I said, if there were _real_ data showing any particular brand of hard disk had failure rates in double-digit percentages, consumer protection groups would be all over it like a rash.

Every relevance you attach to anything is arbitrary.

No, no it's not.
For a basic example, food is quite objectively more relevant to survival than, say, your favourite TV show.

Correct. I wrote (and implied) nothing about drivers. My point was that states (at least those I have knowledge of) has not proven competent to judge them.

If you are saying nothing about drivers, how have you drawn a conclusion about whether the boogyman^W"state" has not proven competent to judge them ?
Is your fundamental argument here the "state" is not capable of judging anyone ? Should we be living in a lawless, free-for-all society ?

This means your selection of Games is dependent on the OS you use, which is fucking retarded in every sense of the word -- It's bad for gamers, it's bad for game devs, it's bad for hardware makers, it's bad for everyone but.... Microsoft.

Actually it's quite good for customers and developers because developers not having to worry about multi-platform QA means their time to market is quicker and their maintenance overheads are lower. The only people single-platform software is bad for are the ones without that platform.

Chip makers did. In fact, because of so much proprietary Windows market share, and resistance to architecture changes meant that the bloated x86 had to stick around FAR longer than it was actually needed. For fuck's sake man, we have interpretors on the chip just to emulate rarely used instructions! That's not an advance! That's Retardation!

Windows was multi-architecture from the early '90s. The market wasn't interested. Microsoft did nothing to hold anyone on to x86 and were ready to move whichever way the CPU architecture wars went.

It's blatantly wrong, but for the sake of argument, Windows consumes more cycles than BSD, Linux, and some OSX versions.

No, once you equalise for features and capabilities Windows is no heavier than the others (particularly OSX, which was far and away the heaviest OS on the market, especially in the 2000s - you literally could not buy a Mac that ran it well for *years* after its release - no version of Windows has ever been that bad).

Their decade long lag with IE6, and non adherence to standards is the scourge of every the web designer. We'd have had the web we have now, but Sooner and FASTER without MS's browser shenanigans, i.e., w/o IE.

Long before IE6 were IE3 and IE4, which killed Netscape and their dreams of a proprietary client-server WWW, while delivering better standards compliance, performance and feature set.

Even if I gave you this one too, the progress would have been made by someone else. If Alexander G. Bell would have died at birth, we'd have had the Telephone one hour later. We had incandescent bulbs two years before Edison figured out which gas to put in them, others were doing the same work, but he had more money -- Someone would have replaced the vacuum bulb with argon, there's only so many known elements. MS could have never existed and nothing of value would have been lost.

But they didn't, so it was Microsoft. Seriously, do you have a problem crediting Bell and Edison even though someone else would have eventually done it as well ?

MS's OS GUI wasn't vastly superior to OS2, X, or MacOS.

It certainly was to anything you'd find on X (which isn't even a GUI) until the 2000s when KDE and GNOME started to mature. Classic MacOS's instability and lack of decent multitasking, then OS X's atrocious performance and responsiveness until the mid-2000s and common availability of G5s/x86 made its GUI awful as well. So, for a good 7-odd years the Windows "GUI" _was_ easily the best on the market.

Were the solutions MS provided to be provided by a company other than MS, there would have been a chance that interoperability issues would have been resolved sooner and RISC-esque chipsets would likely have been more prevalent pulling less power for the same computations, thus consuming far less energy.

Laughable. Microsoft had Windows NT running on multiple RISC platforms in the '90s and no-one was interested. Why ? Because they were proprietary and/or hideously expensive.
You clearly have a chip on your shoulder and a desire to blame everything on Microsoft, which is why you're ignoring the real culprits for the (dubious) "crime" of constraining cross-platform software: the software developers.

There is no way that any new software we would accept could suck so hard that this hardware wouldn't serve it fast.

I'd like you to meet one of our (multiple) in-house applications that are single-threaded.
We (the Systems - ie: infrastructure - Architecture team) had to explain to the lead software developer (who has been here thirty years and is politically untouchable) why his brand new $100k, quad-socket, 32-core server was actually slower than his dual-core desktop at running his code.

"a basic living wage to the masses" is a guarantee that the huge fraction of the populace that thinks that just getting by is good enough will expand, and never work a day in their lives.

Provide evidence for this assertion.
Actual evidence, as well, not "I know this guy who does nothing but collect welfare cheques, smoke dope and surf" anecdotes.
You might start by looking at the countries where living on welfare is, in fact, possible yet most people still choose to work.
Actually, it might be easier for you to find the countries where living on welfare is possible and some appreciable proportion of the population choose _not_ to pursue better paying employment (as far as I know, there aren't any).

The reality is, 15 year olds having sex is way too common because all of society seems okay with it. And it is 14, and 13 too. When, as a society, are we (society) going to take responsibility for the message that "sex is great, do not wait" message that is permeating media today?

Today ?
Teenagers have been having sex since time immemorial. Even when the cost of doing so (ie: painful death) was far more serious than it i today. There's nothing unusual - socially or biologically - about people having sex once they have reached sexual maturity. Nearly all, however, when given the option, are eager to separate sex from procreation.

I have daughters who are virgins into their 20's, and people think this is crazy!

It is. The social conditioning (or, less politely, religious brainwashing) required is mind-boggling. I pity your children.

What is staggering is your apparent total lack of reading comprehension.

So your implication here:

Hell, most states can't even properly decide a driver's competence.

Is _not_ that the typical licensed driver (which, let's face it, is all but equivalent to the typical adult) is incompetent ?

Evidence tends toward no. Hell, most states can't even properly decide a driver's competence. I wouldn't trust them a bit with guns.
Your dissonance is staggering, yet unsurprising. You apparently argue the same people who incapable of driving a car should be allowed to own and operate deadly weapons without even the most basic forms of regulation and control around access, competency and storage.

I'm comparing arbitrary criteria that can be used for discrimination.

Guns aren't arbitrary criteria. Arbitrary criteria would be things like how you take your coffee, or what your favourite colour is. Things that actually have zero relevance to the rest of the society you live in.

You miss the point. Weapons shouldn't be registered to start with. The state shouldn't have any idea who owns what. It's none of their business.

It is, however, the business of the thousands of people who live near you to be confident you have some capability and competency of how to handle said weapons.

Hence the reason we have licenses for other things that are of similar importance, like driving or practicing medicine.

If the car can't react to it in time, the chances of an inattentive "driver" doing so must be approaching zero.

The plural of anecdote is not data.