I think that it does, because most people in history bought a PC from an OEM, and the rest of us could get an OEM copy if we wanted to. Having been a Mac user up into the 040 days, and then slightly again after that, I did always appreciate the fact that Apple wouldn't even in theory hassle you about making your own copies of the System disks. But: Apple wasn't giving you anything that it didn't make sense for them to give you, and they for most of history they've charged a substantial price premium and provided inferior performance. Even today, when they actually have impressive hardware for a time longer than the moment the G5 had in the sun, they still only excel up into the mid-range, but I have to admit they're killing it there.

I paid $100 for the last version of Windows I bought (the absolutely peak Windows 7 Pro x64, for what it's worth) and I got a legit system builder's license as I was building a potato of Theseus which has evolved into the big black cube-shaped 5900X I'm using now. I could run that Windows 7 in a VM today if I want to, and I occasionally do when I need to run some kind of programmer or something — just attach a hub to the VM to solve all the awkwardness. But I haven't run either Windows or MacOS except under protest since I discovered AmigaOS and Unix at nearly the same time, in 1991.

It seems to me that there is a general lack of sanity in the world. This is only one of the most personally irritating personifications.

That's fair in general, but that still doesn't mean that you should chase every CVE immediately... I know, see above

Both things

My favorite is the times it's told people to make a right angle turn off the side of a bridge. That's not an instruction very likely to cause harm because there's not an exit there for some idiot to take, but it's especially hilarious because there's no excuse for that.

PS2s didn't come with HDDs so devs couldn't rationally require one.

Most games after that install

Are you trying to sound like geekmux or did you forget not to?

I bought a Ford F-150 XLT (the full-hybrid pickup) and was very disappointed to find that several of the features (Including Blue Cruise and navigation) were subscription-based with an initial free period of a year or so.

Other than that the vehicle is fantastic - but was very pricey when I bought it, so having to pay over and over for the features was a very annoying surprise. (They quit working rather than quit updating when the subscriptions run out.)

... a bunch of cancer progression theories based on cell culture progression had to be thrown out when it was discovered that the cultures were being contaminated by a particularly robust and aggressive cancer cell culture, HeLa, which had contaminated lab equipment like environmental chambers or survived equipment sterilization and eventually took over culture lines in labs.

It's hard to get that evidence, which was the point of creating a coin to profit from the presidency.

If I accept a cookie from a customer I can be cashiered, but if the president sets up an entire automated bribery SYSTEM you will make excuses for him

Die mad, cucks

From TFS:

Can't manage it yourself? Pay a company for support, or "just use Debian or Yocto as their security practices are amazing."

They suck a huge amount of money out of the court system and then We The People who paid for that don't even get to find out what the outcome was? The courts sure as fuck don't work for us.

No, it isn't. We know that's not the explanation because historically, Apple did NOT give you tools and free software other companies charged for. That was not true until Mac OS X, when they finally gave away a development environment. Prior to that you had to buy a compiler from a third party, as Apple didn't even offer one.

Apple did give you hypercard for a while with classic MacOS versions, but they failed to execute on that and it eventually died. It might have been popular, but all the extensions you needed to make it do anything interesting were commercial (like you couldn't even send serial characters) so it was inferior to BASIC which you got with DOS, Windows, Amiga, Atari... well, pretty much from everyone but Apple.

Which Apple are you thinking of?

I don't disagree that your example is somewhat applicable, but a more mundane example we all face is actual "credit scores" which are becoming more and more closely akin to China's "social credit" system. If your credit score is bad, it affects your ability to get transportation and housing, and even employment. Credit scores shouldn't actually exist, they don't do what they say they do, because you can have no ability to pay anything whatsoever and your credit score can be huge based on your prior activity and ability to pay.

The users will (for the most part) need someone to interpret the information for them, but that's been true of pretty much everything since before the industrial revolution. Everything is complicated now.