Once upon a time, in a political climate that was far simpler than that of the 21st century, President Harry Truman reportedly took responsibility for his actions with the phrase, “the buck stops here.”

These days, the blame for a serious transgression of one sort or another is usually deflected to a subordinate who is forced to take the blame for the boss. Does that same philosophy exist over at Apple, Inc.?

Well, consider that the SEC has gone after for Apple CFO Fred Anderson for his part in that stock options scandal that has caused the company to restate its earnings for a period of several years. Former head legal counsel Nancy Heinen, who is facing civil fraud charges in connection with these episodes, is apparently hanging tough, so her case is not apt to be resolved so quickly.

Now it’s not that Anderson and Heinen face jail time for their crimes. They left Apple as millionaires, and facing fines to settle their scores with the authorities will have, at best, a minor impact on their bank accounts. That assumes, of course, that Heinen eventually reaches some sort of settlement, which isn’t certain right now.

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Imagine if the world were turned upside down, and you were forced to use Windows everywhere, just as some of you are now at the office. Consider how things would be. You’d be forced, for example, to confront a “Wizard” to perform such basics as file sharing, or even configuring a printer.

Worse, malware would be commonplace. If you didn’t stay ahead of the curve with the latest and greatest security software, your PC could become a spam-bot just minutes after getting online. Over time, your computer would run slower and slower, even if you didn’t install any new, more powerful software to drag it down. Eventually, you’d just give up and buy a new model, only to go through the very same vicious circle.

But the manufacturers would love each and every dollar they earned from selling you new hardware. Maybe they should make those boxes obsolete every single year, so you’d replace them more often. What about a hidden self-destruct time bomb that would fry the logic board?

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One of the lamer suggestions I heard from an instructor at some unmentionable educational institution some years back was that you could boost the number of graduates simply by lowering the standards. At the time, I thought the person who made this foolish statement probably could use a new job, perhaps one at a local fast food restaurant.

I’ll explain what I’m getting at shortly.

To begin with, as Apple patches more and more security leaks in Mac OS X, you have to wonder when or if any of them will be exploited. I mean, if you read the nasty details of a typical problem, you can’t help but feel just a little less secure.

Take the most recent update released this month. Among over two dozen fixes was one that addressed this deficiency: “A memory corruption vulnerability exists in fsck. It is possible to cause fsck to be run automatically on a disk image when it is opened. By enticing a user to open a maliciously-crafted disk image, or to run fsck on any maliciously-crafted UFS filesystem, an attacker could trigger the issue which may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution.”

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A long-time friend produces annual jazz concerts. He’s been using Macs for years, and stores his mailing list in FileMaker Pro. No, he’s not an expert at databases, but he has managed to put something together that works to his liking.

That is, until his printer got in the way the other day.

Indeed, he called me frantically, because he had to get his mailing out within just a few days, or he’d lose a lot of business. So I rushed over and checked out his configuration. He has an iMac G5 running Mac OS 10.4.9. There were no system add-ons, and aside from Apple Mail and Safari, he runs FileMaker Pro and Skype. He is definitely not the adventurous type, and only wants things to work reliably.

Well, everything did work reliably, until his printer started delivering blank pages when he attempted to output his mailing list. Now, I didn’t immediately blame the printer as responsible, because all other documents printed perfectly, every time.

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