and IF it's truly novel, as opposed to simple combination of existing art
THEN maybe it's patentable.
There's far too many patents of the kind, "Here's a solution to a problem that I happened to think of first. Once you think of the problem, the solution is obvious, but since I thought of the problem first, I deserve a patent on it."
Is it DRM'ed if I'm not playing protected content"
on
AMD's New DRM
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
One poster mentioned that this is essentially covering the framebuffer with the TCPA "curtained memory" spec.
TCPA is and has always been a 2-edged sword that can also be sheathed. I can completely ignore it, I can use it to my own benefit.... or I can surrender control of my computer to The Dark Side.
Is this "hidden framebuffer" the same way? In other words, if I'm not touching protected content can I still access the framebuffer as I wish? Is it also possible that I can use this as extra security? We've taken to encrypting filesystems and swapfiles, and moved from xhost to xauth, it seems to me that the framebuffer could be considered another leakage point. (Won't comment on the difficulty of exploiting.)
Theoretically TCPA can be a good thing, and most of people's fears center around it being required and locked away from the owner. I'm not sure I ever see that being an issue, simply because of implementation and legal difficulties. What I can see is "If you want to use ??AA media, surrender control of your computer, for this boot." As long as I can reboot and have complete control of my own computer, that is.
Vista raises the bar for the "minimum" PC, and I'm sure everyone but the consumer likes that.
It certainly appears that Microsoft has engaged in some arm-twisting to make sure that Vista has 100% penetration in the retail space. But I don't think there was too much resistance from the rest of the supply chain. The lowest cost/price PCs also have the lowest profit margins, but at the same time nobody could afford NOT to sell to that price point. Vista removes that bottom point, or at least moves it up significantly. As long as everyone plays by the "Vista rules", everyone is better off. It's kind of a prisoner's dilemma, but in this case Microsoft is there to make sure nobody can defect.
Business PCs are a different matter, both because businesses migrate later and because they're generally not at that bottom point.
What about X Windows over my company's VPN? I know it's sub-optimal, but every now and then I just need to bring up my CAD application, do a tweak or two, or maybe just export data so I can do some real "telecommute". But every now and then, I need X. For that matter, once I've exported the data, it maybe a few 10s of MB.
Yes, Microsoft has been and currently is the best for the "beige box PC."
But you have to look one layer deeper and ask why.
Microsoft is the best because they're the biggest and most pervasive. That's why they have the hardware support. That's why they have the network-effect on their file formats and protocols. That's why the computing model as evolved from the 1980's is locked into Microsoft.
Fastforward to 2007 and you'll see that we're still in an extension of the 1980's computing model. Maybe it's "natural" and "intuitive" and "inherently good". Maybe it's because Microsoft has used its dominance to forced computing to stay in that model for 20+ years. If there's a squeak of truth the latter, at some point the dam will break, and Microsoft will be left in an adapt-or-die position, like IBM was.
Because in spite of everything you say being "Score:5, Insightful/Obvious," the sticky point is being missed.
How do we make sure the artists get paid, so they can afford to keep being artists? Otherwise they need to pay the bills too, and may more likely end up in retail sales, slinging burgers, etc. Some say "concerts" and maybe that's the right model. But maybe not, because from what I've heard, some types of tours are so inherently expensive to pull off that they basically don't make significant money - they publicize album sales.
Actually, from what I've heard the existing recording industries don't do a very good job of this, most of the time. Now that I think of it, I wonder how much the movie industry is like the record industry... a few highly-paid superstars, and the vast majority struggling to make ends meet.
Gee, most people seem to practically worship Reagan. IMHO, Reagan "Loosed the hounds of greed" in the US.
(What's a "freak"? I generally don't bother to pay too much attention to those little circles to the right of names, though "friend" and "foe" I can understand.)
This is a key fact. If the American worker is SOOOOO overpaid, and American benefits are SOOOOOO expensive, and it's just IMPOSSIBLE to make profitable high-mileage cars, how is it that Toyota and Honda have profitable factories in America when Detroit is having a tough time making a profit shipping jobs overseas as fast as they can get away with? I'd consider a long look at boneheaded moves in the executive suite.
They could REALLY save some money if they oursourced the most expensive employees overseas - the executives.
Maybe you're right, maybe outsourcing R&D overseas is the BEST thing to do for cost and profits. But they'd better not wave an American flag or call themselves patriotic as they do so, because in the process they're destroying their country, all in the name of profit.
If they're that enamored of India and China, and if they're that willing to forsake their own country, why don't they just move there? Who knows, maybe once America is toast, and India and China reach what America once had, they WILL move there. Then they'll start outsourcing future-expensive Indian and Chinese jobs back to future-cheap American labor.
After all, there's nothing more important than profit. Tonight take your wife in your arms, look deep in her eyes, and tell her lovingly, "I'd sell you into slavery for the right price."
I picked up a cheapo TV card to set up my Myth box, mainly because in the long term I want to migrate to HD, and the NTSC card was just a stopgap. But at this point I'm beginning to think I might want a better quality card, since the cutover date has moved out another year, and depending on features may not be expensive.
When comparing video cards most of the energy of the reviews on NTSC cards seems to go into the on-card encoding, but aside from the ATSC cards there isn't much talk about front-end quality. My card uses a bt878, which is pretty standard, though it doesn't actually use the sound side of the chip. I'm under the impression that there are better capture chips than bt8x8, but this seems to be a dead area these days. Do you have any pointers?
IBM actually WAS forced to open up protocols and specifications. I have actually held in my own hands the "360 OEM Channel Specification" once upon a time. It was the very document that allowed 3rd parties to connect their peripherals to IBM mainframes, and I believe that it was one of a range of similar documents that IBM was required to divulge.
It's all well and good to be feisty and innovative as a company. But once you've become "the Standard of the industry" things become different. Because you're now "the Standard" everyone has to interoperate with you, or they're out of business. In that position it's easy to abuse the Standard and keep yourself on top for as long as that industry continues. In a worse context, it allows you to "manage" the pace of change of the industry, so you can remain on top. But in this same context, the industry dominator remains on top to the detriment of that industry, simply because innovation has been slowed and channeled.
The "documentation remedy" was good for IBM and the industry then, and I would argue that it's good for Microsoft and the industry now. Furthermore, it wasn't the "documentation remedy" that brought IBM down, it was a sea-change in the industry. If anything, the "documentation remedy" has helped the mainframe industry survive better into the PC era.
Really, this is security by obscurity, and as fast as people keep touting the "TrueCrypt 2-layer" advantage forensics experts will develop techniques to identify and locate "missing space" on a drive and start requesting the second key - in court. If you really want to hide the stuff, use steganography, not a hidden volume.
Just to expand on that a little, part of the "Compelling" reason to buy Vista was the new Aero experience - that's one reason to run out a buy a new "Vista-Capable" PC. or is it?
One could make an argument that software emulation of the legacy stuff is actually better than having the hardware execute it at-speed. Remember the really old days of running an 8088 game on an 80286? Some games used cpu loops for timing, and those things flew by at absurd rates, both because of the clock speed and because instructions were timed/executed differently. Slightly newer than that was the timing loop of some version of Windows that was supposed to not crap out on Intel CPUs until around 600MHz, but died on AMD CPUs at around 350MHz, because of differences in execution.
The situation really reminds me of "The Soul of a New Machine", where the new CPU architecture subsumed the compatibility, so it looked like a really clean design with a backward-compatible wart on the side.
Years/decades ago I read a science fiction book about a planet where the survivors of the planetary settling had vision and hearing problems. Back in civilization it didn't matter, because we have glasses and hearing aids. That stuff quickly faded on this particular planet, because for some unremembered reason, they were starting pretty much from scratch. They adapted to everyone having poor vision and hearing, and managed to survive.
The story was about a young girl who had normal sight and vision, and was an outcast because she was something of a "witch." As an interesting side, the story used our words "speak", "hear", "look", "see", etc to mean their versions of those actions, but they don't really tell you that, outright. The author then invented new words like "spiek" and "hier" for what the girl did, using our normal senses.
Rather a nifty treatment, though I remember nothing else about it, may have even been a teenager when I read it, and may remember it more fondly than it really deserved.
Google "four color vision" for more. One aspect is that the mutation which makes men color-blind gives women 4-color vision, because it's really a bandwidth shift in one color of cone receptors. For men it means the receptors aren't spaced properly for color vision, but for women it gives finer color discrimination. Google even has a link to Slashdot on this one. But from TFA, the surprise was the the brain simply learned to use the extra sensory information.
On the side, I have a problem with the way malpractice settlements are handled. I have a problem that 'bad doctors' are quietly shuttled off to practice somewhere else, with nobody the wiser, and the information not generally available, for that matter. Before *I* would agree to any sort of damage limits, I'd like to see some way of removing 'bad doctors' from practice. (Either by making them 'good doctors' or 'not doctors'.)
That said, I recognize that there has to be a way to differentiate between a 'bad doctor' and a 'good doctor' who takes on very difficult problems or runs into unusual circumstances.
Beyond that I have a pet concept... In a malpractice suit, certainly the injured party deserves compensatory damages. IMHO he doesn't deserve punitive damages. From a principle point of view punitive damages are quite simply punishment, as in "NO! Bad Dog! NO!" in the only language a corporate entity understands, money. The punitive damages should be scaled against the plaintiff in order to be an effective "NO!", and that has nothing to do with the injured party. I would further extend this idea to ANY punitive damages. Punitive damages should be punishment to the appropriate party in order to effect positive change, and reward to nobody.
That leaves the problem of what to do with the punitive damages... I say "burn the money." If we were to donate the punitive damages to charity, charity would come to depend on them, and judges might see the good done, and be more likely to award them than is wise. Similarly for pretty much any other task or group. The key is for nobody to get benefit from punitive damages, they're purely negative behavior modification. So when I say "burn the money" it's really donated back to the economy as a whole as a negative pressure on inflation. At that scale, hopefully it's also sufficiently diluted that the Fed won't count on it when setting the prime rate.
I'm not quite sure what you're asking, or which part you're responding to.
But obviously the corporation doesn't pay squat to the union, it's pays and pensions its employees. The employees have the option of supporting the union. Equally obviously if the corporation goes out of business, it can't pay salaries or pensions. But just because one accepts those facts doesn't absolve the corporate or its executives of abuse. As I said, according to a co-worker's viewing of Frontline on PBS, there was a shady debt deal made by USAir execs right before declaring bankruptcy. Somehow in that deal, the banks were guaranteed to get their money back with better-than-market interest, and the executives got a very hefty sum put into their retirement fund. The extra debt going into bankruptcy was financed out of the pay and pension of the workers.
I'll go a step further and say that one of the best things about Open Source Software is that developers have figured out a better way to measure their egos than in ca$h. The more prominent OSS developers certainly have comfortable lifestyles, but also clearly not excessive, and they have direct ego-feedback over the Internet.
For most people, by the time you're somewhere in the $10e6 range of net worth, you never really NEED any more money to sustain your physical needs or wants. I'll agree that there are exceptions to that, for instance that some people want to do Big Projects. But for the most part, once your net worth is up in the $10e6 range, more money is just ego-measurement. Now this is certainly a controversial statement on my part, but I would further assert that once you're in that range, taking money from others (What else WAS the USAir debt deal?) who more demonstrably NEED in than you, simply to stroke your own ego, is EVIL. By the same token if a CEO says $10e6 isn't enough, and he/she NEEDS more, are they really that bad at handling money?
I know that's a questionable point to make, and one is likely to turn that back on me and say I don't NEED more money - am I that bad at handling what I have. I'll respond by saying that my salary and assets aren't the size of a small town's budget, or more. That's all US-to-US comparison, by the way.
The situation becomes different when you're a monopoly. Last I knew, Microsoft was recognized as such, and Apple wasn't. They don't have to give away the farm, but they do have to provide for interoperability.
You grow up. Realize that there is a bigger world.
IMHO, it's a problem of "black and white". The "democratization of the workforce" and "classic union" people are on once side, and at first reading, your posts are on the other.
It just ain't that way.
It's not a case of "Unions are lazy and abusive, and corporations are wise," nor is it a case of "Corporations are greedy and abusive, and unions are the only thing protecting us." IMHO over the past 50-60 the Unions betrayed their sacred mission, which quite precisely was to protect workers. They did that, but where they went wrong was in going far beyond necessity in terms of pay and perks. By the way, the pay and perks also inflated the union coffers, feeding a cycle of corruption. But then again, the unions had no monopoly on corruption - there was plenty of money flowing on the management side of the fence.
You mention the USAir bankruptcy, which may be a good case, but misses another little factoid. The executives of USAir did some sneaky financing on the side just before going into bankruptcy, and financed themselves an amazing retirement package, right at the same time as they were taking away from the workers. Then again, my ISP is now Comcast, where it used to be Adelphia. Adelphia was run into the ground by a guy named Regas, who used (and abused) the company as his personal bank - one of the few who actually made it to prison.
The fact of the matter is, money (and power) corrupts. Any time you see an inordinate concentration of power/money, you'll see corruption close behind, and neither labor nor management is excepted. Look at health care too - today we appear to get less service than ever before and yet costs keep rising. IMHO it's people who located the golden flow of cash, and have inserted themselves.
It IS effectively impossible for nearly anyone to start many businesses. Sure, it's possible to start any number of boutique businesses or mom & pop stores, and even SOME sorts of high-tech startups. But in many fields there are tremendous barriers to entry, either in the form of initial capital investment or in the form of Intellectual Property holdings.
In particular, "start your own factory," is typically VERY difficult, for both reasons.
It's not even that they're safer, for reasons you point out. It's that they're *perceived* as safer, and a large part of that is advertising. Beyond that SUV's tend to have 2 problems. One is that they frequently have a higher center of gravity, and roll more easily. Another is that they're often 4wd or AWD, and their improved starting capability in ice and snow may give false confidence, because stopping power is no better than 2wd, and you may feel confident going faster in bad conditions because you started up so well.
Slashdot Mirror
IF they fix a significant problem
and IF it's non-obvious to one skilled in the art
and IF it's truly novel, as opposed to simple combination of existing art
THEN maybe it's patentable.
There's far too many patents of the kind, "Here's a solution to a problem that I happened to think of first. Once you think of the problem, the solution is obvious, but since I thought of the problem first, I deserve a patent on it."
One poster mentioned that this is essentially covering the framebuffer with the TCPA "curtained memory" spec.
TCPA is and has always been a 2-edged sword that can also be sheathed. I can completely ignore it, I can use it to my own benefit.... or I can surrender control of my computer to The Dark Side.
Is this "hidden framebuffer" the same way? In other words, if I'm not touching protected content can I still access the framebuffer as I wish? Is it also possible that I can use this as extra security? We've taken to encrypting filesystems and swapfiles, and moved from xhost to xauth, it seems to me that the framebuffer could be considered another leakage point. (Won't comment on the difficulty of exploiting.)
Theoretically TCPA can be a good thing, and most of people's fears center around it being required and locked away from the owner. I'm not sure I ever see that being an issue, simply because of implementation and legal difficulties. What I can see is "If you want to use ??AA media, surrender control of your computer, for this boot." As long as I can reboot and have complete control of my own computer, that is.
>Will anyone gain anything from this?
Hardware makers, marketing, and sales.
Vista raises the bar for the "minimum" PC, and I'm sure everyone but the consumer likes that.
It certainly appears that Microsoft has engaged in some arm-twisting to make sure that Vista has 100% penetration in the retail space. But I don't think there was too much resistance from the rest of the supply chain. The lowest cost/price PCs also have the lowest profit margins, but at the same time nobody could afford NOT to sell to that price point. Vista removes that bottom point, or at least moves it up significantly. As long as everyone plays by the "Vista rules", everyone is better off. It's kind of a prisoner's dilemma, but in this case Microsoft is there to make sure nobody can defect.
Business PCs are a different matter, both because businesses migrate later and because they're generally not at that bottom point.
I once heard this in a different (The "Open" Group) context, but an adaptation seems appropriate here:
The only thing "Open" about Microsoft is your wallet.
What about X Windows over my company's VPN? I know it's sub-optimal, but every now and then I just need to bring up my CAD application, do a tweak or two, or maybe just export data so I can do some real "telecommute". But every now and then, I need X. For that matter, once I've exported the data, it maybe a few 10s of MB.
Throttling is not acceptable for telecommuting.
Yes, Microsoft has been and currently is the best for the "beige box PC."
But you have to look one layer deeper and ask why.
Microsoft is the best because they're the biggest and most pervasive. That's why they have the hardware support. That's why they have the network-effect on their file formats and protocols. That's why the computing model as evolved from the 1980's is locked into Microsoft.
Fastforward to 2007 and you'll see that we're still in an extension of the 1980's computing model. Maybe it's "natural" and "intuitive" and "inherently good". Maybe it's because Microsoft has used its dominance to forced computing to stay in that model for 20+ years. If there's a squeak of truth the latter, at some point the dam will break, and Microsoft will be left in an adapt-or-die position, like IBM was.
Once upon a time they used to say, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
Times change.
Because in spite of everything you say being "Score:5, Insightful/Obvious," the sticky point is being missed.
How do we make sure the artists get paid, so they can afford to keep being artists? Otherwise they need to pay the bills too, and may more likely end up in retail sales, slinging burgers, etc. Some say "concerts" and maybe that's the right model. But maybe not, because from what I've heard, some types of tours are so inherently expensive to pull off that they basically don't make significant money - they publicize album sales.
Actually, from what I've heard the existing recording industries don't do a very good job of this, most of the time. Now that I think of it, I wonder how much the movie industry is like the record industry... a few highly-paid superstars, and the vast majority struggling to make ends meet.
Gee, most people seem to practically worship Reagan.
IMHO, Reagan "Loosed the hounds of greed" in the US.
(What's a "freak"? I generally don't bother to pay too much attention to those little circles to the right of names, though "friend" and "foe" I can understand.)
This is a key fact. If the American worker is SOOOOO overpaid, and American benefits are SOOOOOO expensive, and it's just IMPOSSIBLE to make profitable high-mileage cars, how is it that Toyota and Honda have profitable factories in America when Detroit is having a tough time making a profit shipping jobs overseas as fast as they can get away with? I'd consider a long look at boneheaded moves in the executive suite.
They could REALLY save some money if they oursourced the most expensive employees overseas - the executives.
Maybe you're right, maybe outsourcing R&D overseas is the BEST thing to do for cost and profits.
But they'd better not wave an American flag or call themselves patriotic as they do so, because in the process they're destroying their country, all in the name of profit.
If they're that enamored of India and China, and if they're that willing to forsake their own country, why don't they just move there?
Who knows, maybe once America is toast, and India and China reach what America once had, they WILL move there. Then they'll start outsourcing future-expensive Indian and Chinese jobs back to future-cheap American labor.
After all, there's nothing more important than profit. Tonight take your wife in your arms, look deep in her eyes, and tell her lovingly, "I'd sell you into slavery for the right price."
I picked up a cheapo TV card to set up my Myth box, mainly because in the long term I want to migrate to HD, and the NTSC card was just a stopgap. But at this point I'm beginning to think I might want a better quality card, since the cutover date has moved out another year, and depending on features may not be expensive.
When comparing video cards most of the energy of the reviews on NTSC cards seems to go into the on-card encoding, but aside from the ATSC cards there isn't much talk about front-end quality. My card uses a bt878, which is pretty standard, though it doesn't actually use the sound side of the chip. I'm under the impression that there are better capture chips than bt8x8, but this seems to be a dead area these days. Do you have any pointers?
Funny you should mention that...
IBM actually WAS forced to open up protocols and specifications. I have actually held in my own hands the "360 OEM Channel Specification" once upon a time. It was the very document that allowed 3rd parties to connect their peripherals to IBM mainframes, and I believe that it was one of a range of similar documents that IBM was required to divulge.
It's all well and good to be feisty and innovative as a company. But once you've become "the Standard of the industry" things become different. Because you're now "the Standard" everyone has to interoperate with you, or they're out of business. In that position it's easy to abuse the Standard and keep yourself on top for as long as that industry continues. In a worse context, it allows you to "manage" the pace of change of the industry, so you can remain on top. But in this same context, the industry dominator remains on top to the detriment of that industry, simply because innovation has been slowed and channeled.
The "documentation remedy" was good for IBM and the industry then, and I would argue that it's good for Microsoft and the industry now. Furthermore, it wasn't the "documentation remedy" that brought IBM down, it was a sea-change in the industry. If anything, the "documentation remedy" has helped the mainframe industry survive better into the PC era.
Dang it! Now you've let the secret out.
Really, this is security by obscurity, and as fast as people keep touting the "TrueCrypt 2-layer" advantage forensics experts will develop techniques to identify and locate "missing space" on a drive and start requesting the second key - in court. If you really want to hide the stuff, use steganography, not a hidden volume.
Just hope you don't get sued by the bar association for denigrating lawyers.
Just to expand on that a little, part of the "Compelling" reason to buy Vista was the new Aero experience - that's one reason to run out a buy a new "Vista-Capable" PC. or is it?
One could make an argument that software emulation of the legacy stuff is actually better than having the hardware execute it at-speed. Remember the really old days of running an 8088 game on an 80286? Some games used cpu loops for timing, and those things flew by at absurd rates, both because of the clock speed and because instructions were timed/executed differently. Slightly newer than that was the timing loop of some version of Windows that was supposed to not crap out on Intel CPUs until around 600MHz, but died on AMD CPUs at around 350MHz, because of differences in execution.
The situation really reminds me of "The Soul of a New Machine", where the new CPU architecture subsumed the compatibility, so it looked like a really clean design with a backward-compatible wart on the side.
Years/decades ago I read a science fiction book about a planet where the survivors of the planetary settling had vision and hearing problems. Back in civilization it didn't matter, because we have glasses and hearing aids. That stuff quickly faded on this particular planet, because for some unremembered reason, they were starting pretty much from scratch. They adapted to everyone having poor vision and hearing, and managed to survive.
The story was about a young girl who had normal sight and vision, and was an outcast because she was something of a "witch." As an interesting side, the story used our words "speak", "hear", "look", "see", etc to mean their versions of those actions, but they don't really tell you that, outright. The author then invented new words like "spiek" and "hier" for what the girl did, using our normal senses.
Rather a nifty treatment, though I remember nothing else about it, may have even been a teenager when I read it, and may remember it more fondly than it really deserved.
Google "four color vision" for more. One aspect is that the mutation which makes men color-blind gives women 4-color vision, because it's really a bandwidth shift in one color of cone receptors. For men it means the receptors aren't spaced properly for color vision, but for women it gives finer color discrimination. Google even has a link to Slashdot on this one. But from TFA, the surprise was the the brain simply learned to use the extra sensory information.
On the side, I have a problem with the way malpractice settlements are handled. I have a problem that 'bad doctors' are quietly shuttled off to practice somewhere else, with nobody the wiser, and the information not generally available, for that matter. Before *I* would agree to any sort of damage limits, I'd like to see some way of removing 'bad doctors' from practice. (Either by making them 'good doctors' or 'not doctors'.)
That said, I recognize that there has to be a way to differentiate between a 'bad doctor' and a 'good doctor' who takes on very difficult problems or runs into unusual circumstances.
Beyond that I have a pet concept...
In a malpractice suit, certainly the injured party deserves compensatory damages. IMHO he doesn't deserve punitive damages. From a principle point of view punitive damages are quite simply punishment, as in "NO! Bad Dog! NO!" in the only language a corporate entity understands, money. The punitive damages should be scaled against the plaintiff in order to be an effective "NO!", and that has nothing to do with the injured party. I would further extend this idea to ANY punitive damages. Punitive damages should be punishment to the appropriate party in order to effect positive change, and reward to nobody.
That leaves the problem of what to do with the punitive damages... I say "burn the money." If we were to donate the punitive damages to charity, charity would come to depend on them, and judges might see the good done, and be more likely to award them than is wise. Similarly for pretty much any other task or group. The key is for nobody to get benefit from punitive damages, they're purely negative behavior modification. So when I say "burn the money" it's really donated back to the economy as a whole as a negative pressure on inflation. At that scale, hopefully it's also sufficiently diluted that the Fed won't count on it when setting the prime rate.
I'm not quite sure what you're asking, or which part you're responding to.
But obviously the corporation doesn't pay squat to the union, it's pays and pensions its employees. The employees have the option of supporting the union. Equally obviously if the corporation goes out of business, it can't pay salaries or pensions. But just because one accepts those facts doesn't absolve the corporate or its executives of abuse. As I said, according to a co-worker's viewing of Frontline on PBS, there was a shady debt deal made by USAir execs right before declaring bankruptcy. Somehow in that deal, the banks were guaranteed to get their money back with better-than-market interest, and the executives got a very hefty sum put into their retirement fund. The extra debt going into bankruptcy was financed out of the pay and pension of the workers.
I'll go a step further and say that one of the best things about Open Source Software is that developers have figured out a better way to measure their egos than in ca$h. The more prominent OSS developers certainly have comfortable lifestyles, but also clearly not excessive, and they have direct ego-feedback over the Internet.
For most people, by the time you're somewhere in the $10e6 range of net worth, you never really NEED any more money to sustain your physical needs or wants. I'll agree that there are exceptions to that, for instance that some people want to do Big Projects. But for the most part, once your net worth is up in the $10e6 range, more money is just ego-measurement. Now this is certainly a controversial statement on my part, but I would further assert that once you're in that range, taking money from others (What else WAS the USAir debt deal?) who more demonstrably NEED in than you, simply to stroke your own ego, is EVIL. By the same token if a CEO says $10e6 isn't enough, and he/she NEEDS more, are they really that bad at handling money?
I know that's a questionable point to make, and one is likely to turn that back on me and say I don't NEED more money - am I that bad at handling what I have. I'll respond by saying that my salary and assets aren't the size of a small town's budget, or more. That's all US-to-US comparison, by the way.
The situation becomes different when you're a monopoly. Last I knew, Microsoft was recognized as such, and Apple wasn't. They don't have to give away the farm, but they do have to provide for interoperability.
You grow up. Realize that there is a bigger world.
IMHO, it's a problem of "black and white". The "democratization of the workforce" and "classic union" people are on once side, and at first reading, your posts are on the other.
It just ain't that way.
It's not a case of "Unions are lazy and abusive, and corporations are wise," nor is it a case of "Corporations are greedy and abusive, and unions are the only thing protecting us." IMHO over the past 50-60 the Unions betrayed their sacred mission, which quite precisely was to protect workers. They did that, but where they went wrong was in going far beyond necessity in terms of pay and perks. By the way, the pay and perks also inflated the union coffers, feeding a cycle of corruption. But then again, the unions had no monopoly on corruption - there was plenty of money flowing on the management side of the fence.
You mention the USAir bankruptcy, which may be a good case, but misses another little factoid. The executives of USAir did some sneaky financing on the side just before going into bankruptcy, and financed themselves an amazing retirement package, right at the same time as they were taking away from the workers. Then again, my ISP is now Comcast, where it used to be Adelphia. Adelphia was run into the ground by a guy named Regas, who used (and abused) the company as his personal bank - one of the few who actually made it to prison.
The fact of the matter is, money (and power) corrupts. Any time you see an inordinate concentration of power/money, you'll see corruption close behind, and neither labor nor management is excepted. Look at health care too - today we appear to get less service than ever before and yet costs keep rising. IMHO it's people who located the golden flow of cash, and have inserted themselves.
It IS effectively impossible for nearly anyone to start many businesses. Sure, it's possible to start any number of boutique businesses or mom & pop stores, and even SOME sorts of high-tech startups. But in many fields there are tremendous barriers to entry, either in the form of initial capital investment or in the form of Intellectual Property holdings.
In particular, "start your own factory," is typically VERY difficult, for both reasons.
>women buy SUVs because they're safer.
It's not even that they're safer, for reasons you point out. It's that they're *perceived* as safer, and a large part of that is advertising. Beyond that SUV's tend to have 2 problems. One is that they frequently have a higher center of gravity, and roll more easily. Another is that they're often 4wd or AWD, and their improved starting capability in ice and snow may give false confidence, because stopping power is no better than 2wd, and you may feel confident going faster in bad conditions because you started up so well.