It is and it isn't, though, because it still retains too much of the architecture of previous versions.
Why are we still dealing with explicit drive letters? C:\Windows\Foo\Bar should for all intents and purposes be something that's only available in a per-app virtualization layer for Win32 apps.
While Vista/7 is a "new" kernel, it's like buying a "new" car that only has a new engine but shares the body and interior with the previous model.
Sure, he could have fixed the security problems but it would have been costly and risky and meant sunsetting the Windows OS as we know it.
He *could* have setup an OS skunkworks in some other city, given them talent from the Windows division, all the Windows source code and documentation, a couple of billion dollars and told them to write a new version of Windows with no strings attached and the only limitation being that it had to run Win32 applications and be much more secure.
No consideration need be given for upgrades in place, other MS divisions or products, and borrowing ideas from Linux, BSD and Apple would be encouraged (aka, Not Invented Here Not Allowed).
Hopefully we would have ended up with a singular (ie, no bullshit server/desktop differentiation) operating system with in-built virtualization like VM/CMS, security and flexibility and none of the bullshit that holds back Windows because some wanker with stock options in another division won't play along.
"Applications and Services Engineering Group: Led by Qi Lu, and tasked with handling broad applications and services core technologies in productivity, communication, search and other information categories.
Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group: As the name suggests, this group will concentrate on datacenter, database, and other enterprise technologies."
----
I could see it fitting in to both sides. Clearly with Office365 they are making a big push for Exchange-as-a-service and short-sighted VARs like mine are happily turning over meaningful service revenue on Exchange for the pennies per month spiff we get for Office365 just to be cloud-mumble-mumble-mumble.
It seems to me, though, that there's a fair amount of overlap and obvious opportunities to create conflict here as the line blurs between hosted/service/cloud systems (like email) and traditionally deployed systems (like email).
Maybe it was meant as a way to disrupt the cultural pattern? Mix in some Westerners and break the dynamic.
But maybe there's just a Freakonomics explanation -- Western pilots were safer and more experienced and with the consolidation and labor disruption in the US airline industry just became more available at reasonable prices?
If you were qualified as a 747 captain and either had the job or were more or less sure you would move up soon, it would take a lot of money to get you to leave a US airline and fly for a Korean airline.
But if the airlines were squeezing paychecks, you couldn't move up or got squeezed out in a merger, suddenly a Korean job paying what you would have made sounds pretty good.
And it's a win-win. From the Korean perspective, it may have been cheaper to hire a bunch of Westerners and get up to par quickly than to try to overcome entrenched cultural values, implement new training programs, not to mention risking a few hundred million dollars in crashed planes and lost business.
I wasn't told specifically it was MSRA, but was told it was a "very serious infection that needed monitoring" which is why he used a Sharpie on my leg.
I'm pretty sure whatever infection came not from the water (which of course smelled like a direct tap from the bleach plant) but from the surrounding decking areas and locker room. I tried to walk in dry areas and keep my shoes on as much as possible in the locker room, but apparently not enough.
I actually worry less about the water, because as you say, they treat the hell out of it and most of it keeps moving to keep it filtered/treated/etc. It's all those wet areas you have to walk through.
Strangely, we've had season passes at the community pool for years and never had a problem, but I also think the water park at the amusement park had a different demographic than the pool we go to, plus I was either in the pool or on a lounge, and otherwise I wore my crocs.
I'm fine with that form of anarcho-capitalsm because I presume it comes with enough lawlessness that I can reclaim (or attempt to reclaim) my funds through the barrel of a gun.
It's one thing to lie and cheat and then hide behind the protections of civil society, it's quite another to lie and cheat when there's no protection of civil society.
How many water park visitors use the fucking shower before going to the water park?
We went to the local amusement park here in the Twin Cities last summer and because my brother in law doesn't like rides, part of the deal was going to the water park.
About a week and a half later my foot was killing me -- it looked like I had some kind of sore on my toe. I went to the doctor and he was like "Wow, that's a bad one.." explaining I had a serious infection. He used a sharpie to draw a line around my shin and showed me the infection, telling me that "we don't want it to get to this line...if it does, you'll have to go to the hospital." I got both an injection of antibiotics AND a 10 prescription of something strong.
I explained the water park visit and he said "yeah, you probably had a small cut in your skin when you were there..." And so that's how you end up with MRSA.
While I like the idea of water parks (I love to swim, dive, jump, etc), I always worry about the cleanliness of the water itself as well as the surrounding areas and the patrons.
I might do a Disney water park with my son in the future, but anyplace else they're going to have to really convince me they keep the water clean and the rest of the surroundings clean (ie, 200F chlorine pressure washing).
I find screen protectors invaluable. I replace mine about every five months because the gouges and scratches in the protector get so bad you can't see the screen well.
I've used PowerSupport screen protectors but needed a new one on short notice and bought a new Belkin that seems even clearer and thus far has resisted pocket scratches from keys, etc.
After seeing the beating my screen protector takes and other people's non-protected screens with scratches, I'm just not willing to gamble with a $100 smart phone repair.
The standard argument is that the engineering and physics challenges with long-distance space travel are so great that any entity that can solve them doesn't really care about the bugs on Earth or Earth itself, they can get what they want from any sun or planet they can find and feed into their matter/energy/matter systems.
Or they have perfected remote sensing that they don't travel at all.
This would be impossible to do to Air Force One over European air spaces. Dozens of US fighters are capable of being scrambled from all over Europe to protect Air Force One, and this assumes there isn't a fighter escort all the time.
Even if for some weird reason AF1 would land, the secret service would never allow the plane to be searched or probably even approached by anything less than an armored company-size force.
To me the simplest and most straightforward solution is enabling a phone's touch interface to be extended to the larger dash screen. This could happen wirelessly or via wired connector (USB or HDMI).
This puts the phone's features on the larger dash screen where they are presumably easier to interact with. For safety reasons, you could consider a restriction that prevents use of text and video apps display while the vehicle is in motion (but still make it easy to short that wire to ground for those of us who don't want to be limited like this).
To make this work, iOS and Android would both have to support touch interfaces external to their device as well as better external display formatting (ie, not just the rectangular phone screen, but matching the aspect/size of the car display). Ideally there would also be some kind of standard that would support tactile physical buttons mappable to touch functions.
At this point, the car maker only needs to provide basic infotainment controls for the car radio and amplifier and climate controls.
....accepted only at the company store. And somehow you can never get ahead because your scrip is barely enough to pay your rent (in company housing) and buy essentials. But fortunately, the company store offers you credit so that next packet of scrip leaves you just enough behind to need a little more credit...
I honestly don't see how people running a business do this with a straight face, although I suspect its one of those things where someone responsible for payroll is given some ridiculous "cost reduction" goal by an owner and figures either they keep their job by meeting the goal or they get shitcanned.
There is a cost of business calculation in here that makes the fines look ineffectual, along with a generally sleazy business plan that simply reboots the business in a new office under a new name within days.
What needs to happen is a RICO prosecution which would drag in all the service providers involved with this. ISPs, financial institutions, and all the other generally legitimate businesses that enable this kind of fraud.
When these guys are ALSO getting $100,000k personal fines + 20 years in jail, along with the principal perpetrators of these frauds, it'll get to be a lot harder to run these frauds.
Women don't exist as a single, collective shared intelligence, and that's not required to accept my logic, either. I'm describing the broader behavior of the entire group, not predicting the behavior of any specific woman.
I could describe the behavior of a flock of birds and never describe the behavior of the sparrow in your yard, but it doesn't mean that the flocks of sparrows don't exhibit the behavior I've described.
It's funny how people want to reject demonstrably believable, if not factually true, group descriptions because they are not perfect predictors of any single individual or don't explain the behavior of an outlier (in this case, the Dr. Who t-shirt wearing poster above).
The overwhelming statistical reality is that women ARE image conscious and as a group actively seek to enhance their appearance and leverage it for benefit (social, reproductive, mate-seeking, professional even). The magazines, the clothing lines, the people you meet on the street reinforce this time and again.
It does not mean that *some* women don't reject this for all kinds of reasons -- belonging to a religious group, being a lesbian, lack of social integration, or other specific internal variables not understood.
Any time women decide they don't want to leverage their appearance they are welcome to stop doing it, but I suspect that there are several truisms that will make this unlikely.
1) The benefit is short term, while the negative is long term. In that situation, most people give in to the short-term benefit and ignore the long-term consequences (smoking, drinking, drugs, etc).
2) Women, I think, are inherently image-conscious (reproductive advantages) and usually it takes a repressive, male-dominated religious movement to suppress this. It's not something they do on their own.
3) Contemporary cultural values -- despite how much simpler it would be as a woman to have a plain, shorter haircut, not wear makeup and not wear a lot of clumsy girl clothes (pantyhose, high heels, elaborate undergarments), most women do not want to be a "tomboy". In fact, I think most women do not dress to consciously appeal to men but instead to out-compete with other women.
You can blame men for objectifying women with porno mags and videos, but nobody's putting a gun to women's heads to make them read Glamour, Cosmopolitan or other magazines that "tell" women how to behave. It's a self-imposed system, not something men tell them.
It's what I assumed. The Panny UI is sluggish where the Sony UI is speedy.
I found this really surprising considering how my Panny E80 DVD recorder always worked flawlessly and still works. Of course I don't use it much but I occasionally find something worthwhile SD to transfer to disc, thankfully the Tivo HD still supports analog/SD downconvert!
My first DVD player was an Apex, back when it was a big deal to reflash it with region-free/no macrovision firmware (circa 2000?). At some point I ran into issues with this player when MPEG2 bitrates went over some threshold (5 Mbps?) -- the player just didn't have the horsepower to handle that data rate.
Eventually that player died and I went through a series of inexpensive Chinese players. Some failed outright after six months, but those that didn't die would often choke on some discs, freezing in the middle of playback or stuttering every 15 minutes.
I finally gave up and spent nearly $100 on a name-brand player and all those problems went away....until I got into Bluray players!
I bought two nearly identical Panasonic Blu-Ray players, hoping that a big name and higher price bought me better equipment, but these players have also been flaky, although not as bad as the Chinese DVD players, requiring full power cycling (pulling the plug) from time to time.
Usually the content (seems most common with HBO discs) freezes and won't continue, like it has a tracking error. Sometimes you can chapter skip and it will continue playing, but usually I pull the plug. Some software updates have helped, but it still happens too often. A Sony purchased in the last six months doesn't do this.
Anyway, the moral of the story is test your discs in better players. I kept home-burned CD-Rs in my car for years and was terribly abusive to them (left on the seat, jammed 3 into one slot in the visor holder, etc) without ever having problems except for the most obviously scratched discs. Other than some very early Kodak CD-Rs I burned in the late 90s optical media, whether factory or burned hasn't been an issue as much as the player hardware has.
The assumption here is that the bribe is always paid by a company offering substantially above-market pricing for commodity products and that the price differential between fair market prices and bribery prices pays the bribe.
I would argue that this form of kickbacks is much less common and less likely to happen. There almost always is intense scrutiny of costs and substantive overpricing will almost always be noticed, especially on recurring products.
I think kickbacks are probably more common in situations where pricing is opaque (complex and one-time transactions) and where pricing is relatively equal and the value to the kickback payer isn't in the increased margin but in the increased volume or market share.
In the situation where pricing is equal, it's hard to see where the crime is because the company doing the purchasing has nothing to gain or lose switching between vendors.
I've read that by the late 1960s many significant Klan leaders were informers, many of which were paid by the FBI to form their own "klaverns", recruit members, etc.
I don't know what it's like now, but I suspect being a high-profile right wing racist is probably only a hobby you can get away with by being an informant.
It's completely clear why this "steering" is illegal. I thought that's largely what sales WAS -- steering to company A over company B for reasons beyond simple differences in product quality or cost.
I have to believe that this goes on all the time, everywhere. I used to get free lunches and unsolicited trinkets from vendors all the time. I never changed my buying habits based on this, but maybe for $7 million I might.
I get why steering is undesirable from an economic perspective -- it's a huge economic inefficiency, but then again, so is paying your CEO a billion dollars when the company loses money. I also get why businesses would fire you if they found you doing it, but then again, they might fire you for not showing up to work, yet that isn't a crime, either.
About the only argument that makes sense is that it is "stealing" indirectly, but this would seem to depend on the product being purchased at meaningfully inflated prices versus simply from the lowest cost vendor. Even when products are identical, it often makes sense to choose a higher priced supplier for service or other reasons.
At some point, while I agree it is shady and not an ideal practice, it kind of seems like it's illegal because business management doesn't like it or get a piece of it, not because it represents material harm.
Find some CS grads, offer them PDP-11 training and assembler training and a job paying slightly-above-average wages & bennies and tell them the job is guaranteed for the next 30 years.
Right now that sounds pretty good to me --- guaranteed employment on a well-understood platform for 30 more years (although I really only need about 20-25 more years..)
Sure, some guys would rather slave away 80 hours a week to develop iPhone apps, Metro tiles or Web X.0 apps because that's what all the cool guys are doing and it's "the future" (until those jobs are shipped off to the next up-and-coming third world country).
Of course, MBAs would manage to fuck this up by deciding that because it's an "obsolete" technology, you don't need to pay anything.
The thing is, so many of our current problems -- climate change, environmental exploitation, pollution, energy scarcity, food costs and in many cases, political conflict are magnified greatly by large populations.
It's really hard to see the benefit to human civilization that a global population of 8 or 10 billion brings versus 2 billion. Many of the extra 6 billion people are in poverty, live squalid lives and contribute to political instability. Those that aren't in poverty drive resource exploitation (eg, deforesting the Amazon for commercial farmland), greenhouse gas production, etc. There's really little that can be said for a world population past 1-2 billion people.
A world with fewer people demands fewer resources. It has more space, more room for error and demands less stringent political controls to manage big populations and big population densities.
Slashdot Mirror
It is and it isn't, though, because it still retains too much of the architecture of previous versions.
Why are we still dealing with explicit drive letters? C:\Windows\Foo\Bar should for all intents and purposes be something that's only available in a per-app virtualization layer for Win32 apps.
While Vista/7 is a "new" kernel, it's like buying a "new" car that only has a new engine but shares the body and interior with the previous model.
Sure, he could have fixed the security problems but it would have been costly and risky and meant sunsetting the Windows OS as we know it.
He *could* have setup an OS skunkworks in some other city, given them talent from the Windows division, all the Windows source code and documentation, a couple of billion dollars and told them to write a new version of Windows with no strings attached and the only limitation being that it had to run Win32 applications and be much more secure.
No consideration need be given for upgrades in place, other MS divisions or products, and borrowing ideas from Linux, BSD and Apple would be encouraged (aka, Not Invented Here Not Allowed).
Hopefully we would have ended up with a singular (ie, no bullshit server/desktop differentiation) operating system with in-built virtualization like VM/CMS, security and flexibility and none of the bullshit that holds back Windows because some wanker with stock options in another division won't play along.
From the reorg'd groups:
"Applications and Services Engineering Group: Led by Qi Lu, and tasked with handling broad applications and services core technologies in productivity, communication, search and other information categories.
Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group: As the name suggests, this group will concentrate on datacenter, database, and other enterprise technologies."
----
I could see it fitting in to both sides. Clearly with Office365 they are making a big push for Exchange-as-a-service and short-sighted VARs like mine are happily turning over meaningful service revenue on Exchange for the pennies per month spiff we get for Office365 just to be cloud-mumble-mumble-mumble.
It seems to me, though, that there's a fair amount of overlap and obvious opportunities to create conflict here as the line blurs between hosted/service/cloud systems (like email) and traditionally deployed systems (like email).
Maybe it was meant as a way to disrupt the cultural pattern? Mix in some Westerners and break the dynamic.
But maybe there's just a Freakonomics explanation -- Western pilots were safer and more experienced and with the consolidation and labor disruption in the US airline industry just became more available at reasonable prices?
If you were qualified as a 747 captain and either had the job or were more or less sure you would move up soon, it would take a lot of money to get you to leave a US airline and fly for a Korean airline.
But if the airlines were squeezing paychecks, you couldn't move up or got squeezed out in a merger, suddenly a Korean job paying what you would have made sounds pretty good.
And it's a win-win. From the Korean perspective, it may have been cheaper to hire a bunch of Westerners and get up to par quickly than to try to overcome entrenched cultural values, implement new training programs, not to mention risking a few hundred million dollars in crashed planes and lost business.
No, it wasn't a racial comment. In terms of sheer volume, there were kind of a lot of low-rent people.
I wasn't told specifically it was MSRA, but was told it was a "very serious infection that needed monitoring" which is why he used a Sharpie on my leg.
I'm pretty sure whatever infection came not from the water (which of course smelled like a direct tap from the bleach plant) but from the surrounding decking areas and locker room. I tried to walk in dry areas and keep my shoes on as much as possible in the locker room, but apparently not enough.
I actually worry less about the water, because as you say, they treat the hell out of it and most of it keeps moving to keep it filtered/treated/etc. It's all those wet areas you have to walk through.
Strangely, we've had season passes at the community pool for years and never had a problem, but I also think the water park at the amusement park had a different demographic than the pool we go to, plus I was either in the pool or on a lounge, and otherwise I wore my crocs.
I'm fine with that form of anarcho-capitalsm because I presume it comes with enough lawlessness that I can reclaim (or attempt to reclaim) my funds through the barrel of a gun.
It's one thing to lie and cheat and then hide behind the protections of civil society, it's quite another to lie and cheat when there's no protection of civil society.
How many water park visitors use the fucking shower before going to the water park?
We went to the local amusement park here in the Twin Cities last summer and because my brother in law doesn't like rides, part of the deal was going to the water park.
About a week and a half later my foot was killing me -- it looked like I had some kind of sore on my toe. I went to the doctor and he was like "Wow, that's a bad one.." explaining I had a serious infection. He used a sharpie to draw a line around my shin and showed me the infection, telling me that "we don't want it to get to this line...if it does, you'll have to go to the hospital." I got both an injection of antibiotics AND a 10 prescription of something strong.
I explained the water park visit and he said "yeah, you probably had a small cut in your skin when you were there..." And so that's how you end up with MRSA.
While I like the idea of water parks (I love to swim, dive, jump, etc), I always worry about the cleanliness of the water itself as well as the surrounding areas and the patrons.
I might do a Disney water park with my son in the future, but anyplace else they're going to have to really convince me they keep the water clean and the rest of the surroundings clean (ie, 200F chlorine pressure washing).
I find screen protectors invaluable. I replace mine about every five months because the gouges and scratches in the protector get so bad you can't see the screen well.
I've used PowerSupport screen protectors but needed a new one on short notice and bought a new Belkin that seems even clearer and thus far has resisted pocket scratches from keys, etc.
After seeing the beating my screen protector takes and other people's non-protected screens with scratches, I'm just not willing to gamble with a $100 smart phone repair.
The standard argument is that the engineering and physics challenges with long-distance space travel are so great that any entity that can solve them doesn't really care about the bugs on Earth or Earth itself, they can get what they want from any sun or planet they can find and feed into their matter/energy/matter systems.
Or they have perfected remote sensing that they don't travel at all.
This would be impossible to do to Air Force One over European air spaces. Dozens of US fighters are capable of being scrambled from all over Europe to protect Air Force One, and this assumes there isn't a fighter escort all the time.
Even if for some weird reason AF1 would land, the secret service would never allow the plane to be searched or probably even approached by anything less than an armored company-size force.
To me the simplest and most straightforward solution is enabling a phone's touch interface to be extended to the larger dash screen. This could happen wirelessly or via wired connector (USB or HDMI).
This puts the phone's features on the larger dash screen where they are presumably easier to interact with. For safety reasons, you could consider a restriction that prevents use of text and video apps display while the vehicle is in motion (but still make it easy to short that wire to ground for those of us who don't want to be limited like this).
To make this work, iOS and Android would both have to support touch interfaces external to their device as well as better external display formatting (ie, not just the rectangular phone screen, but matching the aspect/size of the car display). Ideally there would also be some kind of standard that would support tactile physical buttons mappable to touch functions.
At this point, the car maker only needs to provide basic infotainment controls for the car radio and amplifier and climate controls.
....accepted only at the company store. And somehow you can never get ahead because your scrip is barely enough to pay your rent (in company housing) and buy essentials. But fortunately, the company store offers you credit so that next packet of scrip leaves you just enough behind to need a little more credit...
I honestly don't see how people running a business do this with a straight face, although I suspect its one of those things where someone responsible for payroll is given some ridiculous "cost reduction" goal by an owner and figures either they keep their job by meeting the goal or they get shitcanned.
There is a cost of business calculation in here that makes the fines look ineffectual, along with a generally sleazy business plan that simply reboots the business in a new office under a new name within days.
What needs to happen is a RICO prosecution which would drag in all the service providers involved with this. ISPs, financial institutions, and all the other generally legitimate businesses that enable this kind of fraud.
When these guys are ALSO getting $100,000k personal fines + 20 years in jail, along with the principal perpetrators of these frauds, it'll get to be a lot harder to run these frauds.
Women don't exist as a single, collective shared intelligence, and that's not required to accept my logic, either. I'm describing the broader behavior of the entire group, not predicting the behavior of any specific woman.
I could describe the behavior of a flock of birds and never describe the behavior of the sparrow in your yard, but it doesn't mean that the flocks of sparrows don't exhibit the behavior I've described.
It's funny how people want to reject demonstrably believable, if not factually true, group descriptions because they are not perfect predictors of any single individual or don't explain the behavior of an outlier (in this case, the Dr. Who t-shirt wearing poster above).
The overwhelming statistical reality is that women ARE image conscious and as a group actively seek to enhance their appearance and leverage it for benefit (social, reproductive, mate-seeking, professional even). The magazines, the clothing lines, the people you meet on the street reinforce this time and again.
It does not mean that *some* women don't reject this for all kinds of reasons -- belonging to a religious group, being a lesbian, lack of social integration, or other specific internal variables not understood.
Any time women decide they don't want to leverage their appearance they are welcome to stop doing it, but I suspect that there are several truisms that will make this unlikely.
1) The benefit is short term, while the negative is long term. In that situation, most people give in to the short-term benefit and ignore the long-term consequences (smoking, drinking, drugs, etc).
2) Women, I think, are inherently image-conscious (reproductive advantages) and usually it takes a repressive, male-dominated religious movement to suppress this. It's not something they do on their own.
3) Contemporary cultural values -- despite how much simpler it would be as a woman to have a plain, shorter haircut, not wear makeup and not wear a lot of clumsy girl clothes (pantyhose, high heels, elaborate undergarments), most women do not want to be a "tomboy". In fact, I think most women do not dress to consciously appeal to men but instead to out-compete with other women.
You can blame men for objectifying women with porno mags and videos, but nobody's putting a gun to women's heads to make them read Glamour, Cosmopolitan or other magazines that "tell" women how to behave. It's a self-imposed system, not something men tell them.
I want an iOS GoogleVoice to work like Line2, using VoIP for calling and with cellular callback as a last resort.
I'd use the hell out of it if it worked that way.
It's what I assumed. The Panny UI is sluggish where the Sony UI is speedy.
I found this really surprising considering how my Panny E80 DVD recorder always worked flawlessly and still works. Of course I don't use it much but I occasionally find something worthwhile SD to transfer to disc, thankfully the Tivo HD still supports analog/SD downconvert!
My first DVD player was an Apex, back when it was a big deal to reflash it with region-free/no macrovision firmware (circa 2000?). At some point I ran into issues with this player when MPEG2 bitrates went over some threshold (5 Mbps?) -- the player just didn't have the horsepower to handle that data rate.
Eventually that player died and I went through a series of inexpensive Chinese players. Some failed outright after six months, but those that didn't die would often choke on some discs, freezing in the middle of playback or stuttering every 15 minutes.
I finally gave up and spent nearly $100 on a name-brand player and all those problems went away....until I got into Bluray players!
I bought two nearly identical Panasonic Blu-Ray players, hoping that a big name and higher price bought me better equipment, but these players have also been flaky, although not as bad as the Chinese DVD players, requiring full power cycling (pulling the plug) from time to time.
Usually the content (seems most common with HBO discs) freezes and won't continue, like it has a tracking error. Sometimes you can chapter skip and it will continue playing, but usually I pull the plug. Some software updates have helped, but it still happens too often. A Sony purchased in the last six months doesn't do this.
Anyway, the moral of the story is test your discs in better players. I kept home-burned CD-Rs in my car for years and was terribly abusive to them (left on the seat, jammed 3 into one slot in the visor holder, etc) without ever having problems except for the most obviously scratched discs. Other than some very early Kodak CD-Rs I burned in the late 90s optical media, whether factory or burned hasn't been an issue as much as the player hardware has.
The assumption here is that the bribe is always paid by a company offering substantially above-market pricing for commodity products and that the price differential between fair market prices and bribery prices pays the bribe.
I would argue that this form of kickbacks is much less common and less likely to happen. There almost always is intense scrutiny of costs and substantive overpricing will almost always be noticed, especially on recurring products.
I think kickbacks are probably more common in situations where pricing is opaque (complex and one-time transactions) and where pricing is relatively equal and the value to the kickback payer isn't in the increased margin but in the increased volume or market share.
In the situation where pricing is equal, it's hard to see where the crime is because the company doing the purchasing has nothing to gain or lose switching between vendors.
I've read that by the late 1960s many significant Klan leaders were informers, many of which were paid by the FBI to form their own "klaverns", recruit members, etc.
I don't know what it's like now, but I suspect being a high-profile right wing racist is probably only a hobby you can get away with by being an informant.
Oops, that should read "It's NOT completely clear..."
It's completely clear why this "steering" is illegal. I thought that's largely what sales WAS -- steering to company A over company B for reasons beyond simple differences in product quality or cost.
I have to believe that this goes on all the time, everywhere. I used to get free lunches and unsolicited trinkets from vendors all the time. I never changed my buying habits based on this, but maybe for $7 million I might.
I get why steering is undesirable from an economic perspective -- it's a huge economic inefficiency, but then again, so is paying your CEO a billion dollars when the company loses money. I also get why businesses would fire you if they found you doing it, but then again, they might fire you for not showing up to work, yet that isn't a crime, either.
About the only argument that makes sense is that it is "stealing" indirectly, but this would seem to depend on the product being purchased at meaningfully inflated prices versus simply from the lowest cost vendor. Even when products are identical, it often makes sense to choose a higher priced supplier for service or other reasons.
At some point, while I agree it is shady and not an ideal practice, it kind of seems like it's illegal because business management doesn't like it or get a piece of it, not because it represents material harm.
..unless MBAs get involved.
Find some CS grads, offer them PDP-11 training and assembler training and a job paying slightly-above-average wages & bennies and tell them the job is guaranteed for the next 30 years.
Right now that sounds pretty good to me --- guaranteed employment on a well-understood platform for 30 more years (although I really only need about 20-25 more years..)
Sure, some guys would rather slave away 80 hours a week to develop iPhone apps, Metro tiles or Web X.0 apps because that's what all the cool guys are doing and it's "the future" (until those jobs are shipped off to the next up-and-coming third world country).
Of course, MBAs would manage to fuck this up by deciding that because it's an "obsolete" technology, you don't need to pay anything.
The thing is, so many of our current problems -- climate change, environmental exploitation, pollution, energy scarcity, food costs and in many cases, political conflict are magnified greatly by large populations.
It's really hard to see the benefit to human civilization that a global population of 8 or 10 billion brings versus 2 billion. Many of the extra 6 billion people are in poverty, live squalid lives and contribute to political instability. Those that aren't in poverty drive resource exploitation (eg, deforesting the Amazon for commercial farmland), greenhouse gas production, etc. There's really little that can be said for a world population past 1-2 billion people.
A world with fewer people demands fewer resources. It has more space, more room for error and demands less stringent political controls to manage big populations and big population densities.