That's some lovely insights you have there. Do you actually have any experience in an emergency service to back up you up your claims (none of which are correct)? I certainly hope that next time you are trapped in a vehicle covered in blood and sitting in your own shit and vomit, your flesh all broken and mangled and your eyes hanging our of their sockets that society can spare $50 in fuel to pay for extra services to be directed your way. If they aren't needed, well they can return to station.

Road Crash Rescue (RCR) is vastly different than it once was even 10 to 15 years ago. If you doubt me, go to your nearest station and ask them to show you the equipment on the truck and about the training they undertake to be RCR qualified. They can explain to you how many tasks they have to complete in a very limited timeframe and you can learn for yourself why two trucks are often needed. Even you want to play the numbers game about costs, you will find that the huge medical and rehabilitation costs to get people back to being productive members of society vastly outweigh the relatively small cost of having extra emergency service personnel attend and assist at the initial stages of a RCR.

So while I can appreciate that as a taxpayer while you are sitting at home nice and safe you can think about how much something costs. I hope that you can also appreciate that when I get to an incident I have more important things to think about.

Open source costs nothing?
It's the time consuming necessity of manual upgrading hundreds of machines which stops me deploying more apps in government. I may not be the system admin at the governmental organisation you work at but then again I might be. I will install deploy firefox, openoffice and a open source media player in our next SOE if you can show me a reliable, simple system which will allow me to update the above programs through a single interface without repackaging/recompiling/wasting time each individual app or update.

Just like every other employee I need to CMA and part of my job is to be the person responsible for every outdated and insecure app on our network.

Sure some jobs have respect but respect isn't everything. Frankly I found my full time shifts as a firefighter boring: Clean the truck check the equipment. Wait. Do an inspection. Wait. Clean the station. Wait. Do some skills / drills. Wait. Wait. Wait. Get a cat down from a tree. Wait. Wait Wait. Did I mention the waiting?

IT on the other hand, there's always something going on (and I still moonlight as a firefighter so I still get to go to all the good jobs anyway, I'm just a few minutes behind the full time crew).

Well I find my IT job a pleasant change from my other job as a firefighter where I'm in the public eye, TV crews, people thinking you can do anything (and expecting you to do everything for them no matter how lame (ie finding their lost "pedigree" dog)) and most of all the unjustified hero worship.

The two two jobs are actually very similar: Troubleshooting, helping people, lateral thinking, consistency and always, always, have a backup, the more the better. I enjoy both jobs equally (for different reasons) so if you are finding IT not as rewarding as you would like, retrain yourself and try something different (like volunteer /part-time firefighting on the side. (The hardest part about it for me was getting over my self doubt to actually turn up to join.)).

Just to add a data point to the discussion: When I owned and operated a bookstore some of the most commonly purchased books were the classics. These newly printed books are out of copyright and were bought and sold cheaply ($5) despite being available for free elsewhere (Project Gutenburg). For works that are not protected by copyright there is still a viable market for those works to be reproduced, bought and sold.

Whith a fully loaded character carying a bucket, use a nearby well you will get a new bucket spawned at your feet. Not really useful unless you consider houses made of buckets a good thing..