lunch is when I read Slashdot!

Agreed, In a very pragmatic sense, employers value a degree as a form of risk mitigation. The idea is that some respected institution has already done the vetting process. The accuracy of this process is certainly debatable, but it's certainly a shortcut for employer to have to perform very deep screening of potential hires. Greg

This "Mac clones nearly killed Apple" is always brought up as some sort of gospel proof that open hardware is bad for Apple. While there is probably some truth to this, the main things that nearly killed Apple in the mid 90s were lackluster machines with clone-like industrial design sold at a premium and an aging operating system. Jobs came in and rectified these issues starting with the iMac and then OSX. That the clone Mac were competitive is really more an indicator of Apple's mid 90s lack on innovation.