Re:Discovery vs Invention
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 2
Patents should last 10 years maximum, ever.
Far too short for may domains. And the other limits you specify are already part of patent law. The problem is the implementation, not the specification.
adding "expiration" field to a copyright form...
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 2
The proposal is to add an "expiration" field to a copyright form, and letting someone filing the copyright specify a more limited time than what is allowable by law. This is a nice, backward compatible mechanism which could create competition based not only on price, but also on the expiration date.
No vendor would set a copyright at anything reasonable if it were for competitive advantage. Not many customers would take into account the expiration of the copyright in their purchasing decisions.
Americans _love_ numbers and stastics. The copyright expration date would play in nicely with this "scientific comparision" tendency... you just don't know. It could become a huge factor in purchase decisions. A company like Ford Motor may buy a HumanResourceSoftware for 2-3x the purchase price of an equivalent software if they _knew_ in 5 years it would become public domain and wouldn't be price-gouged on an endless upgrade cycle... I know someone who makes purchase decisions like this at Chrysler, and I've talked to him about this idea; he thinks it would make a difference.
So, its a small change and thus has a good chance of being feisable to implement (politicians could be accused of being non-capitalistic if they don't support it) and it may make a big difference... if it puts the expry date column on software reviews... imagine. Also, imagine the influx of open source software as companies up their price but lower their expiry date to 2-5 years and compete not only on price, but also on when the software becomes public...
Changable Copyright Term Limits
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 2
What's to stop everyone from choosing the 50 year term and still selling the software for a high price?
Nothing. However, if the time of the copyright becomes a factor in competition it is a way for one vendor to differ themselves from another. Right now we have two extremes: open source (aka free of charge) and proprietary (perpetual charge). Nothing saying that we can't make a derived model which is proprietary for N years and then public domain for years there after. In order to get a copyright on a binary, you'd have to submit to the copyright office the source code in escrow, which would be released upon the expiration date. You could then always update your copyright to make the expiration date shorter. Given another alternative, some vendors will choose it. In this model, open source is effectively "no copyright" (yes, I use the term lightly), and proprietary is "full copyright", a limited term copyright is a ballence; you are specifying when your code becomes public domain. This is a differentiation point... and could be used in software reviewes right next to cost.
A tangible suggestion...
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
In an emerging market, where prior investment is negligible, consumers desire highly differentiated software offerings; our legal environment supports this need exquisitely. However, in established markets, where consumers have invested in and have become dependent upon a particular software, these same consumers no longer desire competition for new and different software offerings. Instead, if given a choice, they would prefer competition for the change in the software they currently use. Unfortunately, our current legal practices, focused on emerging markets and justified with natural-right copyright thinking, deny the marketplace this alternative style of competition.
I do think that a contractual system is possible to establish such a competitive market for software upgrades, could prove more effective than a breakup. This proposal necessitates the creation of a non-profit registry-of-deeds tasked with maintaining records of software produced by revisions from competing authors. Specifically, the registry would administer access to source code and would calculate royalties from the licensing of administered software. The proposal rests on the following principles:
1. Before offering software to the marketplace, a developer would deposit into the registry all source code, description of patents, and design materials necessary to understand and build the program offered.
2. As part of each deposit, the developer would also specify a per-end-user licensing fee for programs derived from the material deposited.
3. Anyone can then retrieve these deposits and build from the material contained provided that any derived or competing work which the reader is thereafter involved is registered according to this same method.
4. When a derivative program is licensed, the sale price is calculated with the licensing fees for the materials upon which the program is derived. A technique involving anonymous serial numbers can be employed so that a given deposit is only licensed and charged once per user.
5. The developer may at any time reduce the posted price for their deposits; but may not license use of the material separately for amounts less than the posted price.
6. When fees are collected, royalties are distributed to each developer according to the number of licenses issued for each of their deposits.
7. The license for each deposit does not extend to trademarks, intellectual property of other parties, or material that was deposited separately. Deposits which would overlap in material must be decomposed into smaller units; the original treated as a derived work.
While the above may seem complicated, it will administer software that is a composite of revisions from competing authors. I am positive that most of this process can be automated so that developers, customers, and distributors are shielded from the administrative burden.
I believe that this mechanism could bring about more professionalism within the industry. It would eliminate bait-and-upgrade schemes. It would also improve software reliability. Lacking serious competition for upgrades, established software vendors have little incentive to work on quality control issues. Furthermore, with source code and design documents publicly available, retired programmers could be independently contracted for the evaluation of commercial applications. I can even imagine professional review organizations emerging, helping the consumer sort through the hype to identify those products with good, solid engineering.
How do you define what software is and isn't?
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 2
Really, if you can't get enough benefit out of writing a piece of software in 10 years, then it's someone else's turn
What happens if the software you wrote has a limited customer base, and you figure it will take 20 years to get a return on your investment?
I'd rather have the user be able to specify the limit of their copyright on the form and then have markets use this additional information (when the copyright expires) as an additional factor in their decision. They may choose to buy software that costs $500 now and becomes public domain two years later over software that is $100 now and doesn't become public domain for the next 50 years...
This is a much harder set of issues...
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 2
All copyrights must be held by a private individual. No corporate entity may hold a copyright.
This can easly be circumvented by an exclusive license, and many many other legal instruments.
Copyright terms may vary up to a period of 17 years (depending on content type -- To Be Specified
Any boundary you make will be blurry. What is a movie that is generated by a computer program dynamically? This is inflexible and won't scale.
Copyright expires upon the death of the copyright holder.
Thereby making it impossible for me to use copyrighted material as an asset? Oh brother. Your solutions are worse than the problem.
Copyrights cannot be assigned to another entity
See above. There are tons of legal ways to get around this... why? If I want to sell it I should be able to. It is a limited monopoly afterall, it has value, and thus I should be able to use it in the marketplace. Copyright law is silent on all of these issues for good reason.
If a work has some form of access control, that access control must be disabled when the work enters public domain
Good idea, hard to enforce. A better way is a registry; if you want to copyright binary source code, you must include the source code to the copyright office for escrow, as soon as the copyright expires, the source is released.
Reverse engineering any sort of access control is legal
Yes, withdrawing DMCA is a great idea. But I'm not certain if you can go any further. Tradesecret law is important...
Patents must be held by individuals, not corporate entities
They are held by individuals, they just happen to be assignable/licensed to companies.
Only physical objects and processes may be patented.
How do you make this distinction? A can-of-worms this is.
No patent shall be granted for algorithms or business processes
I'm not certain this is such a good idea, just about everything shoudl be patentable, IMHO, but only if it "advances the sciences and useful arts".
A working implementation of the patented process must be provided (upon request of USPTO)
This is called "reduction to practice" and it is already a requirement.
Naturally occuring results of processes may not be patented (ex: DNA)
Once again, it's hard to make this distinction. Any guidelines? The patent process is by necessity a one-by-one kind of thingy.
The USPTO must conduct a good faith search for any prior art
But they do already! They just hire idiots to do it who are impressed by anything technical sounding... the problem is more how they get funded. The funding of the PTO comes from patent applications. Thus, to get more funding, they need to increase applications. And what a better way to encourage the applications then by approving a big chunks of them.
Perhaps a better solution is to make them accoutnable so that the PTO can be sued a fixed fee for patents which should not have been issued. This, or some other accoutability mechanism is needed to provide a dis-insentive to approve applications without doing due dillegence.
Overall, nice ideas though. You need some serious thinking on this stuff...
I propose a centralized copyright system (registry of deeds) whereby software is free as in libre, but not necessary as in gratis. To read the most succinct version I've come up with, go here. Unfortunately, my distributedcopyright.org isn't up.
They may just confirm Judge Jackson's assertion that any sort of compromise short of a breakup will be insufficient. Here's hoping that Kollar-Kotelly's nose is as good as Jackson's.
This is FUD, plain and simple. The fact is, that the.NET CLR and C# specifications are right up there on the ECMA [www.ecma.ch] standards board for anyone to freely implement.
Just beacuse it is an open spec doesn't mean that it isn't burdened with patents. About 6 months ago I was down at the PTO filing a provisional (I do this often on the stuff that I write... with no intention to follow up; it just puts my stuff in the public domain so no one can patent it) and ran into the fella from IBM. He had a huge stack of patents (about 40 or so). I asked him how often he does this... he smiled and said "about once a week". I multiplied 50*40=2000 patents? And he just grinned, proud of this legal terror they had constructed. I can't imagine that Microsoft is much different. In those few hundred (perhaps a thousand or more) software patents I bet there are several on CLR. And I bet if/when you seriously come close to threatening Microsoft, they will use them against you. So please. Calling something FUD when it isn't is just niave.
Congrats, you've just described a maintenance nightmare. Every time someone has to change some code, you've just forced them to double their workload, and change some comments too.
The comments should talk about _what_ the module dues, not _how_ it does it. Stick with this distinction and it'll be a bit easier. If your module changes so much that the _what_ changes... then you really should take the time to reconsider your comments... as they may point out what assumptions other code may be making and where compensating changes may be needed.
An XBox sale is a sale Sony or Nintendo won't make
on
Console Pricing Economics
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· Score: 4, Insightful
and this is the important part. Microsoft's strategy here is just to bleed its competitors over the next few years to make them very unprofitable. As XBox gains marketshare, the other two vendors will give way. This will then increase the box price for the other two vendors (less volume) and the software available for newer units will probably be less, as vendors will make stuff for the Xbox first. And then the network effect kicks in...
So, it may cost Microsoft a few billion dollars in losses to crack this nut... who cares? In the end Microsoft will control the game market and it will become a monopoly; where each game manufacturer supports XBox, but none of the others. This is one half, and we haven't talked about how Microsoft's Venture Capital fund is sure to help out start-up game manufacturers who promise _never_ _ever_ to make a Sony or Nintendo game cartrige.
It voted to require the Federal Trade Commission to develop privacy rules for offline businesses as well, and reduced the maximum amount consumers could win for privacy violations from $5,000 to $500.
This is just absurd. Assuming that a violating company only got 1% of people suing, and a fraction of them winning... this means that the average cost per customer is really about $5. This is an acceptable "cost of doing business".
snail mail and accidental loss of credit cards
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
Don't bother calling them. Just send them a registered letter 30 days before about the cancelation. And then cancel your credit card and get a new one.
I recommend a $500 credit card limit "sacrificial" card. It gets good amount of activity from electronic transactions (from tatteredcover, etc.) and about once every six months you loose it. It is amazing how the card just disappears... I mean my sacrifical card just spontaneously combusts in the drawer where I keep it... Oh well, with just a simple call I get a replacment; one with a new number. Then I call up the services I still have that monthly bill (NY Times, etc.) and tell them about the new card number. In this manner I've been lucky enough not to have my credit card used for purchases that I don't approve. I've been amazed at the calls I get within the next 30 days after canceling... A friend of mine has had his card for 3-4 years, he didn't want to "loose" it since he had memorized the number and didn't want to have to re-learn it; problem is, every vendor (and any cracker that has broken in to the vendors) knows the number too... luckly he has alot of time to sort out all of the invalid billings on his card. I don't have that kind of time, memorizing a new credit card number every few months is a bit easier... I think.
If they go about causing enough pain for enough people... perhaps congress will get involved and fix the monster that they have created? (or perhaps they will just make it worse...)
And don't be afraid to remind them that the ROI for certs is far greater than for college tuition in the short and even medium term.
Don't walk, RUN, from any college that takes this perspective. College is to prepare you for life-long growth, not jupping through hoops created by brain-dead statistics monkeys who don't know how to think critically. Certainly a few certificates may help (but do this in the summer). However, if any college you interview takes the perspective of the above poster... run Look for colleges which will develop your ability to think critically. Don't settle for anything less (certificate focus) or you are wasting your money. If you want certs, just stay home with your parents, study, and pass them. If you want to learn to think... go to a real college and don't worry about any "practical" impact...
I would stick to a state school (like Michigan State University) instead of a really "high power" school. Why? So that you can have time to goof-off, learn how to manage the opposite sex, and get lots of job experience via internships/part-time contract work.
A few other suggestions: (a) take business classes, especially a class or two in law; (b) take a good amount of english/technical writing courses; and (c) take a course in civics (government, ethics, etc.) Basically... be well rounded -- give the non-technical courses some serious work. Hang out with the artsy crowd some... yes, it may be painful, but it will come in handly later on.
Designer William McDonough is a very thoughtful and moving speaker; he damn near brought me to tears (and fuming with anger) when I heared a speech of his at the Press Club in Washington, D.C. It was simply a wonderful speech. I double the recommendation...
I love my 1985 HP-11C as well... I wish they still made them, as I'd buy a few more for members of my extended family who are turning 12. What a great way to learn how to write simple programs; registers, stacks, etc.
The problem is that a camera has perpetual memory and with optical regognition, it would also allow profiling; letting the government track where I am at any given time. This latter more subtle aspects are what I'm worried about. A cop behind a banner doesn't have these abilities, and they are an invasion of my privacy.
I also live in D.C. and i have yet to get one of these violations... (knock on wood). But then again, I usually follow the posted limits and am rather conservative with traffic lights.
That said, i did get nabbed 10's of times very close to home; but this was due to malfunction.
The title of the law.com article is "PR Campaigns Loose Speech Protection". Now, I've heared alot about the differences between PR and out right advertising. But frankly, I've also heared people say that PR (creating "buzz") is a very good form of advertising. Thus, the whole premise that PR is not advertising is kinda funny to me. It seems that anything a company does in the political world be to be a "good citizen" and thus enhance their trademark's value, aka advertising. For example, press release put out on newswire is "PR" but a radio spot or a banner ad is "advertising". Escuse me, they are both places where the company gets out its message, and most of the time they both cost money. A newswire press release is about $300.00. Am I missing anything?
Slashdot Mirror
Patents should last 10 years maximum, ever.
Far too short for may domains. And the other limits you specify are already part of patent law. The problem is the implementation, not the specification.
The proposal is to add an "expiration" field to a copyright form, and letting someone filing the copyright specify a more limited time than what is allowable by law. This is a nice, backward compatible mechanism which could create competition based not only on price, but also on the expiration date.
No vendor would set a copyright at anything reasonable if it were for competitive advantage. Not many customers would take into account the expiration of the copyright in their purchasing decisions.
Americans _love_ numbers and stastics. The copyright expration date would play in nicely with this "scientific comparision" tendency... you just don't know. It could become a huge factor in purchase decisions. A company like Ford Motor may buy a HumanResourceSoftware for 2-3x the purchase price of an equivalent software if they _knew_ in 5 years it would become public domain and wouldn't be price-gouged on an endless upgrade cycle... I know someone who makes purchase decisions like this at Chrysler, and I've talked to him about this idea; he thinks it would make a difference.
So, its a small change and thus has a good chance of being feisable to implement (politicians could be accused of being non-capitalistic if they don't support it) and it may make a big difference... if it puts the expry date column on software reviews... imagine. Also, imagine the influx of open source software as companies up their price but lower their expiry date to 2-5 years and compete not only on price, but also on when the software becomes public...
What's to stop everyone from choosing the 50 year term and still selling the software for a high price?
Nothing. However, if the time of the copyright becomes a factor in competition it is a way for one vendor to differ themselves from another. Right now we have two extremes: open source (aka free of charge) and proprietary (perpetual charge). Nothing saying that we can't make a derived model which is proprietary for N years and then public domain for years there after. In order to get a copyright on a binary, you'd have to submit to the copyright office the source code in escrow, which would be released upon the expiration date. You could then always update your copyright to make the expiration date shorter. Given another alternative, some vendors will choose it. In this model, open source is effectively "no copyright" (yes, I use the term lightly), and proprietary is "full copyright", a limited term copyright is a ballence; you are specifying when your code becomes public domain. This is a differentiation point... and could be used in software reviewes right next to cost.
From here:
In an emerging market, where prior investment is negligible, consumers desire highly differentiated software offerings; our legal environment supports this need exquisitely. However, in established markets, where consumers have invested in and have become dependent upon a particular software, these same consumers no longer desire competition for new and different software offerings. Instead, if given a choice, they would prefer competition for the change in the software they currently use. Unfortunately, our current legal practices, focused on emerging markets and justified with natural-right copyright thinking, deny the marketplace this alternative style of competition.
I do think that a contractual system is possible to establish such a competitive market for software upgrades, could prove more effective than a breakup. This proposal necessitates the creation of a non-profit registry-of-deeds tasked with maintaining records of software produced by revisions from competing authors. Specifically, the registry would administer access to source code and would calculate royalties from the licensing of administered software. The proposal rests on the following principles:
1. Before offering software to the marketplace, a developer would deposit into the registry all source code, description of patents, and design materials necessary to understand and build the program offered.
2. As part of each deposit, the developer would also specify a per-end-user licensing fee for programs derived from the material deposited.
3. Anyone can then retrieve these deposits and build from the material contained provided that any derived or competing work which the reader is thereafter involved is registered according to this same method.
4. When a derivative program is licensed, the sale price is calculated with the licensing fees for the materials upon which the program is derived. A technique involving anonymous serial numbers can be employed so that a given deposit is only licensed and charged once per user.
5. The developer may at any time reduce the posted price for their deposits; but may not license use of the material separately for amounts less than the posted price.
6. When fees are collected, royalties are distributed to each developer according to the number of licenses issued for each of their deposits.
7. The license for each deposit does not extend to trademarks, intellectual property of other parties, or material that was deposited separately. Deposits which would overlap in material must be decomposed into smaller units; the original treated as a derived work.
While the above may seem complicated, it will administer software that is a composite of revisions from competing authors. I am positive that most of this process can be automated so that developers, customers, and distributors are shielded from the administrative burden.
I believe that this mechanism could bring about more professionalism within the industry. It would eliminate bait-and-upgrade schemes. It would also improve software reliability. Lacking serious competition for upgrades, established software vendors have little incentive to work on quality control issues. Furthermore, with source code and design documents publicly available, retired programmers could be independently contracted for the evaluation of commercial applications. I can even imagine professional review organizations emerging, helping the consumer sort through the hype to identify those products with good, solid engineering.
Really, if you can't get enough benefit out of writing a piece of software in 10 years, then it's someone else's turn
What happens if the software you wrote has a limited customer base, and you figure it will take 20 years to get a return on your investment?
I'd rather have the user be able to specify the limit of their copyright on the form and then have markets use this additional information (when the copyright expires) as an additional factor in their decision. They may choose to buy software that costs $500 now and becomes public domain two years later over software that is $100 now and doesn't become public domain for the next 50 years...
All copyrights must be held by a private individual. No corporate entity may hold a copyright.
This can easly be circumvented by an exclusive license, and many many other legal instruments.
Copyright terms may vary up to a period of 17 years (depending on content type -- To Be Specified
Any boundary you make will be blurry. What is a movie that is generated by a computer program dynamically? This is inflexible and won't scale.
Copyright expires upon the death of the copyright holder.
Thereby making it impossible for me to use copyrighted material as an asset? Oh brother. Your solutions are worse than the problem.
Copyrights cannot be assigned to another entity
See above. There are tons of legal ways to get around this... why? If I want to sell it I should be able to. It is a limited monopoly afterall, it has value, and thus I should be able to use it in the marketplace. Copyright law is silent on all of these issues for good reason.
If a work has some form of access control, that access control must be disabled when the work enters public domain
Good idea, hard to enforce. A better way is a registry; if you want to copyright binary source code, you must include the source code to the copyright office for escrow, as soon as the copyright expires, the source is released.
Reverse engineering any sort of access control is legal
Yes, withdrawing DMCA is a great idea. But I'm not certain if you can go any further. Tradesecret law is important...
Patents must be held by individuals, not corporate entities
They are held by individuals, they just happen to be assignable/licensed to companies.
Only physical objects and processes may be patented.
How do you make this distinction? A can-of-worms this is.
No patent shall be granted for algorithms or business processes
I'm not certain this is such a good idea, just about everything shoudl be patentable, IMHO, but only if it "advances the sciences and useful arts".
A working implementation of the patented process must be provided (upon request of USPTO)
This is called "reduction to practice" and it is already a requirement.
Naturally occuring results of processes may not be patented (ex: DNA)
Once again, it's hard to make this distinction. Any guidelines? The patent process is by necessity a one-by-one kind of thingy.
The USPTO must conduct a good faith search for any prior art
But they do already! They just hire idiots to do it who are impressed by anything technical sounding... the problem is more how they get funded. The funding of the PTO comes from patent applications. Thus, to get more funding, they need to increase applications. And what a better way to encourage the applications then by approving a big chunks of them.
Perhaps a better solution is to make them accoutnable so that the PTO can be sued a fixed fee for patents which should not have been issued. This, or some other accoutability mechanism is needed to provide a dis-insentive to approve applications without doing due dillegence.
Overall, nice ideas though. You need some serious thinking on this stuff...
I propose a centralized copyright system (registry of deeds) whereby software is free as in libre, but not necessary as in gratis. To read the most succinct version I've come up with, go here. Unfortunately, my distributedcopyright.org isn't up.
Ya, but the G forces are nothing compared to the peer pressure a 13 year old boy feels when his buddies prod him to go on the "big one".
By calling it Linux and not GNU/Linux the community shows a lack of respect. And respect is the currency of our profession.
They may just confirm Judge Jackson's assertion that any sort of compromise short of a breakup will be insufficient. Here's hoping that Kollar-Kotelly's nose is as good as Jackson's.
This is FUD, plain and simple. The fact is, that the .NET CLR and C# specifications are right up there on the ECMA [www.ecma.ch] standards board for anyone to freely implement.
Just beacuse it is an open spec doesn't mean that it isn't burdened with patents. About 6 months ago I was down at the PTO filing a provisional (I do this often on the stuff that I write... with no intention to follow up; it just puts my stuff in the public domain so no one can patent it) and ran into the fella from IBM. He had a huge stack of patents (about 40 or so). I asked him how often he does this... he smiled and said "about once a week". I multiplied 50*40=2000 patents? And he just grinned, proud of this legal terror they had constructed. I can't imagine that Microsoft is much different. In those few hundred (perhaps a thousand or more) software patents I bet there are several on CLR. And I bet if/when you seriously come close to threatening Microsoft, they will use them against you. So please. Calling something FUD when it isn't is just niave.
Congrats, you've just described a maintenance nightmare. Every time someone has to change some code, you've just forced them to double their workload, and change some comments too.
The comments should talk about _what_ the module dues, not _how_ it does it. Stick with this distinction and it'll be a bit easier. If your module changes so much that the _what_ changes... then you really should take the time to reconsider your comments... as they may point out what assumptions other code may be making and where compensating changes may be needed.
and this is the important part. Microsoft's strategy here is just to bleed its competitors over the next few years to make them very unprofitable. As XBox gains marketshare, the other two vendors will give way. This will then increase the box price for the other two vendors (less volume) and the software available for newer units will probably be less, as vendors will make stuff for the Xbox first. And then the network effect kicks in...
So, it may cost Microsoft a few billion dollars in losses to crack this nut... who cares? In the end Microsoft will control the game market and it will become a monopoly; where each game manufacturer supports XBox, but none of the others. This is one half, and we haven't talked about how Microsoft's Venture Capital fund is sure to help out start-up game manufacturers who promise _never_ _ever_ to make a Sony or Nintendo game cartrige.
It voted to require the Federal Trade Commission to develop privacy rules for offline businesses as well, and reduced the maximum amount consumers could win for privacy violations from $5,000 to $500.
This is just absurd. Assuming that a violating company only got 1% of people suing, and a fraction of them winning... this means that the average cost per customer is really about $5. This is an acceptable "cost of doing business".
Don't bother calling them. Just send them a registered letter 30 days before about the cancelation. And then cancel your credit card and get a new one.
I recommend a $500 credit card limit "sacrificial" card. It gets good amount of activity from electronic transactions (from tatteredcover, etc.) and about once every six months you loose it. It is amazing how the card just disappears... I mean my sacrifical card just spontaneously combusts in the drawer where I keep it... Oh well, with just a simple call I get a replacment; one with a new number. Then I call up the services I still have that monthly bill (NY Times, etc.) and tell them about the new card number. In this manner I've been lucky enough not to have my credit card used for purchases that I don't approve. I've been amazed at the calls I get within the next 30 days after canceling... A friend of mine has had his card for 3-4 years, he didn't want to "loose" it since he had memorized the number and didn't want to have to re-learn it; problem is, every vendor (and any cracker that has broken in to the vendors) knows the number too... luckly he has alot of time to sort out all of the invalid billings on his card. I don't have that kind of time, memorizing a new credit card number every few months is a bit easier... I think.
If they go about causing enough pain for enough people... perhaps congress will get involved and fix the monster that they have created? (or perhaps they will just make it worse...)
And don't be afraid to remind them that the ROI for certs is far greater than for college tuition in the short and even medium term.
Don't walk, RUN, from any college that takes this perspective. College is to prepare you for life-long growth, not jupping through hoops created by brain-dead statistics monkeys who don't know how to think critically. Certainly a few certificates may help (but do this in the summer). However, if any college you interview takes the perspective of the above poster... run Look for colleges which will develop your ability to think critically. Don't settle for anything less (certificate focus) or you are wasting your money. If you want certs, just stay home with your parents, study, and pass them. If you want to learn to think... go to a real college and don't worry about any "practical" impact...
I would stick to a state school (like Michigan State University) instead of a really "high power" school. Why? So that you can have time to goof-off, learn how to manage the opposite sex, and get lots of job experience via internships/part-time contract work.
A few other suggestions: (a) take business classes, especially a class or two in law; (b) take a good amount of english/technical writing courses; and (c) take a course in civics (government, ethics, etc.) Basically... be well rounded -- give the non-technical courses some serious work. Hang out with the artsy crowd some... yes, it may be painful, but it will come in handly later on.
Somebody needs to remind DOE that the signs only need to be effective for 600 years or so.
Given that Nuclear Winter may be just around the corner and we could all be killed off, in say 20 minutes from now; 600 years is enough time to spend money on signs. After all, the money we are spending on this is _nothing_ like the money we pay _daily_ for our "defence" spendings.
Designer William McDonough is a very thoughtful and moving speaker; he damn near brought me to tears (and fuming with anger) when I heared a speech of his at the Press Club in Washington, D.C. It was simply a wonderful speech. I double the recommendation...
I love my 1985 HP-11C as well... I wish they still made them, as I'd buy a few more for members of my extended family who are turning 12. What a great way to learn how to write simple programs; registers, stacks, etc.
Don't run red lights all over town and they won't track you. And BTW, police officers read the plates, not the cameras. They just take pics.
I'm not talking about the "state-of-the-art", I'm talking about the "next advance":
1. Optical recognition of license plate numbers
to save money;
2. Tracking all vehicles, so that it is easier
to hunt down stolen vehicles;
Add those too together and we have a big invasion of privacy, and this is more or less what I'm worried about.
The problem is that a camera has perpetual memory and with optical regognition, it would also allow profiling; letting the government track where I am at any given time. This latter more subtle aspects are what I'm worried about. A cop behind a banner doesn't have these abilities, and they are an invasion of my privacy.
I also live in D.C. and i have yet to get one of these violations... (knock on wood). But then again, I usually follow the posted limits and am rather conservative with traffic lights.
That said, i did get nabbed 10's of times very
close to home; but this was due to malfunction.
The title of the law.com article is "PR Campaigns Loose Speech Protection". Now, I've heared alot about the differences between PR and out right advertising. But frankly, I've also heared people say that PR (creating "buzz") is a very good form of advertising. Thus, the whole premise that PR is not advertising is kinda funny to me. It seems that anything a company does in the political world be to be a "good citizen" and thus enhance their trademark's value, aka advertising. For example, press release put out on newswire is "PR" but a radio spot or a banner ad is "advertising". Escuse me, they are both places where the company gets out its message, and most of the time they both cost money. A newswire press release is about $300.00. Am I missing anything?