Machine guns are illegal, even though it's "just a tool".
I know this is somewhat off topic, and will probably get lost in the noise, but...
Machine guns are not illegal in the U.S. Many private individuals happily -- legally -- own machine guns. I know a couple. I've been to the target range with them. Forget the stigma associated with machine guns for a moment. They're just plain fun to shoot. Useless for target shooting, though.
To legally own a machine gun in the US, you must first undergo an FBI background check. If you're crime free/arrest free/drug free/not a threat to national security/not a threat to your neighbors, and if you get a permission slip from your local police chief, then and only then will the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms issue you a permit to own a machine gun.
Way back in the days of yore, when I was in college...
My most memorable CS class was one on software design. During the first week or so, we were to form 3 member teams. As the semester went on, the three member teams were all supposed to be working on the exact same assignment, applying newly learned knowledge to the project. There was specific deliverable at mid-term. Oh, and at mid-term, the class was then required to form 4 member teams. The prof said something about it representing job hopping in the real world (this was in '83, so it's not a new concept, boys & girls). Some teams were necessarily disbanded in order to meet the 4-member requirement. And then the project continued, with more milestone deliverables throughout the rest of the semester, including some rather off-the-wall stuff. It was supposed to mirror the real world he said. We laughed.
And now that I'm older and far more jaded, I see he was right.
And the dynamics of the team was: one guy took over the design work and just handled it. I and the other member took care of coding. Was it a team effort? Not every step of the way. Did some team members contribute more than the others? You betcha. But then that's the way it really works in the real world.
What surprises me is that some of the major hardware vendors would put up with this. Compaq, Dell and IBM?
Actually, it's not surprising at all. Compaq, Dell & IBM are in business to sell boxes. OS/2 wasn't the big hit it was expected to be, because IBM was threatened with loss of preferred pricing terms for DOS & Windows if they agressively pursued marketing plans for OS/2. At the time, IBM was in a heated market place, and to pay higher prices for the OS, meant higher prices on their products, which would mean lower sales volume, and ultimately shareholder dissatisfaction.
I'm not trying to defend MS (in my mind they are the Great Satan's Prime Contractor), but it's quite easy to see their motivation: If you agree to carry our product exclusively, we'll cut you a better deal on the price. This sort of thing goes on all the time, and I'm very sure there's nothing patently illegal about it. Yeah, sure, it's enough to royally piss-off the freedom-loving penguin-heads among us, but so what?
It's been pointed out in other articles that the real key to the.NET initiative is the Passport service, not the actual implementation of any underlying protocols. That's why MS hasn't been all that worried about an open source implementation of.NET. Tony Goodhew's comments are more MS-GPL-viral-infection-FUD spin. The open source community is clearly capable of creating a.NET clone. We know it, MS knows it, everyone knows it. That's not the point. MS still controls the Passport servers, and that's where the real cash cow is.
Think back in history. Think City-State. Think of a heavily fortified city at the cross roads of some very heavily travelled trade routes..NET is the paving on the roads, while the fortified city is MS-Passport. And to move your goods through Passport, you have to pay a tax. Do you think given that model that billg cares whether he owns the roads or not? I don't think so. If I was in bill's shoes, I'd be all for people building roads to my kingdom.
And so who cares if.NET is proprietary or not? If it's easily available for, or ships with, 90+% of the desktops in the world, what does it matter? All of this Mono hype misses the point: what is really needed is a credible competitor for Passport. Forget.NET. Building a.NET work-alike merely reinforces the MS monopoly. We should really be setting our sites on building a competitor to the Passport services.
From then on all you'll see is a dialog box that pops up saying "Do you want to buy this? YES NO" Peopel will just hit yes and barely think about. Since all the info is already in Hailstorm, you won't need to retype your cc.
Amazon.com begins to turn a profit due to license fees on their "One-Click" patent. Meanwhile, cost conscious consumers begin to shop less on the Internet, as MS, Amazon and the CC company's cut of the purchase drives up the cost of basic items sold on the web to a point where the local mom&pop can survive again.
Or, Amazon & MS enter a long protracted legal battle over the "One-Click" patent, where the courts finally throw it out. MS inadvertantly causes patent law in the US to be rewritten, effectively killing business process type patents, bringing sanity back to the system.
Hmm... Can someone tell me again who loses?
Who is the bigger fool: the fool, or the fool who believes what the fool is saying?
The question begs asking: Is MS' seeming turnabout driven by the fact that they're faced with either a) a clean-room re-implementation of some application/program/widget/thingamabob that has become a core part of something else that began life as a GPL'd hunk of code, or b) acknowledgement that all the truly cool stuff is being done in the GPL universe and there's no way for them to capitalize on it (hence embrace, extend and corrupt)?
. If I work for a company developing software (which I did) and they went open source then I can practically wave goodbye to my job.
Actually, I made quite a decent living for several years in the mid to late 80's working with open source software. It was an accounting package that was FAR from GPL'd, but it was nonetheless supplied in source code format. The customer purchased the base package from the vendor, and paid me to tweak it for them. Just because a hunk of code is Open Source doesn't mean it's a zero revenue stream...
Remember: Open Source != Free[1], GPL === Free[1].
Many, many companies may enjoy - imagine they have five workstations. Getting the latest (or any version) is going to cost $2500. Thats a big expenditure. Now, instead of paying for it all at once, maybe it'd be nice for them to pay $75/month for three years.
I think you miss the point: That office you describe looks at the software as part of the cost of the equipment. Since all of the major PC suppliers (Dell, Micron, Gateway, etc) offer PC's with Office pre-installed, and since the pricing schemes on these companies' web sites seem to imply that Office is free with the machine, and since MS has done such a good job maintaining backward compatibility (ok, more or less), the only time a small company would upgrade is when they purchase new equipment. They don't budget for software upgrades to the basic suite; they budget for PC upgrades and the software is free.
Where this is really going to hurt would be companies like the one I work for: we have a number of elderly computers that are perfectly adequate for word-whacking in Win95/Office95, and woefully inadequate for Win2k/Off2k. So the cost of upgrading isn't the cost of the software anymore. It's the cost of a new box PLUS the software.
`(2) PERMISSIBLE ACTS OF ENCRYPTION RESEARCH- Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), it is not a violation of that subsection for a person to circumvent a technological measure as applied to a copy, phonorecord, performance, or display of a published work in the course of an act of good faith encryption research if--
...
IANAL either, but it seems to me that the RIAA has standing in this. The bit you quoted merely says that a researcher can in good faith circumvent an encryption method, but it does NOT grant the researcher the right to discuss those circumvention methods with her or his peers. They met all the requirements of (2)(A)-(D) when they broke the encryption. That much was legal. Presenting a paper to tell the world how they did it is not permitted under this law.
No, boys and girls, they made the right call. Its not likely that they would have prevailed in court. The RIAA's pockets are far, far deeper, and they're in a much better position to kill resistance through litigation. The battle over the DMCA must be chosen wisely, and this case just aint the grail.
Microsoft is very standards driven. We are an active participant in many of the standards bodies and have been leading the charge in promoting the use of XML, SOAP and other standards for our.NET initiative.
Yeah, sure. Whatever.
We should be very clear in defining the difference between standards and proprietary intellectual property
Ahhh... Now we come to the crux: When it's got an RFC number, it's a standard. But when it gets "embraced and extended" it becomes "proprietary intellectual property." It's all becoming very clear.
So with respect to *n[ui]x interoperability, what he seems to be saying is: "Sure, we'll play ball. We'll make our systems work so that they can play nice with the heathen-OS'd boxes you've got. That's 'cuz we conform to standards. But if your boxes want to interact with our boxes, you'll have to use OUR solution, because that's proprietary intellectual property.
...because... most employees in those stores,... either don't know the answers to your questions,
or are way to busy for you to find them and ask anything.
Which is why I've given up trying to get help from the vast majority of store employees. Go to any mega store, and what do you find? Low prices. that's it. Working in these places isn't a career, it's something to do while getting your career started. Forget about getting useful information. There's a hardware store in my town, the kind with squeaky wooden floors, and a real old guy who knows exactly how many #2 washers they've got on hand, and probably remembers when they were invented. That's the kind of store I shop in.
So what's so new about $PrinterCompany putting people on-site to push their product? I remember a friend of mine telling me (15 years ago) that $PrinterCompany2 was paying money direct to the sales people in his store for each $PrinterCompany2 printer they sold. The only difference now, is that $PrinterCompany recognizes that $SuperStore's sales staff are pitifully trained, and that if they want to move product, it has to be through properly trained sales people. It's a logical extension of what's been going on for years.
In my first post-high school job, I worked part time at a computer store. We'd sold a system to a doctor, and after a few monthshis secretary called , complaining that it wasn't working. It was a (at the time) brand-new Cromemco Z-80 based system -- top of the line! -- with dual quad density double sided 8" floppy drives. The (rather large) box was perched on a shelf just off to the secretary's side, and it just so happened that the 8" drive openings were right where she blew her smoke.
The doctor was getting upset with the company I worked for, accusing us of selling him defective hardware. On the third service call to replace the floppy drives, I told the doctor how to fix the problem. Battle-axe that she was, though, we were still making service calls on a regular basis when I left company two years later.
Let's take a look at history: Popular media is full of images of pre-television people huddled around their radios listening to favorite radio shows. The public was conditioned to plan their lives around radio. Then came TV. This was a great leap forward as people could actually now SEE their favorite personalities. And since radio had conditioned people to plan their lives around a broadcast schedule, they had a large and obedient audience. Then came the VCR. And suddenly, people didn't have to plan their lives around broadcast schedules. Can't watch your favorite soap opera because work gets in the way? No problem! Can't watch your favorite sit-com because little Kimmy has a piano recital that night? No problem! Want to watch your favorite movie anytime you want? No problem!
Each of these technologies succeeded because they offered something truly revolutionary. Radio brought visitors into our home who would entertain us. TV added a second sensory input, enriching the entertainment experience. VCRs gave us the power to decide what we wanted to watch, when we wanted to watch it. We as a society became accustomed to being able to decide for ourselves how we spent our time. At the same time, television's all pervasive nature has somehow made it less important in our lives. How many of us live in an area where the local broadcast TV station doesn't broadcast 24x7?
And now, with the advent of digital copy controls, the content producers are once again in a position to dictate when we can watch what they produce, and even how or where we watch it.
I think we as a society have reached the point where it no longer matters; that TV has become a convenience, not a necessity. And if we are no longer able to time shift, most of us will never miss it. We'll move on to other activities. We'll find other things to occupy our free time. TV will become just another media form trying to grab our attention. The signal will devolve into so much noise, much in the same way as Usenet has reached max entropy. And we won't miss it.
In the big scheme of things, it's the media companies that will lose.
I now send the postage-page envelopes back from junk mailers. Empty. Eat that! 30
cents out of your pocket! Yeah!
Empty? You send them empty?! Go to WalleyWorld or any other large chain store with a sporting goods section that caters to the pickup-truck-with-a-gun-rack-in-the-back crowd, and get a couple of pounds of 1oz lead weights. Drop one or two in the envelope and THEN send it back. 30 cents? Hah! Now we're talking real money!
Or do what a friend of mine has been known to do: tape it to a brick and send that (only he included his name with a polite request to not receive future mailings -- and you know what? It worked!)
The bottom line is that you've got to have your own staff to support your machines.
[And for a 90,000 seat deployment, you're a fool if you don't have your own staff to support it]
Since the code is open source, when something does go wrong your staff can fix it. When was the last time you heard of a 90,000 seat MS-Deployment where the customer was able to tell the vendor "We've got an MS-Problem, and we'd like it fixed," only to hear the MS-Vendor say "Sure, we'll get our MS-Staff right on it!"
At least with Federal (U.S.) Goverment tax-payer paid for projects, a Freedom Of Information Act request is all that's required to get the source to custom-developed-for-the-Fed software. And FOIA requests aren't all that hard to file.
The Harvard article cites the DMCA as a possible means of forcing the University to comply. This is because of the clause making ISPs responsible for copyright
violations if they refuse to take them down when notified.
IANAL, but I disagree. If the University is made aware of a specific copyright violation, then they are on the hook to remove the violating material from their network. Napster is not, in and of itself, a copyright violation. Regardless of what the courts have to say, there are legitimate, non-infringing uses for Napster which justify its continued existence on the Universitys' networks.
No, I think the Universities are taking the proper position in this matter: Policing their own networks is bad business for them on so many levels. Let those who believe their rights have been infringed do their own policing.
I had similar complaints with a Java course I took earlier this year from Sun. Over all a good course, but the trainer wasn't much more than live-action "Clippy" reading from the book. Not a guru by any stretch. A lot of material was covered during the week long course, but way too much time was spent on the simple stuff, and the more involved stuff was glossed over. Granted, the instructor was appealing to the lowest common denominator in the class.
As near as I can tell, courses like these are only useful if you already have significant familiarity with the material. Otherwise, you're not likely to really learn anything, and you only slow down the rest of the class.
By accelerating the expiration on all of the NT 4 certs, they have effectively reduced the amount of 'free' time that current MCSE's could use to seek other certifications. I think it could be viewed as a defensive move intended to put just one more obstacle in the path to wider-spread adoption of non-MS revenue stream products.
I'm surprised to find out that anyone gives a fsck about vendor "certification". I thought everyone had realized it was a meaningless scam by now.
I agree that certification is meaningless ($DIETY knows I've seen my share of.*C.*'s that don't know their butt from their elbow), but the sad truth is that certification does help sell an organization's credibility to potential clients, and it does open doors for people looking for employers.
Where I work, I constantly hear whining about how meaningless certifications are, and yet when we hire, that's the first thing we look for.
Clueful customers may realize that certs are worth less than the paper they're printed upon, but IME, clueful customers are far and few between. And those that I have found, usually have a clueless PHB (with purse strings) that's easily impressed by indiscriminant use of acronyms.
The Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval doesn't mean anything, and yet it was a very successful marketing tool. Most certifications today are not much more than that.
What if another state passed a similar law requiring not ADV: but SPAM: for example?
I suppose the Direct Marketing Association is getting what they deserve, then. Congress failed to pass any sort of UCE/UBE legislation, and now the states are passing their own. This is, of course, the nightmare scenario for the direct marketers: instead of a single piece of legislation governing their actions, now they find themselves with many different sets of rules governing how they may and may not send their messages. It seems inevitable that in time, with enough states enacting their own anti-spam legislation, the states may succeed where congress failed: Spam will be legislated out of existence, because it will become impossible to send it and comply with all of the differing laws.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is somewhat off topic, and will probably get lost in the noise, but...
Machine guns are not illegal in the U.S. Many private individuals happily -- legally -- own machine guns. I know a couple. I've been to the target range with them. Forget the stigma associated with machine guns for a moment. They're just plain fun to shoot. Useless for target shooting, though.
To legally own a machine gun in the US, you must first undergo an FBI background check. If you're crime free/arrest free/drug free/not a threat to national security/not a threat to your neighbors, and if you get a permission slip from your local police chief, then and only then will the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms issue you a permit to own a machine gun.
My most memorable CS class was one on software design. During the first week or so, we were to form 3 member teams. As the semester went on, the three member teams were all supposed to be working on the exact same assignment, applying newly learned knowledge to the project. There was specific deliverable at mid-term. Oh, and at mid-term, the class was then required to form 4 member teams. The prof said something about it representing job hopping in the real world (this was in '83, so it's not a new concept, boys & girls). Some teams were necessarily disbanded in order to meet the 4-member requirement. And then the project continued, with more milestone deliverables throughout the rest of the semester, including some rather off-the-wall stuff. It was supposed to mirror the real world he said. We laughed.
And now that I'm older and far more jaded, I see he was right.
And the dynamics of the team was: one guy took over the design work and just handled it. I and the other member took care of coding. Was it a team effort? Not every step of the way. Did some team members contribute more than the others? You betcha. But then that's the way it really works in the real world.
Actually, it's not surprising at all. Compaq, Dell & IBM are in business to sell boxes. OS/2 wasn't the big hit it was expected to be, because IBM was threatened with loss of preferred pricing terms for DOS & Windows if they agressively pursued marketing plans for OS/2. At the time, IBM was in a heated market place, and to pay higher prices for the OS, meant higher prices on their products, which would mean lower sales volume, and ultimately shareholder dissatisfaction.
I'm not trying to defend MS (in my mind they are the Great Satan's Prime Contractor), but it's quite easy to see their motivation: If you agree to carry our product exclusively, we'll cut you a better deal on the price. This sort of thing goes on all the time, and I'm very sure there's nothing patently illegal about it. Yeah, sure, it's enough to royally piss-off the freedom-loving penguin-heads among us, but so what?
Think back in history. Think City-State. Think of a heavily fortified city at the cross roads of some very heavily travelled trade routes. .NET is the paving on the roads, while the fortified city is MS-Passport. And to move your goods through Passport, you have to pay a tax. Do you think given that model that billg cares whether he owns the roads or not? I don't think so. If I was in bill's shoes, I'd be all for people building roads to my kingdom.
And so who cares if .NET is proprietary or not? If it's easily available for, or ships with, 90+% of the desktops in the world, what does it matter? All of this Mono hype misses the point: what is really needed is a credible competitor for Passport. Forget .NET. Building a .NET work-alike merely reinforces the MS monopoly. We should really be setting our sites on building a competitor to the Passport services.
I gotta get out more...
Hmm... Can someone tell me again who loses?
Who is the bigger fool: the fool, or the fool who believes what the fool is saying?
The clueful will figure out a way to defeat this feature. The clueless will get what they deserve.
Their behavior seems odd to me...
Actually, I made quite a decent living for several years in the mid to late 80's working with open source software. It was an accounting package that was FAR from GPL'd, but it was nonetheless supplied in source code format. The customer purchased the base package from the vendor, and paid me to tweak it for them. Just because a hunk of code is Open Source doesn't mean it's a zero revenue stream...
Remember: Open Source != Free[1], GPL === Free[1].
[1] as in beer.
I think you miss the point: That office you describe looks at the software as part of the cost of the equipment. Since all of the major PC suppliers (Dell, Micron, Gateway, etc) offer PC's with Office pre-installed, and since the pricing schemes on these companies' web sites seem to imply that Office is free with the machine, and since MS has done such a good job maintaining backward compatibility (ok, more or less), the only time a small company would upgrade is when they purchase new equipment. They don't budget for software upgrades to the basic suite; they budget for PC upgrades and the software is free.
Where this is really going to hurt would be companies like the one I work for: we have a number of elderly computers that are perfectly adequate for word-whacking in Win95/Office95, and woefully inadequate for Win2k/Off2k. So the cost of upgrading isn't the cost of the software anymore. It's the cost of a new box PLUS the software.
IANAL either, but it seems to me that the RIAA has standing in this. The bit you quoted merely says that a researcher can in good faith circumvent an encryption method, but it does NOT grant the researcher the right to discuss those circumvention methods with her or his peers. They met all the requirements of (2)(A)-(D) when they broke the encryption. That much was legal. Presenting a paper to tell the world how they did it is not permitted under this law.
No, boys and girls, they made the right call. Its not likely that they would have prevailed in court. The RIAA's pockets are far, far deeper, and they're in a much better position to kill resistance through litigation. The battle over the DMCA must be chosen wisely, and this case just aint the grail.
Yeah, sure. Whatever.
We should be very clear in defining the difference between standards and proprietary intellectual property
Ahhh... Now we come to the crux: When it's got an RFC number, it's a standard. But when it gets "embraced and extended" it becomes "proprietary intellectual property." It's all becoming very clear.
So with respect to *n[ui]x interoperability, what he seems to be saying is: "Sure, we'll play ball. We'll make our systems work so that they can play nice with the heathen-OS'd boxes you've got. That's 'cuz we conform to standards. But if your boxes want to interact with our boxes, you'll have to use OUR solution, because that's proprietary intellectual property.
Which is why I've given up trying to get help from the vast majority of store employees. Go to any mega store, and what do you find? Low prices. that's it. Working in these places isn't a career, it's something to do while getting your career started. Forget about getting useful information. There's a hardware store in my town, the kind with squeaky wooden floors, and a real old guy who knows exactly how many #2 washers they've got on hand, and probably remembers when they were invented. That's the kind of store I shop in.
So what's so new about $PrinterCompany putting people on-site to push their product? I remember a friend of mine telling me (15 years ago) that $PrinterCompany2 was paying money direct to the sales people in his store for each $PrinterCompany2 printer they sold. The only difference now, is that $PrinterCompany recognizes that $SuperStore's sales staff are pitifully trained, and that if they want to move product, it has to be through properly trained sales people. It's a logical extension of what's been going on for years.
In my first post-high school job, I worked part time at a computer store. We'd sold a system to a doctor, and after a few monthshis secretary called , complaining that it wasn't working. It was a (at the time) brand-new Cromemco Z-80 based system -- top of the line! -- with dual quad density double sided 8" floppy drives. The (rather large) box was perched on a shelf just off to the secretary's side, and it just so happened that the 8" drive openings were right where she blew her smoke.
The doctor was getting upset with the company I worked for, accusing us of selling him defective hardware. On the third service call to replace the floppy drives, I told the doctor how to fix the problem. Battle-axe that she was, though, we were still making service calls on a regular basis when I left company two years later.
Let's take a look at history: Popular media is full of images of pre-television people huddled around their radios listening to favorite radio shows. The public was conditioned to plan their lives around radio. Then came TV. This was a great leap forward as people could actually now SEE their favorite personalities. And since radio had conditioned people to plan their lives around a broadcast schedule, they had a large and obedient audience. Then came the VCR. And suddenly, people didn't have to plan their lives around broadcast schedules. Can't watch your favorite soap opera because work gets in the way? No problem! Can't watch your favorite sit-com because little Kimmy has a piano recital that night? No problem! Want to watch your favorite movie anytime you want? No problem!
Each of these technologies succeeded because they offered something truly revolutionary. Radio brought visitors into our home who would entertain us. TV added a second sensory input, enriching the entertainment experience. VCRs gave us the power to decide what we wanted to watch, when we wanted to watch it. We as a society became accustomed to being able to decide for ourselves how we spent our time. At the same time, television's all pervasive nature has somehow made it less important in our lives. How many of us live in an area where the local broadcast TV station doesn't broadcast 24x7?
And now, with the advent of digital copy controls, the content producers are once again in a position to dictate when we can watch what they produce, and even how or where we watch it.
I think we as a society have reached the point where it no longer matters; that TV has become a convenience, not a necessity. And if we are no longer able to time shift, most of us will never miss it. We'll move on to other activities. We'll find other things to occupy our free time. TV will become just another media form trying to grab our attention. The signal will devolve into so much noise, much in the same way as Usenet has reached max entropy. And we won't miss it.
In the big scheme of things, it's the media companies that will lose.
</preach>
Empty? You send them empty?! Go to WalleyWorld or any other large chain store with a sporting goods section that caters to the pickup-truck-with-a-gun-rack-in-the-back crowd, and get a couple of pounds of 1oz lead weights. Drop one or two in the envelope and THEN send it back. 30 cents? Hah! Now we're talking real money!
Or do what a friend of mine has been known to do: tape it to a brick and send that (only he included his name with a polite request to not receive future mailings -- and you know what? It worked!)
Since the code is open source, when something does go wrong your staff can fix it. When was the last time you heard of a 90,000 seat MS-Deployment where the customer was able to tell the vendor "We've got an MS-Problem, and we'd like it fixed," only to hear the MS-Vendor say "Sure, we'll get our MS-Staff right on it!"
At least with Federal (U.S.) Goverment tax-payer paid for projects, a Freedom Of Information Act request is all that's required to get the source to custom-developed-for-the-Fed software. And FOIA requests aren't all that hard to file.
IANAL, but I disagree. If the University is made aware of a specific copyright violation, then they are on the hook to remove the violating material from their network. Napster is not, in and of itself, a copyright violation. Regardless of what the courts have to say, there are legitimate, non-infringing uses for Napster which justify its continued existence on the Universitys' networks.
No, I think the Universities are taking the proper position in this matter: Policing their own networks is bad business for them on so many levels. Let those who believe their rights have been infringed do their own policing.
We set up AM radios next to our Apple II's -- before FCC mandated EMI shielding -- and use processor RF harmonics to play tunes.
As near as I can tell, courses like these are only useful if you already have significant familiarity with the material. Otherwise, you're not likely to really learn anything, and you only slow down the rest of the class.
If you dangle it as bait trying to catch a cracker, that is another matter altogether.
Call me a cynic, but...
By accelerating the expiration on all of the NT 4 certs, they have effectively reduced the amount of 'free' time that current MCSE's could use to seek other certifications. I think it could be viewed as a defensive move intended to put just one more obstacle in the path to wider-spread adoption of non-MS revenue stream products.
I agree that certification is meaningless ($DIETY knows I've seen my share of .*C.*'s that don't know their butt from their elbow), but the sad truth is that certification does help sell an organization's credibility to potential clients, and it does open doors for people looking for employers.
Where I work, I constantly hear whining about how meaningless certifications are, and yet when we hire, that's the first thing we look for.
Clueful customers may realize that certs are worth less than the paper they're printed upon, but IME, clueful customers are far and few between. And those that I have found, usually have a clueless PHB (with purse strings) that's easily impressed by indiscriminant use of acronyms.
The Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval doesn't mean anything, and yet it was a very successful marketing tool. Most certifications today are not much more than that.
-----
[1] eXtended Three Letter Acronym
[2] Five Letter Enhanced Acronym Syntax
I suppose the Direct Marketing Association is getting what they deserve, then. Congress failed to pass any sort of UCE/UBE legislation, and now the states are passing their own. This is, of course, the nightmare scenario for the direct marketers: instead of a single piece of legislation governing their actions, now they find themselves with many different sets of rules governing how they may and may not send their messages. It seems inevitable that in time, with enough states enacting their own anti-spam legislation, the states may succeed where congress failed: Spam will be legislated out of existence, because it will become impossible to send it and comply with all of the differing laws.