That would not fly in the US. I do believe that in some countries universities may have copyright claim on student work but this is simply not the case in the US unless there is a contract and funding making it a work for hire or copyright assignment. I am not aware of any US schools which have such requirements and I study and practice in the field of education.
What country and field is this in? If they are sponsoring the research...maybe. In my experience though it is exactly the opposite. Unless you sign a contract making something a work for hire I am aware of no legislation in the US which would give the university any rights to your work at all (other than fair use of course).
I did this for my PhD (in 2009) too and my school (University of Minnesota) didn't blink over the copyright being CC at all. I also agree with Danah that you should try to make it as available as possible. Even with a CC license it's important that people be able to find it so they can use it. Luckily in my field there is a clearinghouse (ERIC) which will host theses, papers, and articles and distribute them indefinitely. I also allowed the University Archives to post it online. Interestingly, ProQuest later submitted the copy I sent to them to the same database (of course they didn't submit the full text, just a reference link to there site where you can buy it).
Your institution and department don't have any claim to your work (unless they are directly paying for it, but even so giving up the rights to it would be rather unusual) and should not be telling you how you can and cannot copyright it. Worst case you just re-release it after the fact with whatever license you want. Academia is the last place that closed licenses belong!
This is not a new discussion... there have been people thinking about this for some time. In March of 2006 I wrote an article on my blog about it (reproduced below) which eventually led to me consulting with Public Radio on a show they were doing at the time about online public information (you can listen to an archived copy of that at October 12, 2007: Your Exposed Life on MPR
My Original Article 3/24/2006:
I've often wondered who will be able to run for political office in forty or fifty years. People, especially youg people, seem to be so naive about posting things online. For years online forums and message boards have been a place where people vented. Now sites like Myspace, Facebook and others are creating such a low barrier to entry that almost every middle and high school child in the United States has some kind of web presence. What many fail to understand is that once something is posted or "said" on the internet it never goes away...ever. The internet is also quite easy to search if you know what you're doing. This dangerous combination means that everything you write to a message board can be found at some point in the future and "can and will be used against you". Any kind of off-color comment or joke you ever made online, even if your intention wasn't to hurt anyone, is public knowledge.
Employers already know about this. BusinessWeek recently ran an article called "You are what you post" that talked about some of the implications for job seeking but I think the arena where this will really get the consultants salivating is politics. There are so few people who are able to hold their tongue and never offend anyone. In the past politicians have relied primarily on obscuring and making it difficult to find embarrassing things about their past. When today's teens start running for political office these things will only be an internet search away. Remember that posting to that email discussion list about STDs you made when you were 15? How about that time someone on a message board got you mad and you called them a racial slur? You may have forgotten these incidents but the internet has not and neither will your enemies.
I wonder if the politicians of the future will need to be groomed from birth to have no defects and think very, very carefully before ever speaking. On the other hand our society may end up becoming more accepting of faults which would not be an all bad outcome. This remains to be seen but in the meantime those of us who have always tried to think about how what we say today could come back (for better or worse) in the future are going to be much better off than the indiscriminate masses.
Maybe because the web is a medium and not a place?
I'm all for requiring public physical places to be designed with the needs of the disabled in mind. This only makes sense and I think has made a tremendous difference for both the legally disabled and our generally aging population but I don't think the web is the equivalent of a public place. I think it's a medium more akin to a newspaper or book.
Would it make sense to REQUIRE all book publishers to publish extra copies in braille for example? I can certainly see the value of regulations which said that if the publisher (or website author) doesn't do it themselves a third-party service provider must not be prevented from (legally) making the information accessible but to require all websites to do it themselves would put a huge burden on website authors and may just cause a lot of people to stop putting information on the web unless they need to or their is a compelling commercial reason to do so.
Let's look at a project to scan in material from old books and make it available in image/pdf format for research. If the information were required to be accessible it would add a significant amount of work and cost to the (already expensive) digitization process. In my own case where I am putting up some very specific historic and technical material which I am making no money on I might just stop doing it. This would be a net loss for the spread of knowledge.
These types of regulations work best when they encourage people to do the right thing but do NOT just stop anything from happening. eg. If people stopped building public places because of the expense of ADA compliance the ADA would not make sense on a societal level as public places have value. The same goes for websites.
Why is this sad? What's wrong with implementing RS-232 on a 25 pin D-sub connector? In fact for real RS-232 support you need more than 9 pins and the 25 pin connector is really better suited. The fact that 9 pin connectors became the norm for RS-232 on PCs is the part that's more interesting.
Mod parent up, it's unfortunate that even reasonably skilled (compared to the general populous) computer users don't know that the type of communication is independent of the physical connector.
Obviously you have not been smacked down by Wikipedia editors for reporting original research in Wikipedia. In other words if you want to prove that someone famous lives in your town going to their house and interviewing them is not sufficient. You must publish that interview somewhere else (and not self-published because they'll smack you for that too) and then someone else must correct the article. All because some newspaper got lazy and reported the incorrect town of residence as a larger town nearby. No, I'm not upset though.
The problem is that in the United States the local shops have several things going against them. First, the selection is often not all that good which is a problem for informed consumers who usually want one of a couple options none of which may be carried by the small retailer. Second, and perhaps more important to Americans is the price difference. It's usually a lot more than the few cents you cite. Often a product will cost at least tens of dollars more and depending on the price of the product perhaps $50 or $100 more from a local store. These are not insignificant price differences and people, at least Americans, will put up with just about anything to save $5. Unless your local store is within $5 on just about everything you will loose customers to the big store no matter how much better your service is, many are not. This is not to say there are not successful small, local computer (and other) stores but there are a limited number of them, usually in densely populated cities making it much more convenient for most consumer to shop at the (much closer and much less less expensive) big box retailer.
I was going to say what secret does Germany know about trains that allows it to build 20 minutes worth of Express S-Bahn (now there's a measurement unit for you!) for 1 million euro? It seems to me that 20 minutes worth of new line here in the states costs about $675.4 million.
Papers Please: Arrested At Circuit City
September 2nd, 2007 @ 4:15PM EST Update
A few people contacted me wanting to know if I was accepting donations for my legal fund. Donations would be greatly appreciated. If more
funds are raised than are actually needed I will donate the excess to the ACLU. Donations can be made via PayPal to: paypal@michaelrighi.com.
Today was an eventful day. I drove to Cleveland, reunited with my father's side of the family and got arrested. More on that arrested part to come.
For the labor day weekend my father decided to host a small family reunion. My sister flew in from California and I drove in from Pittsburgh to visit my father, his wife and my little brother and sister. Shortly after arriving we packed the whole family into my father's Buick and headed off to the grocery store to buy some ingredients to make monkeybread. (It's my little sister's birthday today and that was her cute/bizare birthday request.)
Next to the grocery store was a Circuit City. (The Brooklyn, Ohio Circuit City to be exact.) Having forgotten that it was my sister's birthday I decided to run in and buy her a last minute gift. I settled on Disney's "Cars" game for the Nintendo Wii. I also needed to purchase a Power Squid surge protector which I paid for separately with my business credit card. As I headed towards the exit doors I passed a gentleman whose name I would later learn is Santura. As I began to walk towards the doors Santura said, "Sir, I need to examine your receipt." I responded by continuing to walk past him while saying, "No thank you."
As I walked through the double doors I heard Santura yelling for his manager behind me. My father and the family had the Buick pulled up waiting for me outside the doors to Circuit City. I opened the door and got into the back seat while Santura and his manager, whose name I have since learned is Joe Atha, came running up to the vehicle. I closed the door and as my father was just about to pull away the manager, Joe, yelled for us to stop. Of course I knew what this was about, but I played dumb and pretended that I didn't know what the problem was. I wanted to give Joe the chance to explain what all the fuss was for.
I reopened the door to talk with Joe and at this point Joe positioned his body between the open car door and myself. (I was still seated in the Buick.) Joe placed his left hand on the roof of the car and his right hand on the open car door. I asked Joe if there was a problem. The conversation went something like this:
Me: "Is there a problem?"
Joe: "I need to examine your bag and receipt before letting you leave this parking lot."
Me: "I paid for the contents in this bag. Are you accusing me of stealing?"
Joe: "I'm not accusing you of anything, but I'm allowed by law to look through your bag when you leave."
Me: "Which law states that? Name the law that gives you the right to examine my bag when I leave a Circuit City."
Of course Joe wasn't able to name the law that gives him, a U.S. citizen and Circuit City employee the right to examine anything that I, a U.S. citizen and Circuit City customer am carrying out of the store. I've dealt with these scare tactics at other stores in the past including other Circuit Cities, Best Buys and Guitar Centers. I've always taken the stance that retail stores shouldn't treat their loyal customers as criminals and that customers shouldn't so willingly give up their rights along with their money. Theft sucks and I wish that shoplifters were treated more harshly than they are, but the fact is that I am not a shiplifter shoplifter and shouldn't have to forfeit my civil rights when leaving a store.
I twice asked Joe to back away from the car so that I could close the door. Joe refused. On three occasions I tried to pull the door closed but Joe pushed back on the door with his hip and hands. I then gave Joe three options:
1. "Accuse me of shoplifting and call the police. I will gladly wait for them to arrive."
2. "Back away from the car so that I can close the door and drive away."
3. "If
I think that the parent's point is that more people want ESPN so it will cost less per subscriber than say SciFi/History/Discovery/CSPAN/etc. Hypothetically a large number of people who subscribe to cable just to get the sports channels (yes they do exist and if you don't think it's a lot of cable subscribers you're probably mistaken) are also allowing them to carry less popular channels such as the ones you or I might watch. The smaller audience size for the channels I want might mean I end up paying more per month than I do now. Got it?
I did read the article and I do concede that in the takedown letters they state "Refrain from posting or causing to be provided any AACS circumvention offering or from assisting others in doing so, including by direct links thereto, on any website now or at any time in the future." However, I question how reasonable this is.
First, there is the untested (AFAIK) issue if such a short string of numbers is really a circumvention device. We're not talking about code (eg. DeCSS) which actually does something, this is just a string of numbers. If this is ruled to be part of a circumvention device we're in trouble because by that logic the first part of the string '09' would be a part of a circumvention device and prohibiting people from distributing the number 9 would be rather unfortunate.
Secondly, I don't think other recipients of takedown notices (eg. Blogspot/Google) are proactively preventing "...any AACS circumvention offering..." from being posted so my assumption would be that they are only acting on sites specifically mentioned in takedown notices and I wonder why Digg should be different.
In any event, I was only stating what the reasons for the Digg revolt were; right, wrong or otherwise.
My understanding is that they were. The issue is that a takedown notice applies only to the posting(s) mentioned and new postings should require additional takedown notices. Digg was proactively removing postings before receieving additional takedown notices which users took to be them "caving" and which resulted in the revolt. At least that's how I understand it.
That's a different process. The old method used for matching CDs involved a hash based on the number and length of tracks, collisions happened. I beleieve that what iTunes, etc. are using is the Gracenote audio fingerprinting service which is a different way of determining the song and not a simple hash.
Yes, that is possible but because in theory people could also be modded down it probably wouldn't happen very often for each poster and, at least theoretically, there is still a net gain because real contributions are being made to the "pop fluff" articles in this process. It's still going to be easier to control the situation than it is now.
My understaning was that you needed a player key granted from the AACS people to put in that player, my guess is they would fail to give you a key if you didn't follow their specification about the device revocation list. If you developed a player anyway and stole someone elses key you could never sell it commercially or they would sue you into oblivian.
As I understand it one of the "benefits" of AACS is that keys can be revoked through new discs. In other words, when you go buy a new AACS encrypted title and play it in your HD-DVD or Blu-ray player it will update the list of all revoked keys in the player.
If you have a GSM provider and purchase unlocked phones you can already do this, I've been doing it for years and some of my favorite phones have been European imports.
My experience was just the opposite, in high school we couldn't use the 89 or 92 on tests (though the school owned a classroom set of 92s so we could use them for learning geometry concepts periodically). The school recommended an 83 but I sprung for the 86 which waqs good for a couple of reasons. First, since most people had 83s the teachers demonstrated only how to do something on the 83 and I had to figure out how to do it on th 86 which caused me to learn a lot more about my calculator, a good thing in the long run but a bit frustrating at times. Secondly, different models of calculators are targeted at different groups, specifically the 86 has some things more easily accessible on the keypad which makes it easy to do physics problems as as I became more interested in physics this made it quite a useful calculator to have, allowing me to do physics problems is a fraction of the time it took people with their 83s.
In college I did trade up to the 89 which was allowed on exams (it is at my brother's college as well). I found the 89 more useful for checking answers in my math classes but it was actually slower to use for my electronics and physics classes so I took my old 86 to those. Be aware of how the different calculators work and that some are better for some things than for others, a common mistake is to buy the highest model calculator you can when a "lesser" model might be more appropriate for the kinds of calculations you'll do most often.
I'm not as familiar with the scientific fields, but in many of the other fields such as humanities and social science a great number of journals are published by for profit publishers, see here for examples.
Slashdot Mirror
That would not fly in the US. I do believe that in some countries universities may have copyright claim on student work but this is simply not the case in the US unless there is a contract and funding making it a work for hire or copyright assignment. I am not aware of any US schools which have such requirements and I study and practice in the field of education.
What country and field is this in? If they are sponsoring the research...maybe. In my experience though it is exactly the opposite. Unless you sign a contract making something a work for hire I am aware of no legislation in the US which would give the university any rights to your work at all (other than fair use of course).
I did this for my PhD (in 2009) too and my school (University of Minnesota) didn't blink over the copyright being CC at all. I also agree with Danah that you should try to make it as available as possible. Even with a CC license it's important that people be able to find it so they can use it. Luckily in my field there is a clearinghouse (ERIC) which will host theses, papers, and articles and distribute them indefinitely. I also allowed the University Archives to post it online. Interestingly, ProQuest later submitted the copy I sent to them to the same database (of course they didn't submit the full text, just a reference link to there site where you can buy it).
Your institution and department don't have any claim to your work (unless they are directly paying for it, but even so giving up the rights to it would be rather unusual) and should not be telling you how you can and cannot copyright it. Worst case you just re-release it after the fact with whatever license you want. Academia is the last place that closed licenses belong!
If you're interested you can see what I did at: http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/detail?accno=ED505597
This is not a new discussion... there have been people thinking about this for some time. In March of 2006 I wrote an article on my blog about it (reproduced below) which eventually led to me consulting with Public Radio on a show they were doing at the time about online public information (you can listen to an archived copy of that at October 12, 2007: Your Exposed Life on MPR
My Original Article 3/24/2006:
I've often wondered who will be able to run for political office in forty or fifty years. People, especially youg people, seem to be so naive about posting things online. For years online forums and message boards have been a place where people vented. Now sites like Myspace, Facebook and others are creating such a low barrier to entry that almost every middle and high school child in the United States has some kind of web presence. What many fail to understand is that once something is posted or "said" on the internet it never goes away...ever. The internet is also quite easy to search if you know what you're doing. This dangerous combination means that everything you write to a message board can be found at some point in the future and "can and will be used against you". Any kind of off-color comment or joke you ever made online, even if your intention wasn't to hurt anyone, is public knowledge.
Employers already know about this. BusinessWeek recently ran an article called "You are what you post" that talked about some of the implications for job seeking but I think the arena where this will really get the consultants salivating is politics. There are so few people who are able to hold their tongue and never offend anyone. In the past politicians have relied primarily on obscuring and making it difficult to find embarrassing things about their past. When today's teens start running for political office these things will only be an internet search away. Remember that posting to that email discussion list about STDs you made when you were 15? How about that time someone on a message board got you mad and you called them a racial slur? You may have forgotten these incidents but the internet has not and neither will your enemies.
I wonder if the politicians of the future will need to be groomed from birth to have no defects and think very, very carefully before ever speaking. On the other hand our society may end up becoming more accepting of faults which would not be an all bad outcome. This remains to be seen but in the meantime those of us who have always tried to think about how what we say today could come back (for better or worse) in the future are going to be much better off than the indiscriminate masses.
Maybe because the web is a medium and not a place?
I'm all for requiring public physical places to be designed with the needs of the disabled in mind. This only makes sense and I think has made a tremendous difference for both the legally disabled and our generally aging population but I don't think the web is the equivalent of a public place. I think it's a medium more akin to a newspaper or book.
Would it make sense to REQUIRE all book publishers to publish extra copies in braille for example? I can certainly see the value of regulations which said that if the publisher (or website author) doesn't do it themselves a third-party service provider must not be prevented from (legally) making the information accessible but to require all websites to do it themselves would put a huge burden on website authors and may just cause a lot of people to stop putting information on the web unless they need to or their is a compelling commercial reason to do so.
Let's look at a project to scan in material from old books and make it available in image/pdf format for research. If the information were required to be accessible it would add a significant amount of work and cost to the (already expensive) digitization process. In my own case where I am putting up some very specific historic and technical material which I am making no money on I might just stop doing it. This would be a net loss for the spread of knowledge.
These types of regulations work best when they encourage people to do the right thing but do NOT just stop anything from happening. eg. If people stopped building public places because of the expense of ADA compliance the ADA would not make sense on a societal level as public places have value. The same goes for websites.
Why is this sad? What's wrong with implementing RS-232 on a 25 pin D-sub connector? In fact for real RS-232 support you need more than 9 pins and the 25 pin connector is really better suited. The fact that 9 pin connectors became the norm for RS-232 on PCs is the part that's more interesting.
Mod parent up, it's unfortunate that even reasonably skilled (compared to the general populous) computer users don't know that the type of communication is independent of the physical connector.
Obviously you overestimate the quality of Encyclopedia Britannica which is also full of errors.
Obviously you have not been smacked down by Wikipedia editors for reporting original research in Wikipedia. In other words if you want to prove that someone famous lives in your town going to their house and interviewing them is not sufficient. You must publish that interview somewhere else (and not self-published because they'll smack you for that too) and then someone else must correct the article. All because some newspaper got lazy and reported the incorrect town of residence as a larger town nearby. No, I'm not upset though.
The problem is that in the United States the local shops have several things going against them. First, the selection is often not all that good which is a problem for informed consumers who usually want one of a couple options none of which may be carried by the small retailer. Second, and perhaps more important to Americans is the price difference. It's usually a lot more than the few cents you cite. Often a product will cost at least tens of dollars more and depending on the price of the product perhaps $50 or $100 more from a local store. These are not insignificant price differences and people, at least Americans, will put up with just about anything to save $5. Unless your local store is within $5 on just about everything you will loose customers to the big store no matter how much better your service is, many are not. This is not to say there are not successful small, local computer (and other) stores but there are a limited number of them, usually in densely populated cities making it much more convenient for most consumer to shop at the (much closer and much less less expensive) big box retailer.
I was going to say what secret does Germany know about trains that allows it to build 20 minutes worth of Express S-Bahn (now there's a measurement unit for you!) for 1 million euro? It seems to me that 20 minutes worth of new line here in the states costs about $675.4 million.
My mistake, I screwed up the formatting and now someone else has posted it.
Papers Please: Arrested At Circuit City September 2nd, 2007 @ 4:15PM EST Update A few people contacted me wanting to know if I was accepting donations for my legal fund. Donations would be greatly appreciated. If more funds are raised than are actually needed I will donate the excess to the ACLU. Donations can be made via PayPal to: paypal@michaelrighi.com. Today was an eventful day. I drove to Cleveland, reunited with my father's side of the family and got arrested. More on that arrested part to come. For the labor day weekend my father decided to host a small family reunion. My sister flew in from California and I drove in from Pittsburgh to visit my father, his wife and my little brother and sister. Shortly after arriving we packed the whole family into my father's Buick and headed off to the grocery store to buy some ingredients to make monkeybread. (It's my little sister's birthday today and that was her cute/bizare birthday request.) Next to the grocery store was a Circuit City. (The Brooklyn, Ohio Circuit City to be exact.) Having forgotten that it was my sister's birthday I decided to run in and buy her a last minute gift. I settled on Disney's "Cars" game for the Nintendo Wii. I also needed to purchase a Power Squid surge protector which I paid for separately with my business credit card. As I headed towards the exit doors I passed a gentleman whose name I would later learn is Santura. As I began to walk towards the doors Santura said, "Sir, I need to examine your receipt." I responded by continuing to walk past him while saying, "No thank you." As I walked through the double doors I heard Santura yelling for his manager behind me. My father and the family had the Buick pulled up waiting for me outside the doors to Circuit City. I opened the door and got into the back seat while Santura and his manager, whose name I have since learned is Joe Atha, came running up to the vehicle. I closed the door and as my father was just about to pull away the manager, Joe, yelled for us to stop. Of course I knew what this was about, but I played dumb and pretended that I didn't know what the problem was. I wanted to give Joe the chance to explain what all the fuss was for. I reopened the door to talk with Joe and at this point Joe positioned his body between the open car door and myself. (I was still seated in the Buick.) Joe placed his left hand on the roof of the car and his right hand on the open car door. I asked Joe if there was a problem. The conversation went something like this: Me: "Is there a problem?" Joe: "I need to examine your bag and receipt before letting you leave this parking lot." Me: "I paid for the contents in this bag. Are you accusing me of stealing?" Joe: "I'm not accusing you of anything, but I'm allowed by law to look through your bag when you leave." Me: "Which law states that? Name the law that gives you the right to examine my bag when I leave a Circuit City." Of course Joe wasn't able to name the law that gives him, a U.S. citizen and Circuit City employee the right to examine anything that I, a U.S. citizen and Circuit City customer am carrying out of the store. I've dealt with these scare tactics at other stores in the past including other Circuit Cities, Best Buys and Guitar Centers. I've always taken the stance that retail stores shouldn't treat their loyal customers as criminals and that customers shouldn't so willingly give up their rights along with their money. Theft sucks and I wish that shoplifters were treated more harshly than they are, but the fact is that I am not a shiplifter shoplifter and shouldn't have to forfeit my civil rights when leaving a store. I twice asked Joe to back away from the car so that I could close the door. Joe refused. On three occasions I tried to pull the door closed but Joe pushed back on the door with his hip and hands. I then gave Joe three options: 1. "Accuse me of shoplifting and call the police. I will gladly wait for them to arrive." 2. "Back away from the car so that I can close the door and drive away." 3. "If
I think that the parent's point is that more people want ESPN so it will cost less per subscriber than say SciFi/History/Discovery/CSPAN/etc. Hypothetically a large number of people who subscribe to cable just to get the sports channels (yes they do exist and if you don't think it's a lot of cable subscribers you're probably mistaken) are also allowing them to carry less popular channels such as the ones you or I might watch. The smaller audience size for the channels I want might mean I end up paying more per month than I do now. Got it?
I did read the article and I do concede that in the takedown letters they state "Refrain from posting or causing to be provided any AACS circumvention offering or from assisting others in doing so, including by direct links thereto, on any website now or at any time in the future." However, I question how reasonable this is. First, there is the untested (AFAIK) issue if such a short string of numbers is really a circumvention device. We're not talking about code (eg. DeCSS) which actually does something, this is just a string of numbers. If this is ruled to be part of a circumvention device we're in trouble because by that logic the first part of the string '09' would be a part of a circumvention device and prohibiting people from distributing the number 9 would be rather unfortunate. Secondly, I don't think other recipients of takedown notices (eg. Blogspot/Google) are proactively preventing "...any AACS circumvention offering..." from being posted so my assumption would be that they are only acting on sites specifically mentioned in takedown notices and I wonder why Digg should be different. In any event, I was only stating what the reasons for the Digg revolt were; right, wrong or otherwise.
My understanding is that they were. The issue is that a takedown notice applies only to the posting(s) mentioned and new postings should require additional takedown notices. Digg was proactively removing postings before receieving additional takedown notices which users took to be them "caving" and which resulted in the revolt. At least that's how I understand it.
That's a different process. The old method used for matching CDs involved a hash based on the number and length of tracks, collisions happened. I beleieve that what iTunes, etc. are using is the Gracenote audio fingerprinting service which is a different way of determining the song and not a simple hash.
Which is a great reason to look at MusicBrainz.
Yes, that is possible but because in theory people could also be modded down it probably wouldn't happen very often for each poster and, at least theoretically, there is still a net gain because real contributions are being made to the "pop fluff" articles in this process. It's still going to be easier to control the situation than it is now.
Exactly what I was thinking.
My understaning was that you needed a player key granted from the AACS people to put in that player, my guess is they would fail to give you a key if you didn't follow their specification about the device revocation list. If you developed a player anyway and stole someone elses key you could never sell it commercially or they would sue you into oblivian.
As I understand it one of the "benefits" of AACS is that keys can be revoked through new discs. In other words, when you go buy a new AACS encrypted title and play it in your HD-DVD or Blu-ray player it will update the list of all revoked keys in the player.
If you have a GSM provider and purchase unlocked phones you can already do this, I've been doing it for years and some of my favorite phones have been European imports.
My experience was just the opposite, in high school we couldn't use the 89 or 92 on tests (though the school owned a classroom set of 92s so we could use them for learning geometry concepts periodically). The school recommended an 83 but I sprung for the 86 which waqs good for a couple of reasons. First, since most people had 83s the teachers demonstrated only how to do something on the 83 and I had to figure out how to do it on th 86 which caused me to learn a lot more about my calculator, a good thing in the long run but a bit frustrating at times. Secondly, different models of calculators are targeted at different groups, specifically the 86 has some things more easily accessible on the keypad which makes it easy to do physics problems as as I became more interested in physics this made it quite a useful calculator to have, allowing me to do physics problems is a fraction of the time it took people with their 83s.
In college I did trade up to the 89 which was allowed on exams (it is at my brother's college as well). I found the 89 more useful for checking answers in my math classes but it was actually slower to use for my electronics and physics classes so I took my old 86 to those. Be aware of how the different calculators work and that some are better for some things than for others, a common mistake is to buy the highest model calculator you can when a "lesser" model might be more appropriate for the kinds of calculations you'll do most often.
I'm not as familiar with the scientific fields, but in many of the other fields such as humanities and social science a great number of journals are published by for profit publishers, see here for examples.