fatman

It doesn't. The experiment could have been done by the dad and his daughter on their own without a single form. Its when the school and their lawyers get involved. The cynic in me wants to point out that the paperwork exercise might be the part that best prepares the young student for an actual career in science or engineering.

Maybe it's my white privilege talking, but I don't see the racial angle here. Would "Corporations" be any less inclined to appropriate and profit from the creations of white teens? Would the moral wrong of the taking be any less egregious? Sometimes bad behavior directed at minorities is just generally bad behavior and not racism.

Because I'm a stubborn ass who'd rather suffer a freeloader than hand in an incomplete assignment. In hindsight, I guess I should have finished the project and explained the division of labor.

Seems like a good a time as any to break out my favorite anti-MBA story.

I took a Masters CS class some time ago, and for our final class project, not knowing anyone else in the class, I got lumped in the "leftover" group with a working engineer and a Wharton MBA student. We meet up the day before the project is due to integrate each of our individual pieces together into a final submission and the MBA candidate shows up empty handed. Turns out he had spent his time trying to "schmooze" the answers/code out of the professor and the TA, who, to their credit, had stood firm. Guess who spent that entire night writing that dolt's portion of the project from scratch.

It's funny - the only two businesses that have made me use the EMV features on my card are the locally owned butcher shop down the street and Wal-Mart.

I think this was Larry Lessig's position at one point. I think it's a a nice, practical solution that acknowledges that copyright is a political animal - let Disney keep Mickey forever, but the public gets everything of a lesser order of magnitude in value faster.

Shhhhh... Don't broadcast your flouting of your state's Use Tax like that!

You don't need a lawyer pro-bono, just one on contingency. If you can survive the motion to dismiss at the outset, you've now entered discovery, and BigCo will now start incurring bigtime legal costs. Settlement offers will be forthcoming. Litigation isn't about winning in the courtroom, it's about inflicting pain until someone says "uncle". (Patent litigation often goes further because the stakes are so high. Your five-figure breach of contract suit, not so much.)

Wow. It's no surprise that rms lacks empathy or social grace, but I'm kind of shocked one man's availability could single-handedly delay a release of a project like emacs. What if the poor chap had got hit by a bus?

Nuremburg was an exception to the general rule that you couldn't prosecute soldiers for carrying out the orders of their superiors - establishing that the mass genocide of innocent people crosses a line. However, the torture of a handful of active enemy participants might not.

I wouldn't expect a business school professor, JD or not, to have any clue about state consumer protection law.

I would expect an MBA to bluster on in an area in which he was clearly out of his depth.

That's an awful lot of detail from a event with no surviving witnesses.

Sounds promising. Calories in, calories out - the rest is just noise.

Or, what if the interviewer explicitly challenged the interviewee to come up with an interview coding challenge? And perhaps even worked the challenge, with the interviewee hinting, helping, and evaluating? Maybe it would be a good way to demonstrate complete command of a subject, or the ability to think on one's feet, or even to evaluate the candidate as a teacher/leader of younger developers?