Going over credit limits

Colleges & Universities University of Virginia
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<p>I’m kind of in limbo with my schedule atm.</p>

<p>I’ve got Chem 141/141L, Math 131, & ENWR 110 atm. (12 Credits)</p>

<p>I’m also holding Biol 201 but I am going to drop that very soon. I’m looking at maintaining 15 credits so I’m at least eligible for Phi Beta Kappa. I’m trying to find a humanities “filler” class so I don’t feel too overwhelmed 1st semester.</p>

<p>Here’s what I have so far:</p>

<p>Psyc 101 (got a 4 on AP Psych…shouldn’t be that bad right?)
Econ 201
HIEU 100 (limited spots)
HIUS 100 (limited spots)
Phil 100</p>

<p>Which one would be the easiest to get an A in the course? Thanks guys.</p>

<p>P.S. I’m kind of leaning toward Psyc 101 since I have prior experience in that course and because I enjoyed it during high school. However, I have a Chem Lab from 2-5:30 pm and the psyc discussion is 5:00-5:50 pm. Do you think switching chem labs or the psyc discussion will be a problem?</p>

<p>P.S.S. What is this online waitlist business? If it’s not grayed out in the COD, it’s probably not full right?</p>

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<p>FYI, HIEU and HIUS 100-level classes will be a lot of reading/writing. I’d take a 200-level class, personally. And they don’t go and check that you have background, so you don’t really need to take a 100-level class unless it’s your major. Econ 201 is interesting for some, so it might be a good class to take.
Best advice: take something you’re interested in. If you like the subject, you have a higher chance of doing well since you’ll want to go to class and learn the material.</p>

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<p>No, you can’t get away with all of these classes doing just part of the reading. You could perhaps still escape by doing that in the lower level classes, but as soon as you get into the higher level classes, where the topics are more focused, you’ll need to read all of your texts to write a thorough analysis. </p>

<p>And no discipline is ‘easy’ for everyone. As a math-oriented person, I sometimes find these disciplines somewhat new, refreshing and challenging in different respects. I’m not used to reading 100+ pages per week so it can be more difficult for some people, especially if you lack passion in the subject.</p>

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<p>That certainly hasn’t been my experience. Different strokes for different strokes, I guess.</p>

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<p>Pffft. Patent law. What we need are patent jurists. Software patents are getting out of control, when companies can be sued for borrowing another company’s concept of a customer service button.</p>

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<p>ehiunno: Are you heading anywhere near information theory, or even anything that branches on cogsci?</p>

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<p>That is not at all what is happening. There are direct lines of infringement of software rights, and I’ve seen things/software that should be patented, and is, for a reason. It’s generally not the software that is patented, either. It usually goes along with unique hardware that it services. Not always, but a good share.
And, patent law is vital. Without it, you’d see a million of the same products on the market, and the only way businesses would win is find a cheaper way to produce it, lowering product quality in the long run. That, and hardwork of many engineers, including myself and the sometimes 50+ hours I put in, would be for waste. I’d jump planets if patent law went away.</p>

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<p>I’m not against the general concept of patents (rewarding the innovator for the spillover benefits associated with his private product). I just think that intellectual property law needs a major overhaul, especially since I suspect that a great deal of many IP judges aren’t Web 2.0 users. </p>

<p>There are freedom of speech/thought issues too. Minds have a natural tendency to reproduce information (high capital, low variable cost) – singing the melody of a song stuck in your head for instance, or one that lingers subconsciously in the brain for a few years until you write a new song and it influences your own melodies unconsciously. Etc. This is copyright law of course. </p>

<p>But as far as patents go, the point of IP law is to encourage innovation. You want to keep the incentive for innovation, but not create ridiculous barriers to pass on innovation in derivative works (which is a major issue with many libertarians), especially if someone gains inspiration and synthesises a new concept by epiphany, by looking or observing another product, but is prevented from using that inspiration by patent law. </p>

<p>For example, if someone created a drive-thru system, another person who gets inspired by using the drive-thru system shouldn’t be prevented from creating a new synthesised system of his own imagination from scratch. He should be prevented from enrolling in the originator’s company, copying the blueprints, then using them himself, but why should an individual be prevented from creating something from his own experiences? Now imagine an analogous situation for e-commerce, where other commercial websites other than Amazon are prevented from making their sites more convenient for their users because by patent law, only Amazon can legally retain shipping and billing information in the system so customers don’t have to enter it each time for every purchase. (The unjust decision was later overturned – eight years later, with massive economic inefficiency already having been committed.) </p>

<p>If an inventor gains inspiration by looking at a bird, doesn’t evolution have the original “patent”? And so forth. Patent law as it stands is still founded on some rather dated concepts, what with kings granting monopolies to people who ventured forth from England to buy new products and whatnot. </p>

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<p>Eh? Innovation should always be restrained by a sense of cost. Marginal benefit per marginal cost and whatnot. That patents allow monopolies in exchange for having produced a private product with a public good (information/innovation) is a cause of concern to some economists. There are some alternate models – a period of tax breaks for revenue coming innovative products, for example. Other companies are free to use the innovation in their derivative works, but they don’t have the tax-break variable-cost subsidy, so effectively they pay for the private cost that was required to develop the innovation’s spillover benefit.</p>

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<p>Actually the point of IP law is to protect innovation. Capitalism encourages innovation.</p>

<p>For the record this is the second time this week you have spoken of “borrowing” others thoughts and ideas. First in books, now in patent infringement. </p>

<p>Are you certain you will enjoy living under an honor code?</p>

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<p>What? Don’t slander me! I like the social contract… (which is what the Honor Code effectively is). You misunderstand me, I think.</p>

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<p>I’m a libertarian. </p>

<p>Intellectually, we must cite our inspirations and sources. But though we must credit Albert Einstein for his theories, I note nothing forces us to pay royalties every time we attempt to invoke relativity. It is the intellectual hacker mentality (in the MIT sense, not the corrupted pedestrian sense). Free flow of information, proper cred where it’s due, and all that. </p>

<p>Now, I think you do not get why I was rather tiffed at the book issue. I thought the publisher was attempting to create market barriers in order to exploit what is called in market economics as “price discrimination”, which tends to increase as a market regresses further away from perfect competition into a monopoly. For example, in a perfectly competitive market, revenue for a product is demand multiplied by price, a rectangle whose area is a subset of the area underneath the demand curve. But with “perfect” price discrimination, the seller’s revenue is the entire area under the demand curve – [often</a> a sign of economic inefficiency.](<a href=“http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2/different/#SECTION0004]often”>http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2/different/#SECTION0004)</p>

<p>For example, DVD region coding is an attempt to introduce price discrimination into the DVD market, such that consumers in different parts of the world pay different prices for the same thing for reasons unrelated to cost of distribution/transport. The issue is of quite some concern to economists. As I understand it, that “international versions” of books are illegal to sell in the US/Canada (just like you cannot legally use a DVD purchased from one region and play it another, at least not under the DMCA) is probably due to some publisher having high lawmaker friends to enforce his price discrimination system.</p>

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<p>What is this, “patent infringement”. My argument that Barnes and Noble was not infringing on any patent at all, because Amazon didn’t have a valid software patent in the first place. </p>

<p>**If you want to call it patent infringement, you better attack the US Patent Office instead, for they are the ones who overturned it.<a href=“But%20much%20too%20late,%20which%20is%20why%20the%20case%20was%20so%20terribly%20unjust,%20not%20to%20mention%20the%20eight%20years%20of%20economic%20inefficiency%20accrued.”>/b</a></p>

<p>So why do you slander me by asserting that I support patent infringement?!!</p>

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<p>Only when its convenient eh?</p>

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<p>Patent infringement is stealing, or as you say, “borrowing” something from another. You can’t reasonable put your personal spin on the law.</p>

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<p>What are you talking about? Current IP law is not consistent with the libertarian social contract. On what grounds do you accuse me of hypocrisy? Honor Code: Thou shalt not lie, cheat or steal. Being inspired by a product and then creating a product of your own, is not stealing, as much as the act of being inspired by birds to create airplanes is not tantamount to stealing from evolution. Because that inspiration was a product of your own thought! It is true that thoughts are dependent on thoughts on another people, but then to apply the principle consistently we should be legally able to monopolise all our thoughts and ideas. Why, it should be illegal to sing a melody stuck in your head (caught from somewhere) without paying a royalty, and God forbid you hum that melody to a friend, who proceeds to create an inspired work from it. In the future perhaps, you might be able to transfer a high-fidelity copy of that harmony from one brain to another (with a help of a proxy). Why do you think satire or parody is protected? Forbid the free flow of ideas, and you forbid inspiration; 95% of paintings have been created by what you call “stealing”.</p>

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<p>It’s not my personal spin. You can go against the methodological individualism of the Austrian School of Economics if you want to. Why aren’t you attacking the Patent Office, not me? They are the ones who ruled (much too late) that Barnes and Nobles wasn’t stealing. </p>

<p>You are ignoring the crux of my argument, making a very circular loop. (Not to mention having completely sidestepped the economic issue.) My premises is that much of innovation has been borrowed from another innovations. Not citing your inspirations is a form of stealing (because it fails to give credit where it is due), but working from your inspirations (once having cited them) is not stealing. Remember that innovation is a non-exhaustible good – another person isn’t deprived of that same innovation merely because you use it. That is a key reason for why borrowing an idea is much different from borrowing tangible property. (I take your Mercedes-Benz – you lose it. I get inspired by a drive-thru system – no one loses anything, as long as I give proper credit.) Therefore, borrowing ideas and synthesising new ideas in derivative works is just, and to forbid that would be to forbid most of all future innovation.</p>

<p>(If you think that my argument is unjust, you can’t say that I am supporting cheating/stealing by citing the premise of the law, because I am attacking those premises. You can’t use a disputed premise to support the same disputed premise – it’s a logical fallacy known as a “circular argument”. I am asserting that the current state of patent law is unjust and is indeed of reform, unless you want to assert that anyone who disputes any law is inherently against all concepts of law and order like the Honor Code.)</p>

<p>Now the key problem of suitable IP law is sufficiently rewarding the innovator, because otherwise you have a free rider problem: others reaping the rewards of the spillover benefit of innovation that was funded by private cost. To introduce monopolies is to create economic inefficiency and to stifle innovation. The sensible alternative is to create a production-tied subsidy for the innovator (a subsidy for a revenue-based tax that all others have to pay). The others who refuse to pay for that tax then, have stolen. </p>

<p>In fact, I will go so far to say that we don’t own our ideas. The ideas are their own beings: our minds are simply the vessels. (Just like in radical “selfish gene” theory, the organisms are merely machines being used by genes. Organisms don’t own genes – they are just vessels for genes.) </p>

<p>But besides the innovator himself, those who use an innovation (including other derivative-innovators) have to pay economic compensation for the private cost that was assumed in developing the innovation that produced a public spillover benefit. That will lead to an economically-efficient outcome. Shoebox can enjoy her economically-subsidised unit production for her designs – a VERY significant economic advantage, by the way. </p>

<p>That is why (a reform of) IP law is important.</p>

<p>And I really didn’t want to type an essay in here, especially as I worry I am not sounding cogent, but then, I didn’t want to be slandered defencelessly either.</p>

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<p>Hello? Are you going to come up with something more substantial than slanderous one-liners? I wonder who’s not being HONORABLE now…</p>

<p>So what about price discrimination? Do you consider that just? Are you going to come up with some EVIDENCE for why you think that it is unjust that I clamour for dismantling the legal corruption that allows price discrimination? After all, I consider the comment, “Are you sure you will enjoy living under an Honor Code,” (being the adherent to social contract theory that I am) a grave (and very hurtful) insult. Do you want to make a formal charge, perhaps, and outline your theory before a court or a committee? You can use your parents’ income for the best lawyers you can find, and I can represent myself.</p>

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<p>Um…isn’t this thread supposed to be about credits/courses?</p>

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<p>Not until vistany practically decided to call me a knave. Apparently I have been (unjustly, frivolously, irrationally) charged with an Honor violation in spirit, and what can a man do but defend himself?</p>

<p>Don’t you think it dishonorable to make random accusations without substantiation or aforethought? Can a man not make an argument for economic reform without being accused as a cheater? Come back sir, and defend your honor!</p>

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<p>haha, knave. such a funny word.</p>

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<p>[The</a> Economic Consequences of DVD Regional Restrictions](<a href=“http://www.mbs.edu/home/jgans/papers/dvd.pdf]The”>http://www.mbs.edu/home/jgans/papers/dvd.pdf)</p>

<p>So vistany, can you either substantiate your accusation, or rescind it?</p>