Ask for ROI estimates instead of (or as well as) priority estimates. This won't work in every environment, but where it works, it can have a lot of upside.

I put it in play at a company where the engineers worked directly with marketing. One of the marketing guys was a pure sociopath -- lied about his priorities every single time, regardless of the upside for the company, just to keep his numbers up. After one particularly expensive project that generated about enough revenue to cover the electricity for the coffeemaker, I asked him for an estimate of ROI on the next project.

As it happens, he was actually a pretty sharp analyst, and he gave me some really accurate figures. They were low, and he acknowledged that his new project wasn't really high priority compared to the other things on the plate. He didn't even seem upset about it -- once he had run the numbers, he couldn't deny reality. It was the numbers' fault, not mine.

As noted above, this obviously won't work in every situation. When it does, however, it is quite effective. It also has some significant upside for marketing the IT department internally. If you keep track of the estimated ROI figures, and follow up for actual figures, you can make a clear case that IT is a profit center, not a cost center (as it is often perceived).

Perhaps this is obvious, but it seems that an anarchic, leaderless grouping can be hard to keep tabs on.

I saw an article in the paper not too long ago that talked about the Mayor of Oakland having contacted the leadership of the Occupy movement to ask them to disavow Occupy Oakland. It made me want to smack my forehead. The hierarchy drones have a fundamental lack of comprehension of "distributed."

When evils progress beyond what is sufferable, you pass a tipping point where there need be no rabble-rousers. The rabble become self-rousing. These are the warning signs that our leadership has overstepped its bounds and we need to re-examine our dedication to the principles that hold us together as a free nation and people. When the rabble start rousing themselves, we would do well to assume that the more civilized among us are likewise displeased, but with more self-control. The longer we fail to correct our course, the lower the barrier to rabble-hood becomes. It's just the nuttiest x% that are genuinely acting out right now. Soon it will be the nuttiest 2*x%.

Suppose it costs $20/hour to hire a student to help proctor a test.

Suppose students take four classes per semester, two semesters per year, four exams per class, two hours per exam. That's 64 exam hours per year per student.

Hire one proctor for each of ten students. So each group of ten students will have to pay for $20 * 64 proctor hours. That's $1280 per ten students, or $128 per student per year for exam proctoring.

Now, let them use the Internet as much as they want, and have one student-proctor monitoring each group of ten students for inappropriate behavior. That costs $128 per student per year.

Now, hire an additional set of proctor-proctors for another $128 to manage and oversee the first set of proctors. Hire students from the business school and give them half a credit of management.

With twice the estimated required number of proctors, that's still only $256 per student year to closely monitor the tests. That is not a large portion of college tuition.

This sounds like a very solvable problem -- if the institution is flexible enough to come up with interesting solutions. Seems like being able to come up with that kind of solution would also be a pretty good way of judging the quality of a university -- good PR opportunity.

Having grades align well with academic proficiency seems like a high-value line item for universities. Spending less than 10% of tuition to make exams more accurately test for subtle skills seems like a worthwhile investment to me.

Sweet. I like the way you think, because I am short on cash and thought I would resell my iTunes purchased music that I don't listen to anymore to a friend of mine to raise some extra cash. First-sale doctrine being what it is, I bet I could get him to pay me a quarter a song to transfer ownership to him.

Wait... what?

Exactly so, go for it. And if your friends don't want them, there's even a market maker called "ReDigi." If they're relatively popular tracks, I think ReDigi pays more than $0.25 each.

Both. It's a license or a sale depending on which benefits the RIAA more. Apparently, music files are like photons being waves or particles. They're both until observed (brought into a court of law) when they collapse into a single (RIAA-benefiting) state.

That is funny, but bear in mind that the legal truth in this case almost certainly is that they are both -- but reversed from the RIAA's argument.

When a label gives a single master copy to iTunes and grants them a license to reproduce for retail sale, that is a license. That is important, because it means that the label is not incurring the cost of reproduction and distribution of many individual copies, and should not be retaining the pressing costs associated with vinyl records (the rational reason for copies paying the artist less).

When iTunes sells an individual copy to a retail customer, that is a sale -- but it has no bearing on the contract between the artist and the label. The artist's contract interest is in the transaction between the label and iTunes.

From a legal standpoint, it is almost certainly the case that the labels license iTunes to reproduce and distribute, and iTunes sells copies to retail customers. Trying to claim that something else is the case would require a judge with a very pliable sense of reality.

Please RTFS again. Artists get a 25% percent cut when it's a license. The MAFIAA is telling them that music through iTunes is sold, which only gives artists a 6% cut.

It's actually even worse than that. The label is arguing that when they give iTunes a single master file and a license to reproduce that file for retail sale, it is a sale. But when iTunes sells individual MP3 copies to end users, it is a license.

The legal truth is almost certainly reversed. When the label gives a single master file and license to reproduce to iTunes, it is a license. When they sell an individual copy to a retail customer, it is a sale.

when labels argued that there was no right of resale for customers.

This lawsuit appears to be discussing the transaction between the record labels and the retailers -- the transaction with which the artist has some concern. The transaction between the retailer and the retail customer is none of Sister Sledge's concern, and a federal district judge has just denied a request to shutter ReDigi on the basis that MP3's may well be traditional property. It is very possible (I would even say almost certain) that the former transaction is a license and the latter transaction is a sale.

The reason the transaction between the label and the retailers appears to be a license is because the retailer gets a single master and license to duplicate for retail sale. Hence the labels do not incur, and should not be retaining, the cost of reproducing the "records".

They're the middlemen; the brokers. The only "benefit" they have for the artists is its distribution channel and marketing/ promotions (but that''s been eroding for the past decade, thanks to the internet.)

They also provide the equivalent of venture capital to small artists with potential to go big. There is lots of room to debate the pros and cons of how those relationships are formed and how they mature (just as with venture capital). Regardless of those questions, however, it is another benefit that has to be acknowledged when forming a complete image of the problem space.

The television networks that actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn't take advantage of their broadcast credibility to press their case.

Perhaps that is sufficiently dubious in itself, given the ratio of pro-SOPA to anti-SOPA perspectives presented on the news networks. (don't forget to count single-sentence meme-casting like, "the bill before congress that would prevent online music theft")

That alone is, at best, one-eyebrow-raisingly dubious. But wait! There's more!

Let's take a hard look at the general form of that statement:

[The television networks that] actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn't take advantage of their [broadcast credibility] to press their case.

Two quick substitutions:

[Those who] actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn't take advantage of their [position] to press their case.

So, nobody who supported SOPA gave concert tickets to a Senator whose daughter just loves Bieber? Not one member of the MPAA got a Congressperson's spouse a tour around a movie studio? The Obama kids have never been introduced to a music or movie star by a SOPA supporter? Not a single record label made an introduction between a politician who was up for reelection and an ASCAP rep to talk about public performance rights on the campaign trail?

Oh yeah, and bribery. The RIAA and MPAA bribe our legislators. They give money directly to politicians, and threaten to cut the off if they don't get their way. In public. They call that "free speech" because a corporation handing a politician money is legally indistinguishable from a person speaking. And they have the gall to attack Google and Wikipedia for engaging in actual speech against the bill.

God forbid corporations should start disseminating information about legislation. There is perfectly legitimate graft and bribery going on here, and these rabble-rousers are shamelessly telling the public about the laws that are being purchased! It is unacceptable!

Some people need to go to jail.

You're right, Javascript is a way different style of coding than C/C++/Java, but that's OK. So is Lisp. Surely you wouldn't feel wounded by having to learn Lisp. Use the different style to develop a new facet to your perspective on programming. Duck typing is pretty well respected in academic OOP, so it's not like you're going to be learning GOTO statements or anything.

Debugging is a bit harder, but that's OK, fire up Firefox, go to "Tools >> Web Developer >> Web Console." That'll give you most of what you're looking for (use console.log("message") to write to the console). You can check out Firebug also, if you want something a bit heavier. I personally ditched Firebug as soon as Firefox's Web Console got good enough, because I found Firebug a bit too clunky, but lots of people swear by it.

Leave the preconceptions and stereotypes behind, check out Wikipedia on Duck Typing and give it a go. Don't sweat it when you make noob mistakes -- you're supposed to do that when you're a noob to a language. Give it a crack, have fun with it, relax, it's really not a bad language once you get into it.