During this round at Hood College (Summer 2010 – Spring 2012), I had a few things happen:

I became a father (Maxwell Emerson Hatch, who turned 16 months old yesterday).
Became a stay-at-home dad.

Decloaked HATCHideas from stealth mode… (formerly SHOREtech Systems LLC).
Got the trademark registered on HATCHideas.

Fully developed a collectable dice game named Roll & Rule.
Launched a patent application for the Roll&Rule gaming system.

Launched ohmTown Studios.
Developed 38 video call-in shows.

I also did the research that will lead to launching a new style of search engine (and other possible patents).

I developed 6 products that I’m launching under HATCHideas over the next couple of years
Will be launching a CrowdFunding project under HATCHideas.org in the next month.

Regarding ohmTown and ohmTown Studios, I had or have registered the domain(s) associated with the show
Launched the site at ohmTown.com and before that had each domain redirected to HATCHideas.com as I developed the project.

I launched Mobble.com which was a social network that allowed you to rate and review people you know. After much deliberation, I figured it was simply too much of a headache even though I was getting a lot of traffic. I pivoted Mobble to be a product rating and review site along with people, but that actually destroyed the traffic. It is now closed as a site and pivoted to a Social Networking show on ohmTown Studios.

This excludes what I did in academic circles, I’m sure I’m missing something, this is just a quick post.

A quick rundown of the semesters/classes suggests I wrote about 12 papers.

Now, what does the future hold? I just don’t know. I’d like a PhD/DM or JD but that would mean more time away. I’m guessing I’ll keep looking for a job that I fit in and keep working on HATCHideas as a consultancy and soon as a crowd funding service for select companies, projects and startups. When HATCHideas launches the crowdfunding service, you’ll find it at HATCHideas.org and the service will be fee-free because I’m looking to help fund small business startups.

Enter Jolie O’Dell of Venturebeat.com and non-Apple-Fan-boi who writes “Apple’s press conference showed a brand unraveling” and led to some discussion online and offline. The discussion was apparently about the lack of versioning of the iPad. It’s SHOCKING I tell you… SHOCKING! Apple didn’t version the iPad as HD or 3 or iPhone Mega. There were a few things that were even more idiotic, but this versioning issue that This Week in Tech’s Sarah Lane couldn’t get over as well, is just dumb to harp about.

The iMac hasn’t been versioned since its inception, nor has the iPod Touch, iPod Nano, iPod, Mac Pro, Mac Mini, Macbook, Macbook Pro, AppleTV and I’m going to guess that the next version of the iPhone will NOT be the iPhone 5. She claims its ambiguous. Except it isn’t. It is just the opposite. You don’t go into a store wanting to buy an iPad 2, you buy the iPad. Same thing with EVERY OTHER Apple product. It’s a solidification and removal of the ability to claim fracturing of the brand.

I would have respected her opinion more if she would have mentioned something about the UI on the AppleTV or perhaps that there didn’t seem to be any haptic extensions to the iPad [no vibration on alert, gaming, etc]. No, she chose to pick on someones crumpled shirt? Should everyone resort to that kind of observation? I would be skewered if I said that she should concentrate on looking pretty instead of talking about technology and business. She even bitched about a tie-dyed Apple logo while at the same time complaining about the Apple ethos being that of Utopia and dreams. Anyone who mentions Utopia certain correlates that to tie-dye.

I think she’s too caught up in needing clicks instead of connecting the dots of business and technology. She is aspiring to understand it more. Good luck. She’ll go far because she’s attractive and doesn’t have a crumpled shirt like the unraveling brand of the Apple CEO.

*edited the name Lacy to Lane, 5:31PM EST

Babies’R'Us is another business by the parent corporation, which I swear doesn’t do anything to make its businesses move forward. It continues to ride the forward motion that was set before Toys’R'Us was acquired.

Babies’R'Us likes to send out advertisements, the one sitting in front of me has a “SAVE 20% on ANY one regular-priced baby item” in red, white and purple. That ANY is allcaps and bold, not by me, but by design on the coupon. So, when I go to use it, you can bet I would expect to save 20% on ANY one regular priced baby item. BUT WAIT! There is very fine print. It has to be fine because of everything that is typed in there. Here it is…

Offer valid for Rewards”R”Us members only. (WHAT?)
Membership number must be presented at time of purchase. (Look me up, its the 21st century.)
(Here is the icing on the cake.)
Excludes ALL toys, (That ALL is allcaps and bold as well, there is a comma there too.) baby food, diapers, formula, wipes, “Unbeatable Price! items, Ameda, Aprica, Baby Brezza, Baby Jogger, BOB, Britax, Bugaboo, Cybex, Ergobaby, Mamas & Papas, Motherhood Maternity, Nap Nany, Pediped, Peg Perego, Phil & Teds, Quinny, Robeez, Tommee Tippee, Under Armour, electronic learning toys, netbooks, tablets, video game hardware, video games, Apple products, FAO products, RobotGalaxy, Buyer Protection Plan, gift cards, photo studios, phone orders, Special Orders, assembly fee, breast-pump rental fee, delivery fee, and shipping & handling.

There is a bit more, but the key thing here is… “Excludes ALL toys, baby food, diapers, formula, wipes” which is just absurd. This is from Babies’R'Us too. I’m not sure how many of the decision makers are parents, but I do know that if you have a child of any age, there are three things you are looking for… Food, Clothing, and Entertainment. These coupons exclude all of those. You can’t buy food because both baby food and formula are excluded, you can’t get clothing because diapers are excluded [not to mention certain brands or sale items], and you certainly can’t purchase anything entertainment since it forbids the use of a coupon to purchase ALL toys.

I’m sure I could find something not on sale, not subject to the fine print, and… on who am I kidding. I’ll just stick to going online. I can get my supplies cheaper. I can get them just as fast to get to my door since I can do other things while someone delivers them. Most importantly, and oddly enough, I’ll get better customer service since I won’t have to deal with the ever declining quality of employees in the retail sector.

I’ve been there, on the employee side of retail. I would bend over backwards to make sure that my customers were happy. I was paid horrible compared to the people getting paid today. You can’t tell me (and people try to) that it is because they are underpaid. It doesn’t take specialized training to treat customers properly.

A coupon won’t help get me in the store.

Prior to CS4, Adobe’s Student/Educational edition prevented users from producing commercial works. Microsoft Office Home and Student CURRENTLY prevents users from producing commercial works [page 21 of 24 in the English EULA]. That is just two quick looks at EULA’s that Ed Bott suggests he reads so that you don’t have to [his quote on his post about the Apple EULA, not my interpretation].

Ed is just plain wrong. For software, I hardly read the EULA. Why? Because I have no negotiating power to edit it, submit it for acceptance and have a meeting of the minds. A VERY important aspect of creating a contract between two parties. Without it, the contract is void. So, in essence, you either accept the EULA and use the software, or don’t and delete it.

Ed said he has read it multiple times, as per his many edits to his blog post [at least he discloses that]. Currently, he has read it 4 times. But misses the point that Adobe charges $450 for the current plain vanilla version of Photoshop for students and educators, but it allows both to create commercial works. The Microsoft Student edition still requires no commercial compensation for works created by the student edition and that costs around $100 depending on where you go to get it.

Again, only two applications, one an application that allows, but costs several hundred, one that does not and costs around a hundred. Apple iBooks Author is free and is a one stop shop for publishing. The only limit is that it has to go through Apple for sales. One of the largest marketing and distribution machines on the planet. It also costs a certain percentage. Less than publishers, more than free.

Apparently, Mr. Bott wants the software to be free, the publishing, distribution and marketing to be free, the work to be produced on that free software for use anywhere on top of that and for icing on the cake, he wants it to be sold for free too because 30% is way too much for doing everything except writing the work.

He also takes exception to the definition of “work” or “Work” which is just odd. Even calling it shoddy lawyering.

It all smacks of bias and link bait marketing around a new product and service that people have wanted for several years. A quick and easy way to get published without having to submit your work (Work) to a hundred publishers, only to get rejected again and again. Ultimately landing on some good spirit who gives a low ball offer, we’ll call it the inverse relationship to the Apple offering, so 70% goes to the publisher and 30% goes to the author. Then you have to wait for checks, go to book stores for signings [not for fun, but because you have to get out there and show your face], and hope that the publisher pulls their own weight.

Apple promotes the hell out of its foundation product(s), the iPad, iPhone and iPod get TV time. How many publishers do the same?

I think Ed Bott is just plain wrong.

Ignoring NDAA which requires only a waiver to make a person disappear without trial while lighting torches and sharpening pitchforks over PIPA and SOPA can be described as…

“You can take my neighbor, but you can’t take my Facebook!”

Anyway, the NDAA is here to stay. Sites like Reddit, Google and many others, have banded together in an effort to raise awareness over the two acts, PIPA and SOPA. Both of which attempt to extend copyright law into a draconian form of criminalizing and bringing down what amounts to the stealing of intellectual property which has gone so far as to eliminate the ability for IP to ever enter the public domain during the lifetime of the creator and his/her offspring. Once media companies tie the Citizens United case of creating a person out of a corporation to the PIPA/SOPA concepts and copyrights will never expire.

The problem everyone has with this is akin to the problem consumers had with protesting gas prices. They didn’t buy gas for a day in some places. Big deal. You still want it, you still need it. You can’t get away from it. I understand that in the sense of gasoline. You can’t get to work without it. Even if you use public transport, they still need gas too. But this is digital copies of music and movies. No one needs it. It’s a want. It isn’t a right. But lets ignore the rights aspect for now. That is a different argument.

So, you want movies and music. They, the media companies, want to maximize profits for shareholders. They are legally bound to do so by their investors contract. So, they lobby to get laws changed to more draconian form. While they are spending money, the same money that you consumers are spending on the products, they are seeking to limit consumer ability to consume how they want. Then they go after “pirates” which, although I agree with stopping piracy, is a moral/ethical dilemma, not a legal one. You can’t stop a person from pirating something with law. It hasn’t stopped murder theft, rape, abduction or anything else.

Nothing will stop it unless it’s committed by an ethically fringe case.

What do I mean by that? It means that the person is ethically sound, but has been jaded to the point where they don’t care about it at the time of the criminal act. Ethics takes time to brew in a person. When a person is young, they don’t know about right and wrong, or care enough about it because of some threshold. Like a balk-rate in economics; the point at which a person will step out of line to avoid the cost of waiting. There is also price apprehension or the rate that makes a person pause to sell or buy.

When I was younger, piracy was a very underground scene. You had to dial into a website on a telephone line and download whatever you wanted at a rate that would require being connected sometimes for days. Now it’s just faster. At that time, the price for a game was $30-50 per title. Now it is about $40-60. 25 years later, the price for distributing has nearly vanished, the consumer base has grown exponentially, and speed has increased at what seems like a record pace, but when compared to foreign countries the US is really slow. There are also MMO [Massively Multiplayer Online] Games which aren’t as threatened by piracy since their content is socialized on what amounts to a central server.

So, piracy is primarily a socio-economic event. If a person makes enough money, they’ll buy it. Even if they pirated a copy previously, they want to play it first to see if they like it and can pass their balk rate. A person will buy an item if the price is below their balk rate. How do I know? iTunes is a perfect example. Economics tell me that as well. Books are priced outrageously for mass consumption, the same with magazines. Outrageously for digital versions. The print versions are fairly cheap even though the cost of production and distribution is phenomenal.  iTunes and Amazon are going to prove that the low cost, mass digital sale and distribution model will be beneficial. What throws a corkscrew into any economic analysis of this, even at this cursory unscientific level, are ethics.

Ethics, simply put, describe moral conduct. Morals are culture based. So a person who grows up thinking that software piracy [or the devaluation of the work of others to the benefit of your own] is okay, it will be okay. Like a train, that thought bias will be difficult to derail. For some, even the lowest of price will not justify paying for an item. But then, they would pirate no matter what.

There is a political aspect to all of this “How to truly stop them” talk. But should it really take millions of people struggling to stop just a small segment of people looking to keep their status quo going? I don’t think so. But if you look at the money that is involved, it will take 80% of the population to speak out against the millions of dollars spent lobbying to get SOPA and PIPA in place.

And that is where my way of stopping PIPA and SOPA [unfortunately it won't stop NDAA expansion from happening]… don’t buy from any company that supports SOPA and PIPA. Not now, not ever. That is the only way to stop from funding the very lobbying that is extending the very limitations you fight against.

You are funding your very own criminalization.

I tried to start writing for NaNoWriMo [National Novel Writing Month] but Max got a nasty little cold and then he gave it to me. Mom didn’t get it though, so that’s good. Max has his own website still at MaxwellHatch.com if you want to stop by and see what he is up to. We almost bought a house. They asked for something that made me pause for a little bit. When I finally got back to them, they sold the lot we wanted.

I almost got a new [used, new cars are great for the warranty but I've never liked paying $30,000+ for something I now only put about 500 miles on each month and gets dinged up by people who don't understand physics] car because the stroller doesn’t fit in my little car so I can’t take Max out without taking JP’s car. First car, the dealer sold before I could tell them to hold it [but no other car in my list moved], then a second car was sold between talking to the guy and me coming in [two days], then the third car I wanted suddenly got sold two days after I told the dealer to bring the car up to the dealership for me to look at and after I told him I had the check ready.

Anyway, back to Max who is demanding my attention.