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Attended a rally for health care reform in San Francisco today, at which this poster appeared.

I gave this talk at Cardozo Law School’s conference on the Internet and Openness , held earlier this year. It was lots of fun and I learned a great deal from the other speakers.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak at this event. I should start out by saying that I do not speak for arstechnica.com here, or anywhere else for that matter. I’m just one voice there, working in the status of contributor for the site.

I’m also not going to stand here in the company of these very informed speakers and represent myself as an expert on the Internet. I’m not. What am I then? Well, occasionally I write something on Ars that somebody finds so unacceptable that they devote an entire blog entry to my inadequacies. Last year one of them angrily   denounced me as a “self-appointed FCC watcher,” among other allegedly bad things.

In fairness to this detractor, I have to admit it’s true. That’s what I am: a self-appointed Federal Communications Commission watcher. In my defense, I tried to find an appointment for quite some time, but I’m certainly not going to decline to watch what I’m interested in watching in the absence of one.

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The Wall Street Journal reports that the job market for most new lawyers is quite bad. Does this mean that you should not go to law school? Well, if you really want to be a lawyer, off you go. “Follow your heart,” I always tell my students.

But if you are planning to take the law route because you think that it is a safe, secure career, and you don’t know what else to do, read this article and think again. . . .

Hard Case: Job Market Wanes for U.S. Lawyers
Growth of Legal Sector
Lags Broader Economy;
Law Schools Proliferate

By AMIR EFRATI (Wall Street Journal)
September 24, 2007; Page A1

A law degree isn’t necessarily a license to print money these days.

For graduates of elite law schools, prospects have never been better. Big law firms this year boosted their starting salaries to as high as $160,000. But the majority of law-school graduates are suffering from a supply-and-demand imbalance that’s suppressing pay and job growth. The result: Graduates who don’t score at the top of their class are struggling to find well-paying jobs to make payments on law-school debts that can exceed $100,000. Some are taking temporary contract work, reviewing documents for as little as $20 an hour, without benefits. And many are blaming their law schools for failing to warn them about the dark side of the job market. (more…)