For the Strength of Everyone

These moral standards apply to everyone, even when we age beyond youth. Life isn't too different when we're all grown up. Responsibilities may greater, but the difficulty of our challenges tend to stay relative to our ability to handle them. Those same principles that help a youth tackle the challenges of youth-hood will help an adult handle the challenges of adult-hood.

First Things First

A man's death bed regret is never failure to achieve the next level in his favorite video game. Time is a precious gift, one not to be idled away in enticing game play. Our time should be given to those people or things that matter most. Video games should never trump relationships.

Tis the Season

The Half Life of Knowledge

Knowledge decays over time as society transforms by adopting new technology. Nobody knows how to work a VCR or a cassette player anymore. Therefore, it is important to focus on knowledge that won't likely become outdated. Everything else we can look up on Wikipedia.

Long term knowledge isn't tied to any particular technology or application. Algebra is a good example because no matter what language or platform you program for, you still have to manipulate numbers. Though my eventual career may be in a technological field that does not now exist, chances are algebra will come in handy. The more I am tied to a particular technology, the most limited I am in my opportunities in life. If, rather, I can learn good foundational skills that apply in every field, then I can adapt when the world shifts again.

One pertinent example is the realm of social media. It has transformed that landscape, but the people on the landscape are still fundamentally the same. Facebook friends have not changed the nature of friendship or people's need for a few deep, personal relationships. You will be better served by learning relationship skills outside the context of social media, and then applying them to the social media landscape.

"C'mon Women, Call the Bluff Already!"

If someone verbally advising against your career of choice deters you from pursuing it, you probably don't want it bad enough anyway. Even more so, if stereotypes, which are perceived but not real opposition, are keeping women from studying computer science, then perhaps it is for the best. The real problem is that pre-college exposure to computer science (CS) is so limited that both males and females need to rely on stereotypes to evaluate CS as a potential career. The solution is not to change the stereotypes, but to decrease ignorance by increasing early exposure. Once an individual has decided on CS, outside pressure shouldn't have any influence on that decision.

If Kids Enjoyed School

Students in school and developers in open source software both do work, but achieve very different results. On the one hand, open source developers novel projects of their own choosing and set their own deadlines. On the other hand, teachers assign students to jump through hoops by certain deadlines. Unlike the open source environment, school kills incentive to innovate because school work has no real value outside school. The open source paradigm has a superior power to motivate because contributors like what they do and make something of value for themselves and the world. Other systems, like school, would be wise to adopt some of these principles.

The Gospel to All the World

The medium is the message. Newspapers are for news. TV is for entertainment and commercials. The Internet is for, well, everything. Many web pages (especially social media) have a unique way to spread content and can be considered a unique medium. These media are still relatively new, and the content is produced by amateurs, so the expected messages are not fixed. Have you ever said, “that doesn't belong here,” in response to anything you've seen on Facebook? Probably not, because Facebook content is a digital form of everyday conversation, which can be anything anyone feels like talking about. Then, is there any reason to say that the Internet is not a medium for spreading the gospel?

If Men were Angels

Patent trolls, by definition, exploit the letter of patent law while ignoring the original intent to promote innovation. Record companies squeeze musicians by demanding ownership of their music and also penalize fans who share digital music. YouTube bots indiscriminately threaten amateur uploaders with litigation for using copyrighted material. The laws governing these situations were originally based on principles to help foster innovation and economy. These principles clearly suggest that patent trolls are bad, music should belong to the creator, and sharing is good, but as human experience has shown again, laws governing behavior cannot force adherence to principles. Until the law can do so, we must accept that the system is exploitable.

Whose to blame for stolen passwords?

 

Some believe that the Internet security problem will be solved by a better, more secure system than passwords, claiming that the password system is inherently insecure. While passwords are not 100% secure, irresponsible use of the system accounts for most of the difficulties.  For example, because passwords are hard to remember, users choose common dictionary words, reuse passwords across accounts, and sometimes keep default passwords. This behavior makes them sometimes easy to guess.  99% of the time users care more about usability than security; Dealing with hacked accounts and stolen money comprise the 1%.  Users exhibiting this behavior take security into their own hands.

James Madison said, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Angels wouldn't need artificial limits to coerce them into proper behavior. Our attempts to coerce users into secure passwords fail to achieve their aim (http://xkcd.com/936/). Responsible users using the suboptimal password system would, in practice, be more secure than irresponsible users using an inherently more secure system like biometric authentication. We need to accept that passwords are here to stay and educate users of the Internet, meaning everyone, on Internet safety.

Playgrounds have bullies, and the Internet is one big playground

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law...” The legal rights of the accused are familiar phrases to any T.V. watcher, but few people know Internet copyright law. Perhaps users are too reliant on the computer to verify that they make no illegal move, as in a game of solitaire. It may also be that because they do not see a traffic cop to keep them under the speed limit, they believe that no such limit exists. Whatever the reason, general ignorance of copyright law is exploitable. Knowing your Internet rights leads to two things: One, you will not break the law. Two, you will protect yourself with it.

Ref: http://consumerist.com/2013/09/30/youtube-copyright-bots-finally-tick-off-someone-who-understands-copyright-law/

Great Aunt Georgiana Syndrome

Technological tools have broken down one set of walls in family history work, but another wall remains. Great Aunt Georgiana has already done most everything, or so we sometimes believe. We know that some work remains, but we aren't sure what it is. Besides, it took Georgiana decades to get to know the family tree. You can break down that barrier to entry, without putting in the same effort, because FamilySearch is now crowd sourced, or as some describe it, “your family tree meets Wikipedia.” An essential feature that helps ensures the accuracy of Wikipedia is the “needs citation” flag that any user can raise. FamilySearch has a similar mechanism, so don't be afraid to use it. If your eight-great grandpa has a birth date but no reference for it, raise the flag to tell Aunt Georgiana to attach the picture of his birth certificate. It's easier to supervise than to dive in, and it breaks the wall as well.

“Without the right to privacy, there is no real freedom of speech or freedom of opinion and, therefore, there is no actual democracy.” -Brazilian President Rousseff

Internet privacy is not a requirement for what I consider free speech. Free speech is the right to make your ideas public, not to keep them private. To keep something a secret, you only tell people that you trust won't tell others. Now our middlemen can't be trusted to keep the secret, so if you want something to remain private, cut out the middleman. Assuming the right to free and convenient Internet services without strings attached is the epitome of the entitlement generation. Freedom of the press didn't grant every US citizen a printing press back in 1787. Nobody today seriously complains about airport security, and the NSA checking our email will soon be as routine.

Refs: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/09/brazils-rousseff-trashes-us-over-nsa-spying/

In the wake of PRISM

The cat we all knew was there is out of the bag. Aside from hurting our country's ability to market data-hosting services to the world, how is PRISM going to affect our daily lives and use of technology? Despite the knee-jerk reaction we all have when we realize the government is spying on us, there are some benefits to realizing our data is vulnerable. The weakest link in security has always been the user, and the bottom line has always been, if it's private, don't put it on the Internet. PRISM dispels the false security that passwords make your Internet data private. A skilled and determined hacker can get into most accounts one way or another. We would all be wise to be more careful about the information we make public. Besides, users becoming more careful about their private data shows that even big, ugly, monstrous, black clouds have silver linings.

Ref: http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/prism-facts-doubts-laws-and-loopholes/

Who is master and who is slave?

Technology eats as much time as it saves. As our servant, it meets our needs with ever-growing efficiency. Food, transportation, communication, and security are all enhanced. As our master, it creates needs we didn't previously know existed. Who needed an iPod before there was one? We are given an increased capacity to produce and consume, so the world expects us to produce and consume more. If merely producing or consuming more is our objective, then we are achieving it. But wouldn't you say that there is a little more to life?

First Post!!!!

Hello World!