Just walk away.

One day I decided to just quit playing an MMORPG that I had been playing for the last 3 months. The funny thing is that after quitting, I never looked back and I never felt like I had lost anything. I did, however, look back with regret at all the wasted time. At two separate times in my life I have been addicted by a MMORPG, once in middle school and once in high school. In hindsight, most people are able to recognize that their gaming addiction was a complete waste of time, but in the moment, these games truly captivate your attention and monopolize your priorities. As I leveled up and got better equipment, I really felt a sense of accomplishment. Enjoying this, many people are captivated and trapped by these games. The thing that brought me back into reality was simple, but I wish to reiterate it here for all to read. I simple sat on my bed for a few minutes and pondered to myself. Within minutes, I had come to realize the stupidity of my actions and the toll it had placed on my schoolwork, friendships, and family relationships. By simply reassessing our lives, I believe the willpower to leave these wasteful MMORPGs will come to us. The rest is simply doing what your brain tells you to do.

Vlog -- SOPA

The amazingly social social network.

Think of your most unique interest. If this interest is unique enough, chances are you don't know anyone who truly shares your passion for the subject. If you want to interact with those who share your interest of say, extreme geocaching, your options are really quite slim, but with the help of the internet, specifically social networks, other extreme geocachers like yourself can interact easily and share stories and helpful hints. This is one of the amazing implications of social networking, and one of Clay Shirky's points of interest in his book "Here Comes Everybody." Social networking has allowed for people with similar interests, no matter how obscure, to interact with great effectiveness. This social connectivity can foster all sorts of progress, such as disgruntled customers banding together in an effort to right a wrong caused by a corporation, or political activists joining together to speak with one strong voice. This powerful tool can also be used for evil as well, and it is up to us as users to moderate our actions as to promote good cooperation and progress.

When will companies learn from past copyright history?

Something that has caught my interest of late is researching the history of how the actions of copyright holders progress as they encounter a new technology. In my childhood, I remember two of these periods of time. One is when the music industry reacted to the prevalence of mp3 files and the other is when the movie industry reacted to the prevalence of consumer access to writable DVDs and file sharing programs. In each case, the industry assaulted the technology and did everything in its power to prevent the technology from harming sales. The industry struggled for a while and eventually gave in when they realized that their actions were hurting sales more than the new technology. The music industry reacted by suing people who shared mp3s and by selling DRM (digital rights management) encoded audio files. The movie industry reacted also by suing people who shared movies and by protecting DVDs with DRM. In each case, the industry was met with public disapproval of their actions and eventually someone broke the conventions of the industry and everyone else followed. Ever since iTunes stopped selling it's audio files with DRM, very few online retailers sell DRM encoded audio files. Also, DVDs and CDs are no longer sold with dubious copyright protections in them. Given this history, you would think the e-book industry would follow suit, but surprisingly, they haven't learned anything. The current e-book industry is segmented by various e-book formats and riddled with DRM in almost every e-book sold. It is only a matter of time, in my opinion, that e-book retailers will realize the hassle they cause for all of their customers and sell non-DRM e-books.

CS, the manliest degree....

As I've progressed through my Computer Science courses during my years in college, I've noticed that the number of women in my classes has dwindled with each semester.  My freshman year, I though it oddly peculiar that less than a fourth of the class was female.  Last year, my classes had even fewer females as I progressed farther along in my schooling and progressed past the classes required to earn a minor in Computer Science. And now, in my Junior year of school, there is not a single female student in any of my three computer science classes this semester.  This trend is nothing new, and it has been documented and studied by many people. Some suggest that the lack of women pursuing a Computer Science degree is because women are trying to avoid negative labels such as nerd or geek.  Others suggest that women feel ostracized by the male dominated culture and that women feel that other career paths will have more opportunities for employment.  All of these ideas seem to point to the idea that women just don't feel like they fit in with the primarily male computer scientist population.  This bothers me because the problem itself is causing the problem.  As women see less and less women in computing, less women feel welcome in the field  causing a further decrease of women in computing.  I believe that there is nothing about computing that suits men more than women, and it is up to us to make them feel more welcome in this field of study.

Ever met your ancestors?

One of the most captivating and awe-inspiring experiences in my life was exploring my ancestry through the use of familysearch.org.  The website allows anyone to search for an ancestor by name and then access genealogical information on several if not hundreds of generations back in history.  I am somewhat lucky, as the website already has most of my ancestry data completed and recorded with no effort on my part.  Others may find that there is missing information, but that is great because everyone can contribute the ancestry information they know to the database and make it more complete.  I spent an entire evening digging through my ancestry, and it was amazing. I traced my ancestry back to dozens of royal couples.  One of my ancestry lines even went back to the 1400's.  If that doesn't impress you, then something is wrong with you.  I'd encourage everyone to explore the website and learn a little about your ancestry, everyone who does will be impressed.

The dot com bubble....

Watching a Frontline documentary on the Dot-com bubble has made me realize that the Dot-com bubble was quite different than what I had assumed it to be.  As a person growing up in the late 1990's, I had always assumed that the blame for the bubble bursting rested solely in the speculative nature of the consumer stock holders, but the aptly named documentary, "Dot Con," opened my eyes up to the true culprits.  Investment bankers and venture capitalists saw the excitement in the market directed at the internet industry and saw an opportunity to make a lot of money.  By pushing internet start-ups towards an IPO and then selling the stock on the first day, these investors were able to use the hype surrounding internet stocks to cash in huge amounts of money. It is quite scary how much profit was had by these companies. On another note, the crash was not as bad as I assumed, as Wikipedia states that half of these companies survived well past the bursting of the Dot-com bubble.  Avoiding rampant speculation is a new goal of mine, I don't want to be in a similar situation.

Are free open source alternatives really all that widely known among the general populous?

I recently began contemplating the influence of open source software after viewing the movie "Revolution OS."  I came to realize that while I had experience using Linux and other open source software, most of my friends had little to no experience with them.  As a Computer Science undergraduate, I have learned to use and appreciate many open source projects, but it seems that most people have not.  The example of Photoshop and GIMP came to my mind.  Ask anybody about Photoshop and they will tell you that it is a program to edit photos, but ask them about GIMP and they will likely have no idea what it is. Photoshop is maintained by Adobe and costs $700 for a full version, whereas GIMP is maintained by the open source community and costs nothing.  For the average consumer, both products can accomplish practically the same things. Why is it, then, that GIMP is not widely known and Photoshop remains the only option in the mind of the consumer?  I think that open source proponents need to be more vocal about the powerful open source options available.  I make it a goal to spread the word whenever I find useful free software. 

Protecting yourself from hackers.

I recently finished reading a captivating book on catching computer hackers called "The Cuckoo's Nest."  This non-fictional account of the endeavors of a man trying to defend his network of computers, as well as those networks connected to his network, has reminded me of the risks inherent to the public nature of the Internet. In the book, the threat of hackers connecting remotely to computers and mucking around is a real one.  Today, many of the limitations described in the book that limit the speed and effectiveness of the hacker are no longer present, and we need to be extra cautious because of it. As the Internet has progressed to be far more powerful and interconnected than the rudimentary Internet from the book, the threats everyday users face have grown continuously.
We need to reevaluate the security of our online accounts and our computer networks.  If a hacker were to intercept a password, would he be able to access your email, bank accounts, and credit card information?  I presume that most people reuse a common password for most of their online accounts.  Have you considered the implications of this practice?  Protecting our computers and our online information is much like protecting our homes.  We need to make sure that we are the only person who has the key and we need to be vigilant to notice any anomalies.
For more information on protecting our online presence, I recommend visiting the Internet Safety Wiki and reading articles of this nature.

What smells better....

Which smells better: the smell of gasoline, or the smell of coffee beans? If you chose the latter, you may very well be interested in this coffee bean powered car that just recently set a Guinness World Record for fastest gasification-powered vehicle. The car has an impressive averaged speed of 66.5 mph. This certainly is not fast enough for normal highway travel, but the implications of this technology are very intriguing. If a group of engineers in their free time could create a car that utilized green, renewable sources for fuel, it is certainly plausible to hope that a car manufacture with significant research and development resources could improve on the concept and bring green powered cars to a wider market. With my wallet hurting every time I visit the gas station, I hope that more green technology comes sooner rather than later.

Face to face interaction is gone, and voice communication is quickly following it.

The results of a recent study by the Pew Research Center were quite surprising. The study found that 31% of cell phone users prefer to be contacted via text message rather than by a phone call. I take that back, I don't find the results all that surprising, I find them disturbing. I find them disturbing because I worry that society is becoming less socially interactive as each year passes, and this study reinforces this concern. As people opt to send a text message instead of directly interacting with others, they lose opportunities for real social interaction. In the place pf interesting voice communication is a stale and dull mode of communication we call "texting." I truly hope the statistics on text messaging usage found in the study results are an eye opener for many of my readers. It is my hope that we can urge others to talk directly to others whenever possible as opposed to texting.  It is much more rewarding.

Antitrust laws are called antitrust for a reason.

The U.S. government made a great move in protecting the interests of its citizens a couple of weeks ago when it announced that it filed antitrust suit against AT&T's intent to acquire rival company T-Mobile. This suit puts a block on a merger that would have been disastrous for the United States cell phone service market. Had this deal have gone through, American cell phone subscribers would have their scanty selection of four major carriers reduced to just three. By reducing the number of carriers, competition is reduced along with innovation. The remaining companies would be even more content in the shared monopoly that they hold and would have no need to aggressively compete in order to attract customers. Some argue that we should just let capitalism run its course and allow these companies to do whatever they wish, but I argue that cell phone service is no longer a luxury but is now practically a necessity.  The government, therefore, has a duty to protect its citizens from price gouging, and it is doing a great job at it, as is evident by the antitrust suit directed at AT&T.

How did we spend those daily 30 minutes of Facebook time before there was a Facebook?

An essay by Neil Postman published in 1998 entitled "Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change" is just as relevant today as it was when it was published over 10 years ago. In fact, the concerns Neil brought up years ago are huge issues that Internet and computer users should be aware of even today. Of the five issues brought up by Neil, the first issue is particularly important to consider as society continues to become deeply imbued in Internet connectivity and social networking. Neil mentions that all new technology brings with it both advantages and corresponding disadvantages. As users of the Internet and social networks, we need to keep in mind that the benefits social networking brings to our lives also bring negative trade-offs. These trade-offs are likely never considered by users of social networks. Think about this: Before people started spending minutes or even hours out of their daily routine updating their Facebook and Twitter accounts, people used that time for other activities. By participating in Facebook and other social networks, people lose out on that time to potentially do more productive activities. Some users obsess over their image on the Internet that they fail to continue to develop their various talents because their time is spent tinkering with their social networks. The trade-offs that social networks bring to our lives are real, and vary from person to person. Think hard and try to identify things in your life that have gone missing since you started participating in social networks. I'm positive that you will find something. Are you happy with this loss?  Personally, I've lost my novel reading time to Facebook. I'm not happy with this, and I bet you won't be happy with what you realize you've lost either.