Saving Ethics

“If ye have not charity, ye are nothing, for charity never faileth” (Moroni 7:46). A man without charity is a man who does not seek a better world and nor does he seek peace. Selfishness creates conflict meanwhile charity places someone’s personal interests aside in order to resolve or prevent problems. If we all exercise charity, our society will flourish and our societal issues will decrease immensely. A society that exercises near perfect charity will have public safety, honest leaders, happier citizens, and healthy progression. What can we do to practice charity and encourage others to love one another?

Digital Abuse

Technology is like medicine, it treats a specific problem to make conditions better. Electronic media treats boredom, the Internet treats communication limitations, software treats weaknesses in business, and more. However, medicine needs to be taken in proper doses and for proper treatments. Medicine overdosing is lethal to one’s health and consuming medicine when healthy causes illness. Likewise, technology has similar side effects when technology is abused. Too much gaming can harm social lives and prevent social interaction. Also, technology opens a pathway for destructive material, such as pornography, to enter into our lives and destroy what matters most. Just like medicine, technology heals when used properly and with appropriate time usage.

Internet Censorship

My Scientific Yet Poetic Mind

My Hello World runs

It prints to the terminal

Crashes on SEG FAULT

My set is unique

Swiftly traversing the tree

Found a duplicate

Here Comes Everybody

The Internet has created a sophisticated social network that connects people from all across the globe. This connectivity gives an incredible amount of power any person that wants to gather large groups of people together. Such power can have a positive influence for good, such as the Egyptian riots that protested via Twitter. However, such power can be abused or used for wrongdoing. In a specific example, one man, Evan Guttman, was able to use the Internet in order rally thousands of supporters to recover a lost cell phone. Guttman’s story made national news over a $350 phone that was recovered by a 16 year girl that refused to return the property. Guttman’s reasons to recover the phone were not immoral, but Sasha Gomez did not deserve the punishment that she received during this time. She was labeled by the national news as a thief and was arrested in order to return the stolen property. Although Guttman’s actions were noble and Sasha’s actions were dishonest, she didn’t deserve to be made an example to the entire nation. Action needed to happen before Sasha Gomez was humiliated to the entire public. We need to establish a system that allows the right thing to be done without destroying the lives of the opposing party.

Women in Computer Science

As technology evolves, it fails to appeal to women as a satisfactory career option. Since the mid 1990s, fewer women have enrolled in computer science every year. Computer science needs more women engineers in order to add more diversity and creativity to the field. More women have joined math and science departments across the nation, but less women choose to pursue computer science. The first step in reversing this decline is to ask women who switch out of computer science to explain the key points that caused them to change careers. By answering that question, departments can advertise computer science to women better than they could without knowing what drives women away.

Open Source Production

Open source programming creates a different kind of product from those products released by most software companies. Open source projects bring the community together in order to produce an application that serves the public. This style of programming introduces a new kind of synergy in the programming world, but also presents several problems. Because anyone in the community can contribute code to the application, malicious code can be submitted in order to provide a backdoor to hackers if the code is subtle enough to pass code inspections. On the other hand, the community provides many solutions to the problems that the application tries to solve and costs nothing to the company. Open source projects have many benefits, but risk increasing the number of bugs in a program and potentially introducing backdoors for hackers to break into the program.

“Too much of a good thing is a bad thing”

There exists a limitless need for computers. These machines can be used for creation, design, entertainment, communication, and much more. As computers become more powerful, our desire to get more use out of our computers grows. Elder David A. Bednar counsels us that we should be responsible with technological advancements and usage. He reminds us that as we use these devices we need to be able to feel the Holy Spirit in our life and not impede our ability to live, to love, and to serve. There are many examples of computer use that clearly drive away the Spirit of the Lord or invite the Spirit into our lives. However, other uses are not as obvious, such as computer gaming. Video games provide entertainment and a sense of accomplishment to many gamers. But, at what point do video games change from being something we love to being an obstacle that prevents our ability to live and to serve?

Broken Patent System

The government provides patent protection in order to prevent stealing ideas and also protect small companies from large corporations. Currently, patents seem to do more harm than good within the market, specifically the technology market. Anyone can get a patent on an idea they have for a new technology. In order to protect the rights of the patent owner, the owner can sue other companies for making money off of that technology. Patent trolls are people who own many patents and sue other companies while having no desire to actually create the technology. These patent trolls prevent innovation by making money off of a flaw in the patent system. The trolls steal money from hard working citizens who had an idea, worked hard for that idea, and became successful. The patent troll doesn’t need to show any proof that they have been creating the same technology. They only present their patent in court. In order to receive a patent, there should be a plan on how the technology will be created and have proof of an actual attempt to build that technology.

The Cuckoo's Egg

Picture all of your belongings stored away in a locked chest and you have the only key that opens the chest. The chest protects your personal belongings from others and only grants access to the owner with the key. If there are any flaws with the chest, then your belongings may be compromised to any attacker who knows the chest's weakness. This principle is an ongoing problem in the computer world. Computers store valuable data that needs to be locked away and can only be accessed by authorized users. Hackers find flaws in computer systems and in encryption algorithms in order to access data that does not belong to them. Many hackers expose systems in order to steal information and either causes damage to the victim or sells that information on the black market. This heinous crime is a serious attack on personal privacy, on classified data, or on companies that profit from that data that is stolen. Companies and consumers need to be informed of basic security protocols in order to prevent large attacks from happening through the Internet.

Ctrl-Alt-Del

Bill Gates calls the Control-Alt-Delete feature on Windows a mistake. This feature was meant to be used by the developers of Windows and the developers kept the feature a secret. Software publishers found out about the feature and learned that this three-key combination logged the user out of their current session on Windows. PC users need this feature when the operating system or any program becomes unresponsive. I do not understand the reason why Bill Gates considers the feature a mistake since it is a necessary feature when the system fails. The failure comes from the design and the experience of the feature. When first discovered, some software developers included Control-Alt-Delete in sets of instructions as a prank to users who didn't know about the feature. This certainly created a frustrating experience for PC users who didn't understand why their system kept restarting. If Microsoft informed the market of this feature, the outcome would have been different for Control-Alt-Delete.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/26/tech/innovation/bill-gates-control-alt-delete/?iref=obinsite

Twitter: LDSCONF

This was my first experience with Twitter. I really liked how some of the important key points of each talk were being tweeted and it gave me a good summary of what was being said. I can definitely relate to Prof. Knutson's comment on how he would get more out of conference from conference tweets than his sleeping children would get by watching conference. This is definitely a good feature to have for certain events. I personally won't use Twitter to follow my friend's posts. I prefer Facebook.

LDS Genealogy

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints invests heavily on genealogy research and encourages members of the church to participate in this work. Elder David B. Haight answers the question as to why the church invests millions of dollars and thousands of volunteer hours by saying "Because we love them [our ancestors]." This simple answer explains that genealogy is part of the core doctrine of the church and that the church performs service to those who cannot help themselves. This selfless project does not compete with other genealogy services, such as ancestry.com, rather the LDS project, FamilySearch, encourages users to use other online sources and any preserved historical documents to build the FamilySearch project. FamilySearch is comprised of two important components; truth and love.

NSA spies with social media

The NSA continues to spy on the American people through social media networks. It may seem harmless to some citizens because social media only has information that the user provides. On a personal note, it doesn't matter to me if the NSA collects my personal information such as my name, my birthday, my current living location, and any other information I provide. The government already has that information. What most people don't know is that the NSA collects information on who you connect with and is capable of tracking your location when you post information. Social media that allow location features now gives the government an easy method of monitoring where any person may be. By watching its citizens like this, the US government is transforming into George Orwell's communist society described in his book, 1984. This is another step that our government has taken to become more like a communist party and there is little being done to restrain the government.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/30/us/nsa-social-networks/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

The American market is filled with workers who pursue the American Dream. The belief that any person can progress from poverty to fame creates incentive for entrepreneurship and generates new ideas for our society. One of the greatest examples who lived the American Dream is Steve Jobs, cofounder and CEO of Apple Computers. Starting from the bottom, Steve Jobs founded his company from his own home by building computers from his own garage with Steve Wozniak. Today, Apple Inc. influences at least 6 large markets and is one of the most profitable companies in the world. Steve Jobs' home is now being evaluated to see if it can be preserved as a historical landmark. Jobs showed that the American Dream is achievable with perseverance, creativity, and brilliance. He proved that anyone can achieve their dream.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/23/tech/steve-jobs-childhood-home/index.html?iref=allsearch

Technological Advancements

Technological changes bring many great and new inventions to help society flourish. These inventions have two opposing viewpoints on how it affects society. An invention is either progressive or it is destructive. The nature of technological advancement is that most of these new developments have characteristics that support either belief. This means that technology's affect on society depends on the original motive or design for how it is used and human responsibility to use it accordingly. One such example in our society is the Internet. The Internet was originally designed for quick communication over long distance, but it now introduces cyber-attacks that are a quicker and new form of crime. When criticizing whether an invention is productive, we should ask, are we using it as it was intended to? The greatest form of destruction is the misuse of our creations.