Bud's Corner

Google Print

2005-09-28T15:27:00.000-07:00

Google now has a subsite called Google Print (http://print.google.com/) where you can search the entire text of books. The Authors Guild is currently trying to put an end to the site. I do not agree with the Authors Guild. While the site allows you to read several pages in a row of a book, it does not let you read a book from cover to cover. If it did, I would disagree with it strongly. But if a regular citizen is able to read several pages of a book online, I would think he would be more likely to buy the book. There is peer influence, friends saying which books are good, but Google Print wouldn't stop buying of books because of that. It would allow the person to read a tiny sample of the book which he may not even buy otherwise, even with his friend saying it is good. I think Google Print should continue, because as I said earlier, I think it helps the Authors Guild, not hurt it.

Weblog Ethics

2005-09-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

URL: http://blackboard6.umw.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_15879_
Title: Rebecca's Pocket: Weblog Ethics

In this blog entry titled Weblog Ethics, it talks about just that topic, with a brief introduction about blogs. The writer has a list of principles that she hopes will be picked up by the blogosphere. She first says do not publish anything as fact that you do not think of as that. The second thing is list your sources, if any. I agree with this along with having it being reinforced many times as a freshman in college. I even reference the article I am writing about at the top of this page. Another point she makes is to add to, but do not rewrite or delete any entry. I had never thought about this before, but it is a good point. You should not go back on what you said before. The last point that I am going to write about is that you should note questionable and biased sources. While the writer of the blog entry might have to search a tiny bit for this information, it is important for the reader to know it, like the author says. I mostly agree with this list of ethics that the author makes.

New Online Database

2005-09-28T13:23:00.000-07:00

URL: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66476,00.html
Title: Wired News: Database Fights Diploma Mills

The U.S. Department of Education has created a new database that has the 'names, addresses, and enrollment of all schools accredited by organizations recognized by the federal government.' This concept sounds like a really good idea to me. It prevents the distribution of fake degrees. It was created because of concerns that diploma mills are using the Internet to trick prospective students. If a fake degree is used in another state than it was recieved, the person could be sent to jail for fraud. There are a lot of colleges that have similar names, one fake college and a real one. One example the article gives of this Hamilton University, which is just a diploma mill in Wyoming, and Hamilton College, a real school. It is sad that there are people out there faking degrees to try and lure students, but hopefully this new database will help cut that down.

Searching For Myself

2005-09-18T15:31:00.000-07:00

I have had an interesting time searching for myself on Internet search engines. I have used Google every time I have done it, which is the same search engine I use for most of my regular searches. When I searched for the name I use, Bud McDonald, several years ago, I had to go through several pages to find something about me, but then I found a website with information about one of the games from recreation league soccer, which I played for several years. My name was mentioned in it as kicking a corner kick which somebody else on my team scored off of. Then, a few months ago, I searched for my real name, Brady McDonald, and one of the results I got was a University of Florida website that had birthdays of the Class of 2005, and there was a person with the same name as me, and the same birthday as me, September 15. I would not know how University of Florida would have my birthday, and why I would be on a ufl.edu based website, but that's weird that another person would have the same name along with the same birthday as me.

Filtering and Blocking Devices

2005-09-18T13:03:00.000-07:00

I do not agree with computers using filtering and blocking devices to not allow access to certain things. The opinions against them are that they block some sites with useful information by blocking certain words. Some examples of this are sites with safe sex information, information about drug legalization, or other controversial issues, or topics such as breast cancer (Ackermann). The other issue, and also the most important issue, is they partly take away your first amendment freedoms. If parents do not want their children on bad sites, instead of putting a filter on, they can just check in with them every now and then to see what site they are on. This is why I do not agree with filters or blocking devices being used.

Ackermann, Ernest and Hartman, Karen, Learning to Use the Internet and World Wide Web with Revitalized URL's, Franklin, Beedle and Associates Inc., Wilsonville, OR, 2005

Search Engine Users Statistics

2005-09-18T12:37:00.000-07:00

Summary of: http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3462911

This was an alarming article when I read it. 2,200 adults were surveyed by phone, and some amazing statistics were discovered. 92 percent of those who use search engines said they are confident about their searching abilities, with 52 percent of them being very confident. I consider myself not a super tech-savvy person, but I think I know a bit about computers, and I consider myself a tiny bit under confident for my searching abilities. This is why I found these 2 statistics to be suprising. The other statistic I find to be suprising is that 17 percent of users say they always find the information for which they are looking when they perform a search. On this statistic, I agree with Deborah Fallows, Senior Research Fellow at the Pew Internet & American Life Project and author of the report, who is quoted in the article as saying "the majority are doing simple searches." I agree with this because I have done several searches where I have not found the information that I wanted to find. The other statistics were hard to believe, but the 3 I mentioned are in my opinion, the main ones.

Digital Piracy

2005-09-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

Summary of:
To Hollywood's dismay, digital piracy is the big ape in film
Author: Timothy O'Brien (New York Times Writer)
URL: http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/28/business/pirates.php

The article is started by talking about the remake of King Kong set to open in December. It explains how it is supposed to be this huge blockbuster, with awesome special effects. It then goes on to talk about the troubles that could be faced with the problems of digital piracy going on in today's world, where people steal copies of first-run movies and illegally distribute them, causing a lot of financial loss to the studio that produced the movie. Peter Jackson, the director of King Kong, is quoted as saying "if that (piracy) happens, they (films) will stop being made. No studio is going to finance a film if the point is reached where their possible profit margin goes straight into criminals' pockets." In addition to piracy, the new technology, such as DVD players and flat screen TV's, are causing more people to watch movies at home rather than in the theaters. The Motion Picture Association of America says that the lost profit just from bootleg DVDs being distributed is over $3 billion in just last year. That does not include illegal internet distributing. BigChampagne, which is a company that tracks online media use, is quoted as saying that for the week through August. 9, an average of 102,895 people a day downloaded the new "War of the Worlds" using BitTorrent, a file-sharing program. It is too bad that thinigs like digital piracy are happening, and not only criticizing the people that put it illegally on the internet or make bootleg DVDs, but the people that recieve them and watch them. I would not want a great movie not to be produced, if it gets bad enough that the movie studios stop making movies, like Peter Jackson said may happen. Hopefully, this issue is solved fully or at least partially.

Personal Computer Security Issue

2005-09-12T17:25:00.000-07:00

There has only been one computer security issue that I have been involved in that I can remember. It was not a very big one, but it very well could have been. I have signed up with usernames and passwords on a lot of websites, and sometimes I forget the screenname or password when I am trying to log into one. One day, around 4 or 5 years ago, I went onto espn.com, and tried to log in. I tried using one of my usual passwords, and the login was successful, but I realized it was another person's account. All you can do once you are logged in on espn.com pretty much is stuff related to fantasy sports, so it wasn't a very big deal, but if it had been a site like Paypal or any other site with private information, it would have been bad. Why I consider it so close though is that since my passwords are sort of similar along different sites, that the person whose ESPN account I accessed, could forget his password on another site, and try entering mine, and getting in. This is why I consider it a significant issue.

Copyright

2005-09-12T16:50:00.000-07:00

In the article "The Tyranny of Copyright?" by Robert Boynton, it talks about students of Swarthmore College getting access to memos talking about flaws in Diebold Election Systems (the largest maker of electronic voting machines) software. The students posted the memos on the internet, but thanks to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the memos were taken off, but no legal action was taken. A little bit later, they were put back on the Internet. I think this is truly wrong for the students to do, and that no act should prevent legal action from being taken, which is the case in the Act that "their speech could be silenced without the benefit of actual lawsuits, public hearings, judges or other niceties of the proccess." (http://econ.gsia.cmu.edu/ecommerce/The%20Tyranny%20of%20Copyright.htm)
On the issue when the Recording Industry Association of America began suing people for illegally downloading music off the internet, including pre-teens, I agree with the suing. I will be honest, I used to do it, but as soon as it became an issue, we took it off our computer, and I haven't used it since. Currently, my family and I have Rhapsody, which you can still listen to many songs on the computer, but you pay for the service, and then you pay just under a dollar a song to copy them onto a CD. There are people that fear that increasing copyright protection will "hinder our ability to experiment and create and eroding our democratic freedom. I do not agree at all with this viewpoint. We have plenty of freedoms without using other people's copyrighted things. There is a point why copyright was created, and that is that the information that is on the internet was created by another person, and unless they say specifically that others can use that information, no one should be allowed to. In conclusion, I agree with copyright in any form and the direction society is going in, as long as it doesn't go too far.

Washington Nationals

2005-09-05T17:55:00.000-07:00

The Nationals are my favorite baseball team. I live in Alexandria, VA, and I go to college in Fredricksburg, VA, so Washington D.C. is the closest pro sports market to me, and I am a hometown team kind of guy. I also like the Redskins and Wizards. The first major league baseball is being played in Washington after about 34 years with no baseball team at all in Washington. Since I wasn't alive when baseball was back in D.C. last, I have cheered for the Baltimore Orioles since I have liked baseball, which was somewhere around when I was 5 or 6 years old. So I am really happy that a team is back in Washington now. Before this year, they played in Montreal/Puerto Rico and were known as the Expos. They finished with the 4th worst record in baseball last year, and were not expected to do a whole lot better this year, but they are still hanging around in the National League wild card race, currently 1 1/2 games back. The Nationals are a great thing for Washington, and should get more people to become baseball fans. Even though I was a big fan of baseball before this year, the Nationals have made me an even bigger fan.

Event Coverage

2005-09-05T17:39:00.000-07:00

Orientation week at the University of Mary Washington; the time that we, as freshmen college students, can get used to college and the campus before classes start. When I got the detailed schedule of what we were going to be doing for Wednesday, August 24th, through Sunday, August 28th, I was not very happy. It seemed like we would not have any free time to do anything other than what the school had scheduled for us. The first day was pretty much that way. I along with some other people I talked with were really tired by the end of the day. As the week went on however, I had more free time than I had imagined. Some of the things we did weren't the most fun in the world, but we had things like a comedian, who came one night for part of that night's evening entertainment. Overall, I had a bit of a better time than I thought I would.

Internet Trust

2005-09-05T17:03:00.000-07:00

Is the information on Internet websites really trustworthy? Before now, I have not really paid attention to this issue. Before high school, I went to a private Montessori school, so the issue did not come up then. For high school however, when I wrote papers or essays, I used the Internet often for some of my sources. I never really thought about the sites being false, I just assumed and had the thinking in my head that they were trustworthy sources, unless it was a really extreme website that you could tell the information was false. Writing about it as an assignment though, along with talking about it some in class, it has opened my eyes to it. In the future, for whenever I write papers using websites as some of my sources, I will look into them more carefully then I would have done a few years ago. Because when you think about it, the information on a website is created by a person or persons, the trustability of the site just depends on how much work the site creators put into making sure the information they use is trustworthy.