Episode VI

Return of the Jedi

"Luke Skywalker has returned to his home planet of Tatooine in an attempt to rescue his friend Han Solo from the clutches of the vile gangster Jabba the Hutt."

A ship shuttle craft lands on the docking bay of the deathstar, carrying darth vader inside. A nervous commander awaits him.

Are users overly worried about privacy on facebook?

No users are not overly worried about privacy on facebook. One of the main reasons that people join facebook is for the privacy. What sets facebook apart from myspace is that you can only share information with people you choose, and its widely understood that purpose of facebook is to connect and share with "friends"

The purpose of facebook is not to meet new people. The purpose of facebook is to reconnect with lost friends and to allow the people that you choose to keep up with you. This is why it is great that facebook does not allow google crawlers to post up information about facebook users. If the stuff that facebook users post up was not tightly kept between them and their friends facebook would lose its and identity and its usefullness.

Youtube Drama

Ok before getting in to my argument, let me introduce a few characters:

This man is Zen Archer. He gained a slight viewer ship after posting this video.

This man below is Greg Solomon. His main purpose is Critisizing, the man above, Zen Archer.

The man below is Zed Archie. He is a youtube account whose whole purpose to parody Zen Archer. A large group of people believe Greg Solomon made this character.

The arguments that these individuals had could only have been done this way, and have been this entertaining, on youtube.

Wikipedia <3's Me

Sam Houston Wiki

Recently we had an assignment to make a significant edit to Wikipedia and see how long it would "stick" and what the implications would be. To be honest, I was extremely nervous about this assignment because I kinda figured that the wikipedia editors would be stuck up grammar nazi's with too much time on there hands. They might be, but if that is so they still can't check every article.

I edited Sam Houston since I just finished reading a biography about him and reading numerous texas history chapters that illustrated his importance. I figured that I knew enough about him to find missing information on his wiki and make a factual edit to his page. I noticed that a lot of the information was taken directly from the book that I had read so i decided to also take information from the book. What I added was "In 1809, at age 13, Sam Houston ran away from home, because he was unsatisfied working as a shop clerk." I didn't know how to add a sources so i didn't. It stuck and still there!

I was surprised that my edit stuck because looking through the discussion page I discovered that the editors of this page consider this article to be nearly perfect. It was a shock to me that they would allow an anonymous person come in and alter their perfect page. To say the least, I was pleasantly surprised and impressed with wikipedia. It seems that the "small guy" can make a mark.

Wikipedia

The article that I chose to analyze in my blog is Intelligent Design. I thought that it would be pretty interesting because any sort of crazy religious topic is usually highly debated. It turns out that I was correct. A+ for me.

The discussion over this topic is a war zone. People are going back and fourth debating the feasability of this theory and its applications, if any, to science. However, once user summed up my analysis best by saying "I came to this page looking for information on Intelligent Design. What I found instead was a (in many ways well-written) critique of intelligent design. The article seems to be falling over itself to punch holes in the theory/philosophical stance/call it what you will." Though I do not agree with the theory of intelligent design, I find it completely bias that MOST of the article is dedicated to denouncing the theory.

I expect a definition and an account of its history. Not accusations that it is not science.

Twitter

This article , written by Eric Qualman, has two focuses: the effectiveness of twitter and its inevitable downfall. For each focus Qualman lists several valid points. My favorite line in the article is "Twitter is free. If a local plumber has 1,500 followers, even if it's likely most of them aren't listening at any given moment, as long as at least one person is, that's all that matters." This shows that twitter basically follows the same principals as email spam, but on a followers only basis.

this article

Now for a quick commercial break that is completely wrong and about twitter.

Music Copyright and the internets

First, just to start out my blog on a light note, here is a parody of the anti-piracy commercial that is the beginning of a lot of films. It is making fun of the fact that if this film had been pirated, then this message wouldn't be there. It is accusing the film industry of punishing people that actually payed to see the film.

This next video is the one that I will be basing my argument on. It basically says that there needs to be a line drawn on what copyright violations are damaging and which ones are helpful.

I agree with the statements of the both of the speakers. I believe that the law should still stand firmly against those who steal copyrighted work and then turn around and sell it for a profit. Personal use of copyrighted material and remixes of the original work, however, should be considered a public good.

To make all creative properties public goods would solve most of the major problems facing media industries today, but the only way for this to ever happen is by installing a new tax. Money from this tax would be divided amongst artists based on the number of "plays" or "downloads". The government could keep track of this by inserting a "DRM" like script into the code of the file. This script would act like a digital rfid chip and track the number of downloads. The pool of money collected by the tax could then be divided accordingly.

There you have it, the cure for the cancer that the internet has been for the Media Industry.

.. your welcome.