Record Companies and the Advent of the Internet

     Telegraphers required great skill to do their job, but their profession became obsolete with the invention of the telephone.  Record companies faced a similar situation when the internet was invented.  However, record companies sold the need for their existence by saying that they support the musicians by spreading their art and funding them.  Today, the free exchange of music online can do the same thing.  Musicians make most of their money on performances and make very little on music sold to the public through record companies.  Many even claim that the record companies enslave musicians.  The record companies used their large amounts of money to work the court system to their advantage.  Record companies should be a thing of the past.  Society no longer needs them, and the internet can do the job that record companies claim to do.

The Birth of Computer Security and Espionage: The Cuckoo's Egg

Computer security has been a rising concern since the sixties.  There appears to be two sides on the information, or computer security, debate.  Governments wish to hold back information from other countries so that they have an advantage.  They argue that this makes their citizens and governing bodies safer.  It also protects their interests.  Hacktivists on the other hand, want to give this information for all to see and study.  Hacktivists hold that this is what actually promotes citizen's interests and will level the playing field for all people in the world.  After reading the Cuckoo's Egg, I was able to see the frustrating bureaucracy that one needs to go through to track down unethical programmers.  With all the privacy protections, the person tracking hackers has a much less chance of actually nailing the perpetrator.  For the case in the Cuckoo's Egg, the hackers were doing bad things like selling secrets to another country.  This action is even against the Hacker Manifesto where they are to give their findings to everyone, not just one or two entities.  I can now see why the government wanted to give the NSA more rights to find criminals. It is a difficult job and makes it harder to track down a hacker than to be one.  One important thing that was discussed in the Cuckoo's Egg is that people need to be able to trust that their information is safe.  It is a sad thing that some unethical programmers spend their whole lives learning how to break into systems when they could be benefitting everyone in the world with new computing technologies.  Some people have paranoia because their information may not be safe and it is hard to tell if it is safe.  The sad thing about this is that the government doesn't trust its citizens and the citizens don't trust their government.

Twitter and LDS General Conference

I used twitter with general conference for the first time and found that I was paying attention more than before.  I was pleased with the experience.

Graphene poised to revolutionize our society

Graphene is a one atom thick material at about .33 nanometers high.  It can conduct electricity better than copper and is 300 times stronger than steel.  It can stretch to 20% of its original length and is stronger than a diamond.  Because of these amazing properties, engineers are considering reinforcing plastic with Graphene, making it stronger and conductive at the same time.  Others are using it for energy storage, improving batteries and fuel cells.  Still others are using Graphene for biosensors.  Because it is so thin, electronics can now be found anywhere, even clothes, walls, and appliances.  Phones and tablets can be constructed flexible and thinner.  Some are even trying to use this new technology to replace silicon to make smaller, faster electronics.  7,500 patents have already been filed on inventions using Graphene.  Thanks to this amazing discovery, our society will be impacted in unforeseen ways and may outpace what plastic did for the human race.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/02/tech/innovation/graphene-quest-for-first-ever-2d-material/index.html#

Turning the hearts of the children to the fathers and the hearts of the fathers to the children

According to "The Information", people didn't have the same concept of information before the use of computers.  "We can see now that information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principal."   As I sat in my temple class today I saw an application of the principles in this book.  Before baptisms for the dead were done in the Nauvoo Temple, people did this ordinance in the Mississippi River.  Because no records were kept, there were many duplications of baptisms, making some of these redundant.  The prophet Joseph Smith had a revelation that these ordinances needed to be recorded on earth to be recorded in heaven.  Now that we have a greater knowledge of what information is, we are better able to deal with the vastness of the family connections within the human population.  This vastness is not much compared to what God can handle, but we are able to help move the work forward as we use this new understanding of information and computing in the form of familysearch.org.