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Showing posts from February, 2022

The Case for Copyright Reform - review (week 5)

In this opinion review I am going to talk about Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström's work: The Case for Copyright Reform.  Today’s copyright legislation is out of balance. Frankly speaking, it even turned an entire generation of young people into criminals in the eyes of the law. In the most cases I don't see anything illegal in the file sharing, especially if it is used in non-commercial purposes. From the introduction, it was obvious that authors share the same opinion. Therefore, they introduced some of the ideas in order to reform the current copyright system. In today's world, copyright imposes serious restrictions on what ordinary people can do in their lives. I absolutely agree that sharing copies, making use of somebody else’s copyrighted work, should never be prohibited if it is done by private individuals without a profit motive. However, we should not forget about the fact that you can not claim yourself an author if you do not appear to be the one.  If we tal

Challenges of the Global Information Society - review (week 4)

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In this review I am gonna talk about Himanen's work: Challenges of the Global Information Society, which was written in 2004, and compare it with present situation in the world. In his work he introduced different challenges to the global development of the information society and suggested one alternative for meeting these challenges: the model of the information society combined with the welfare state.  Photo 1: Information Society [2] In short, his idea of the information society can be defined as a creative society that is based on interaction. From the perspective of the author, the most important to the information society is not new technologies but a new way of doing things. This review comes to the conclusion that the most critical aspect in the development of the information society is the development of the deep-set structures of society, to which we must pay close attention.  To start our comparison, let's see first what author was focused on in his work.(numbers an

Multi-user online games (Week 3)

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By nature, people are very playful. No other species pursues such a wide variety of entertainment. The right entertainment is a very important element of our life. It boosts our energy and desire to do everything that we need to do. Research has shown that playing games is essential for healthy development especially in early childhood. Photo 1: Playing games is important! [6] Gaming is obviously social, so it is not a surprise that one of the major forms of using social media and social network is online gaming industry. We are witnessing the biggest revolution in games since the introduction of home computers: online games, played via modem over the Internet. Many companies now insist that every game they develop must have an online component. The most ambitious online games are persistent worlds, which immerse hundreds of players in a single, shared environment. The predecessor of modern online games was MUD that stands for Multi-User Dungeon. MUDs were a revolution in gaming. These

Two technologies from the earlier history of the Internet (Week 2)

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  Floppy disks Floppy disk is a flexible removable magnetic disk (usually encased in a hard plastic shell) for storing data. The majority of us don't use floppy discs anymore, but why? How did the floppy disk become obsolete? Firstly, floppy disks are not that reliable, as it could seem. They usually were in casing, but even then they were prone to damage. Sometimes the data could be lost even without a physical damage. Obviously there is no data storage that is 100 percent secure, but floppy disks were not the best anyway. In addition, probably the main reason that floppy disks became obsolete was the storage capacity. The most popular floppy disk could fit in around 1.44 MB of data. In comparison with nowadays, it is unspeakably little. But back in those days, you could even fit entire games on it. Photo 1: Floppy disks [2] As people began listening to digital songs and using high resoultion pictures, floppy disks just wasn't quite enough for this task. In addition to that, a