New Gorge Video

Unknown Worlds posted a new Gorge video! Linky

Smallish Post VIII - Watching for Software Abuse

I don't think software companies spend enough time watching for destructive uses of their products. MMOs could easily detect gaming addicts, but they choose not to. Search engines could add tobacco like warning labels to pornographic searches, but they choose not to. With the horror stories coming out of the Far East, I think that companies will start paying closer attention in the near future. And as BYU graduates, I think we will have an impact on the changes those companies make.

Position Statement

Smallish Blog Post VI - Go ye therefore, and Teach all Nations

It used to be that the Gospel did not reach an area until the LDS Church sent missionaries there. Now anyone with a telephone, cell phone, or internet connection can access Christ's teachings. These technologies have become so cheap they are even connecting the poorer areas of the world. Africa alone has nearly 300 million cell phone subscribers. The time when the Apostles can truly "teach all nations" (Matt. 28:19) may come sooner than anyone expects.

Smallish Blog Post V - Long Live the Borg Queen

Web 2.0 allows people from all over the world to work together on a massive scale. This concept, which I will call Massively Multi-User Online Collaboration (MMOC), is also reflected in the software Web 2.0 is built on. Many of these sites were developed with PHP and then hosted on the Apache Web Server. Both PHP and Apache were built using the GNU Compiler Collection. All three of these tools are open source projects that utilize MMOC. It seems that Web 2.0 is merely a facet of the many MMOCs that make up the software industry.

Book Inspired Post II - Flattening MUD

Globalization has a huge potential for promoting peace. Historically the benefit countries could derive from war was enormous. Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan built massive empires through war. However the advent of nuclear weapons has made war a very expensive proposition[1]. Since the end of the Cold War globalization has further increased the expense of waging war.

Growing superpowers like China and India are so interconnected[2] with the rest of the world that a war would have devastating consequences on their economies. This economic reliance on other countries could make war an intractable prospect in the coming century.


Notes

[1] Mutually assured destruction
[2] Chapter 16 (15 in my version) of The world is Flat (ISBN: 0-374-29279-5) by Thomas L. Friedman discusses a similar thesis.

Smallish Post IV - Embracing Change

I think that the movie and music industries, as represented by the MPAA and RIAA, have long suffered from short sighted executives. These executives are very similar to the ones at Xerox who refused to enter the personal computer market even though they had the means to dominate it. Instead of embracing technology the MPAA and RIAA have actively sought to suppress it. They have tried to kill everything from VCRs to MP3 players. This shortsighted mindset is changing however as companies like Apply and Hulu prove that embracing technology can be profitable. I think that music and video have nowhere to go but up.