Post 5

The message we heard in class given by Elder Bednar made me think more about how we use technology in the Church.  I'm normally rather negative towards the churches far-too-negative approach to the internet.  Too often their stance is "the internet is a terrible horrible place unless you're doing genealogy or visiting lds.org!".  They also seem to say the only reason for social media is to share the gospel.  I feel like taking stances as absolute as these does more to alienate people then help them.  The way Elder Bednar talked about social media in his ta;l was more encouraging.  It seemed must less restrictive, and more conducive of bringing our gospel principles positively into a digital world that we're all a part of.

Post 4

In class today as well as on a few other occasions, we talked about the importance of using the internet and this wonderful new technology we have 'responsibly'.  Though it's true that this technology furthers the work of God and we have a responsibility to use it in that fashion, I feel like we're demonizing other uses of technology.  Not too long ago there were articles in the Ensign that spoke of "The proper ways to use technology" which amounted to doing genealogy and looking at lds.org.  I feel like the church's reaction to technology is far too conservative.  There are many other worthwhile uses, communicating with family, finding news, educating yourself and learning new skills are just a few.  Even video games, which t he church has repeatedly denounced as a frivolous waste of time, have been proven to encourage creativity and different skills.  It was mentioned today that the church isn't as slow at adopting new technology as we might think.  Though that might be true of implementation, I feel that often our mindset is far behind what it should be.

Study Journal 6

I feel like the work environment being typified as a 'men's' environment, and thus aggressive and loud does a disservice to both genders.  That implies that only the men who are loud and disrespectful will advance.  This should change to help both genders.

A lot of times when our guest speaker was sharing experiences and oppinions, there were scoffs from people in the class.  It bothered me that even here at BYU there were people who just believed it was women complaining.

One person sarcastically remarked "well garbage trucks are driven primarily by men, why don't we strive for equality in that industry?"  That isn't our industry.  We should be trying to improve where we are rather than pointing our finger elsewhere as an excuse.

Should we be pushing for gender and race equality in all things?  Are we ignoring the point that there ARE differences in genders and cultures that lead to different interests?

Is Computer Science such a focus for 'getting everyone involved' because of its high profile and income levels?

I feel like gaming isn't as problematic of a time sync as was discussed in class.

Services like twitter seem as ill-prepared to handle online harassment as the current police force and laws.  They need to be unafraid to make a stand to protect their users.

My wife and I consistently spend a lot of time on the internet.  However we have noticed that this sometimes causes problems, and we've been working on this (mostly getting me to spend less time =P)

It's difficult to determine when you're spending too much time on the internet, especially when your job/social/hobbies are all on there.  This gets even harder when you work from home, so you can have an excuse 24/7 to be on the internet.

I don't understand how people can consume the internet primarily from a mobile platform, but it seems that's where trends are leading towards.

Is the amount of time we spend online truly bad?  Or is it just different and because of that we're having issues adjusting to it?

Diversity

So we've spent several class periods talking about diversity in class, and I feel like I should sum up my opinions on the matter, especially in regards to comments other students made.  One student made the off-handed remark that garbage trucks are almost exclusively worked by men, and that we should we working harder to get a more diverse workplace in that field.  Though I understand their intent by saying this (oh, the women are only trying to take the good-paying jobs, and are content with men only working the low paying ones) I feel like it's the same as saying "Well somebody somewhere has a worse situation than you, so there's no need for me to do anything".  We're dealing with creating products that are meant to have a global reach, not providing a service.  When you're trying to affect a global audience, you need your  team to be constructed globally so you can get as much different insight as possible.  Too many products have failed by sitting on top of the "White male opinion is always right" card.

Study Journal 5

I feel like the investment bankers were ethically at fault for bringing businesses they knew weren't ready to the public market.  Just because it worked once didn't mean they should throw their rules out the window.

I found it hypocritical that investment consultants, whose job it was to inform people about investment opportunities they didn't understand instead started informing people about tech companies saying "who knows how successful internet things are!" without themselves knowing how the internet worked or whether or not it'd be successful.

I feel some blame rests on the tech company owners who should've had some idea of the risk of their venture.  I'm assuming they took the advice of the bankers as proof of concept, and assumed that meant they'd succeed.  They were the experts and were listening to others!

It bothers me that the people who did this are still employed, and are currently finding other backdoor methods to getting rich that we just haven't caught on to yet.

As much as I enjoyed every aspect of Professor Knoutson's lecture, there was one aspect I disagreed with.  When talking about funnels, he mentioned there's a point where a boy gets so deep in his funnel and I disagree both with that assumption and the implications it would mean were that true.

I think we need  to spend more time looking at the actual physical reasoning behind different temptations and worldly things rather than just chalking everything up to spirituality.

I think though we could safely put together a missionary reunion knowing that our creating it doesn't make us responsible for the actions of potentially wayward missionaries,   I do however think our compassion for those missionaries should influence our decision.

I like his approach to handling issues with pornography, basically making it an issue of chemistry rather than spirituality.

My question for how to support women who are harassed by consumers rather than coworkers wasn't directly answered, so I'm still looking for a solution.

A lot of the issues regarding prejudiced when it comes to women stems from a general sexist environment in the country.  It needs to be rooted out on the home level before a natural fix reaches the workplace.

As important as it is for women to learn how to interact in an industry dominated by men, I think men can work to create an easier environment for women to acclimate to.

Current Event : Shuttered Doors

http://www.polygon.com/2015/3/4/8149791/ea-closes-maxis-simcity-the-sims

This article announces the recent closure of the original Maxis studio by EA games.  Maxis is responsible for games like Sim City and The Sims, and created many foundational games that built the industry we see today.  The last we heard of Maxis was the failed launch of their new Sim City that was released last year.  The game was plagued with launch issues, server problems (thanks to a surprise requirement of having to always be connected and poor PR.  It was clear that the executives and producers at EA (the publishing company that purchased Maxis) required many unpopular features from the development team.  When issues arose due to these requirements, EA tried to iron-hand their policy of no-returns, trying to force people to stick with a broken unusable product.  When people started calling their credit card companies for returns, and the credit cards agreed the sale was fraud due to a non-functioning program, EA would delete the person's account with ALL their purchased games.  Since then Sim City has floundered uselessly until the point where EA decided to close the studio (again, because of lack of performance caused by their decisions).  This is just another of many studios to fall due to EA's mis-management.  This shows the types of problems that arise when businessmen who have no idea how to make or manage games get into a position of power to put requirements on their employees.  When all goes wrong, the only people who suffer are those that didn't have a choice.  This is a problem across the industry as a whole, with every lead AAA developer mentioning how, at one time or another, they've had to manage the ridiculous demands of a producer that could end up ruining a game.

Study Journal 4

The past few classes we've discussed a lot about ethics involved in cyber security and spying.  Our discussion about moral justification for having spy programs that we denounce in other countries was, as already stated, disturbing to me.  Taking the 'might is right' stance for morality bothers me quite a bit.  In reference to this same thing, I feel like transparency would do a lot to mend the rift between the American government and the people they collect data on (read everybody).  I don't think the issue is with people being upset about America looking at that data (since frankly you can find anything on the internet anyway) it's the way that it tried to hide it, and when revealed tried to justify it in unsatisfying ways.  On the lines of people revealing secrets (ie Wiki Leaks) I feel like, again, the governments justifications are unfounded.  They expect to to be privileged to all the worlds secrets, but get upset when people use the same methods to reveal theirs.  In these reactions we can see that the government sees themselves as above or exempt to the law.  I feel like requiring the government to act in ways like a company, subject to the same laws, would lessen this effect.

Ethical Direction

Recently in class we discussed the "Us vs Them" mentality when it comes to spies and digital hacking.  For years now the American government has been advising people not to buy routers that come from China, claiming that there were surveillance back doors built into them and that they weren't safe.  America has been very vocal with their denunciation of China's digital spying.  Fast forward to a few months ago when it was revealed that the NSA was regularly intercepting shipments of American-made routers to open the packages and install their own back doors before sending them to other countries.  This brings up the ethical dilemma that, if it's not okay for others to be doing it, why can we denounce them while doing the exact same thing?  When this question was asked to our guest speaker, his response was "America has done more than any other Country for the benefit of the world, so we're justified in protecting that" which equates to "We're the best so we get to do whatever we want".  This attitude leads to a view of the world being "America is all that matters and anyone that matters should be American" rather than finding peace and a way that everybody can belong and coexist.  As a Canadian here as a foreign student, hearing America's complete hypocrisy on this topic being justified by "We're America the great, so we can do whatever we want" is frankly appalling.

Net Neutrality

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/02/26/fcc-ruling-on-net-neutrality-will-have-major-implications-for-the-internet-space/

This article details the recent decision of the FCC to support net neutrality and eliminate the ability of internet service providers to create fast and slow lanes for various internet services.  Though the ruling is a win for anybody using the internet, the public reaction has been disturbing.  A game developer I follow on twitter said something along the lines of "There are two people in the Net Neutrality debate, those who are for it and those who haven't done the research to know better".  The comments to any news post is full of doomsayers claiming how Obama is evil and is trying to ruin the internet.  If they did their research they'd see the current decision is what's been practiced for years, and only recently was it determined that companies could use fast lanes (the thing this decision turns down).  The people who knew enough about the situation decided to do something about it, and sent in petitions to get this changed back.  The people who are too lazy to research did nothing, and then act outraged at a decision they don't understand.

IP

IP in Computer Science has always been a sore spot for me.  I've been doing entrepreneurial software development for a few years, and have received different counsel all across the board as to what my approach to it should be.  I've taken the stance that software patents are often unnecessary and actually hinder creativity (where as the point of patents is to foster creativity by forcing people to come up with new ideas).  Nothing we make in software development we make solely on our own.  Every bit of software is built on something someone else has written, all the way down to the original computer punch cards.  The only reason we're able to make cool things is thanks to those who made cool things before us.  I feel like we should keep our accomplishments as open as possible, and much of the licensing used in Open Source Software resembles this fact, in getting people to acknowledge that they're working together, and to agree to do it more.

Threats

http://www.polygon.com/2015/1/27/7923521/anita-sarkeesian-shares-the-graphic-violent-threats-that-fill-her

I've been following the GamerGate scandal for a while now, and feel like this article sums up one wing of many issues faced by Women in the gaming industry.  The article explains how Anita, a feminists who focuses on sexism in games suffers from harassment due to anonymity online.  I feel that the anonymity that platforms like twitter provide causes issues where people can perform acts that under other circumstances are illegal.  On top of this, current law enforcement isn't yet equipped to handle this new form of harassment.  This permits people to behave in unethical ways, all while claiming to wave the banner of ethics.

Ethics Foundations

One interesting aspect I learned about during this weeks classes pertains to the ethical collapse of "Younguns and Bigger Than Life CEO's".  I'm currently in the situation where I've been offered a job at a company doing something in software development I don't really want to do, but I'd be getting paid much higher than usual to do it.  I've mentioned to them I'd rather work on a project I'm actually excited about, and their response was to kindly try and get me to stay, while raising the salary in my offer.  I'd never really thought of this as unethical, but after the lessons this past week I'm seeing how it could be considered just that.

I find it interesting that these metrics of ethical collapse can also be seen in our government in the way we treat whistle-blowers.  They're overcoming their fear and silence in order to inform the people of ethical collapse, and then that collapse is further strengthened by our reaction and pushing more fear and silence.

I think at times we need to be careful about how we perceive ethics.  Currently in the games industry there's a group of people fighting for 'ethics in games journalism'.  The truth is they're using this as a mask to attack minority game developers (mostly women) with harassment and death threats.  They managed to get a lot of good people on their bandwagon at the start by pointing out (what have now proven to be false) conspiracy theories about a web of game journalists that promote their friends games above all others.

I think as Mormon's we have to be careful about our decrying of ethics.  We often find ourselves thinking we're the only people who understand morality to the 100% perfection.  Just because we have the gospel that teaches us how to live in our personal lives, doesn't mean the gospel is the perfect ethical meter.

I think situational ethics is not something you can 100% plan for.  There's no way you can be Batman and think of a plan for every contingency.  I think your plans to remain ethical should focus more on "This is how we want to act in all situations" rather than a rule book for every situation.

I think in the professional scene where dealing with those of all religions, we need to avoid falling back on "Whatever God says is what is the right thing to do".  I don't think that fosters a conducive environment to work with other people.