Start of paper:  People talk a lot about smart phones, good and bad—what can they do for us? Why do we need them? Are they worth the money and effort?  I would say that we don’t necessarily need them, but I am sure glad we have them!  A smart phone can do just about everything your computer does, and is more convenient, because your phone will go where ever you go!

Thesis:  Smart phones are the future.

Counter argument:  Why have all these extra features for a simple cell phone?

Three points:

1) Smart phones can still be used as “just a cell phone.”

2) Smart phones are not just phones they are all-in-one devices.

3) Smart phones are becoming more like handheld computers every day.

Conclusion:  Smart phones are amazing devices that are not “just cell phones,” they are becoming little handheld computers that can go everywhere you go and organize every aspect of your digital life with the touch of a finger.

Sources:

Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_phone

All Things Digital – Droid:  http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20091104/motorolas-droid-is-smart-success-for-verizon-users/?reflink=ATD_myyahoo

CNET – Best smart phones:  http://reviews.cnet.com/best-smartphones/?tag=contentMain;contentBody

In chapter one, the author begins by comparing the fall of communism and the years after to the Internet and the world of cyberspace.  The introduction seems a little out of place and the transition could be better, but it does seem like it will end up a good analogy.  The first chapter talks about some original thoughts on the Internet and what it would be, comparing that thinking to thoughts held in Europe immediately following communism’s fall.  But the author says, “I believe that these first thoughts about the government and cyberspace were just as misguided as the first thoughts about government after communism.”  He says that “the argument of this book is that the invisible hand of cyberspace is building an architecture that is quite the opposite of its architecture at its birth.”  He explains each of the five parts of the book.  Part I is “about the change from a cyberspace of anarchy to a cyberspace of control.”  Part II is about understanding how the changes in the regulation of cyberspace and the Internet will occur, and understanding that he says is critical.  In Part III he talks about “three areas of controversy—intellectual property, privacy, and free speech—and identify the values within each that cyberspace will change.”  Part IV brings those ideas into the international sphere, asking “How will the sovereigns of everywhere live with the claimed ‘sovereignty’ of cyberspace?”  Finally, Part V ends the book with the questions, are we, as Americans, able to respond rationally to the choices that need to be made, and do we have institutions in place that are able to understand and respond rationally?  He believes we cannot, as of now, respond rationally, and also, that we do not have any trustworthy institutions in place to handle these choices for us.  He believes the government should not be trusted to make these choices for us, and fears that it will be too easy for governments to “dislodge” any real changes that will be made.

Chapter 2

In chapter 2 the author tells four stories meant to represent the four themes of his book, “regulability,” “Regulation by Code,” “latent ambiguity,” and “competing sovereigns.”  The first two stories “describe cyberspace.  The other two describe aspects of the Internet more generally.”  The first story is a very interesting debate between neighbors.  Martha grew poisonous flowers, and Dank’s dog had eaten a pedal and died from it.  Martha’s reaction at first seems harsh and nonsensical, “There’s no reason to get so upset about a few dead dogs” and “Get yourself a pain-free-death dog,” until we are told that this argument is taking place in the virtual world of Second Life.  In Second Life, when purchasing a dog, you can choose whether or not your dog will suffer when he dies, and even whether or not he will replace himself after dying.  Also, Martha could program her flowers to only be poisonous on her own property, or, since she enjoys selling them sometimes, to only be poisonous while in the possession of one who has ownership rights to the flowers.  All of these ideas are completely foreign to the real world; in the virtual world reality is recreated.  The second story explains a more “real life” consequence of the Internet and the complications that arise from it.  The state of Boral does not allow gambling, but a citizen decides to create an online gambling site that he runs out of his home.  The authorities told him to “Shut down your server or we will lock you up,” so he does, but then moves his site to a server that is located outside of Boral.  The question arises, can the authorities still prosecute to keep gambling out of their community, or is the site now out of their jurisdiction?  The third story is much darker.  About a college student at the University of Michigan who became quite famous online for his short stories about the rape, torture, and murder of women.  When the University was notified, they had him arrested and federal charges were brought up against him.  Eventually the court agreed to his claim that “his stories were only words, protected by the First Amendment” and he was released.  The author says he is concerned about people like this student, “a person normed into apparent harmlessness in real space, but set free in cyberspace to become the author of this violence.”  The fourth story is about a debate over the Fourth Amendment—should the government be allowed to send out a “worm” to search all computers and report back if illegally possessed documents are found?  The Fourth Amendment states that searches are only allowed with a warrant, and that a warrant is only to be served under reasonable suspicion, but the argument is that the Amendment was put in place in order to prevent the chaos and disruption of property of generalized searches, and since this worm doesn’t disrupt (in fact, is not noticed at all) and (he assumes) “can ‘see’ only one thing,” it does not violate the Fourth Amendment.  All of these stories point out huge questions that need answering, and that will have a huge impact on our lives and our future.

In chapter 3 the author begins by describing the “first-generation thinking” of cyberspace, “That it ‘cannot be governed’; that its ‘nature’ is to resist regulation.”  But he immediately goes on to say that this should raise suspicion in our minds, that “If there is any place where nature has no rule, it is in cyberspace.  If there is any place that is constructed, cyberspace is it.”  He says that we fall into the fallacy of “is-ism,” the thinking that the way something is, is the way it has to be.  He says we must learn to see that technology is “plastic,” that it can be molded into new things or changed to something completely different than it was before.  Originally, he says, the Internet was very difficult to regulate, but predicts that in the future “cyberspace will be the most regulable space humans have ever known.”  He uses examples of two universities to show different extreme approaches to regulation of the Internet.  One allowed free access to the entire Internet just by plugging in to one of many Ethernet cables located all over the university.  The other only allowed users who were registered (“licensed, approved, verified”) with the network, and to register with the network you had to be a current student and had to agree to their terms of service, which stated that everything that went on through their network would be “monitored and identified to a particular machine.”  There are other designs for networks as well, ones that provide some control for the owners of the network, but not to the extreme of monitoring every move made by each individual on the network.  He lists three items of information that those wanting control over the Internet are looking for: who is using the Internet, where that someone is geographically and what are they using it for?  It is difficult to know these things, and therefore difficult to control the Internet.  There are good reasons to want to control the Internet; the example he gives is a state wanting to prevent children from being able to access porn.  As of now, it is almost impossible to control something like that.  He states that “The claim of this book is that there are sufficient interests to move the [Internet] from a default of anonymity to a default of identification.”

Chapter 4

Chapter 4 talks about how everyone was “invisible” on the Internet originally, but how having an identity on the internet could be more and more useful.  It could be used to “authenticate” yourself more easily.  He also talks about new identification technology and how it could make your identity more secure and protect against fraud.  He talks about a new technology that Microsoft is coming out with, an “Identity Metasystem,” which could identify you online and provide credible authentication to websites without giving more information than is needed.  Your information would also be more secure, being held by one trustworthy entity rather than by each individual website you have to provide it to now.  One downside he mentioned is on the business side, businesses will no longer have easy access to useful demographic information that may have previously been required.  He also talks about software that tracks what you do on your network.  A product he mentions is “iProtectYou,” a software program parents can use to track what their children are doing on the Internet.  He then goes on to talk about how the physical location of a person using the Internet can be deduced using an IP address, even though the IP address itself tells nothing about physical location.  He mentions a company called Geoselect that can tell you your geographic location with 99 percent accuracy as soon as you enter their website.  He talks about how these software ideas have not been created by any government agency, but by commercial institutions for commercial institutions.  He lists as a reason for identification a fear stated by Plato, that, if invisible, “no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice.”  In other words, we cannot really be trusted to do all right all the time when we know that no one can see us anyway.

Chapter 5

In chapter 5 the author begins talking about government regulation of the Internet and its transactions, and how commerce has built most everything necessary for it to do so.  He claims that the need to identify terrorists and terrorism in general, “has weakened the resolve to resist government action to make government more powerful and regulation more effective,” and that there is not much more the government needs to do in order to make the Internet “perfectly regulable.”  He shows that the government is already determining the structure of telephone network systems in order to make wire tapping easier for law enforcement, and that they are also requiring cellular companies to provide them with information needed to determine the location of a caller when a cell phone call was placed.  The author talks about how the government uses code to regulate technologies that in turn regulate behavior, and says, “If done properly, these steps [will] reduce and isolate untraceable Internet behavior.  That in turn [will] increase the probability that bad behavior [will] be detected.”  He talks about the security and accessibility that could come from such regulation, as well.  “Imagine a world where all your documents exist on the Internet in a ‘virtual private network,’ accessible by you from any machine on the Net and perfectly secured by a biometric key.”  He then talks about Z-theory, from Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s The Generative Internet.  He says the “crucial (and once you see it, obvious) insight of Z-theory” is “Terror motivates radical change.”  He says that Zittrain is attempting to prepare us for change (and then compares the Internet to the aliens in Independence Day, declaring it hostile).  His end point is that “Commerce has a purpose, and government can exploit that to its own end,” and that “It will, increasingly and more frequently, and when it does, the character of the Net will change.  Radically so.”

Ms. Begleiter talked about the importance of images and imagery in film, and how images and shots can be used to tell so much about a scene.  She says that with a good film you should be able to watch it with the sound turned off and still be able to follow.  According to her, a single images or shot should tell a lot about the scene.  You should be able to get the basic idea and feel for a scene just from the picture.

She then showed many examples of storyboards and scratch images/ paintings done by and for famous film directors and films.  It is quite interesting to hear her analyzing and explaining each, and realizing just how much can  been seen in each.  It is interesting to be able to get the actual feel from an image.  She also showed that much detail is not needed in order to show what the scene is about.

As she went through different images, she talked about how to get an understanding for the image.  She showed how to take cues from the image to get a feel for what was supposed to be happening and what the emotion of the picture should be.  A big factor was the angle of the camera, or the perspective.  Another thing she pointed out was that in some of the elongated scene images, you can follow the direction of the flow of the scene by cues.  One was an image of a person on a balcony, looking down to a person at the top of stairs below, looking down to a man at the bottom of the stairs sleeping with a newspaper over his head.  Therefore, the scene flowed from top to bottom.

This was a very interesting video and I would recommend it to anyone interested in film or anyone just wanting to learn a little about storyboards and their importance.

The HTC Droid Eris is competition to the Motorola Droid as the second Android phone released from Verizon.  It lacks some of the features of the Motorola Droid, like a physical keyboard, but it is also much cheaper at $100, instead of $200 for the Motorola Droid.  Another drawback is that it is running Android version 1.5, when it seems that two newer versions are already out.  The Eris uses the HTC virtual keyboard instead of the Android virtual QWERTY, which is said to be a good thing, with the HTC one being easier to use in terms of key space and clarity.  The Eris screen is also said to be very sharp with a 320×480-pixel resolution.  It will be interesting to see where these two phones go as far as popularity and general opinion, especially since they are being released at the same time.

The Motorola Droid, which I believe was released last week, is supposedly the first Verizon smart phone to truly compete with the Apple iPhone.  The Droid runs Google’s Android software and is selling at only $200.  Walter S. Mossberg of All Things Digital said this of the Droid, “It’s the best super-smart phone Verizon offers, the best Motorola (MOT) phone I’ve tested and the best hardware so far to run Android.”  He did complain of the physical keyboard, that the keys were too flat and mistakes were common, but said that the virtual keyboard worked quite well.  The battery life is said to be great as well, which has been one drawback of some recent smart phones.  Overall the Droid seems to be a success as a smart phone, and as always, has the great coverage of America’s largest 3G network.

Cause rockets are awesome!

In the future I think people will be shot at the moon in this rocket for a reality show called “Moon Survivor.”

Seriously though, rockets are awesome.

And in case you managed to miss it:  colorado balloon boy story

Richard Heene built this balloon in the hopes that they could eventually “hover to work in it” instead of having to deal with cars and traffic.  I want to hover to work too!

I think these balloons could be a great long-term investment.  I think in the future we will all be floating around in balloons that emit “a million volts on the outer skin” every few minutes.  Should make for a good defense mechanism.  Anyone looking to invest in these balloons should contact Richard Heene through the Larimer County Sheriff’s department.

Ford “Work Solutions” Makes Trucks Smart—Ford Smart (written Feb 2008)

This technology allows you to mark each of your tools, from circular saw to screwdriver, and has “scanners” in the truck bed that can even tell you if you are missing a tool before you leave a worksite!  The truck also has a web browser supported by the Sprint network, so you can browse from anywhere,  and has the ability to track other work crews and uses a combination of “GPS with the tool sensing to determine the best crew to do a job at any given call.”  Pretty cool!

I am just waiting for cars that drive themselves!

Here’s Ford’s official site on the new F-150.

I picked this video because, first of all, I love hearing about new cell phones!  I love cell phones and cell phone technology.  Cell phones are one of the most exciting technology topics because they are awesome and because the technology is moving so fast.  Doesn’t seem very long ago when I got my first cell phone, the Motorola StarTAC.  Yes, that was a great phone, but now even Motorola’s slick little Razor is dying.  Now, we need faster, prettier, fancier cell phones to keep us happy, which brings me to my second reason for choosing this video- they picked my cell phone as #1!  Yes, I absolutely LOVE my new enV Touch!  Of course there are a few things I would change, but I am never satisfied with cell phone software!  Maybe someday I’ll be able to prevent them from making such stupid mistakes, like the Samsung Glyde! This was my first touch screen, big mistake! (Example: Half the time touch screen thought I was selecting the bottom of screen, no matter where I was actually tapping, which happened to be a location where 3 accidental clicks from the home screen could erase your entire list of contacts!) Yea, it’s cute, but I’d stick with LG if you want a touch screen! (Non-touch Samsungs have always been good to me.)

Ok, well I can’t wait to see where cell phones are in a few years, or if they even still exists!  (I hope so! What will I drool over if they don’t?)  And remember, Life’s Good! (Registered trademark of LG).