Music Piracy

I think like two classes ago we talked about music piracy and the laws concerning it. So right now in Canada the laws are kind of confusing and they contradict each other. In the United States, the record companies got IP adresses from people downloading from ISPs (Internet Service Provider) and they fined them. There's two laws we talked about. One is fair use and the other is concerning copyright infringment. The fair use law says that if you buy a music CD then you're allowed to rip it to your computer for your personal use as long as you don't distribute it. The other law is that if a copyright is placed on something owned by someone your not allowed to break it. The law on downloading music right now is that you're allowed to download music but not upload it. The laws are about to change is six months and they make it a criminal offense to even rip a CD for your own purposes. The ethical choice you have to make is whether you want to download music. Some people first download a song, then buy it to support the artist. Some artists have websites where you can donate money if you download their music. To stop illegal distribution of music, online music services have what's called DRM or Digital Rights Management. It protects the file from being shared to other people. Downloading movies and software however is still illegal.

Today we read an article in the Toronto Star about police catching people selling counterfeit DVDs in Montreal. The article claims that Canada is becoming a world leader in pirated movies. Montreal is the international center where people go to moive theatres and record the movies on camera and then realease the movie on the internet. Hollywood stuidos such as 20th Century Fox threaten to delay realeasing movies in Canadian Theatres. And because movies are also released in French in Canada pirates can also sell the movies to the European market. The RCMP are currently running a large scale investigation in Montreal to track down bootleggers.

Digital Ethics

Today in class we talked about digital ethics. Ethics are what we consider morally right and wrong. Questions like what makes a good person and why we need to be ethical were asked by philosophers hundreds of years ago. There are different opinions on ethics and people make ethical decisions for different reasons. One of the ethical models was that if your decision would help the most number of people in a good way, then it was an ethical choice. Another way that we talked about was that if you could imagine that everybody in the world would make the same decision you would make, then it was ethical.

In the new digital age where people interact with other people using computers and other technology, ethics take a shift. Because there isn't a direct personal feeling with people people seem to forget about ethics. One of the big ethical issues being discussed right now is software and music piracy. Most people wouldn't think it's ethical to go into a store and steal a music CD. However the same person might not have a problem downloading the music on a P2P network without paying for it. It's just as bad as stealing, but it seems to be different because your'e not physically going into a store and stealing the music. Many people try and rationalize piracy with different reasons. For example they might say that they can't afford the software so it's ok for them to pirate it. However we can't just start stealing whatever we want just because we can't afford it.

Another example of digital ethics is computer viruses. Most people wouldn't consider it ethical to go into someone else's house and ruin their property. However computer viurses can get inside your computer and destroy all your important files. The person who wrote this virus may not have broken into a house, but he probably didn't think it was a problem to write a virus. Again, because the hacker didn't think of the computer as someone else's property they didn't have a personal feeling and therefore they forgot about ethics.

Technologies such as DRM are being put into place to stop piracy and unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material. However some times there comes a situation whether something may not be illegal but not morally correct. After understanding the circumstances you need to make the decision.

Linking Excel With Powerpoint

In class today, we learned how to link objects in excel to a powerpoint or a word document. Once you save the excel file, you go to powerpoint and go to Insert>Object. There you check the select from file and browse for the excel file. You have to check the box that says Link because you are linking the two documents. If you insert excel objects this way, then if you update the information in your excel file it automatically updates it in the chart in Powerpoint.

Making Graphs in Excel

The last class we had Mr. Case showed us how to make graphs in Microsoft Excel. It's really simple and very easy to use. First you need to create a series and data. Then you select it and click on the chart wizard. This takes you a step-by-step process that you can use to make different types of graphs. It guides you through the parts of the graph. After you create your graph you can personalize in almost any way. You can change titles, colors, sizes and the position of everything on the graph. If you update your data, then so does your graph.

Microsoft Excel

I haven't done a post in two classes but here's what we done so far: We talked about Microsoft Excel. Excel's a program for creating spreadsheets. The spreadsheet is divided into boxes called cells. Each cell has it's own name and can hold three types of data: text strings, values and formulas. Text strings are what they sound like, text. They are also any characters that are not numbers. Values are numbers. Excel is powerful because it can have formulas in cells that relate to other cells. If you update a value in the cell then the formula updates. This makes it really useful. Excel can do math if you type in formulas in the correct way. Each cell can be formatted. You can change: the size of a cell, the font size and style, the angle of the text, the number of decimal places in the numbers and much more.

We got an assignment to do using excel. We had to make a chart with our marks for first term and our goals of what average we want to get in the finals. Then using excel, we had to create a formula to tell us what we needed to get in second and third term to accomplish our goal.