CPSC 430 – June 30, 2010

I’m currently taking CPSC 430 and one of the requirements is to keep a journal throughout the term. I will be blogging here my class notes, thoughts, and links as they come up that are relevant to the course material. Also, see the other posts in the CPSC 430 category. Class Notes for today: Kantianism – duty to respect others as rational beings Utilitarianism – consequences Social contract – collective rights Can mix duties, rights, consequences when evaluating Bayesian filters – similarity Can detect “huge profits” ~ “massive profits” Synonyms Grey listing – send “please send later” to spammer. Disadvantages Continue Reading

CPSC 430 – June 28, 2010

I’m currently taking CPSC 430 and one of the requirements is to keep a journal throughout the term. I will be blogging here my class notes, thoughts, and links as they come up that are relevant to the course material. Also, see the other posts in the CPSC 430 category. Today we covered more of the ethical theories we started last week.  This unit is all about adapting ancient lines of thought with our new technology. Ethical Egoism ~ Alan Greenspan ~ Ayn Rand E.g., acting to maximize own profit Ref – Richard Dawkins – The Selfish Gene Altruistic behavior Continue Reading

CPSC 430 – June 25, 2010

I’m currently taking CPSC 430 and one of the requirements is to keep a journal throughout the term.  I will be blogging here my class notes, thoughts, and links as they come up that are relevant to the course material. CPSC 430 entitled “Computers and Society” isn’t a typical computer science course which involves programming or mathematics.  In fact, I don’t think there is any programming involved at all.  It resembles a TOK class I had in high school in the way that theories and controversial ideas are brought up and discussed and debated. The course description from the course Continue Reading

Trying to crack DeepFreeze

This is an anecdote from when I was in elementary school and takes place around 1999-2000. Windows computers were just being installed in the classrooms. The mechanism that locked down the computers initially was system policies. You could screw around with a limited number of settings and applications on the system, but a lot of stuff was restricted. However, one day in the school library, a new computer didn’t have such restrictions in place. Our 7th grade teacher (resident IT technician) had just finished setting up DeepFreeze on it, and challenged my friends and I to try to break it. Continue Reading