Blog #4

Unfortunately, the article does not work as it shows up with a 404 error so I'll do my best to relate it to current events.

The six clauses or freedoms of the first amendment are among the most important part of the constitution. Many consider them to be the backbone of our law and society in the United States and society as a whole. As such they have been called into question in our current state in the government, the news, and our societal issues at hand.
Recently, a black man named George Floyd died to corrupt police officers who strangled the poor man. This cause an outroar of protestors who reinvigorated the black lives matter movements. However, President Donald Trump ordered the protestors to be tear gassed and controlled and prevented despite their peaceful protests. This escalated into riots with people responding with physical violence out of sheer rage and aggression. This event sparked the questioning of our society's and our government's racial relations and how well they are handling society as a whole. Donald Trump later commanded the national guard to bring in helicopters to control any protestors with violent force. Luckily, this was stopped by the supreme court, but it does not change Trump's handling of the situation who has tried to show much aggression towards these peaceful protests. Looting and other illegal activities have also started occurring amongst the protests where peaceful has suddenly turned into violence.

These threats against the common people should not be taken lightly at all. Trump is in clear defiance of the constitution's first amendment, the right to petition. He is enforceing these protests using the military which is a dangerous abuse of power and should be brought to the attention and questioning of the supreme court.

article explaining the situation
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-considering-move-invoke-insurrection-act-n1221326

Blog #5

My assumptions for why these 2 sites aren't used very often is due to their extreme bias. While its fine to have bias, news articles focusing too much on one side or the other tend to be not great when connected to journalists as it's a sign of unprofessionalism and yellow journalism especially when it is as blatent as this. But even when going over the ANTIWAR.com, a site that claims to be the best source for anti war news, has strong opinions about their opinions and expressions towards their criticisms of the government. Therefore, most news businesses will not want to cite them or introduce them as they will blow up much controversy for the news programs as well as the governments themselves. These sites are probably not well known due to examples of how government controlled expression in the past. Perhaps strong anti-war voices are also drowned out by governments not just from the past, but also in the present and most news crews do not want to come under scurtiny from the government from strong conservative/anti-war propaganda. They also do not want to be showcasing flat out yellow journalist propaganda either.

I personally believe this is unfair and drowns out a lot of voices. Though at the same time, informing the media with two different stands both from radically different perspectives is a smart idea as well. Critiquing the government is always best, but I think the issue lies in how the government can change from this critique. As such representing both sides of the voices is important for helping the nation have a better government.

Week 7

Flash drives were an innovation for their time, as they could be kept in your pocket and carry any sort of information on them. However, the issue connected with them was related to their super secret information that could be hidden could have also been to blame for their uprising. Having a small device that could stealthily conceal and carry information during the 90s was extremely useful.Though how did the device catch on? How did it get so popular? Well during its deployment in the market, the Flash drive was commonly used for its additional storage. This would help users have more megabites of information, FAR more as before all they had was a floppy disk that could only hold a very miniscule amount of data. less than 2 megabytes. As such the flash drive rose in popularity. My assumption why it may have declined is probably because of the invention of the cloud. The cloud is where information is stored on the web, instead of carrying the information around, you put it into a shared storage place you can access it from anywhere you'd access the internet. Now the Flash Drive wasn't entirely forgotten, but now it's associated with some illegal things as people can use the flash drive without notifying authorities or setting off a alarms.

 My assumption why it may have declined is probably because of the invention of the cloud. The cloud is where information is stored on the web, instead of carrying the information around, you put it into a shared storage place you can access it from anywhere you'd access the internet. Now the Flash Drive wasn't entirely forgotten, but now it's associated with some illegal things as people can use the flash drive without notifying authorities or setting off a alarms.

Document of the flash drive vs. cloud
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/cloud-computing-vs-flash-drive-79074.html#:~:text=Cloud%20storage%20services%20require%20an,ranging%20from%204GB%20to%20256GB.

Week 6 project

Topic: Flash drives

You're finishing up your work, you have all the documents done for a presentation you are working on to present to your co-workers. But you find out you do not have enough room on your computer to hold all the documents you worked on. Luckily, you have a special device desined for this sort of thing. A flash drive.

Flash drives were designed to hold digital documents and carry them from place to place from the safety of your pocket. Its small size and flexibility to work on all computers no matter what type or how small is what made the flash drive so important in an office environment. Though they have also been used for questionable means as well, such as stealing government documents that are meant to be confidential. As such a large number of national facilities for this reason and only high ranking officials with special permissions may use them.

Flash drives were first made as flash memory, a method widely used for storing information on smaller devices such as phones or flash drives. It was a method that was extremely expensive when it was invented in the late 1980s. It was the first piece of technology that would have made up flash drives and would have later become widely used as well as very inexpensive. The second piece of technology, Universal serial bus (USB) was developed in the mid-nineties to both simplify connnecting computers as well as creating a standardized port that works on all devices. By the end of the 90s, both these technologies would ahve become inexpensive and easy to use for the mass populace.

The invention of the flash drive is very dubious and controversal. Some say a now non- existing Israeli company called M-systems (Which is now part of SanDisk) was responsible, while another company, I.B.M. filed a patent of a flash drive that was designed by Shimon Shmueli. Who invented the flash drive is controversial as we do not know who to really credit with its invention, but the first company to sell it was Trek 2000, a singaporean company who marketed the flash drive as a ThumbDrive.

Originally, flash drives held only 8 megabytes. Which considering that the only form of portable memory was 1.44 megabyte floppy disks, it was a needed quality of life for most officeworkers and business nonetheless. As time has gone on, Flash drive's capacity has improves and so has their prices. Flash drives which can hold not just megabytes, but gigabytes of data barely cost anything when around the time of their release, they could only hold eight megabytes. To put this in perspective, a single megabyte is one million bytes. A gigabyte is a thousand megabytes, so a flash drive containing that many bytes of information is a huge development.

Unfortunately, this is not without its controversies. Why should someone use flash drive when they can backup their information on the cloud? Since the cloud is completely non-physical and your data will always be safe and easily accessible over the internet. Well since flash drives are not over the internet, they become untraceable. As such, they became a covert way of both stealing and distributing information.

Like all technologies, flash drives still have their faults as well as things they can offer to companies. One should still find value in flash drives as a seperate space of additional storage.

Flash drive Timeline:

https://www.usbmakers.com/history-of-the-usb-flash-drive/

Week 1

https://www.cnet.com/news/video-games-given-full-first-amendment-protection/#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Supreme%20Court%20today,violent%22%20video%20games%20to%20minors.&text=Following%20today's%20decision%20by%20a,is%20now%20a%20dead%20letter.

Everyone knows about the whole idea of how video games "Should be restricted cause they are violent" and the talks about how crazy things get. This whole thing has started ever since video games were made but was especially prominent in 2005 when california wanted to pass a law to restrict video game sales. California wanted to restrict several adult themes in video games such as obscenity and violence and wanted to either remove sales of these types of games or give them more regulations for allowing them. This was turned down by the supreme court claiming video games are works of creative expression and therefore protected under the 1st amendments freedom of speech. While states were unable to fully restrict video games, the video game industry crafted a new ESRB rating system to ensure that the content in a video game could be categorized by age. This is similar to how movies have a rating system. This is to ensure that age appropiate games would be given to age appropiate customers. As such video games became both a work of art and communications and well protected under the first amendment as a freedom of speech.

The article then discusses how despite the rise of violence as well as the violence in video games, correlation does not equal causation. It explained that the were deeply flawed and showed that the difficulty of the game was moreso what caused minor behavioral changes between a violent game and a non-violent game.