Mertins Reviews

  Today's copyright laws are even taking away everyday freedoms. In chapter two of the book  "The Case For Copyright Reform" (link below) he explains very well why copyright reform should be considered. He lays out a proposal for what a two-sided approach to copyright use might look like. In other words, a fair distribution of rights. Nowadays anything we do with a song, a book or anything created by someone protected by copyright is a punishment. The points he deploys from the proposition are the following: - A punish for people who claim to be the authors of something they have never made. - A completely free sharing of content as long as it has no commercial purpose. This was possible 20 years ago, but today it is a criminal offence. - A compulsory registration after 5 years of the rights of a content. Because nowadays we have problems with content where it is not clear who the author is and nothing can be done because there is no one to whom permission can be ask. - F

A bit of IM  Instant messaging had and continues to have a huge impact on society and the workplace environment. IM technology started in the 1970s implemented on the  PLATO  system, followed by the " talk " system implemented on UNIX/Linux in the 1980s and 1990s. Until the appearance of the first completely independent messaging system ICQ , which could only be used over the ICQ network. From then on, different variations with independent protocols started to emerge. This led to the creation of applications such as Pidgin or Trillian that supported several protocols at the same time. Some of today's IM applications support different features: - Private and group messaging. - Call or video-call option. - Implementation in games and entertainment. - Peer-to-peer payments. This technology had a huge impact especially in the workplace, allowing companies to use different instant messaging applications and modify them for their own ease of use such as online meetings, payment

  PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) The ancestor of the modern mobile phone, a personal digital assistant that offered limited access to many modern capabilities such as Internet access, word processing, touch screen functionality and more. They were very successful in the 1980s. They were programmed using a programming language called BASIC. The suppliers of these, some of them are known today, such as Casio and Acer. In 1995 the market for these grew even more thanks to the company Palm, Inc. They even put RAM and processors in these devices years later. After the 2000s, once smartphones became popular, PDAs quickly became obsolete, but before that time they were a favourite of business people all over the world. FAX (Facsimile) Also sometimes called telefax or telecopy, the humble machine was essentially a modern version of the telegrams. For many years, it allowed individuals and companies to transmit scanned documents. There were different types of transmission: - Cable transmissio

1980s: Machine Learning Do you know that today's massive algorithms probably know you better than you know of yourself? It all started with Alan Turin saying a famous and interesting phrase in the 1950s: Can machines think? That is when they started to investigate algorithms in which machines could learn by themselves from data. Until a few years later, when an IBM researcher named Arthur Lee Samuel created the first machine learning algorithm in the game of checkers and popularised it among IT researchers. For various reasons, there were about 25 years without any optimal algorithm results and the popularity of machine learning declined considerably, until the 1980s, when the backpropagation algorithm (neural network) was developed. From then on, different algorithms were developed and improved. Until today where machine learning is one of the most used fields collecting massive amounts of data and looking for patterns among them (without privacy) to improve the experience of each