E-SPEAIT 2021 - Jan Markus Üprus

 Ergonomics can make or break a product, especially in IT. All producers and manufacturers should strive to make their product user-friendly and enable the user to easily and logically use their device. In this blog I am going talk about one example of bad ergonomics that lead to innocent people dying and a good one that saves millions of lives every time it detects something. Towards the end of Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the United States and Iran were in an undeclared war and the USS Vincennes was in the middle of a confrontation with Iranian gunboats in the Persian Gulf when it accidentally shot down a civilian aircraft mistaking it for an enemy aircraft. So why didn't the US ship's radar system have some kind of method to separate hostile and civilian planes? In fact it did, but it was really bad... So you know in RTS or MOBA games where you click on a unit and it shows information about the specific unit and it's statistics. Well, the USS Vincennes had a similar system, bu...

 So in this blog I am going to talk about how I would describe an IT professional in Estonia. The depiction may not portray real life to the best extent, because it is from my point of view, but I hope at least that I won't totally give IT professionals a false depiction. So without further ado I'll start with the qualities of an IT professional in Estonia. Qualities So the major qualities an IT professional in any country has to have are adaptability, the ability to work in a team, the ability to communicate very well and the desire to learn more about your field every day and be interested in IT in general. In Estonia all of these also apply in the depiction of an IT professional, except maybe the communication part for some personnel. This also makes working in a team harder and therefore decreases the overall productivity of the workplace. That is also why TalTech has communication courses for everyone, so that people who are not that good at communicating would develop tha...

When you are online you want to make a good impression of yourself to other people. This is especially important since everything you do online will stay there permanently. Social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc.) have also set unrealistic beauty and fitness standards that make ordinary people believe that the people on the internet portray how they should look. But since usually you can't see the other person who you are either chatting with or otherwise communicating with, how do first impressions take shape in the online world? The first thing everyone notices about someone on the internet is their writing, in particular their grammar and spelling. Let's say that you are in an online game lobby and you have paired up with a total stranger. If the only way to communicate is to use text chat, then usually the first impressions are made when you say hello, good luck, have fun, etc. If your team mate does not respond or uses langua...

 I assume that most people are familiar with Copyright and how authors can protect their rights by Copyrighting their work. But not a lot of people have heard about Copyleft, the movement that practices the right to freely distribute and modify intellectual property with the requirement that the same rights must be preserved with modified works created from a Copylefted work. The main principles of Copyleft are as follow: The freedom to use the work The freedom to study the work The freedom to copy and share the work with others The freedom to modify the work and distribute modified works There are 3 main categories of Copyleft: Strong Copyleft, Weak Copyleft and No Copyleft. Each category of Copyleft also has their own licenses. I am going to talk about all of the different licenses and what advantages and disadvantages each license has. Strong Copyleft: Strong copyleft basically means that derived work from another strong Copyleft work has to retain the same license as the origin...

The book "The Case For Copyright Reform" was written to address the main points of the proposal of the copyright reform by the Pirate Party in Sweden. One of the authors, Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the first Pirate Party and has traveled around the world to talk and write about his ideas of a sensible information policy. The other author, Christian Engström is a member of the European Parliament for the Swedish Pirate Party. Before getting involved with politics he was a computer programmer, who became involved with politics over the issue of software patents. Chapter 2 - A Constructive Proposal For Copyright Reform: The Pirate Party's objective is not to abolish copyrights, but to reform them. They only want to keep copyrights for commercial purposes, but make everything else freely available. The attempts to enforce non-commercial sharing of culture between private citizens is threatening basic human rights, such as private communication and freedom of information...