Netflix

For my week seven post about a technology that some one else did research on, I chose to talk about the iPod but I also found another topic really interesting and that topic is Netflix. Netflix is a cool topic for this because it isn't really a direct factor communication between people, in fact, it kind of ironically promotes the opposite where it wants people to be quite and watch the movies and shows it provides. Regardless, the story of Netflix seemed cool, so I wanted to do some research on it.

It all started when Reed Hastings had a $40 overdue balance on a movie called Apollo 13, that he rented from blockbuster. He thought "what if I didn't have to pay an overdue fee" then the idea for Netflix was born.

 founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph

Originally, Netflix was a service where people would rent DVD's through the mail. At that time, they wanted to stream movies online, but the] technology just wasn't there yet because downloads would just take way too time. In 2007 technology had finally caught up and Netflix began to offer an online streaming subscription service. Since then, the streaming service has grown and reached customers all around the world, but what people don't really know is that Netflix never stopped selling DVD's. The DVD side of the business is slowly winding down, but has still been a huge part of the company's business up until present day.

Netflix is an awesome company with an even cooler story and I can't wait to see how much they grow in the next twenty years of business.


Netflix origins
Netflix's growth story

Week 7: Technology timeline

For week seven, we were told to talk about a technology that somebody else did their technology presentation on. I chose the topic that I felt impacted my life the most and that is the creation of the iPod. Not only did I have an iPod, but I must use at least one apple product every single day. My phone feels like it's a part of me and I hate to admit it, but I don't know what I would do without it. I'd also be willing to bet that a majority of the kids in my class had an iPod at one point when they were younger, as it felt like it 
was a norm to have one at the time. They were just such a cool new thing back in the day. Now music is just a simple little app on our phones.

iPod 1st generation

IPod's didn't even become a thought until the year 2000, when Steve Jobs asked his best hardware employee, Jon Rubenstein, to see if he could make a better version of an MP3 player. Rubenstein tried for a few months before he decided that technology was not advanced enough to make something like it, saying that either the battery would be terrible, it would be too bulky, or have a limited memory. After a yearly trip out to a hardware supplier for apple at the time, Toshiba's headquarters, Rubinstein had a breakthrough when Toshiba executive members showed him a 1.8 inch hard drive that they just prototyped, and 9 months later in October Apple launched its first iPod which was just known as the first generation. From there 15 different generations of iPods were released between the years 2001 and 2015. The newest version is basically an iPhone without the cellular capabilities, so it really is amazing to see what a long way these things have come!

iPod Touch 

iPods are a great example of the crazy transformation technology has taken in the last twenty years and has played a huge part in the direction that technology will continue to go. Although iPods have played a major part in technological history like I just mentioned, I think the day of the iPod has passed and all use will be gone within the next few years. There are just too many devices that use music as a basic feature these days that I can't imagine many people buying a separate device just for their music like they used to.



theverge.com 15 years of iPod  
cultofmac.com impact of the iPod

Week 6: Carrier Pigeons

For my part of the evolution of technology project, I did research on carrier pigeons and their use throughout history. Maybe it's obvious, but carrier pigeons are a little bit outdated in this new age of technology. So what exactly were carrier pigeons then?

Carrier pigeon with a message strapped to its back

Carrier pigeons are a type of pigeons called Homing pigeons. In agreement with their name, these pigeons are known for their ability to go back to their  "home" or nest. This makes them the perfect one way mailing system that can bring messages back to its nest where its owner awaits. One simply would just had to have the bird brought to the place in which they wanted to receive a message from, have the message attached, and have the bird sent home. Next thing you know, the pigeon is home in half the time that it took to get to the messenger surpassing things like: different types of traffic, weather conditions, and untrustworthy humans, these pigeons became an extremely reliable method of sending different messages and mail over long distances.

Carrier pigeon being released from a tank

The first carrier pigeon was said to have been released by Noah, but we also know that some of the first carrier pigeons were used to send horse owners the results of chariot races back in ancient Rome. The ancient Persians were also known for using carrier pigeons to communicate. The next time carrier pigeon became big and even peaked in their use, was during the times of WWI and WWII. France was the first to use pigeons in the masses, using over 30,000 of them by the end of WWI. They even ended up having to make a law that had people sentenced to death for interfering with the military pigeons’ flights because of their importance in the war. This lead to a lot of carrier pigeon use from different countries during WWII after seeing the effectiveness of the birds. This also lead to Germany deploying trained hawks to combat the pigeons and stop important messages from being sent. The Germans also used carrier pigeons for recon by strapping cameras to them. With more countries getting involved with carrier pigeons, during WWII 250,000 carrier pigeons were used by all of the militaries combined.

Carrier pigeons are rarely talked about, but they really did have a part in forming the way people communicate to this day by basically laying the foundation for the use of a mailing system, which of course has evolved to a point where we don't even have to leave a room to talk to virtually anyone anymore. Carrier pigeons also played a huge result in the results of the two world wars so it is truly shocking how we never talk about them in history.

vassallo history wordpress.com carrier pigeons 
scienceabc.com pigeon post
nytimes.com history of the carrier pigeon

Week 5: Anti War

This week we discussed dissent in class, main regarding war, so fittingly we were given two links to websites that are very much anti-war and told to explore and share our thoughts. As Prof. Smith had expected, I have never seen or heard of either of these websites, so I really did have to explore to understand what I was looking at.

First I looked into the American Conservative website. This website isn't strictly an anti-war website as I was expecting it to be, but it does strongly advertise its section that discusses the military and war, which opens up into a whole separate section of the website in itself. I noticed that a common theme in the military section was corruption and this made me wonder why things seemed so bias, so I looked into the "about" section of the website and read more into what they were doing. As I read into the section I realized that the goal of the website is actually to be an outlet for journalists to post about unjust actions that they are happening in our government, so they are more or less being given a platform to call these things out. What I thought were bias, anti-war articles, were actually journalists who are simply opposing and shining light on unchecked powers in the government.


Next I looked into Antiwar.com. According to their website their main purpose is to keep Americans informed about our foreign policy and what we are doing in terms of war, especially overseas. They also have a format that gives the people a voice and allows journalists to post different articles that have relevance to these topics. This website has tons and tons of articles and they seem to add a lot daily. It seems like it is a really good source of information, yet we don't even know about the website.

I think we don't know about these sites, simply because our government doesn't want us to. This is kind of like what we talked about where our first amendment seems to be getting violated but unfortunately it is very hard to prove that these websites are being hidden from us.

Antiwar.com
The American Conservative

Week 4: Facebook's fight against fake news

Original CNN post

Facebook is currently dealing with a loophole for a problem that they had thought they squared away back in 2018. Scammers are creating misleading fake news thumbnails for real articles that they are passing on as real. Before the feature was taken down two years ago, people were able to create their own title and cover photo for any links that they wanted to share on facebook. Unfortunately a smaller group of people had to ruin this feature for the rest of us by spreading fake news through these headlines. It only takes a click to realize that these headlines are fake but unfortunately, most people were sharing these articles without even reading them, causing the posts to snowball and spread to the masses. This problem was completely ended in 2018 when facebook completely took away the editing feature, but recently a loophole has been found and a small group of people are once again spamming and spreading fake news all over facebook. This is even more dangerous now because people must assume that seeing fake headlines would be impossible without a feature to edit them, so I'm sure that these fake posts are being shared at a much higher rate this time around.

Edited version of the same link (pictured above) exploiting the loophole

Pictured on the right is an example of one of these fake headlines but it was actually made by the author of the article that I am getting my information from. He made this as a test and sure enough you would never know that his article was fake unless you went into the link. In his example he used a real CNN article that was about Howard Shultz backing out of the presidential race and turned it into an article that looks like it is about Howard Shultz beating out Trump in the presidential race. It just goes to show how easy it is for these spammers especially with the presidential race that will be happening throughout the next few months.

This whole thing has a much bigger message and that is to not believe everything you see on the internet. Even when things look super official, you have to remember that anyone who really wants to trick people is going to try to outsmart you, so you can't just take things at face value anymore, you have to do your research.

Original Article Link

Week 3: Supreme Court

This week, I will be talking about how the Supreme Court works to supplement our lecture in class about how our judiciary system was set up. The Supreme Court is our highest level of court, so any decisions that the justices make are final and cannot be reviewed by any other courts. I am going to dive into the topic and explain exactly how the court started and how it works.

2020 Supreme Court Justices

The Supreme Court has been around since the constitution was made as it states: “The judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court.”. This also makes it the only federal court listed in the Constitution. The Judiciary act of 1789 had the official number of court members set at six but overtime this number had changed and eventually stuck at nine, via of the Judiciary act of 1869. it is really hard to getIt is really hard to get a case heard by the Supreme Court a case heard by the Supreme Court.. The Supreme Court receives around 10,000 petitions a year and only work on about 75 to 85 cases per year. They typically only take cases that they feel have a national significance and will affect more people then just those involved directly. With this, they'll try to take cases they will help answer questions like "Can kids pray in school?" or "Can you burn a flag at an anti-government rally?" in attempts to serve as many people outside of the cases as possible. They select what cases they will take via of the rule of four via of the "rule of four", which means that four out of the nine justices need to deem a case worthy of taking on, in order to take action. From there, they will have the lower court that last dealt with the case turn the case over and get to work from there. 

The Supreme Court is a very interesting system that our country has, but I think it's really good for everyone as a whole, so that people don't feel like they have no voice if a case doesn't go how they expected and they felt like a real injustice occurred.

Supreme Court building

how does the US Supreme Court work
Supreme Court video part 1
Supreme Court video part 2
wikipedia link
process of the court

Week 2: The 1st amendment

In todays day and age there is a whole lot of controversy involving the police and people's safety. Most people think that a lot of this is simply blown up by the media with all of the videos we see nowadays of altercations with the police. There are numbers that back up the fact that more people are being killed by the police yearly (see article linked below) but a lot of these videos unfortunately lack context which makes them useless in my mind. 

It feels like I see videos of these altercations almost every time I open twitter now and have always wondered if people are even allowed to record them. Most people who record these tend to have an agenda against the police even when the video shows no wrong being done. And I'm not saying that police brutality and wrongful murder doesn't happen because it definitely does. I have just always wondered if the police are supposed to be protected by the first amendment since a lot of these people are intentionally trying to record them in a bad light which could negatively impact their career or even their personal lives.

In an article written by David Hudson, it is stated that the right to film police has become a clearly established first amendment right. There was even a case called "Fields vs the City of Philadelphia". In this case a man named Richard Fields was taking pictures of police breaking up a house party. When he was confronted by an officer and told to stop taking pictures and leave, he refused and was arrested. The case was later reviewed by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and in conclusion they said “Today we join this growing consensus. Simply put, the First Amendment protects the act of photographing, filming, or otherwise recording police officers conducting their official duties in public.”

I think this conclusion is a positive one. I think it is best for everyone's safety that we have the right to film the police and I feel like this result shows good integrity in protecting our first amendment rights.
rights to film article

Fields vs Philly

police brutality stats

About Brad Schmitt

Hello, my name is Brad Schmitt. I am from Freehold, New Jersey. I ended up at High Point University mostly because my brother went here. If he didn't go here I don't think I would have even heard of the school but I am glad he did because I have loved it here so far. 

I am currently a sophomore who finally declared as a Media Production and Entrepreneurship major after a long year of being undeclared and unsure of what I wanted to do. I did finally choose this major but I still have no clue what I would like to do after college. 

I currently sell knives for work and I really enjoy that as well, so having sales experience helps me feel like I won't be stuck doing things related to my major after college if I don't want to. I guess that my biggest fear getting ready to leave college and go out into the real world is being stuck doing something that I don't like but I feel like if I keep myself open to all experiences during college it will help alleviate that fear in the future, as I will accumulate a lot of experience in multiple different fields and give myself options in that way. 

As well as academic and work experiences that I have been a part of, I have also been a part of the club baseball team since I have been here at High Point University. Joining the team has been the single best decision I have made at the school. I have met some my best friends that I will have for the rest of my life on the team, and that is just a bonus on still being able to play baseball at a competitive level in college. Last year my class came in, making the majority of the team and a majority of the starters freshmen which is pretty uncommon for any team but we actually ended up winning our conference undefeated and being the runner up to win the region. Playing for this team has added so much to my experience at High Point University and I look forward to the rest of my time with them. 

Overall I love HPU and cannot believe that I am already almost halfway through! 


Club Baseball Team link