Social, Professional and Ethical Aspects of IT

 Week 15 IT and Ethics Ethical egoism is a term often used in the last years and it stands for philosophical and ethical position that establishes the fundamental priority of the someone's personal interests over any other interests, like public interests or the interests of other subjects.  An "egoist" is often considered as a person who thinks only of himself and / or neglects the interests of other people, while supporters of "ethical egoism" usually argue that such neglect is simply unprofitable for the them for a number of reasons and, therefore, it is not selfishness (in the form of the priority of personal interests over any others), but only a inability to foresee consequences or even stupidity. Ethical egoism in the everyday sense is the ability to live by following your own interests, without contradicting the interests of others. This concept emphasizes that corporate social responsibility is simply “good business” because it helps to reduce long-term...

 Week 14 - The Blind Programmer Tommy McWilliam, Mobile Engineer at Quora told a story about one his of his best friends in high school, who was diagnosed with Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy when he was in his senior year. NONL constantly reduced his eyesight and in his first year of college, he was almost completely blind. He majored in computer science, and the way he programmed was one of the most unusual.  In college, he used a combination of magnifier and narrator. The screen magnifier was called MAGic and allowed him to enlarge the text so that only a few characters could fit on the monitor. The monitor itself was a huge screen over 30 inches, optimized for the visually impaired.He always set Narrator to its maximum reading speed (probably over 300 wpm). By comparison, audiobooks tend to sound twice as slow. His friend also preferred to use the absurdly old version of Firefox (3.5 or something) because it supported his screen reader the best. He performed almost all...