If your unfamiliar with SOPA, your can find out more about it here… but essentially it is a bill currently being discussed that is supposed to protect itelectual properties from being pirated illigally on the internet… such as movies and music. However this bill would cause more damage than good… First of all i doubt it would seriously stop online piracy… however it would swing the pendulum over way to the other side and make it way to easy for various parties to limit information that passes through the internet…
Essentially this would fatally damage the way the internet is free and open to all information, and these types of bills could make it way too easy for someone to control what information is passed through the internet… making search engines, money transaction sites, information sites like Wikipedia, and other major information avenues of the internet stop showing results from sites they deam to be “illegal”. These types of bills would be the start of a major censorship of what Americans see on the internet, defeating the main reason behind the internet, which is sharing of information… any information… the point is we currently decide what to believe and what to discard… we should not let someone else decide what we see and what we should not…lets keep that right… contact your representatives… call them if you can… it’s more powerful than an email… but of you can only do one at least email them… you can find out who your reps are through this link on Wikipedia… which blacked out its entire site today (2012.01.18) in protest of this bill. I did both… if your looking for what words to say in your email to your rep… this is what I wrote to help in your inspiration, or if you just want to copy and paste… go for it… the point is to let our congress people know what we want.
I am writing you today to let you know my family and I are against the SOPA act, PIPA, and similar legislation. Although I understand online piracy is an issue, I strongly believe these types of legislation would not stop piracy, and would in fact cause serious damage to the free and open Internet. I hope you will (or do) understand the ramifications of a bill that would allow any party to manipulate any DNS information, as well as other issues these bills would cause to limiting the “passing on” of information for future generations. my fear is that this type of bill will give to much power and control of limiting a currently free information highway, and could easily be taken advantage of to prevent freedom of free speech, freedom of information, and other freedoms that every united states citizen currently has a right to. I hope you consider my words here and vote in opposition of SOPA, PIPA, and similar legistlation.
If you are studding for your Architectural Registration Exams in the United States you know what the above title means… if you don’t… well this article probably will not interest you… but here’s a synopsis… I’ve written about my opinionated thoughts and explanation on the long procedure to become a licensed architect in any of the 50 States before. Essentially the are called the ARE’s (for Architectural Registration Exams, and if your studying for them you know about the AREForum.org, and if you don’t… you should… as it is an invaluable tool in studying fort the ARE’s. Essentially a forum of everyone else in the US studying for the exams as well as people trying to help that demographic… its a place to ask questions, and more importantly review and have your practice vignettes reviewed by your fellow peers.
However the forums are difficult to log into the first time on an iPhone or iPad if you don’t know this workaround. The problems arises after navigating to the home page of AREForum.org and clicking on the button “Enter Forums”. Before giving you the login prompt it redirects you to the forum rules… which you should read. However there is no way to continue pass this forum rules page and actually log in on an iOS device. I think this is because of Flash… not the super hero in the picture above, but the programing language, which if you know or not, is not available on iOS devices and probably never will be. You can read the rules fine on an iOS device, but there should be a button at the bottom of the rules saying “Accept” however this button i believe is created with flash for some odd reason and does not show up.
So here is the workaround to get AREForum.org to work on the iPad or iPhone… type the full path of the forums (after you actually read the rules to comply with them) in the address bar and you will get to the actual forums, which runs on vBulliten, which works great with iOS devices… its just that lonely accept button at the bottom of the rules that is flash. Anyway the full path of the forums is below. Once there you can login with your user name and password, or register to create a new one. Good Luck… on both the tests and forums 😉
My brother got the iPhone 4s a few weeks before me… when he utilizes the voice recognition software built into it, called Siri, all he has to do is say… “text my brother what are you up too”… and Siri creates a text message to Tim (me) saying “what are you up too”… it remembers his relation ships so it knows who his brother, wife, mother, etc. are… However when I got my iPhone 4s I would say “text my brother hello”… because my phone is new, Siri would ask something along the lines
The problem I was having though, was that she was not remembering Matt was my brother… even though I told her to remember it countless times. I finally figured out the reason and though I would post it here for others incase they are having the same problems and decide to google it.
My situation was that my email runs off of Microsoft Exchange (which for those that do not know many many corperations use for their email servers… which also links up to my own calendar and own set of contacts stored on my exchange server that links with my iPhone. The problem is that default exchange contacts only has association fields of manager and assistant…. and you can not to my knowledge easily create custom association fields like “wife” or “Brother” in my case. So once I figured that out the solution was easy… I simply went to my contacts on my phone… browsed to exchange contacts… and deleted the contact for my self…. then i created a new contact for my self, but instead of doing it with all my other contacts on my exchange server… the one for myself resides souly on my iphone… not related to my exchange server. Now that I have a new contact of myself on my phone I can use any of the association or related fields pre=programed…or even create new ones…
The easiest way to do this after you create the new contact on your phone, rather than through your exchange server is to just call up Siri and say… So and So is my Mom… or whoever and whatever relationship you want Siri to remember. Cmmment below if anyone has any questions.