Equal pay??

I do not believe that the two software testers should receive equal pay.  The standards of living in both countries differ quite a bit and with $15000 sounds like a lot less this is still probably enough to allow the person in India to live comfortably. After doing some research I found that a middle class Indian can live on about 30,000 Rupees a month.  With the current conversion found on xe.com, an indian making $15000USD a year makes nearly 57,000 Rupees a month, more then double the standard middle class.  I would consider $65000USD to fall into the middle class of salary here, so in this perspective the indian is living at a higher standard relative to everyone else in his country.

Whistle blowing!!

One good example of a historically significant whistle blower would be W. Mark Felt, aka "Deep Throat", who was responsible for calling attention to the then President Nixon.  He reported to the Washington Post reports that Nixon was involved in the Watergate illegalities of 1972.  As we all know this lead to the resignation from office of President Nixon and two of his staff members also involved in Watergate served jail time.  I feel like this was a very brave, but ethical choice of Mr. Felt.  It takes a lot of courage to step up with condemning evidence about the President of the United States. I am personally glad that he brought this to light, and that the out come was the resignation of Nixon.

Incorrect Bills

I believe that if a company is responsible for incorrectly billing a customer they aren't necessarily obligated to compensate the consumer for the mistake.  If they overcharged the customer then they should compensate the person by crediting the amount they overcharged to the customers account balance for the next month.  If they undercharge they should probably just let it go as it was their mistake the person shouldn't have to pay the penalty for their mistake.  The fair credit billing act that is available in most states, says that the consumer has the right to challenge the bill when:


Billing Errors. . . .

You may challenge either the purchase or the price of an item that appears on your billing statement. The law defines an error as any charge:

• Not made either by you or someone authorized to use your account.
• Poorly identified, for a different amount or on a different date than is shown on the statement.
• Made for something that you did not accept on delivery or that was not delivered according to agreement.

Billing errors also include:

• Failure to credit your account properly.
• Computational or accounting mistakes.
• Failure to mail your statement to your current address, provided you notified the creditor of your address change, in writing, at least 20 days before the billing period ended.

A request for additional information or an explanation about a questionable item is also considered a billing error.

Fiar Credit Billing (2010) "Fair Credit Billing" Retrieved from :  http://www.in.gov/dfi/2590.htm

Denial of Service Attack on Demonoid

Demonoid is a large scale private torrent site.  It has been  attacked many times with DoS attacks from various people or groups.  In certain instance like this one, I can see the reasoning of the person launching the DoS but it's still unethical.  Granted Demonoid caters to pirating music, movies, and software.  They do however, have alot of good free distributable content and it's often faster to get it from torrent than the original source.   As a result of this DoS, users were unable to access the site to get torrents for literally months.  While this negatively effects Demonid, I'm sure it had little effect on the overall torrent market.  Traffic was just pushed to other popular sites such as The Pirate Bay.

Mennecke, Thomas (2010) "Demonoid Suffers from Massive Denial of Service Attack" Retrieved from:         http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1947

About Me

My name is Brandon Harwood, and I'm a senior CS major with a minor in Biology.  I'm originally from Hickory and have been to school at East Carolina University and UNC Charlotte.  I'm a big computer nerd and love building, modifying, and fixing computers.  Computers are one of my biggest hobbies along with music and playing guitar.  After I graduate I hope to get a job with a larger corporation such as IBM, Apple, or Google.