OpenTangent

For thousands of years people have subscribed to culturally accepted actions and beliefs in order to achieve a sense of belonging . This is a natural desire in a social species but we now face a fork in our evolution since the information age has forced the emergence of global culture and at the same time has forced us to accept rationality through readily available information. It's community versus rationality and i'm sure everyone reading this knows that community will always win but there's hope in the fact that the community of rational thinkers is growing strong. The inspiration for this post was an article by Muhammad Karim  which was written as a reaction to Zapiro 's recent comic strip depicting Muhammad . That was of course a reaction to the "Everybody draw Muhammad day" group on Facebook which has since disappeared with no explanation but  censorship is another debate. I support "Everybody draw Muhammad day" because of my stance on free

At TED 2010 , moot pointed out that anonymity was increasingly important in this big brother age we live in . Being anonymous certainly removes the responsibility of one's actions but it also has the lesser acknowledged effect of removing pride for one's actions. This lack of social restraints on opposite ends produces honesty, without the need to gain credit for your work nor the fear of being pilloried for it, a meme factory is born. 4chan dramatically reinstates art as a mirror of society but for the first time portraying global culture, uncensored. It may not always be pretty but the beauty is that it's real. 4chan is attracting increasing numbers of the elusive " unique visitors " because it offers something few other social sites do; accountless involvement - the ability to contribute without the need to provide any personal information. Posted threads also only live as long as their popularity holds out, so eventually everything is deleted. This feature

As i've mentioned before; Microsoft has quite an impressive patent portfolio but instead of being a safeguard against devious copycats, those patents contribute to an aggressive anti-competitive strategy . I am aware of three agreements that have recently been entered into regarding Linux and it's "infringements" on Microsoft's intellectual property. Firstly; after a couple of sessions in the courtroom TomTom gave into to pressure and signed an agreement with Microsoft and effectively paid them to use Linux on it's devices. Amazon runs Linux on it's Kindles and agreed to pay Microsoft for it before any lawyers got involved. HTC has also agreed to pay royalties to Microsoft for the use of Google Android on some of it's phones. It's a win/win situation for Microsoft because the companies that are willing to use Linux instead of Windows will be forced to pay Microsoft anyway. It seems Google has woken up the the fact that Linux is slowly becom