OpenTangent

You start off distributed, then you centralise, then you decentralise. We tend to think of our world in terms of an order/disorder dichotomy. Anything that isn't heirarchy based order is seen as disorder which is why the word "anarchy" is often mistakenly defined as chaos or disorder.

Eventually, the general attitude towards the free market system will be as widely negative as today's attitude towards communism is. The failure of a system that relies on exponential consumption growth of finite resources is inevitable. Marketing is of course the core of a "market" system and as long as you can convince people that the solution to systemic problems is to increasingly feed the system that caused those problems, people will continue to support that system up to and often beyond the point at which their very survival is at stake.

The word Singularity is to technology as the word Utopia is to society. Additionally, society and technology are inseparable. An absolute Utopia will never exist, likewise the Singularity is not an end, it's simply a new plateau. Once we reach the Singularity the world will be profoundly different, we'll be at whole new level of existence. Issues of health, poverty, politics, etcetera will be gone but we'll face a whole new set of challenges.

Facebook recently censored an image entitled "Ema" by Gerhard Richter because it contained nudity. I'm curious to find out what might happen to an image of L'Origine du monde by Gustave Courbet.

The rate of technological growth is very predictable and is exponential. To draw a correlation; the Mayan calendar is understood to be a measure of significant technological events with an exponential decrease in interval time. This almost immediately disproves the man-in-the-sky idea of god because once we have successfully reverse engineered the human body we will be able to make vast performance improvements. The predictability of technology also simultaneously proves that there is some kind of divine plan at work. The machines will eventually take over but we won't be separate from them, we will become self-engineered, bio-mechanical, super intelligent beings. The singularity is upon us :D

Communism is the purest form of democracy and information is the key to it’s success. Barack Obama was voted into power thanks to a number of promises he made about upholding freedoms and avoiding war. During his term he has broken most, if not all of those promises . The people of the United States didn’t necessarily vote for Obama, they voted for liberties and peace and they assumed Obama would deliver.

Of all the champions of the Freedom of Information movement none can claim to have held the banner quite as high as The Pirate Bay . They have weathered legal storms far greater than anything Napster or even  Wikileaks have conjured up yet as i write this The Pirate Bay site is down. In an orchestrated attack , ISPs accross Europe were raided by police. A number of news sites reported that the site was up and running soon after the raids but this does not seem to be the case anymore. It seems like this was a solid effort to put them down for good but i'm sure this is not the last we'll see of The Pirate Bay. Edit: Guess who's back up ;)

It's been said that the hype around HTML5 and CSS3 has been exaggerated and even abused for marketing purposes . It's certainly true that HTML5 is evolutionary rather than revolutionary but it addresses so many obstacles for web development that i believe the impact will warrant the hype. There are some major technological advances such as HTML5 WebSockets and the popular  video and canvas elements but i think the real advantages will come from CSS3 (the style sheet mark-up language that accompanies HTML5). CSS3 will allow designers to make very rich interfaces with relatively little effort and without the need for any third party plugins like Flash. With these two standards specifications in place, web applications rather than  legacy PC applications  (as Google calls them) should become a very viable option. There was another bottle neck for web apps however and that was the inability of web browser's of the time to rend...

Unbeknown to many; a battle has be raging in the world of internet standards. The dispute is around the HTML5 video tag which will remove the need for Adobe's proprietary Flash to display videos online. Currently YouTube uses the H.264 codec to compress their videos which has a very good performance rating but is encumbered by patents. Ogg Theora video compression format on the other hand, is open source and free of proprietary licensing and copyrights, therefore free of royalty obligations. The Problem with Theora is that it does not match the performance of the H.264 codec. Mozilla and Opera have decided that there is no question as to which codec should be the standard since the web is ultimately based on open standards. They have already implemented support for Ogg video and Google has quickly followed suit with their Chrome browser. Chrome however, also supports the H.264 codec putting Google on the fence with this dispute. Apple  is l...

One of the internet's greatest strengths is the fact that it is decentralised. With the emergence of cloud computing powerhouses such as Google and Facebook we are seeing the decay of a decentralised internet. Majority of our time online is spent "logged in" to some or other cloud infrastructure which has sweeping power over our personal information. Now i'm fairly lax about Google having access to my personal info because they have been true to their "do no evil" motto and let's be honest, it is alot better being served adverts that are appropriate to my interests. But i think we should all be aware of how Google has softly and gently pulled our pants down and is now carefully bending us over the kitchen table while reassuring us that this is what we want. The signs are there, regardless of how comforting the process may be. The same holds true with politics, any party may have good intentions initially but given enough time with enough power, justi...