You don't need to be atheist to get frightened by current politicals VIPs in the US. While we are already used to the reborn Bush, Sarah Palin’s extreme religious worldview sets a new benchmark. I received this link from a concerned American friend; hardly believable that German mainstream media don't waste a single word on Mrs. Palin's stone-age Christianity. As member of a nation that has some experience with a 'thousand-year Reich' I just want to say: Hands off!

"Es ist schon schwer verkraftbar, dass die deutschen Steuerzahler nun für Kapriolen von Banken in Dublin Docks einstehen sollen, die sich dort vor der deutschen Steuer gedrückt haben."

"It's not econimically feasable to make German taxpayers becoming bale for capers of banks at Dublin Docks that tried to weasel themselves out of German tax."

I have to say that this is the first intelligent quote I've heard from our Finance Minister for a long time.

This entry is also published at eclectic imaging as of Saturday, but it fits also here.

Friday evening, stock markets in panic, one of our fabulous public service broadcasters features a special broadcast on the financial crisis. 15 minutes, just the facts. So I thought.

After a short and incomplete description of the situation our Financial Minister, Peer Steinbrück, is interviewed. The interviewer wants to know if the German government plans to initiate a national rescue plan like other European governments intend to do.

Steinbrück: No comment. Too early to second-guess now.

The interviewer tries to modify his question once more, and once again, but Steinbrück is unwilling to answer. The only hint he wants to give is that there are some preparations and that institutions in need for help would have to fulfill strong requirements. Thank you, Finance Minister, end of broadcast.

Huh!? Why is this TV bletherer, who gets his salaries from public money, unable to insist on an answer to his questions? Why does a democratically elected politician think that people at home - taxpayers - don't have to get to know about our government's next steps that will cost some billion Euros? Why aren't we told if private banks will survive this adventure? Of course nobody wants to fan fear, but is it too old-fashioned to expect at least a hint of transparency in a democratic constitutional state? Why not a single question on HRE, its to be expected financial needs of 100 billion Euros next year and these tax-haven companies with voting rights at HRE Holding?

As I've already written in earlier postings, I really don't know anything about this financial stuff. The few factoids I've learned are from a few blogs ('Rebellen ohne Markt' (rebels without a market, German), 'The Big Picture', 'Weissgarnix' (know-nothing - German), Marketwatch'. It's a shame to get no, absolutely no valuable information from our super-expensive, super-influential and super-superficial public broadcasters.

My recession indicator of the week: a do-it-yourself construction manual for building a WLAN antenna from garbage.

Soul Hansell questions the validity of computation models of Wallstreet's computers and the people behind them. He finds out that there's obviously a strong underestimation of the risk of complex finance products and an overly optimistic view on financial data and their consequences. Lying to your computer is like lying to your doctor. (Source)

I had my dark thoughts and prejudices on that branch. Maybe doping regulations should get tightened as well as the excessive regulation that has put us into this mess.

Infoworld lists an interesting collection of possible things to come within the next ten years. Some are obvious, some are pure science-fiction, some are quite frightening. Let's see:

• More cloud computing: because of lower productive costs, enterprises will invest in distributed computing. Perhaps. But only if we think about computing in its literal meaning. Any attempt to re-establish the so-called net computer will fail. (We already had this trend 10+ years ago.)
• Ubiquituous computing with wearable devices and smart gadgets. Perhaps. But there will be an increasing group of people that will find the absence of these gadgets okay.
• Virtual interfaces:
• Error-free computers. Haha, not really. Maybe they hide the error codes.
• Adaptive interfaces. Definitely, I expect some cool designs that work, not just bells and whistles.
• Triumphant automation: yes, to the dislike of workers. But handcraft will have a revival.
• Efforts in image recognition: perhaps, depending on the image material. I wonder if we ever get bored with the permanent image explosion.
• Smart smart phones: yes, but this depends on how much people are willing to spend on this. In critical times this is one of the first markets to fail.
• Always on: Perhaps not.
• Omnipresent surveillance. Definitely. You know my attitude to this.

Not only, but also robots: the US army upgrades its devices, especially its networking capabilities in combat situations. The National Journal shows that common wars will resemble Science Fiction phantasies. The question remains, whether automated fight systems will increase or decrease the possibility of war: on one side, less soldiers will get killed; then again, it will be easier to start an armed conflict, because of that reason. How an automated system will tell the enemy from a civilian is a differerent story.

Simson L. Garfinkel's excellent article shines on the technical issues of merging data into one big data base, the favourite horror scenario of data retention adversaries, dealing with terms like hashes, cross-drive analysis, anonymous resolution, nonobvious relationship analysis and the like. If you want to know what will happen to your data, and how, read it!

Europe wants to take a leading role in Internet 3.0. (Source)

As the article explains, Internet (or better: Web) 3.0 includes "the boom in social networking, the shift to online business services, nomadic services based on GPS and mobile TV, and the growth of smart tags using RFID". Thinking of our recent surveillance systems (hello, UK!) and the subtle loss of privacy that is combined with more and more teasers for the unsuspecting public, I have to say that Europe has a pole position in that race.

"[...] there is little evidence to confirm that data mining can be used to find terrorists."