Whenever I decide to dig into some or other subject matter, I end up being subscribed to several email newsletters, as you often cannot download a piece of content that appears to be interesting (but half of the time turns out not to be – let’s call that the movie-trailer-phenomenon) without submitting your email address. Obviously I could set up Continue reading
“A woman can buy for herself as if she were her own lover.“
Anna Blaman (Dutch novelist)
What is it with all these concerns about privacy? As I am spending quite a bit of my time in Germany, and even more because I am working for a German company operating in the IT security space, I am confronted with privacy related issues on a regular basis. But still I fail to see what the problem is.
Picture by Isengardt https://www.flickr.com/photos/isengardt/
Have all these people so much to hide that they need to be concerned about whatever they are hiding getting exposed to the party they want to hide it from? (Most likely I imagine that to be either the tax administration or the cheated wife – in the first case: please stop using the public roads that I, but not you, have been paying for; don’t call the fire brigade if your house is on fire, but try putting out the fire yourself; and when you unfortunately have to spend some time in the hospital, pay the full bill yourself). Continue reading
“The German language ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.“
Mark Twain
“It seems to me that there are about 1,000 people on the planet to whom ad blocking is problem and about 7 billion to whom it’s a solution.”
Bob Hoffman
“Thirty years from now it will be illegal to drive a car.”
Jamie Dimon (CEO of JP Morgan Chase)
(when asked to give his view on the future of driverless cars)
Yes, that title is meant ironically. More or less anything you want to do online these days, any service you want to use, any network you want to join, comes with the requirement to create a personal profile. This is particularly true if whatever you want to get hold of is free (actually meaning: “you can have this without having to pay for it, if we can have your personal data” – as I discussed in a previous post), or can access your personal data or your money.
In the latter case, I obviously agree that it is a good idea to have some barriers Continue reading
” If you torture the data long enough, it will confess “
Ronald H. Coase
“Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a gap.”
Jerry Seinfeld
Picture from Images Money’s photostream on Flickr
Have you ever heard of helicopter money? The term comes from an image the economist* Milton Friedman used to in a theoretical discussion of what would happen if you simply inject extra money into an economic system (whereby you would throw it out into the streets from a helicopter). There are several ways you could increase the amount of money, and one of them you will probably already have heard of, Continue reading
THE SECOND HALF 