Vacation note
I'm on vacation for a few days. Expect me back in a bit more than a week.
I'm on vacation for a few days. Expect me back in a bit more than a week.
Mozilla.org now is redirected to Mozilla Foundation. AOL is quite fast with turning websites down. Nevertheless the sub-links, downloads etc., still point to mozilla.org and are still functional.
I wonder how long this will last...
Netscape is dead.
Mozilla-developers inside Netscape/AOL will be fired or shifted to other projects. Mozilla will stay alive with help of its great community.
I wish you all the very best for the future. Mozilla rulez.
Humanity is a strange thing: Everyone wants to live in peace. But many try to achieve this goal with force and brutality. This has been true since early stages in the history. There have been only few exceptions as for example Buddhism but even those have some 'military' aspects (i.e. Shaolin monks) although they mostly rely on self-defense. Nowadays this has split somewhat. There are already parts in the world where conflicts are solved by talking rather than by battling. The 'first world' is in peace. Serious war seems to occur only at the borders of the first world and within countries of the second and third world. Why only there or other way round, why is the first world so peacefully? I think this has something to do with economy. It has only regional influence in market if there is a war in a non-first-world-country (as long as it doesn't have resources which are needed worldwide) but a war in a first-world-country would have immediate effect in global business. This is because, I think, the first-world-countries are more tied together and interlinked than the other countries. If one country is affected directly, many others are involved indirectly. That's why the first-world countries try to keep peace within their circle. The side effects of a military conflict are unpredictable.
The countries of the second and third world are more independent of other countries so a country with strong military forces can attack a weak one without the fear that side-effects can return like a boomerang and hit the own economy.
How do these conflicts arise whatsoever?
There are many causes, religion, resources, money, etc. I think one of the main reasons for conflicts in the first world is profit. If I don't have the chance to get profit out of conflict, why should someone contribute to it?
In the second and third world this is more different. Money is a motivation too, but there are also reasons of tradition or honor. Take for example the conflict in Israel. Only few know why they are fighting. They are fighting because 'my father/family fights', just because its tradition to fight. There is no real benefit for anyone if he wins the dispute.
In my opinion the consequences of wars become more interesting in the future because the USA is involved in many conflicts all around the world. And being involved means, that some people won't like you afterwards and these will be trying everything to weaken the western world and US in special. And the US will be more and more be acting like a helpless child in the ocean of self-caused terror, causing even more anti-USA-mood with this behavior. Small advice to Americans: Next time try to elect a president which isn't that aggressive to other nations and thinks a bit about how other nations think about the USA.
You know shares? You even own some?
You hope, that while you own them their value rises and that later you can sell them at the higher price so that you make profit?
Great! Because this behavior is the reason why the whole construction hasn't collapsed long ago.
'Why should it collapse?' you ask? Well, one might think that the price of a share is determined by the value of the emitting company. But this is only true at the moment when the company initially sells the shares. After the emission the price of a share is only determined by bidding and demand of the stock market. The company and its growing has no direct influence on the price anymore.
The crazy spiral begins to spin when enough people buy the share causing the price to increase. This causes more traders to buy the shares hoping that the price will continue climbing so that they can sell them later with high benefit. This again causes the price to increase even more and more and more people want to buy this shares. Suddenly something happens which causes the price to drop significantly (ie. an analysts says the share is highly overrated or the company gets slightly in conflict with law or just a bad rumor is going round). Then many, many stockholders want to get rid of their shares before the drop is hitting them, but it's too late. Nobody wants to buy them anymore (of course not, they are overrated and the price will drop. Why would anybody buy a expensive share and sell it cheap?).
And so they sit on a pack of paper which decreases in value with every breath they take. Finally the share price is far below the price at which most people bought them. Only a few people had some gain, those who sold their shares shortly before the big bang.
What indirectly also happens is, that other shares from other companies can also loose value because for example they are a partner of this one. And then a second spiral starts turning, and this could be the root of a potential stock market crash. We all know that the stock market is highly tied with almost every other market or industry.
Example: Banks also try to get profit out of shares, but if they do not acquire profit they have to roll over the costs to someone else. Anybody remember the anger when the credit rents raised last time? Be happy, you are keeping the stock market alive ;)
What I'm afraid of (and I'm sure that it will happen sometime) is such a real "Big Bang" when the stock market finally crushes and the whole economy follows.
Would be a good time to learn carving bows and arrows.
I hope people will learn not to rely on virtual value created by demand but rather on real created values from companies and industries.
I'm worried!
Not about myself, my work or someone or something special. It's about the world in general and its future. In my opinion large parts of the world and how everything works together will change completely in the next one or two decades.
For me it is unimaginable that some things will last in their current state for longer than a few years:
The root of many political changes will be on the north-american continent. The current goals of the American top heads is not to make the world a better place and to fulfill their electors needs but to increase the value of the market and the few companies which it consists of.
The political management is highly tied with industrial management and the mass media and the all have big influence in each other and everyone tries to get the best out of it just for himself and the few surrounding him. An example: politicians want to get votes, so they try to reach as many people as possible. They have to use the mass media for this, so they promise things to satisfy the mass media companies (ie. weaken anti syndicate laws) so that these in exchange bring only those news about the politician which help him to be elected and fulfill his mission to help the media.
This is only a small part of the big picture, but nearly all parts consist of such "rings of indebtedness".
But slowly things are changing. People get aware of what's going on behind their back although mass media and politicians are trying to cover everything up. And this knowledge spreads, slowly but steadily.
At some point in the future, the current leadership will change in elections. Lets hope that the newly elected people will do better work for everyone than currently Republicans do and not lie at us as Democrats did. (You think, Clinton was better than Bush is? Forget it.)
But I don't want to blame the American administration alone, Europe has also quite a hike ahead, until it really becomes an "Union". There are lots of controversy points inside the EU and there is no real unity between the member states in many points. Consider just the reactions on the Rise of the FP� in 2000 and today's European Union presidency.
Former caused sanctions from several other countries (mostly France and Germany) on Austria but latter has managed it to grab the first chair in the EU without much attention (but creates much "hot air" because Berlusconi can't stand a single critique). If I were up to compare these two, I'd choose Haider. He mostly represents the opinion of his electors, while Berlusconi decides, which opinion his electors should have by using his media imperium. (See the parallelism with America?)
I think, the problems in Europe will reduce with time and patience. But I can't predict, how the whole system will look like at that time.
Whew, this becomes a bit more text than I expected so I'll split it up into several blogs. Remember, that everything is my personal opinion and that I only represent myself and no one else but I appreciate any additional information/links anyone can point me to and allow me to see more parts and different views of our global political situation.
P.S.: I only mentioned America and Europe here because I don't have enough information and news about Asia, Africa and Australia at hand. (I doubt that Antarctica has any serious political activity ;)
Ever had to work with regular expressions and cursed the one who invented this crazy stuff? Well, I had to, and if I had knowledge of The RegEx-Coach at that time, it wouldn't have been such a pain in the a**.
With this tool you can try and evaluate every possible regular expression with every string and follow the evaluation in real time.
Dear Love,
we are now together for 18 months.
I want to tell you that this time has been the best time for my life so far and that I want to extend this period of time as long as I can think.
I love you,
Kosi
<sarcasm>
Great news from our company-group-leader: "Overall salary increases going into {4. quarter of 2003} will be very modest to no increases..."
</sarcasm>
He claims that this is caused by general industry weakness and the effort to expand our markets to EMEA and ASPAC blah blah...
Take gods message to mankind, bastard. :/
Had you ever have a bad feeling about genetically modified food and wanted to know more? Well, there is not that much research data available, because research is mostly suppressed by Biotech companies.
Anyway, I found this half-official publication.
Want to know what the US really wants to do in our world? What really happened in Afghanistan and Iraq? At John Pilgers page the work of this Australian journalist and military correspondent reveals some dark corners in the American leadership.
Yesterday we got mail concerning our "mail"-computers which are still absent: They won't arrive. Instead it has been decided that the access to the VPN will be established with VPN-clients on our regular machines. Hasn't it been said that such connections from non-migrated computers are not allowed? Anyway, clever developers have found out the possibility of connecting via VPN-client quite a while ago...
Legally at last :)