I am sorry to inform the readers of this blog that it will not be maintained any more. The main reason is my lack of time, although it is not the only one.

While it is true that you cannot be made and should generally not use an experimental Linux distribution (I use Debian stable very day and many others stay away from *buntu, Fedora etc), the testing is what brings to you something so well made such as your operating system in use. And while I simply do not accept that what is considered “current” and included by default in many distributions is frequently beta-quality, which is the reason why I will stick with stable, one of the things I (and you) can do, if the hardware enables it, is set up a “virtual” distribution. This way one can have a working OS for everyday use and help in the development of the next-generation software.
This is what I actually do, and I think it the best way to go. Debian experimental/sid in the virtual machine, or whatever other experimental thing you chose – be it Fedora Rawhide, Ubuntu alpha releases, OpenSuse, Arch – and something actually reliable, Debian Stable or CentOs for the real work.

I have been reflecting on the topic for a while now. So far from the more “current distros” I have used Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian Testing; tried Mandriva, Arch. From the stable ones I am using Debian Stable, have tried CentOS. I will try to be as straightforward as possible.
The good about the bleeding edge is that you can enjoy the current trends in FOSS. The user has the latest version of their favorite apps and should they buy brand new hardware, it will run.
What I don’t like about them: the maintainers do not do their job. Seriously. Maintainers should test software before they upload it; instead, all garbage comes into the repos and after installation, system does not work as it should. In my case with Ubuntu (under virtualbox) after every update something did not work. Either the system hang, or some app wouldn’t work. Freezes were constant. The last tine under Fedora when I tried Firefox, it crashed every 15-20 sites. Excuse me, but I don’t find this acceptable. Nevertheless, it seems that the majority of users prefer those distributions to the archaic stable.
I prefer stable distributions, however. In Debian stable there are no such instabilities. Everything is tested and works. There are two problems that I see with those stable ones: first, if I decide to buy a brand new piece of hardware, it will refuse to work because the kernel I use is a little old. Not what the average user would want. And second, there are no perfect programmers in the world. There will always be bugs. When one reports a bug, there are two responses from the maintainers, all others are similar: either 1 : “I don’t maintain this version anymore, check the newest version” or 2: “The patch will be included in the newest version, so check it out when it is released.” Okay, should all users to be beta-testers? I don;t think so. In spite of this, this is what actually happens.
In the end, most users prefer the more bleeding edge distributions. I don’t like those. When I want something fresh, I can always compile it. When I buy new hardware, if it refuses to work, then I install a newer kernel and that does the magic. But unlike others I hate when the system gives me headaches because of the stupid decisions of the maintainer, so I don’t think I will track something non-stable anytime soon. My current Debian Stable does its best to serve till the last days of my hardware.

Yesterday I read an interesting article at polishlinux, here is the exact address- http://polishlinux.org/gnu/the-right-to-be-free/ . I am going to write the promised reply.
It seems, to an outsider- meaning one not connected with the Gnu/Linux world that everything here is always going perfectly well, care-free. The truth is, however, that this is not the case.
So, what is the real problem? Our community is formed around several very important principles. One of the is freedom. But wait, what exactly is freedom?
It seems that everyone has his/her own opinion about the topic. The two most influential people, Linus and Richard, are not sharing the same one. Other mejor contributors don’t fully agree with one another, either. But I will focus on those two hackers.
Stallman is of the opinion that people’s freedom must be guaranteed, no matter what means are used to accomplish this. He even mentions, that the user should not be given the option to chose proprietary software. Is this good? If it is, is it the best way to make Linux users use only free software and driving the others unwilling to accept this away to M$ and Apple land? This question cannot be answered easily.
Back in 2001, there was a movie, the Revolution OS. In it, Stallman said that his only aim was to fight the people who endanger users freedom. This is OK. He also mentioned, however, that companies like M$ are using methods to control their customers exactly the same as those the Soviet Union used. And come to think of it, what is communism then? It seems that today’s fashion is to be anti-communist, because if you are not, you make a very bad impression. In fact, however, these statements are stupid, because a political doctrine has nothing in to do with software development. And, if I had to make a comparison, I’d say M$ methods are fascist rather than communist, but this is not the most important thing. In an interview in 2000, Ballmer, one of the key M$ folks, said that Linux is the same like communism. Word fight? Maybe that is the case. The truth is that both sides are wrong. These methods are used throughout the world and because you need a user key to install the crappy software you have bought from the Redmond company does not make them communists. Because the hacker community actually produces software, which is in most cases better than the M$ one and gives it for free doesn’t make us communists.
In reality, free software users have more freedom. We can do things M$ users cannot (legally) do and this drives some businessmen crazy. We can use software, modify it, share it, distribute it for free, fork it and what not. We don’t need anyone giving us orders how to use software so we don’t do harm to somebody’s wealthy business, we don’t care about those. The problem comes when someone tries to make us slaves to rich titans, be it Microsoft, Apple, Novell or whoever else you can think of.
Stallman says it directly – users shall not have the option to install proprietary software, or else they will be tempted and succumb. My question is, should the code monkey have the option to drink alcohol then? Because (s)he may be tempted to. Has Stallman ever drunk alcohol? I am sure, he must have. But it is forbidden in the culture of many people. And what is the morale? The producers of alcohol practically control millions with their business. They brew it, people die. Isn’t the situation the same with cigarettes? I loathe them, but almost everyone in the street smokes. Tobacco is being grown, no matter how many are affected. It’s the same with drugs. Why don’t people ban those? More and more people die,or at least they become addicted, right? Sure. But in the modern world it is the person, the individual, who can say “I will not do this and this in order not to do harm to myself. If not me, that at least not to those around me.”
But we, free software users are such because we are free. Free to do what we want. Because we are free, we are one community. What Stallman suggests is to take the freedom of choice away. This is no different from what M$ does. Why does Stallman want this? He is afraid that the fruits of the Gnu project will eventually be used for making profit by big corporations. That probably one day Gnu/Linux will be no different from Apple Mac. While he may have a point, is this the way to counter such threats? If in the net there were only audio files in the .mp3 format, then according to rms we will never listen to them. Luckily, there have been more progressive people in the community, who have created other formats, conversion tools. This way we can convert an .mp3 file to .ogg, we can produce audio files in this better format and be patent-free. This seems to be the better way to being independent from propriteary . Personally I think you will agree, this is the better solution. Because the one suggested by rms is a la M$ – can you download an .ogm video file and view it in Windows media player without problems? No. Because M$ prevent the users to do it. Do you want to see this in our Linux world? I do not and I bet you wouldn’t.
In the meantime, Linus Torvalds claims, simply put, that he doesn’t care. He is not “interested in politics” Okay, not being interested is fine – not many are. But again this is a somewhat silly approach. Just closing your eyes to the world that surrounds you doesn’t mean the problems are gone. If Linus really didn’t care, when he created the Linux kernel, he wouldn’t have put it under a license, saying that “You cannot make profit of this product .” But he did, until his paths crossed with Stallman’s and discovered the GPL, under which he licensed the Linux kernel afterwards (Linus mentioned this in an interview). These problems matter, whether or not we try to hide from them.
In the meantime, such disputes can easily tear the users apart. This is exactly what we all do not want to happen, and exactly what M$ would love to see. We have to prevent it.
Stop the silly flame wars in forums and neglect the Windows lovers out there. There are some problems to be solved. Stop complaining how many win users are out there, not aware of the revolution OS. How companies play unfair. Be more active in meaningful discussions on topics like this one. Your opinion matters. What do you think? Is a catholic priest more free than a modern citizen? Should we ignore the fact that in this world where there is good, there is bad and see only the positive side of things? Express yourself, so that you are heard. There are mailing lists, forums, there is IRC, blogs.
Once again, what do YOU think?

I was an azureus user for a long time and while I find the ‘blue frog’ to be an (almost) excellent client and still using it, I have been playing with ktorrent since several months for several reasons, the three major of which are: 1.low system resources consumption, 2.perfect integration in KDE, and 3.the growing ktorrent community.
So, at present ktorrent is at version 3.2.2. In this review I will focus on a more thorough explanation of the client features and viable strengths, rather than posting numerious screen-shots. (personally, I don’t see much sense in this, as a well-written explanation, at least in my experience, is more helpful than beautiful GUI demonstrations). To view screenshots of the client, follow this link: http://ktorrent.org/?q=screenshots . One more thing to note is that while Ktorrent is essentially a part of KDE and was originally made to run on Unix and Unix-based operation systems, recently the developers created a Windows port, so M$ fans out there should be able to enjoy this piece of software as well.
Basic torrent features:
multiple torrent downloads
data check for torrents
silent downloading – performing downloads without asking any questions
torrents grouping
support for various scripts
filtering single IP addresses
enqueueing/dequeueing torrents
integrated ‘recommended settings calculator’
DHT support
UPNP support
µtorrent-capable peer exchange
connection encryption
disk space reserving before starting download
lots more options, given as plug-ins
As you may see, there are some quite common options you can find in a big range of programs, but there are some that only the best competing projects offer.
And now to the actual observation of the program.
Ktorrent is a client with a contemporary GUI. The client is written in C++ with the help of the Qt toolkit. While this may not tell much to the average user, to put things simply: you have a modern application with a very nice GUI, the application itself is fast and spares system resources. It also means, however, that you need to install additional libraries in order for the app to run. But its well worth the dependencies. On a side note, non-Unix users won’t need to bother, as the pre-compiled binaries contain all the libs needed. Also, KDE users will have everything installed and only the core application will be required.
The app in action.
The first time when you start the application, you will see the main window, with a tab ‘all torrents’ – here are viewed all torrents loaded from the program. You can open many tabs, as many as you wish (but I wonder if you would, who needs tens of tabs). On the left , there is a button called ‘group’. When clicked, a new panel shows up with many, well, groups of torrents in a tree-like view. Here you can click on any you wish and the torrents will be filtered to match the pointed group. Below ‘groups’, there is another button, called ’scripts’ – here you can chose some of the given to run, and – good news for programmers- you can write your own scripts. Ktorrent has support for a bunch of languages, including Perl, JavaScript, Ruby, Python. So if you are, say a JavaScript coder or a Ruby fan (like me), this is a good opportunity to experiment. There is even a nice guide for you at this page: http://ktorrent.org/wiki/index.php/Writing_Scripts .
Above you can see the download and search toolbars, separated from one another with a delimiter. On the download toolbar, there are several icons, the descriptions of which speak for themselves. The search toolbar presents the user with a box, in which you fill the desired torrent name, a ’search’ button and a list of available torrent search engines. This way you do not need to utilize a separate web-browser, you can hunt torrents directly from the application. To the bottom of the window you can see several icons, depending on which plug-ins are loaded , as well as status-bars, again depending on the set options. In my case, for instance, I can see how many DHT nodes are there and how many tasks, the upload and download speeds and the total amount of transfers for the session (meaning for the time Ktorrent has been running without being stopped, every app restart starts a new session).
I think this is enough for the main window, lets proceed with the awaiting interesting features below Ktorrent’s skin- the application options.
The menu-bar is at the top of the window. Click Settings>>Configure Ktorrent. Here it is finally – you can see to the left all possible options. When clicked, to the right appear the settings. So lets get down to the bits and pieces.
When you click ‘Application’, the basic settings appear. Here you can tell Ktorrent where to store the .torrent files and where the data will go. A system tray icon is always useful, so leave this and the pop-up messages ticked. As for the miscellaneous settings, this is largely a matter of taste: when hovering over those, you will get a good description – personally, I prefer to be asked when I open a torrent, so I have left ‘open multiple torrents silently’ blank.
When you click ‘Network’, several setting show up, there are a lot of things you can fine tune, but I suggest that you use the perfectly functional ‘Recommended Settings’ button below the test boxes, as when you give it the right values, it will make Ktorrent perform optimally for your specific connection. If you are not satisfied, you can always edit what you need.
If you want to use a proxy, Ktorrent provides you with everything necessary under ‘Proxy’.
There are several useful settings under ‘BitTorrent’. If you want to be able to download and seed data even when the tracker for some reason is down, you can make use of DHT by checking ‘Use DHT to get additional peers’. And as the current most popular torrent client is µtorrent, you may also check the ‘Use peer exchange’ box. To avoid traffic shaping (this is a common practice these days), you’d be better of using encryption, but bear in mind that this also means additional CPU power, although any modern CPU can cope with this without getting in your way. Data checking is one more important thing you must do to ensure you don’t happen to have any corrupted data on your PC, but do not make too regular checks, because this will slow down your machine considerably, no matter how powerful the machine is. The default settings should do for just about anyone.
If you have run the integrated ‘Recommended Settings’ helper, in the ‘Queue Manager’ all important setting should have already been set. Once again, in my personal experience the built-in wizard gives optimal results, so if in doubt, use them.
If you want to dig deeper, in the ‘Advanced’ options you can chose whether to reserve disk space, how to reserve it, how frequent should the GUI update interval be and how should the time estimation be calculated.
By now you should have already managed to set up Ktorrent up and running, so if you feel what so far you’ve read is enough, then don’t read the rest. For the power users amongst us, however, the nuts and bolts are of huge importance, that’s the reason why I will go through them as well.
The ‘Plugins’
This is the place where you can extend the functionality of Ktorrent. If, so far, you have been thinking that Ktorrent is nothing different from the common torrent clientout there, then here you will see for yourselves why Ktorrent has the reputation of one of the best available pieces of software. Once again, at the time of writing this review Ktorrent’s stable version is 3.2.2 and probably in the future more plug-ins will be added. Nevertheless, at present there are a lot of plug-ins and this review will mention only some of them, as all have very good descriptions.
The info widget is capable of showing the list if peers, trackers, downloading chunks, as well as web-seeds.
The log viewer will give thorough information about all connections including DHT, disk I/O, searches, trackers and UPNP.
You can modify the search plug-in to use more torrent search engines, or fewer than the available if you think they are too many. You can also specify which browser is to be used, although the default does its job pretty well.
Another useful add-on is the UPNP plug-in, with the help of which you can forward connections, which is very useful for those users which have a router.
I hope that if you have had the nerves to read this all, you have successfully set your torrent client up. If not, then at least now you are aware of yet another well-made program. Should you be interested, why not join the community? There is a good forum, http://ktorrent.org/forum/ , and IRC support at #ktorrent on irc.freenode.net .

The above work is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Having utilized the bug tracking system several times for some time now, I’d like to share experience and my opinion of it.
Debian is a project deserving admiration. And the BTS as well. It works very well, the reportbug program does its job very well, in not better, then at least up to par with the web wizards out there. Add the fact that there are currently more than 1500 developers all over the world and you can only imagine what quality we are speaking of.
The Debian package maintainers serve the purpose to: (1) work closely with the upstream developers of individual programs, reproduce reported bugs, package patches for/upstream versions of the program.
The current status of the BTS is about 550 000 bugs reported. About 10000 for every two months. While this nay seem as an achievement to one and bring disappointment to other, there currently seems to be a (kind of a) problem.
You may wonder what am I talking about. It is the fact that the Debian BTS was made to track bugs in the distribution. What happens now, however, is that most bugs concern programs which have found their way towards the Debian archive. That is the reason for the increasing amount of bug reports. And what is the final result? You report a bug and the Debian maintainer sends an email response, should the bug be verified: “This is not a Debian-specific bug, it is a [outer or any other adjective you can imagine of] bug.” Which brings the good question: “Isn’t the BTS for that purpose, to report bugs in the Debian distribution?”.
You may have a point. The Debian maintainers are responsible for handling such reports. But some handful of devs are, no matter how much their free time and experience is, not capable of coping with so many bugs. Therefore, there is actually a better approach to doing this. Report the bug directly upstream. This way you can be assured that the bug, if real, will be fixed in the next release of the piece of software by the original developers, and that version will be packaged for Debian, with all fixes. Of course, should you encounter the odd show-stopper in some of the Debian core packages, then you shall definitely use the Debian BTS.
Personally I find the Debian system pretty stable. In fact, it is the most stable distribution I have ever tried, apart from CentOS – which is equally reliable, but the latter is solely for corporate purposes, while the first is equally fine for day-to-day use, multimedia users and servers. Although tracking the testing branch, I can hardly complain about the core Debian system. All glitches, without any exception, come from other programs, mainly my desktop enviromnent – KDE – and its apps. So I rarely use the Debian BTS, when in need I rely on the KDE bug report wizard. It is faster and better that way. So if you are a Debian user and you find a bug in any app, report to the developers of the app, not to the BTS. This way you save from your own time and the time of the maintainers. Leave the Debian maintainers only the packaging task.

So, (almost) a year and a half has passed. When KDE 4.0 appeared, it disappointed many – me included. Of course, at the time I still wasn’t using Debian and wanted to test this new thing; if I had, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do so for a while and wouldn’t have been disappointed, but in the same time I wouldn’t have seen what was all the fuss about.
Anyway, how far have things gone? I am currently using Debian testing and KDE 4.2.2, which will soon be replaced by 4.2.4 . To be as short as possible, I will outline what is yet to be done, so that KDE once again becomes a complete and well-made desktop environment.
Where are the KDE multimedia apps? What is going on with Kaffeine, Kmplayer, Kmid? Not that I used any of these in KDE3, of course – mplayer is simply the best player out there, and while it is true that there are a bunch of front-ends, the best of which smplayer, mplayer works flawlessly via its CLI interface. I believe Kmplayer wanted to be a mplayer front-end, but from what I saw, the team had better not tried. Mplayer is a very powerful multimedia app, with may options and writing a GUI that won’t give user control to a tenth of those is of no use in my opinion. I haven’t heard the Kaffeine team working upon anything different from xine – not that xine is bad, but judging from my experience, mplayer is superior. Being able to play almost anything is not enough for me, mplayer plays absolutely everything and it does it flawlessly. Well, one day Kaffeine might use the mplayer engine, then I might give it another try. At the moment of writing this blog, however, there are no complete QT4 ports of those pieces of software.
Another good question is when Koffice will be usable. I have mentioned many times that I do not like using OpenOffice.org, because the software competes with M$ office and the interface can be improved, not just copied. Koffice will surely be one of the projects I will anticipate, but for now KDE4 has no complete office suite to offer.
In the development corner, it is pleasant that the Kdevelop is doing every effort to port this IDE to QT4 and the work will (hopefully) be finished soon. Yet, there are only non-KDE alternatives. (Personally I am not very affected, because I use Emacs, which does what it should and it does it well)
Up to now, there are no stable enough audio/video editing tools for KDE4. Sure, Kdenlive is a very promising project , but there is some work left.
I may have missed several things, but these are undoubtedly one of the most irritating missing components of the Kool K Desktop Environment. So we will wait for some time until KDE becomes the king once more.

I’ve spent some time recently looking for a good IDE, but unfortunately my quest did not succeed. I had several criteria for a decent program I can develop with: it has to be stable, fast, it has to posses a debugger, good project management, good syntax highlighting, GUI builder – optional. Also, it has to be absolutely free software, meaning nothing else than (L)GPL.
I am not a vi fan, have tried it for a month and never liked it or got accustomed to it.
What I have found so far: there are several others that (not fully) match the criteria: Kdevelop, Netbeans, Eclipse. However, for some reason Kdevelop won’t work as expected: creating projects was virtually impossible, after attempting the IDE would return an error. Later I understood that it was a problem connected with the non-ported to QT4 version, so I threw Kdevelop. Although this was the closest to my taste.
As for the other two IDEs, as expected from Java applications, my humble machine had a serious problem with both. It was clear from first sight that they were made exclusively for the Java programming language, the plug-ins didn’t give much. Syntax highlighting, at least in Netbeans, was poor, Eclipse would simply bring my PC to its knees, eating a *great deal* of my memory. My my, 1GB of RAM is nothing these days. So, these two were dropped.
Of course, I did not stop here. Searching some blogs and forums, I went to code::block website, but wasn’t impressed much. There is still something to be desired from the IDE, and it is not in Debian’s repositories, so ‘I’d better not risk’, I thought.
My conclusion is that there should be an IDE coming with ruby the same way IDLE is pre-installed on some machines for Python development. I hope that in near future, there will be a decent, community-driven ruby IDE. For now, I will stick with Kate and its plug-ins when in X for simple tasks, my favorite IDE emacs for development.

This list includes anime scheduled to appear to the end of this year and sequels I am expecting.
I’d like to start by saying that, unlike in the past decade or two, there were far fewer new tv series, movies, ova and so on. Most titles used to be of very high quality, competition was far less. Today the trend is not the same: there is plenty of competition amongst individuals as well as companies. Different titles are being aired every day, at least half of which with quality nowhere near as their ancestors. Sure, graphics, sound, effects have improved a lot, but solely this does not make a good movie. Part of the explanation is that more and more needs to be produced to respond to market demands; in the same time, budget is not always of abundance. Anyway, there has been and there is something out there that always stands out, that gets most of the attention. It is usually, but not always, the fruits of a high budget anime, with several companies involved.
Enough, here is my personal wish-list:

狼と香辛料 2 (aka Spice and Wolf)
The first season was very good; at least I myself enjoyed it very much. No wonder Holo won the female character of the year nominations in several forums. Up to now, only the OVA – prequel to the second season has been released, let’s hope we will what the second season has to offer this summer.

蒼天航路 (aka Beyond the Heavens)
This series seem promising, although I have not (yet) watched a single episode. The manga has won several awards, so there is little chance for this to be going into the wrong direction.

鋼の錬金術師 (Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood)
The Conqueror of Shambala wasn’t bad, but my expectations of this is to be better.

2008 was a year very many people will remember; a year when suddenly major financial insufficiency occurred around the globe, a year when thousands of people lost their jobs, a year when students started to ask themselves: “Why attend university, when out there I cannot find a job?”. It was the time at which the financial crisis showed its fangs at people, even those little aware of the details.
It is true that the situation isn’t worse than that of the years after World War Two, but it sure isn’t a fulfilled dream. So how countries round the globe cope with this problem?
The USA
Actually, the country’s economy was believed to be in recession earlier than late 2008, however there was little that could be done to prevent it. According to the national statistic, over 1 900 000 people lost their jobs. The dollar rose in value, which, on the one hand, in short is good for people with savings… no, capitals. However, a more expensive dollar means that the country production will become more expensive, meaning harder to export outside of the USA. And the lost money from export hurts badly both national manufacturers, banks, tourist agencies and so on, but also the people working in this sector. Probably they won’t have buried a golden pot full of money deep into their backyard. It is no surprise that farmers initiated protests because of their impossibility to pay all taxes, loans and bills; and it is not only them. Initially, the government settles on an anti-crisis cash injection of $700 billion. Another trusted method that the USA tried was the good old nationalization, very familiar from the times of the USSR. Commie or not, this seems to work – give the company owner the sack, then after several years, when the situation is more secure, sell it to a capitalist. All being said, this is a temporary cure. The situation is still bad; the small, weak companies are bound to bankrupt, the future is in the big players with lots of cash to survive. The only thing that will permanently save the USA will be if the Chinese stop the inflation of the Chinese yuan; this, of course, will not happen. Why would the Chinese want their goods to become more expensive for the consumers worldwide and thus make the dollar more competitive?
There are other ways to go, but people get paid lots of money to gibe solutions to such problems and this blog has no intention to to go further.
Germany
After short discussions, the Bundestag agreed on a 500 billion Euro stimulus package. Again, the soviet method came into use. Even BMW and Daimler Benz claimed a need for additional money; however, despite any expectations, Volkswagen seem to be selling more than good and there is no drop in consumer interest whatsoever. Temporarily, the situation has calmed a bit. The more important thing is, that the economy of Germany has every chance to recover from the current crisis and there is a reason for this. Germany has long been a reliable European partner. Recently, the trust in Germany has been returning to its previous state. Rising interest means fresh money in the economy; this is factor number one, especially in times of crisis, for a economy to revive. Of course, this will not happen immediately, but sooner than the US and the other European countries.
Japan
Undoubtedly, the current situation has mostly affected the country of the rising sun. According to statistics, the interest in Japanese cars fell with more than 60%, the economy shrunk by a nearly 4% in 2008. You can read more figures in the net, I will no write every single detail here. Japan has took no different approach than its colleagues – pay the citizens to replace their old, but working 10-year-old Toyota, Nissan or Mitsubishi or whatever – with a new one, the same manufacture, so that these vendors won’t stop producing Japanese cars. This type of economy, where only the internal demands are satisfied and there is little or no export didn’t work with the Soviet Union; sure they were ahead of their time speaking of military, but their economy wasn’t worth a yen. And this is not a solution. The country that will grab the most foreign interest, meaning foreign money circulating in the local economy, will stop filling its lungs with water. The same goes for Japan. In fact, the to-be super nation, that will bring an end to the ambition of the USA to be *The* one saying what shape the global politics will take, will be PRC, no other. This happens frequently in history, one rising nation, other falling. But the Chinese stimulus of the economy is great news for Japan. It means more selling Japanese goods (at least on the Chinese markets). So, the other nation along with Germany, has its chances for full recovery is Japan; once the bubble economy starts working and the Yen loses value, the cheaper and better quality Japanese electronics will find their way ruling the market. Yet again, this will take some time. But those Asian rivals, although temporarily helping one another, can easily outrun the European gamblers and America. Don’t get this wrong; I’m not saying the Western economy is bound to suffer, it will recover slower. And, this time the number one economy will be the PRC, not the USA. The latter will have to get accustomed within their position in the top 5, after China and Japan.
Britain
I will like to have a bit of a comment on the UK, as I read something interesting two or three days ago. Unexpectedly, the British made a somewhat risky choice – the national bank of England will print 50 billion pounds to keep the credit interest rate low, no more than 0.5%. But this means one more thing: each country has a reserve of gold in its national bank, corresponding to the value of the printed banknotes, in this case pounds. Without the sufficient gold, this approach will cause big inflation: rising taxes, rising prices of all stocks, without salaries/pensions going up. Whether this will help local business or it will gradually start bringing workers to their knees, only time will show. I just hope it will be the first, not the latter.