"I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything..." (Richard Feynman)
I participated from July 10-13 in International Conference on Trends in Knowledge and Information Dynamics, which was organized by DRTC-ISI (Documentation, Research and Training Center, Indian Institute of Technology).
In the Corriere della Sera of April 12 the entrepeneur Del Vecchio (Luxottica) is complaining about the managers of Generali Insurances, who believed also to become a financing institution insisting that financing and insuring are two different businesses, which need to be known and to be learned.
Military spending of many European countries seems just useless to me. To maintain an army you do not need only technology. You need a certain spirit of willingness to fight also in the population. An army that has not been involved into a conflict for 50 years can hardly be supposed to have a successfull stand in an upcoming conflict. Last week I found an article in which US officials were complainig about the unmanly behaviour of German soldiers (They refused to take posiition, because it was too cold :-)).