From Reuters.

HARARE, Jan 16 – Zimbabwe’s central bank will introduce a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar banknote, worth about $33 on the black market, to try to ease desperate cash shortages, state-run media said on Friday.

Prices are doubling every day and food and fuel are in short supply. A cholera epidemic has killed more than 2,000 people and a deadlock between President Robert Mugabe and the opposition has put hopes of ending the crisis on hold.

Hyper-inflation has forced the central bank to continue to release new banknotes which quickly become almost worthless.

There is an official exchange rate, but most Zimbabweans resort to the informal market for currency transactions.

In addition to the Z$100 trillion dollar note, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe plans to launch Z$10 trillion, Z$20 trillion and Z$50 trillion notes, the Herald newspaper reported.

Every time I think that things can’t get any worse under Mugabe, they do.

… that this is the last weekend the Bush regime will be in power.

Alexander Cockburn, for one, will miss him. Here’s his valedictory message, from Counterpunch:

I’ve always been a fan of George Bush, on the simple grounds that the American empire needs taking down several notches and George Jr has been the right man for the job. It was always odd to listen to liberals and leftists howling about Bush’s poor showing, how he’d reduced America’s standing in the family of nations. Did the Goths fret at the manifest weakness of the Emperor Honorius and lament the lack of a robust or intelligent Roman commander?

On Bush’s Jr’s fitful watch Latin America edged nervously out of Uncle Sam’s shadow. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia boldly assert their independence and thumb their noses at Uncle Sam. Twenty years earlier, and even when Bush Sr sat in the Oval Office, the “strong leadership” craved by Americans of all political stripes would have seen Chavez and Morales briskly toppled, their estimable reforms swiftly aborted and the kleptocrats handed back the keys to the presidential office by the CIA and their local right-wing allies…

Thanks to Kevin Horgan for the link.

Here’s something to make the troglodytes on the Today programme choke on their muesli.

Last year, after the social-networking site MySpace found that its members included some 29,000 registered sex offenders, the nation’s top state prosecutors demanded a technological fix, asking that the industry “explore and develop age and identity verification tools for social networking web sites”. But a new study concludes that such technologies are unlikely to thwart anonymous predators and that the threat facing children online is no worse than it is in the real world.

“Our review found too little evidence that any given technology or set of technologies, on their own, will improve safety for minors online to any significant degree”, says the report, written by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, a group of 29 businesses, nonprofit organizations, academic groups, and technology companies that conducted the investigation with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, at the request of 49 state attorneys general. “Moreover, the Internet itself, the ways in which minors use it, and the communities in which they participate, all change constantly, and the available technologies are quickly evolving.”

While no single age-verification solution can solve the Internet’s problems, tools are available to those who choose to use them, and social-networking sites cooperate with law enforcement and actively root out reported problems, says John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor who led the effort. Some 40 technologies are already on the market, including age-verification products and Web filtering and blocking programs.

Pardon me while I bask. In an interview with David Hochfelder in 1999 for the IEE History Center*, Paul Baran — the man who first came up with the idea of a packet-switched communications network which led to the ARPANET and, later, the Internet — listed my book as one of the “four best books on the history of the ARPANET and the Internet”. (For the record, the others are: Arthur L Norberg and Judy E. O’Neill, Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986, John Hopkins Press, 1996; George Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines: the Evolution of Global Intelligence, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 1997; and Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet, MIT Press. 1999.)

*Paul Baran, Electrical Engineer, an oral history conducted in 1999 by David Hochfelder,
IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.

Thanks to Johnny Ryan for pointing it out.

Eat your hearts out, petrolheads! Inside story here.

According to Gizmodo, Obama’s Cadillac has several high tech features, including

• It can withstand rocket impacts and it’s perfectly sealed against biochemical attacks.

• Petrol tank: Can withstand a direct hit thanks to a special foam and armor-plating.

• Bodywork: made of dual hardness steel, aluminum, titanium, and ceramics to “break up posible projectiles”.

• Tyres: Kevlar-reinforced with steel rims underneath so it can run away no matter what.

• Accessories include: Night vision cameras, pump-action shotguns, tear gas cannons.

• Comes with bottles of blood compatible with the President’s blood.

Helpful cutaway diagram here.

Eight miles per gallon, since you ask. No data on emissions from 6.5 litre diesel engine. Top speed 60mph. Zero to 60 in, er, 15 seconds. This is one the Top Gear headbangers won’t be reviewing.

… about Heavy Metal band names.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Astute comment in The Register about the implications of Dell’s decision to close its manufacturing plant in Limerick.

As the shockwaves of Dell’s dreaded but expected withdrawal from Limerick manufacturing reverberate around Ireland’s mid-west region, some lessons are emerging.

The big theme emerging in many reports and commentaries is that the boom in semi-skilled assembly line jobs is well and truly over. There doesn't appear to be any other business likely to come to Ireland and employ 1,000 plus workers on an assembly line. It’s cheaper to do it elsewhere, in a low-wage economy, and ship the goods to the geographies that would be served by an Irish base.

For suppliers like Dell that need a responsive assembly/manufacturing operation in the EU, the accession of Poland and other east European countries into the EU was a godsend; for Ireland, it has been a disaster. Where Dell is going other hi-tech employers may follow – Intel has a chip plant in Ireland, and HP makes printer cartridges there too.

For both of them the annual cost of an Irish worker will be more than the annual cost of a Polish worker. They too will be looking at the numbers and doing a what-if-we-moved-to-Poland spreadsheet calculation. The EU wants a level playing field, and limits what member countries do in the way of bribing businesses to come to them via grants, subsidies and tax concessions.

The conclusion is:

A dawning realisation in Ireland is that it will have to expand university and technical college education. If it’s a white collar future and not an assembly-line one, then that means the current generation of semi-skilled workers have had it. There’s more of them than the country currently needs and they’ll have to do the best they can whilst the country educates their children for the hi-tech R&D jobs.

These jobs will come in dribs and drabs, 20 here, 40 there, not in thousand-plus lumps. The IDA has got to attract many more firms to Ireland. For every Dell with almost 2,000 workers the IDA will need to attract, say, 50 businesses to provide the same number of jobs, and the Irish education system will have to provide 2000 graduates in the right disciplines to gain the jobs.