There are no Euros. Apart from the cash in Euroman's pockets and bank's reserve balances at the ECB, everyone on the continent actually owns a € loan to their bank collateralised with whatever the bank has re-lent it on. The bank credit that Deutsche Bank creates when it makes loans, is tied to Deutsche. If you wire money on deposit at Deutche to a friend who banks at HSBC, Deutsche now owes that money to HSBC (and HSBC owes it to your friend). If too many people move money from Deutsche, the receiving banks will start to demand some of Deutsche's assets.

SWIFT is a miracle of 1970s ingenuity and a testament to man's ability to work across cultures and borders. (How many real institutions manage to have Iranian, Israeli, and Arab members?) It's also €1 for a 700 byte message, takes £10,000 to set-up with my bank, and requires dedicated private line for real-time connectivity.

Cookies are very useful, but they basically suck as they're just an ASCII string bounced between the server and the browser. RFC 2965 has standardised then, but they're still icky. You're best off avoiding them, storing per user data on the servers-side and having permanent session cookies with just a SUID. If you want handle cookies with javascript and correctly handle unicode:

• The JS functions escape/unescape are evil. They do not have server-side equivalents in most languages.

We might often complain about the grip banks have over our personal details and credit. And they certainly try to make the best of it. There won't be Flickr-style APIs for you Lloyds bank account any time soon. It's worth thinking about the fact that there doesn't really need to be.

My chart is here. The data comes from my employer, but this is my pet project.

Everyone in retail finance needs to generate realtime graphs for the web. It gives users a sense of what the price is doing and they're pretty.

A: Soon trains will be wheel-less and integrated to the track!

B: What?

A: Engines are the new wheels.

B: No, you need an engine and wheels to push against the track.

A: New carriages can power trains.

B: That makes them engines.

A: Anyway, in the long term the rails will become the engine and the wheel is a squeaky relic of history.

B: I think you mean a maglev. Which is really a very different system to...

A: Precisely.

A: Would it make any difference to the traveller from a business perspective?

B: Well, no...

A: See.

B: Arrrrrgggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh !

I've written up what I have recently learned about mass mailing as a little guide. It's just notes and a link dump, but I think it covers all the important things you need to do.

The event horizon, the boundary of the region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape, acts rather like a one-way membrane around the black hole... One could well say of the event horizon what the poet Dante said of the entrance to Hell: "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." Anything or anyone who falls through the event horizon will soon reach the region of infinite density and the end of time.

"What's interesting about bills of exchange is that they're just, well, information"
— True, about as much as your driving license/ credit card is just a piece of plastic…

AC@FinancialCryptography

Disclaimer: I've spent my career working for firms too small to afford "proper" enterprise kit. I've never bought a network connection wider than a 100Mbps drop.

The cost of silicon has collapsed; power usage is under control; bandwidth isn't an issue if you're sensible. "Enterprise" is a misnomer, most of it is barely distinguished from what's on sale at Dixons. Within a few years, IT in well run companies will focus almost solely on improving the use of people. CTOs of the future will spend their lives trying to cut phone support and replacement call out costs.