Not usually, but I needed to see if it's even possible to dent my excellent karma. I'd like a fresh start in 2012.

I happen to see it with different eyes. I see the UK as being in trouble next (after Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy) since they are the only country in the EU that plays on both sides.

Romania either had visionaries for it's executive (and honestly, I can't see the sailor and his crew as visionaries), or it just made the right bet in 2009 by accident. That being said, it used it's loans mostly to increase the reserves of the central bank in order to increase confidence, as opposed to using them to stimulate the governmental spending in infrastructure projects or others. How they got that part mostly right is beyond me, but I guess good things happen to undeserving politicians.

Investing in real estate is always a smart thing to do after the bubble bursts. It pays off to invest in construction when builders don't have enough projects to feed their employees. An apartment in Central Park in Bucharest that was €230.000 now goes for half that and with a second parking place. The old blocs of flats in Victoriei Square are moving from targeting small business offices to residential and there are a lot of examples like that.

I wouldn't be so dramatic. Except for the Brits, all the other EU countries would loose too much if the Euro went bust. They are taking their time coming up with the fixes for two reasons:
1) not to put too much pressure on the population (given the social impact in Greece as an example).
2) This uncharted territory for the EU and especially uncharted territory for a currency that is not (yet) tied together by a fiscal and executive union. They want to take it slow to make sure that there are no unintended consequences.

If the Euro does however break up, make sure that all your banknotes have an X in the serial number. The Bundesbank will only exchange the ones with an X to Deutsche Mark.

My point about the EU not being in as much danger as the US comes from comparing the industry. Sure, they have Apple and Google, but it's hard to compare the other aspects of the industry:
a) Airbus kicks Boeing arse bigtime (1378 orders vs 778 orders)
b) The car industry can't even be compared (heck the small italian Fiat actually is buying Chrysler)
c) EU infrastructure is doing a lot better. Better and newer highways in most of the EU (except for the newly joined). The US hasn't touched it's highway infrastructure from the 50s. The EU has a better, much faster, ever-growing train infrastructure (you just can't compare the two). And fortunately, in the EU we still have public transport.
d) Furthermore, the value of the debt is not even the real problem. The problem is the prospects of the debt. The US debt is ever increasing while the EU is moving slowly to a 0 debt policy (thus decreasing it). In the end, this is the big difference. If you have a constant (GDP wise) rolling debt, it's still acceptable and it means that you're living within you means, but having a 43% budget deficit certainly doesn't put that into any good prospects.

Then again, I'm just an IT guy, what do I know?

At least we're cleaning up our own problems back here. How are you guys doing with your debt? How's your deficit? For us (snotty Europeans) a 5% deficit is huge. For the former rebellious colonies 45% still seems to be acceptable. Don't worry, we'll be happy to hire your grandsons to do our laundry and lawns in half a century. Anyway, things here are still better than in the States for now. The future? Nobody can tell, but Wall St. keeps trying (and failing).

Joking aside, while the Euro is having it's puberty phase right now, it will most probably work quite well for a long time. There's a a simple reason: it's way cheaper to fix it than to ditch it.

It's easy, if nobody else helps you with fiber make a neighborhood association and invest in your own last mile. You own it, operate it and can easily get a 1Gbps connection from a large carrier in most places for less than $5.000, now divide that to the 200 households and they each pay $25 for 5Mbps if they all use all the available bandwidth at once (CIR) or more likely 100+Mbps (synchronous) in normal home usage patterns. You can upgrade the bandwidth by renegotiating the contract every 1 year. The real cost of bandwidth at the carrier (excluding the circuit to your POP) is currently at $2-5/Mbps. In Romania the bulk price for guaranteed bandwidth is €2.5 for 100Mbps and lower for higher capacities. The real question when you do this is where do you get a service provider to give you IPTV. Internet is easy to solve, just like voice. ATT probably will refuse to come and provide IPTV over your own infrastructure in order to protect their monopoly. This would be a great business opportunity, to help communities build their own infrastructure and provide them with IPTV, Telephone and Internet at their POP with bulk pricing and letting them figure it out further.

Don't equations imply an equal somewhere?

But does the SSH client check them?

You can always run Lion Server on a Mac Mini Server. It would also be a very fast NAS especially if you add a Thunderbolt disk array. Might not be the cheapest option, but it gives you your own disgustingly easy to configure web/wiki/email/calendar/vpn/dhcp/radius/file server (with push support for email/calendar). If you can also get a static IP address at home from your ISP you're all set. This last part might actually be the most difficult one in the States, but in other countries it's either free (upon request) or for 1-2 Euros.

As you pointed out, it's not a fault of TLS as a protocol. TLS is a decent protocol, but the trusted roots part is not the best approach. I really have much better trust in DNSSEC as an approach. I just wish there was a generic way of publishing all keys over DNS (instead of LDAP) for SSH, PGP, S/MIME, SSL and anything else.