The future is here

James Gosling kinda responed to my "no paper post":

One of the things that's always interesting about visiting Japan is looking at all of their cell phones. I've seen some great things here on this visit. ... You can use your cell phone to book airplane (and train) tickets, and use the cell phone itself as both the ticket and the boarding pass. Zero paper. To check in, you just swipe your phone on a reader as you're dashing to your seat. Very fast and secure.

This reminds me of Singapore, where you can use your mobile phone for virtually everything. You can even use sms to pay for a can of coke at a machine.

I love that idea! I simply want my mobile phone to be an "all-in-one" (Eierlegendewollmilchsau) or "silver bullet" device, which can do everything. As I pointed out, I use my mobile phone to schedule stuff, write down notes, surf the web and write emails. I wanna be able to pay for a cab, get tickets and order seats for a movie.

Unfortunately in Germany that's somehow not possible - for various reasons. One of those reasons is security concerns. Some folks would wack out, if you could pay stuff with your mobile phone. Think of bluetooths hacks, bugging or stealing your identidy!! They are excessively disturbed security freaks preventing innovation!

I know that there are security issues, but I'm sure we could solve them, if we'd just relax a little. I also think we should give everyone a chance to innovate and put his/her's identidy "at risk" if they chose to. Almost everybody is using a wireless network at home and thus already making a choice that they accept the risk of being compromised.

However, there are folks out there, that are not aware of the security problems and I think it's important that the before mentioned security freaks point out those issues for them. What they shouldn't do is create FUD, cause it hinders adoption and thus innovation.