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First off, Skype.

Some weeks ago, I wrote that the Government of Bermuda had made Skype illegal. Skype is a free telephone service provided through the Internet, using a mechanism called Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

I was wrong. My assumption was based on the notion that any activity that undercut the business and/or profitability of Bermudian-owned enterprises would not be tolerated. It was a fair assumption in most cases, and few would complain. After all, isn?t protecting their citizens what governments are supposed to do?

It should be pointed out that the Bermuda Government, which I routinely criticise regardless of who is in power, has made some genuine headway in meeting the sometimes-conflicting telecommunications needs of its citizens and of those who provide the services. A minute on the phone to, say, England, used to cost 75 cents; it now costs 19 cents or less.

I do know that the Government made ?callback? services illegal. Those are the mechanisms by which a Bermuda telephone subscriber dials a number in (I think) New York, and once the connection has been established, immediately hangs up. Through some miracle of modern science (or should that be modem science?), the Bermuda subscriber is then called back with a telephone line on which can be dialled a call to most anywhere at a very low price.

Had Government allowed that service to be used, Bermudians would quickly have put the local service providers out of business, and then the whole telecommunications infrastructure would have collapsed. What seemed like a harsh decision was, in fact, a good one. (I know, we?d rather make cheap calls and damn the consequences, but the consequences, in the end, would damn us.)

Skype is a different kettle of how?s your father. As best I understand it (and it?s technical, so I don?t), VoIP works rather like the rest of the Internet. No clearer? I think it means that VoIP takes your endless prattle, digitises it (whatever that means) and then breaks it up into little packets, short bits of data that can be transferred across the Internet.

Such messages follow the line of least resistance in working their way to their destination. Sometimes, it?s quicker for an e-mail to your auntie in Baltimore to go via Thailand, if the Thai connection is less busy than the Baltimore connection. A friend once showed me the route taken by a message he had sent from his house in Pembroke to his office in Hamilton. It was 26 jumps, half-way around the world. His messages were much better travelled than he was.

I mention this because, logically, you would expect your vocal ramblings, broken down into a zillion little packets of digital data, to be reassembled in, at the very least, a jittery condition. Sort of like Jeff Goldblum in ?The Fly?.

And yet. Last week, I was baby-sitting a couple of child geniuses, when a strange ringing sound was heard. One of the kids shouted to the other: ?Quick! Answer the Skype!? I listened in on the speaker phone, and it all sounded much like a regular phone call to me.

A high-ranking government official recently told me, more or less, that there is no way that the powers that be can stop anyone using Skype, which has become a global phenomenon.

I would say this, however: for it to work, you have to leave your computer on all the time. If you choose to do that (and I wouldn?t), for goodness? sake use the best anti-virus protection money can buy, because always-on connections are manna from heaven to hackers and other do-badders. Always-on connections have brought down Bermuda Internet service providers more than once, so the 19 cents you save may cost the rest of us our connectivity.

So now I?ll be getting letters from sundry geeks and hackers, telling me that I don?t know what I?m talking about, and they?ll be right, sort of.

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In other news, as they say, a very droll fellow I know took exception to something I wrote last week, in which I credited Germany?s hyper-inflation to Adolf Hitler. I would like to quote my source, since he?s such good value:

?You are the greatest genius who ever lived,? he wrote. No, wait. I wrote that. What my friend wrote was: ?There is (an) item in your (column) with which one could take issue. It was on the portly shoulders of Herr Rudolf E.A. Havenstein, (Federal Reserve chairman Alan) Greenspan?s counterpart in 1923 in the central Bank of the German Empire, that the weight of the decision to print his country out of recession, and the awful consequences thereof, must rest.

?By extension it was not the subsequent regime, but the Weimar Republic that must be tainted with the invention of hyperinflation. In the light of subsequent events, this earnest and thorough debauching of the currency pales to a peccadillo.?

My correspondent is right, of course, although in a subsequent e-mail he added:

?Today I discovered that the wretched inventor of serious hyperinflation, the luckless Herr Havenstein of the Reichsbank, resigned because he succumbed to death on November 20, 1923, at the age of about 62. Poor chap. I hope his life was insured in Rentenmarks.?

A short explanation of the Rentenmark, taken from the Internet (but necessarily edited for grammar) at www.schoolshistory.org.uk/ASLevel_History/rentenmark.htm:

?The introduction of the Rentenmark was highly significant. It allowed the currency to stabilise and, supported by the Dawes Plan, stood a good chance of not succumbing to inflationary pressures as had previously happened. The new Rentenmark was valued at 1 Rentenmark to one trillion old marks. The Rentenmark was exchangeable for bonds in land and industrial plant ? in other words it was worth something. Inflation ceased to be a problem, the German people accepted the value of the new currency and businesses accepted it as being of worth.?

Slightly off the subject, the writer added: ?You will also be uninterested to know that I gave all my stamp collection, with stamps overstamped with million, tera-, and petamark denominations, to my sister when I was of a tender age.?

This brought back memories of my own delightful childhood (about three days, when I was seven). I, too, collected stamps, and had German stamps of the 1920s that had been printed as, say, one Mark, and not much later overstamped as one million Marks. The currency devalued so quickly that Germans would need a wheelbarrow full of banknotes to buy a loaf of bread, and the next day need two wheelbarrows full.

I recall this being explained to me as a tender youth (I am now a callous geezer), and understood it then about as well as I do now. Herr Hitler was, in some ways, the product of the Weimar Republic?s inability to control its currency, rather than the cause. Mea culpa.

To borrow a phrase from a deeply offensive advertising campaign in Britain in the build-up to this year?s soccer World Cup in Germany: first left, third reich.

Keep those cards and letters coming. You can reach me at crombienorthrock.bm.