One area where competition has become an unquestionable necessity is among the firms vying for our personal finances. Without the threat posed by a competitor, it seems, banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions are quite happy to provide shoddy service and miserly products.

Everyone from campaigners such as Which? and Martin Lewis to peers in the House of Lords has called for improved standards at banks. Over the past decade, these monolithic organisations have racked up multibillion-pound profits while presiding over a cataclysmic financial crisis and multiple mis-selling scandals.

So, as I have chronicled in recent weeks, I took the plunge and gave the new seven-day switching service a test in late September. I am sorry to report that it has failed somewhat miserably. Not only did the “seven days” promised turn into 20, but one of my direct debits was cancelled on moving from HSBC to First Direct – even though the two banks are owned by the same group.

A blocked credit card, missed bill payment and several charges appeared on my account. It took much effort to right these wrongs, including an infuriating call to HSBC’s foreign call centre, which gave an incorrect explanation of the root cause. Sounds all too familiar, doesn’t it?

"People have really gotten comfortable sharing more information and different kinds." Riiight. Little did we know that by that time, Facebook (along with Google, Microsoft, etc) was already collaborating with the National Security Agency's PRISM program that swept up personal data on vast numbers of internet users.

In light of what we know now, Zuckerberg's high-hat act has a bit of a creepy feel, like that guy who told you he was a documentary photographer, but turned out to be a Peeping Tom. But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised: At the core of Facebook's business model is the notion that our personal information is not, well, ours. And much like the NSA, no matter how often it's told to stop using data in ways we didn't authorize, it just won't quit.

Not long after Zuckerberg's "evolving norm" dodge, Facebook had to promise the feds it would stop doing things like putting your picture in ads targeted at your "friends"; that promise lasted only until this past summer, when it suddenly "clarified" its right to do with your (and your kids') photos whatever it sees fit.

And just this week, Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin told the Wall Street Journal that the company is experimenting with new ways to suck up your data, such as "how long a user's cursor hovers over a certain part of its website, or whether a user's newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone."

But beyond all the Friends and Hangouts and Favorites, there's cold, hard cash, and, as they say on Sand Hill Road, when the product is free, you are the product. It's your data that makes Facebook worth $100 billion and Google $300 billion. It's your data that info-mining companies like Acxiom and Datalogix package, repackage, sift, and sell. And it's your data that, as we've now learned, tech giants also pass along to the government.

On Monday, a gunman opened fire at New Jersey's Garden State Plaza. The suspected shooter killed himself before anyone else was hurt. That incident, coupled with the September terrorist attacks in Nairobi that left more than 60 people dead, may have stirred up questions among shoppers about how safe it is to head to a shopping center.

People are taking fewer trips to the mall as it is. Overall retail traffic has been trending lower over the past decade, as more shoppers go online. Analytics firm ShopperTrak predicts retail traffic will decline 1.4 percent this holiday, though founder Bill Martin said it's important to note that the number of unique shoppers has remained relatively flat over the past 14 months. Retailers will need to perform the delicate task of calming concerns without fanning any fears.

Shopping centers take a number of measures to prevent and handle attacks, according to Malachy Kavanagh, vice president of communications and external relations at the International Council of Shopping Centers. Major centers practice evacuation and training drills throughout the year, and perform shooter training drills with police officers, Kavanagh said.

While armed robots have been tested before, these bots are notable for the accuracy of fire and their apparent readiness for combat. These aren’t science fiction or exotic prototypes, but realistic extensions and modifications of existing robotic platforms.

The robots fired at targets 150 meters out. However the effective range of the weapon is 1800 meters. Moreover, the robot can be remotely operated from over 3000 meters away giving a controlling infantry unit an effective radius of about 5000 meters. However, most humans are not very accurate shots at 1500 meters or more. Enter another interesting military technology related video that made the rounds this week, Austin’s TrackingPoint “smart gun”.

The demonstration video shows how this technology allows the gun operator to have essentially “tap and kill” capability where the gun software calculates the correct targeting parameters and fires itself. The eventual evolution and convergence of the two ideas is a mobile remote robotics platform which will employ small arms more effectively than a human soldier which can be remotely controlled by a human operator far away from the battlefield.

The goal is to feed the reflections of the Synod of Bishops, held in October 2014 the "pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelization.” The audience remains unclear, but the Conference of the English bishops did not wait for further instructions and could be emulated: it published the online questionnaire to all Catholics, "lay people, priests, seminarians, chaplains, catechists..." Wishing to participate in this groundbreaking survey.

The Bishop of Guyana, he has published the text on the site of his diocese. Since his election, Pope Francis promises a more collegial work and greater participation of the laity in the Catholic institution, it's just too centralized. The extent of selected suggestions shows the ability of the Church to take into account the voice of his people.

Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid party, spoke to Kol Yisrael (Voice of Israel) radio following reports that Israel’s chief negotiator, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, is seeking to offer the PA control over several Jerusalem neighborhoods, as well as joint control over other parts of the capital. The city of Jerusalem will not be divided, Lapid stated.

Jerusalem is the “founding ethos” of the state of Israel, and must remain Israeli, he explained. The PA must come to terms with this, he continued, saying, “If the Palestinians want a state, they need to know there’s a price for that. They won’t get everything they want.”

Earlier, Minister Gilad Erdan expressed a slightly different take on things in an interview with Kol Yisrael. Erdan said he was not surprised to hear that Israeli and PA negotiators were discussing the status of Jerusalem, and pointed out that government leaders had stated prior to talks that no issue would be left off the table.

However, like Lapid, Erdan expressed belief that Jerusalem will remain a united city under Israeli sovereignty. The PA has insisted on receiving all land east of the 1949 armistice line, including the eastern part of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount – Judaism’s most sacred site.

Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Conservative leader, said the speculation was unhelpful and de-stabilising to both the workforce and their families. She described the workforce on the Clyde as highly professional, motivated and loyal, and said they deserved clear answers.

A BAE spokesman said the company was working closely with the Ministry of Defence to “explore all possible options to determine how best to sustain the capability to deliver complex warships in the UK in the future”.

Hugh Scullion, general secretary of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions (CSEU), said the union would hold talks with senior BAE Systems executives early next week to "examine the business case of the forthcoming announcement".

Speculation over Govan’s future mounted last weekend after it emerged that five cranes at the yard were being decommissioned, although BAE said the decision was not related to its maritime review.

Two other BAE shipyards in Govan and Scotsoun on the Clyde in Scotland are expected to remain open and continue shipbuilding, in what is being seen as a victory for Alex Salmond.

The Royal Navy has never commissioned a warship from a shipyard outside the UK and sources say that the Portsmouth site could be restarted if there is a "yes" vote in Scotland in ten months time to ensure that this continues to be the case.

Downing Street sources confirmed that the Portsmouth yard will close "by and large" with a few functions being retained. "The future of Royal Navy shipbuilding will be Clyde based," they said.

“We will discuss this question next week,” said EU economics chief Olli Rehn after releasing the commission’s Autumn report. The text said Germany’s current account surplus will remain far above tolerable levels into the middle of the decade.

Mr Rehn said Berlin had been told by EU leaders at a summit in June that Germany has a duty to help boost demand and “create sustained conditions” for German wage rises. This would help rebalance the EMU system and lift pressure off the crisis states in the South.

The report said Germany’s surplus will narrow slightly from 7 percent of GDP this year to 6.6 percent in 2014 and 6.4 percent in 2015, but this still breaches the EU’s new “macro-imbalances” rules. It could ultimately lead to sanctions, with a vote taken by a qualified majority of EU states. Such a dispute would in effect be a court of judgment on Germany by EU peers.

While a confrontation is unlikely, the tougher talk from Brussels raises the political temperature in Europe. An attempt to indict Germany would prompt fury in Berlin, where politicians rejected US criticism last week that the country was acting as a free-rider on scarce global demand and creating a “deflationary bias” for the whole world. Berlin has called such attacks “incomprehensible”, insisting that export success helps the whole of Europe and should be prized.

As one friend of mine put it, "Whatever those morons put aside for settlements, they'd better double it." There's a huge mess involving possible manipulation of the world currency markets. This scandal is already drawing comparisons to the last biggest-financial-scandal-in-history (the Financial Times wondered about a "repeat Libor scandal"), the manipulation of interest rates via the gaming of the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor. The foreign exchange or FX market is the largest financial market in the world, with a daily trading volume of nearly $5 trillion.

One gets the feeling that governments in all the major Western democracies would like to sweep these manipulation scandals under the rug. The only problem is that the scale of the misdeeds in these various markets is so enormous that even the most half-assed attempt at regulation will cause a million-car pileup.

There's simply no way to do a damage calculation that won't wipe out the entire finance sector when you're talking about pervasive, ongoing manipulation of $5-trillion-a-day markets. That's the problem – there's no way to do a slap on the wrist in these cases. If they're guilty, they're done.

The facility, allegedly sited on the roof of the British Embassy in Berlin, is supposedly operated by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK’s largest intelligence agency.

Germany took the unusual step of requesting Simon McDonald, the British ambassador, to attend a meeting at the foreign ministry. The German diplomat responsible for relations with European countries “asked for an explanation of current reports in British media and indicated that tapping communications from a diplomatic mission would be a violation of international law”.

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the US National Security Agency (NSA), appeared to disclose the GCHQ listening post in Berlin, according to The Independent. The British Embassy is only a few hundred yards from the US mission, where the NSA was running an eavesdropping centre that targeted the mobile phone of Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor.

But thanks to the continued miniaturization of technology, snooping devices and those designed to disrupt wireless operations are proliferating at an unbelievable pace. According to Britain's Daily Mail, Russian investigators say they have discovered hidden microchips in Chinese-made household appliances that have been imported into the country, designed to transmit spam and other malware into wireless networks.

The paper said officials in St Petersburg claim to have discovered 20 to 30 kettles and irons that contained "spy chips that send some data to the Foreign Service," Russian media reported. It's not been a good year for Russia and espionage; word of the Chinese chips comes as the European Union launched an investigation into claims that Moscow had bugged gifts it sent to delegates at last month's G20 summit, in a bid to steal data from computers and cell phones.

Other appliances have been causing concern to privacy advocates - among them, so-called "smart TVs." Techies have warned that the TVs are vulnerable to hacking, just like a laptop or other Wi-Fi device, and, as such, could be used to steal your personal data or even "watch you."

Five million tons of wreckage - the remains of homes, boats, and other remnants of shattered lives in eastern Japan - were swallowed by the ocean that day in March, and more than one million tons of flotsam continues to head towards the west coast of the US.

While the first documented debris from the tragedy has already been found in California, scientists fear these new findings mean there could be a lot more to come and it might arrive all at once. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) released its updated findings last week, which show the huge island floating northeast of the Hawaiian Islands. NOAA scientists add that a larger and less-concentrated debris field stretches from Alaska to the Philippines.

The software company has said it is appalled how Google uses “private information for profit” and found the majority of people think scanning emails is “an invasion of privacy. “ In a series of new adverts, Microsoft explains how Google reads every email users send, picking up on key words to target advertising in a bid to make more cash.

In a survey Microsoft found 83 per cent of people felt scanning emails was an invasion of privacy and 93 per cent said they thought users should be allowed to opt out of the service – it is not currently possible to do this as a Gmail user.

Microsoft, which makes most of its money by selling software, has set up a website called keepyouremailprivate.com which includes examples of how Google uses emails to make more money.

Having learned about high frequency trading a few years ago my faith in the stock market was rattled. Then the Crash hit. Then the Fed started pouring money into the world markets. My faith in the stock market, even as it rose was completely shaken.

When I realized what all the new fiat money, coupled with the power of quants meant for the economy I became (and remain) very concerned about the razor edge the world lives on and how far our stock markets have detached from actual real live investing.

It’s not even close to fair for most people in the market. There is a quiet war going on in the ribbons of fiber optics which stretch between Wall Street, Greenwich Connecticut, and beyond. The new masters of the universe write code. They are programmers.