Illicit Economy Underpinning Banksters
Wow.
Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.
Unsustainable Way of Fighting Taliban Bandhs
In an effort to operate freely, the Taliban has been breaking cell phone networks at night for a few years. The State Department’s “Senior Advisor on Innovation” (an innovation czar?) has a solution: have the USG absorb the cost of these disruptions rather than the cell phone provider.
Idea: Tangible Text
I have one of the multi-touch Macbook Pro’s. The ability to manipulate my documents and web browsing experience with swipes has really accelerated my workflow. This performance yield has yet to be extracted from word processing though. Hence TangibleText: A killer feature that enables anyone who has to edit significant amounts of text (professionals, executives, etc) to do so in a way that embraces re-organization as a key component of that process.
When I’m editing complex documents generated by someone else (happens with some frequency) I reorganize a lot more than I add/subtract. For the latter two operations, my keyboard is good enough. Click, type, or click and drag and delete. For reorganizing, I don’t want to be limited by the constraints of this approach.
If I cut/paste, I can’t see the text I’m playing with. If I copy/paste, I have to deal with two copies and delete the original. Neither solution is optimal. This is where swiping/a tablet interface really helps out. Select some text, then drag it around (as a snippet, not the vertical bar that’s currently allowed) with my fingers. Place where I want to, lock it in with another click. Done.
There’s even room for an entire office suite that has multi-touch ingrained at the DNA level (not the superficial application we’ll see ingrained with the next release of MS). Think about building (multi-touch takes that verb to a whole new level in the context of computers) a slide deck this way. Could be very useful, and fun to boot!
