When Congress approved the TARP on Oct. 3, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged the need for transparency and oversight. Now, as regulators commit far more money while refusing to disclose loan recipients or reveal the collateral they are taking in return, some Congress members are calling for the Fed to be reined in.
This is the future of mobile: to invent interfaces that throw away the assumptions of the previous generation. Point and click was a breakthrough for PCs, but it's a trap for mobile interface design. Right now, the iPhone (and other similar smartphones) have an array of sensors: the microphone, the camera, the touchscreen, the accelerometer, the location sensor (GPS or cell triangulation), and yes, on many, the keyboard and pointing device. Future applications will surprise us by using them in new ways, and in new combinations; future devices will provide richer and richer arrays of senses (yes, senses, not just sensors) for paying attention to what we want.
Lord Goldsmith said his critic was "entitled to his own legal perspective".
"But at the time and since then many nations other than ours took part in the action and did so believing that they were acting lawfully," he said.
If there are any doubts about the seriousness of the internet moving into three dimensions, then look to China, which is planning a series of different virtual worlds able to host not tens but hundreds of millions of avatars. The idea is to attract people (as avatars) from around the world to come and buy Chinese goods more cheaply from source. In this way they plan to capture the value added to a shirt that leaves a Chinese factory for a dollar but is sold in London for $20. Since the West is virtually - sorry, actually - living off this 'value-added' revenue at the moment, our manufacturing base already having emigrated to China, the economic implications are ominous.
