I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed, And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Eh, to me, this is more of an issue of a "price point"... the public perception of "expensiveness"... Music on CD is expensive at $18, but not expensive at $12. Goung out ot the Movies is cheap at $5 matinee, but expensive at $8.75. Now a month's subscription to an online game is cheap at $10 and expensive at $15.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. It will remain at $15 for a long time, because of the relative price to purchasing a new game... if it goes up to $20, we're talking on the order of your dial-up ISP bill, or more importantly, the value of half of a new game. If people feel that they are not getting enough "content" for their subscriptions (can an old game provide as much new content as a fully new game every two months?), then they will cancel their accounts, and the game loses their income streams.
Now some games push it (Everquest took about 8 months to get the first expansion) and some are actively delivering new content to their users (City of Heroes, with new zones, new costumes, and new enemies, delivered in one month's time). If the customers feel that they are getting enough new stuff to justify the $15, then they'll stick with it, and everyone's happy in the end.
Exactly, there's no strategic advantage to keeping a tech like this secret. It's gadgets like this that lets the world know that "if you piss us off, we can deliver a 10 ton "bunker buster" on your capital building before you even realize you need to evacuate."
It's the same sort of posturing that Saddam Hussein used to keep Iran and Turkey from invading Iraq; put out news that you have "weaponry" that would make them think twice to mess with you. The difference is that we actually have it.
People seem to have forgotten what the abbreviation Ph.D. stands for... Doctorate of Philosophy in an area of study. These are no longer people who are going to school to learn the existing processes of their study, but are instead contributing to the processes at hand.
You have your normal Batchelor of Science or Arts, who goes to college to learn a specific trade, to learn the base knownledge (vast though it may be for some areas) that will get them employed as a person qualified to make important decisions in their workplace. Then you have people that go back, and study even more things about their area of interest, and gain a Masters degree; they should now be considered to have full understanding of the existing processes, and may have contributed a bit to exploring a thesis at the fringes of their area. Then you have your Ph.D.s, who have Mastered their areas of study, and now spend their time finding new ways of doing things, contributing to the science of things.
Now here's where the problem is. In the education systems, you can jump from one to another to another without actually spending time putting your knowledge to practical use, and you end up with people who are very book-wise but have no idea how to actually produce. So, off the bat, many Ph.D.s in science have no marketability, even if they were unionized...
Let's look at Slashdot, where their idea of science is Computer Science. What does a Ph.D. in computer science do? they develop new algorithms, new optimizations. But what does industry need? interoperability, tested equations, deliverables. Yes, creating a new audio compression layers like MP3 is a great thing, but it is now 10 years since it first appeared on the outskirts of colleges... companies complain about the 7 years it takes to bring new drugs to market... Now, they may have odd ways of thinking that may give a company an edge, but then that's the skillset of the individual, not of PhDs in general.
Unions are definitely not the solution to things, and its a mind-set that many people need to get out of. What a union would do is stifle the desirability of companies to consider hiring Ph.Ds. Why bother, when you can find gifted graduates, and hire them at normal salaries, then give individual bonuses based on performance. New "discoveries" would no longer be done at colleges, but instead in the industry realm, where the new processes can make money (and unfortunately are not as open to society). This is the market solution to the situation, if a Ph.D. actually has something to offer to the company, then they will be paid what the value of their work is worth. What we need to do is stop flooding the companies with Ph.D.s who don't actually know anything about practical work. If there is a drive for such philosophical learnings, then it is best served with grants from the government and let them stay at college where they can contribute to the nation's body of knowledge. Let the companies pay what they are able to and willing to pay, for if the individual is worth it, then they will earn it.
My mistake... I work with EHV AC power all day, forgot that DC is slightly different. And no, I wouldn't recommend AC over that distance either.
One thing that just popped into my head is, how would you deal with a grounded "wire" who's other end is in the clouds during a thunderstorm? Lightning is the electrical static discharge of the temperature front as it moves across the landscape, when the charge stored exceeds the permittivity of air. If you had a wire passing through the storm front, wouldn't it be the most desireable path for a discharge?
I was trying to sound sarcastic, but it didn't come across well...
Of course that's Microsoft's approach.. it's win-win. You annoy your older customers until they "voluntarily" buy the new version of your produce, and you make more money. If they don't upgrade, then you can say "well, you're bringing it upon yourselves"...
Well, then it sounds like Microsoft's preferred solution is that everyone upgrades to Windows XP, and popups will no longer be a problem for the user...
The longest land based transmission line is in the Congo at 1700 km, running at 500 KV DC. For the rest of us, that's 1,056 miles. So basically, we'd need 25x the longest transmission line ever built to date... so we could carry less energy than building one medium size fossil fuel plant on the ground.
Now there are several tricks to power transmission. One, raise the voltage and lower the current, and you'll have less heating of the line, as temperature is proportional to current and resistance. Needless to say, this would incredibly complicate your anchoring system on earth. Next, current flows on the surface of a wire, so transmission lines are actually bundles of smaller "threads" wound together in parallel. This evenly distributes the energy, reducing the net resistance of the "wire".
For a wire that long, you have to work with the old RCLG formulase for losses across the line... reactive charging losses and resistive heat losses. The line would be so long that the voltage would decay long before you'd reach the other end, and no power could be transferred.
The sad part is that upon completion of the Chunnel (sorry, EuroTunnel), it is now no longer the economical method of travel...
London to Paris via train (Eurostar): 149 GBP London (Heathrow) to Paris via plane (AirFrance): 64 GBP
Admittedly, you could probably shop around for a better train price, but since Eurostar is the operator, I figured their rate had the least restrictions...
... having Kirk or Bones know his height in feet and inches, just like they knew the old calendar system as well as stardates...
If the Americans will be the first to master space travel, then why is it so hard to believe that everything will be done using American measuring units? Or did you actually believe that Starfleet would be run like the U.N.?
That's another reason why I liked Firefly... in the future, humans had to be equally conversant in both English and Chinese... what I believe will be a more accurate mixture of future cultures.
Quite insightful, since the mantra of modern science appears to be Discovery without accounting for Morality. Human Embryonic Stem Cells comes to mind...
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. --Albert Einstein
... Those bozos can't even replace the existing Shuttle. Not for lack of money, either....
Ok, you have a NASA administration that is completely incompetent (by your own admission, throwing good money after bad), and then you complain that the commision wants to change out the organizational structure. As if leaving these people in the positions to make business decisions is viable?
And amazingly enough, changing NASA's finance model to a DARPA model, shouldn't cost as much money as NASA is now, so it shouldn't be a surprise that future funding is not as aggresive as it is today. In my opinion, we have given them plenty of money, which they squandered on building (1) a floating international research station without science modules and (2) a flying tractor trailer to move shipments when we needed taxis. They've hardly earned my respect to continue to have responsibility.
I wonder if we're actually seeing a different sort of trend developing, when movies suck so bad I say they should have be released "Direct to Video... Game".
I was rather underwhelmed by the plot in Chronicles of Riddick, I mean really, dude escapes from prison, gets tangled up with a religeous military commander, lots of gunfights, melee, corny jokes... great video game, defintely not your epic sci-fi.
Even Shrek 2, for all its comedy, the whole thing with the Keebler Elf Potion Factory, so help me I was sitting in my chair thinking "conveyor belts, jump to the next one, swing on the machine... Shrek 2 The Video Game is on its way". It's almost like scenes are gratuitously added to the movies so that there's something to do to stretch out a game.
Of course from the capitalist perspective, it's ingenious. You'll blow $8 on a movie for two hours entertainment, $20 for a DVD, but if you can get people to spend $50 on a game, now that's serious profit.
Every now and then I tune into old episodes of Jim Cramer's financial news radio show at TheStreet.com in the upper right... he's also a commentator on CNBC, voice is a little harsh but given that he made his millions in funds (not communications), I'll listen. You'll have to fill out a registration, and then you can stream in a RealAudio feed of yesterday's ep anytime. I happen to like his witty style of digging into bad companies, and he relly seems more of a "watchdog" when it comes to tech stocks... plus it's better to learn how to invest your money (by someone on the radio) than being told where to invest.
Other than that, New York's WABC 770AM offers a free feed here. The afternoon crowd gets a bit too old school conservative for my liking, but Monica Crowley has her "get the government out" libertarian moments. Oh, they also carry the Drudge Report on Sunday Nights... always an interesting show.
Did the government step in and force the show off the air? Not quite, the ABC network made the move. What that instance proves is that the public still has the right to voice their opinion too.
You see, the host made a comment about the 9/11 hijackers who were, in his words, "Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly.". Further analysis on the issue showed that interest groups pressured the advertisers (Sears, FedEx) to stop supporting the show and the public stopped tuning in. The net is that ABC viewership went down and income dropped. ABC, following the market (as businesses tend to do in this country), reacted by cancelling the show at the end of the season.
This is hardly on the order of a senator calling for hearings, subpoenaing actors and Hollywood businesses, and putting them on public trials. Bill Maher didn't serve jail time, and in fact, has gone on to write a number of books. Ooh, chilling effect!
The difference is that the first two were targeted judicial actions brought on by a "vindictive" accuser. The "third", as you put it, is not a witch trial in any sense of the Salem trials or McCarthey trials. Noone's work has been blacklisted, no opinion made illegal, no person unduely arrested, much less executed as in Salem.
The Dixie Chicks still hold concerts. Half of the Senate are vocal opponents of the administration's policies on terrorism. Michael Moore still got his movie out, and he's won a few awards I hear. Speaking out against authority today is nothing like how it was in ages past.
It's one thing to learn from history, but it's another to realize what portion of history is fact and what is propaganda. It's best that we all learn perspective from the past, instead of blindly believing what we are told today... I mean, hell, it's the anniversary of D-Day, when a whole lot more people died in one battle on one day than the most recent war in 4 months across a nation... perspective.
How long until you realize you wouldn't want to live in a roman democracy? Majority rules all the time.
If we were in a democracy, we'd still have slavery, all be Protestant catholics, and the luddites probably would have won the industrial age "war". Hell, the "majority" didnt even support the war of independance that formed the USA. But we follow a system of republic representation, where a few people make decisions that represent the majorities, a few that we think have the foresight to counter bad policies and repeal bad laws.
If you feel your representative no longer holds your interests at heart, then by all means, stop voting for them. And if you chose not to vote, then shut your yap, you have no grounds to complain.
All well in good, in 20 years you will reduce crime. Though, if I want to reduce crime in the short term, I'd start by doing what Japan is doing in the short term:
"... Persons violating Japanese law, even unknowingly, may be expelled, arrested or imprisoned.... In most drug cases, suspects are detained incommunicado, which bars them from receiving visitors or corresponding with anyone other than a lawyer or U.S. consular officer until after indictment, which may take as long as several months. Persons arrested in Japan, even for a minor offense, may be held in detention without bail for many weeks during the investigation and legal proceedings. "
Actually, in 40 years, no generals, 3 lawyers. 17 of the 43 Presidents were governors, and only 3 of the 8 in the last 40 years were governors, so I would hardly say that's the trend.
To answer your political point, I would harther have a president who served without distinction, than one who served only to return to criticize his peers. Or to put it in terms you would understand, I would rather have someone who joined the reserves and did his time without incident (obviously since little records exist, he did nothing that drew attention to himself), than one who joined the military only to tell his fellow soldiers he had joined for political gain, who exited early under the 3 purple heart rule yet will not release any records explaining his injuries that led to the medals. And I wont even go into how he threw "his" awards away...
I believe the answer is that space is expanding, pushing the electron away from the nucleus, and the proton away from the neutron. Now, factor the small rate of expansion versus the attraction of the nuclear forces, and the particles will move back towards one another (which you can argue you can't really tell because of the uncertainty princible). The net is that is looks like the space OUTSIDE of the atom is expanding while the atomic particles remain the same distance from one another.
Take this one level up, and the distance between molecules will "collapse" because of gravity between the particles, so again, it looks like there's more spaace outside of the clump of matter.
Example: put honey and an ant on a balloon. The ant is attracted towards the honey. Inflate the balloon, and the space between the ant and its food will increase. The ant still wants food, so it moves foward slightly towards the honey. If the rate of inflation is small enough, we will think that the relative distance between the ant and its food is constant.
Well, its more like the behavior of a 3D engine with a very short Level of Detail distance, and a new texture file to substitute in each band. Combine that with a low cache (maybe just too much texture variations), and you have constant texture swapping.
Slashdot Mirror
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822
As opposed to officials of the previous administration, who just take the classified documents home with them and "lose" them.
What this tells me is that there aren't enough controls (chain of custody) over documents...
Yeah, this one really makes you want to switch ... ;)
And yet, they make us pay for New Orleans' Mardi Gras videos... why can't the public get free feeds of that? Please?
Eh, to me, this is more of an issue of a "price point"... the public perception of "expensiveness"... Music on CD is expensive at $18, but not expensive at $12. Goung out ot the Movies is cheap at $5 matinee, but expensive at $8.75. Now a month's subscription to an online game is cheap at $10 and expensive at $15.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. It will remain at $15 for a long time, because of the relative price to purchasing a new game... if it goes up to $20, we're talking on the order of your dial-up ISP bill, or more importantly, the value of half of a new game. If people feel that they are not getting enough "content" for their subscriptions (can an old game provide as much new content as a fully new game every two months?), then they will cancel their accounts, and the game loses their income streams.
Now some games push it (Everquest took about 8 months to get the first expansion) and some are actively delivering new content to their users (City of Heroes, with new zones, new costumes, and new enemies, delivered in one month's time). If the customers feel that they are getting enough new stuff to justify the $15, then they'll stick with it, and everyone's happy in the end.
Exactly, there's no strategic advantage to keeping a tech like this secret. It's gadgets like this that lets the world know that "if you piss us off, we can deliver a 10 ton "bunker buster" on your capital building before you even realize you need to evacuate."
It's the same sort of posturing that Saddam Hussein used to keep Iran and Turkey from invading Iraq; put out news that you have "weaponry" that would make them think twice to mess with you. The difference is that we actually have it.
People seem to have forgotten what the abbreviation Ph.D. stands for... Doctorate of Philosophy in an area of study. These are no longer people who are going to school to learn the existing processes of their study, but are instead contributing to the processes at hand.
You have your normal Batchelor of Science or Arts, who goes to college to learn a specific trade, to learn the base knownledge (vast though it may be for some areas) that will get them employed as a person qualified to make important decisions in their workplace. Then you have people that go back, and study even more things about their area of interest, and gain a Masters degree; they should now be considered to have full understanding of the existing processes, and may have contributed a bit to exploring a thesis at the fringes of their area. Then you have your Ph.D.s, who have Mastered their areas of study, and now spend their time finding new ways of doing things, contributing to the science of things.
Now here's where the problem is. In the education systems, you can jump from one to another to another without actually spending time putting your knowledge to practical use, and you end up with people who are very book-wise but have no idea how to actually produce. So, off the bat, many Ph.D.s in science have no marketability, even if they were unionized...
Let's look at Slashdot, where their idea of science is Computer Science. What does a Ph.D. in computer science do? they develop new algorithms, new optimizations. But what does industry need? interoperability, tested equations, deliverables. Yes, creating a new audio compression layers like MP3 is a great thing, but it is now 10 years since it first appeared on the outskirts of colleges... companies complain about the 7 years it takes to bring new drugs to market... Now, they may have odd ways of thinking that may give a company an edge, but then that's the skillset of the individual, not of PhDs in general.
Unions are definitely not the solution to things, and its a mind-set that many people need to get out of. What a union would do is stifle the desirability of companies to consider hiring Ph.Ds. Why bother, when you can find gifted graduates, and hire them at normal salaries, then give individual bonuses based on performance. New "discoveries" would no longer be done at colleges, but instead in the industry realm, where the new processes can make money (and unfortunately are not as open to society). This is the market solution to the situation, if a Ph.D. actually has something to offer to the company, then they will be paid what the value of their work is worth. What we need to do is stop flooding the companies with Ph.D.s who don't actually know anything about practical work. If there is a drive for such philosophical learnings, then it is best served with grants from the government and let them stay at college where they can contribute to the nation's body of knowledge. Let the companies pay what they are able to and willing to pay, for if the individual is worth it, then they will earn it.
My mistake... I work with EHV AC power all day, forgot that DC is slightly different. And no, I wouldn't recommend AC over that distance either.
One thing that just popped into my head is, how would you deal with a grounded "wire" who's other end is in the clouds during a thunderstorm? Lightning is the electrical static discharge of the temperature front as it moves across the landscape, when the charge stored exceeds the permittivity of air. If you had a wire passing through the storm front, wouldn't it be the most desireable path for a discharge?
It's allowed to suck, it's an odd-numbered release...
I was trying to sound sarcastic, but it didn't come across well...
Of course that's Microsoft's approach.. it's win-win. You annoy your older customers until they "voluntarily" buy the new version of your produce, and you make more money. If they don't upgrade, then you can say "well, you're bringing it upon yourselves"...
Or, they could just jump to another browser...
Well, then it sounds like Microsoft's preferred solution is that everyone upgrades to Windows XP, and popups will no longer be a problem for the user...
The longest land based transmission line is in the Congo at 1700 km, running at 500 KV DC. For the rest of us, that's 1,056 miles. So basically, we'd need 25x the longest transmission line ever built to date... so we could carry less energy than building one medium size fossil fuel plant on the ground.
Now there are several tricks to power transmission. One, raise the voltage and lower the current, and you'll have less heating of the line, as temperature is proportional to current and resistance. Needless to say, this would incredibly complicate your anchoring system on earth. Next, current flows on the surface of a wire, so transmission lines are actually bundles of smaller "threads" wound together in parallel. This evenly distributes the energy, reducing the net resistance of the "wire".
For a wire that long, you have to work with the old RCLG formulase for losses across the line... reactive charging losses and resistive heat losses. The line would be so long that the voltage would decay long before you'd reach the other end, and no power could be transferred.
The sad part is that upon completion of the Chunnel (sorry, EuroTunnel), it is now no longer the economical method of travel...
London to Paris via train (Eurostar): 149 GBP
London (Heathrow) to Paris via plane (AirFrance): 64 GBP
Admittedly, you could probably shop around for a better train price, but since Eurostar is the operator, I figured their rate had the least restrictions...
... having Kirk or Bones know his height in feet and inches, just like they knew the old calendar system as well as stardates...
If the Americans will be the first to master space travel, then why is it so hard to believe that everything will be done using American measuring units? Or did you actually believe that Starfleet would be run like the U.N.?
That's another reason why I liked Firefly... in the future, humans had to be equally conversant in both English and Chinese... what I believe will be a more accurate mixture of future cultures.
Quite insightful, since the mantra of modern science appears to be Discovery without accounting for Morality. Human Embryonic Stem Cells comes to mind...
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
--Albert Einstein
... Those bozos can't even replace the existing Shuttle. Not for lack of money, either. ...
Ok, you have a NASA administration that is completely incompetent (by your own admission, throwing good money after bad), and then you complain that the commision wants to change out the organizational structure. As if leaving these people in the positions to make business decisions is viable?
And amazingly enough, changing NASA's finance model to a DARPA model, shouldn't cost as much money as NASA is now, so it shouldn't be a surprise that future funding is not as aggresive as it is today. In my opinion, we have given them plenty of money, which they squandered on building (1) a floating international research station without science modules and (2) a flying tractor trailer to move shipments when we needed taxis. They've hardly earned my respect to continue to have responsibility.
I wonder if we're actually seeing a different sort of trend developing, when movies suck so bad I say they should have be released "Direct to Video ... Game".
I was rather underwhelmed by the plot in Chronicles of Riddick, I mean really, dude escapes from prison, gets tangled up with a religeous military commander, lots of gunfights, melee, corny jokes... great video game, defintely not your epic sci-fi.
Even Shrek 2, for all its comedy, the whole thing with the Keebler Elf Potion Factory, so help me I was sitting in my chair thinking "conveyor belts, jump to the next one, swing on the machine... Shrek 2 The Video Game is on its way". It's almost like scenes are gratuitously added to the movies so that there's something to do to stretch out a game.
Of course from the capitalist perspective, it's ingenious. You'll blow $8 on a movie for two hours entertainment, $20 for a DVD, but if you can get people to spend $50 on a game, now that's serious profit.
Every now and then I tune into old episodes of Jim Cramer's financial news radio show at TheStreet.com in the upper right... he's also a commentator on CNBC, voice is a little harsh but given that he made his millions in funds (not communications), I'll listen. You'll have to fill out a registration, and then you can stream in a RealAudio feed of yesterday's ep anytime. I happen to like his witty style of digging into bad companies, and he relly seems more of a "watchdog" when it comes to tech stocks... plus it's better to learn how to invest your money (by someone on the radio) than being told where to invest.
Other than that, New York's WABC 770AM offers a free feed here. The afternoon crowd gets a bit too old school conservative for my liking, but Monica Crowley has her "get the government out" libertarian moments. Oh, they also carry the Drudge Report on Sunday Nights... always an interesting show.
Did the government step in and force the show off the air? Not quite, the ABC network made the move. What that instance proves is that the public still has the right to voice their opinion too.
You see, the host made a comment about the 9/11 hijackers who were, in his words, "Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly.". Further analysis on the issue showed that interest groups pressured the advertisers (Sears, FedEx) to stop supporting the show and the public stopped tuning in. The net is that ABC viewership went down and income dropped. ABC, following the market (as businesses tend to do in this country), reacted by cancelling the show at the end of the season.
This is hardly on the order of a senator calling for hearings, subpoenaing actors and Hollywood businesses, and putting them on public trials. Bill Maher didn't serve jail time, and in fact, has gone on to write a number of books. Ooh, chilling effect!
The difference is that the first two were targeted judicial actions brought on by a "vindictive" accuser. The "third", as you put it, is not a witch trial in any sense of the Salem trials or McCarthey trials. Noone's work has been blacklisted, no opinion made illegal, no person unduely arrested, much less executed as in Salem.
... I mean, hell, it's the anniversary of D-Day, when a whole lot more people died in one battle on one day than the most recent war in 4 months across a nation... perspective.
The Dixie Chicks still hold concerts. Half of the Senate are vocal opponents of the administration's policies on terrorism. Michael Moore still got his movie out, and he's won a few awards I hear. Speaking out against authority today is nothing like how it was in ages past.
It's one thing to learn from history, but it's another to realize what portion of history is fact and what is propaganda. It's best that we all learn perspective from the past, instead of blindly believing what we are told today
How long until you realize you wouldn't want to live in a roman democracy? Majority rules all the time.
If we were in a democracy, we'd still have slavery, all be Protestant catholics, and the luddites probably would have won the industrial age "war". Hell, the "majority" didnt even support the war of independance that formed the USA. But we follow a system of republic representation, where a few people make decisions that represent the majorities, a few that we think have the foresight to counter bad policies and repeal bad laws.
If you feel your representative no longer holds your interests at heart, then by all means, stop voting for them. And if you chose not to vote, then shut your yap, you have no grounds to complain.
All well in good, in 20 years you will reduce crime. Though, if I want to reduce crime in the short term, I'd start by doing what Japan is doing in the short term:
... In most drug cases, suspects are detained incommunicado, which bars them from receiving visitors or corresponding with anyone other than a lawyer or U.S. consular officer until after indictment, which may take as long as several months. Persons arrested in Japan, even for a minor offense, may be held in detention without bail for many weeks during the investigation and legal proceedings. "
"... Persons violating Japanese law, even unknowingly, may be expelled, arrested or imprisoned.
Or, A spate of juvenile crimes over the past two years has prompted Japan's government to propose a new bill that would lower the criminal punishment age from 16 years to 14 years old.
Actually, in 40 years, no generals, 3 lawyers. 17 of the 43 Presidents were governors, and only 3 of the 8 in the last 40 years were governors, so I would hardly say that's the trend.
To answer your political point, I would harther have a president who served without distinction, than one who served only to return to criticize his peers. Or to put it in terms you would understand, I would rather have someone who joined the reserves and did his time without incident (obviously since little records exist, he did nothing that drew attention to himself), than one who joined the military only to tell his fellow soldiers he had joined for political gain, who exited early under the 3 purple heart rule yet will not release any records explaining his injuries that led to the medals. And I wont even go into how he threw "his" awards away...
I believe the answer is that space is expanding, pushing the electron away from the nucleus, and the proton away from the neutron. Now, factor the small rate of expansion versus the attraction of the nuclear forces, and the particles will move back towards one another (which you can argue you can't really tell because of the uncertainty princible). The net is that is looks like the space OUTSIDE of the atom is expanding while the atomic particles remain the same distance from one another.
Take this one level up, and the distance between molecules will "collapse" because of gravity between the particles, so again, it looks like there's more spaace outside of the clump of matter.
Example: put honey and an ant on a balloon. The ant is attracted towards the honey. Inflate the balloon, and the space between the ant and its food will increase. The ant still wants food, so it moves foward slightly towards the honey. If the rate of inflation is small enough, we will think that the relative distance between the ant and its food is constant.
That is not the behaviour of a 3D engine.
Well, its more like the behavior of a 3D engine with a very short Level of Detail distance, and a new texture file to substitute in each band. Combine that with a low cache (maybe just too much texture variations), and you have constant texture swapping.