Have you bought a technical book lately? I do that rather a lot, and the price of books is just incredible! Software by contrast is a product that continues to decline in selling price (for a given function) at a very noticable rate year-on-year. What is extraordinary about this is that the book has relatively close-ended value, while the software is largely open-ended, so the software should cost more money per function than a book, simply because it performs more of the work. Quicken, for example, is far more valuable than any number of books on accounting, because it provides so much more than just talk. Yet many college accounting text books out-price quicken. When then will the declining cost of software intersect the cost of the books required to learn how to write it ;-).

In the beginning, one can reasonably presume that the martial arts were intended as a means to train for martial purposes, aka, battle, but today, such a position is generally not founded.
This is not a "bad thing".
The role the arts play in today's society could more correctly be described as a means to train to avoid battle in at least two respects.
First, the development and channeling of martial skill has a real tendency to <i>satisfy</i> an inherent need for combat and thereby divert it from venues less safe for such demonstration -- bars being a common example.
Moreover, martial arts is far more than a physical skill. If this were not true, lift weights is just as good. But on the contrary, training for combat, mock or otherwise, leads to a set of attitudes and a physical self carriage that repells would-be attackers.
Of course, neither of these effects is 100% in any case, nor is either effect even present in some cases, but on balance, our modern day training for unarmed combat will more often than not result in less actual combat, which is just fine by me, 'cause practice is <i>way</i> more safe than the real thing.

In the movie The Graduate, we were told that the future belonged to plastics, which indeed, have revolutionized much of packaging and product exterior design.

The invention of the silicon semiconductor gate changed pretty near everything not changed by plastic. Nearly all electronic devices today exist only because of the joint impacts of plastic and silicon.

And the 2004 equivalent to plastics is Carbon nanotubes. These rolled-up sheets of carbon atoms form tubes as small as ten Hydrogen atoms in diameter. Laboratory demonstrations have created marvels such as high speed, high density digital cameras, flexible video displays, and microscopic bio-sensors that can detect single viruses. A decade or more from now we will see portable electronic products based on a combination of nano and semiconductor technology that would be impossible to implement today.

But that prognostication is easy. More than this, we will see products that we can not today even imagine.

I can't wait.

...is apparently far from natural, because both man and horse do not, on average, do very well at it. A better term might be "Enlightened Horsemanship", but that sounds kinda' religious, which really is not necessary.
Instead, we really just need caring and awareness.
Caring gives us the desire to be a partner and awareness gives the tools to be a partner. Once established, however un-naturally, the partnership is fluid, graceful, respectful, and -- seemingly -- natural. All because both man and horse decided to do the un-natural and accommodate each other's nature.

Quoting MSNBC's Countdown, the 1936 Socialist Party platform is now, 60 years later, the law of the land. Hmmm, progress?
Not hardly. <!--break-->Take a look at the 2000 and (brand new) 2004 red/blue presidential election map and notice:
<ol>
<li>the country is predominately "conservative" -- whatever the hell that has <i>come</i> to mean; and</li>
<li>the conservative/liberal split is uniformally a division of urban and non-urban populations.</li>
</ol>
What we are witnessing is the crest in a multi-generational wave of social "reform" that dates to a time prior to the so-called new deal. The near future will be characterized by later historians as a time of slowing down and rolling back programs that embody the socialist doctrines and returning instead to the classical solutions that created these States united in America.

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