Think of what happened last year, when gas prices were $3/gallon. People drove less. They drove more slowly. They honestly considered alternatives, in terms of where they lived and how they got around. As interest rates and gas prices reversed in late 2006, all these changes reversed as well.

Should the kids manage to top SMU next weekend, we will finally see what one-third of the world has been pining for – Rice in a bowl.

The Nixon Thesis worked. It brought the Movement to power. In the form of Reaganism, that movement triumphed in its ultimate aim, which was to win the Cold War through confrontation. But once that war was won, the assumptions of the Thesis continued to work, always seeking new enemies, and building those enemies into dire threats.

Change, and the need for change, continues to accelerate. I know there are people who complain about this. I am not among them. I am enormously thankful for it. It was to track change that I became a computer journalist, and I have not been disappointed.

What is interesting to me is that the Democratic Party today seems to have two strains in it, the descendents of the old Progressives, absorbed as part of the New Deal Era, and these new Populists. Had these forces been on the same side during the Progressive-Populist era just imagine the majorities they might have commanded.

In the case of digital rights, an effective compromise means fair use, an end to the technology veto, but new business models that do indeed compensate artists for their work, so long as the incentive belongs to the artist and not just to an immortal corporation.

It is how you live that determines whether you will be immortal, not what you make or what you do or what you build but how you live.

The Dean vision isn't really about technology. It's about organizing based on a national brand, in every town and subdivision, about activating people to solve their own problems.

The solution Rice has come up with is to create nanoscale sized iron oxide -- nanorust. This rust can be pulled out of solution with a handheld magnet, while other, larger forms of rust require high-power magnets to come out of solution.

Each generation faces a crisis that creates myths, and defines values, which determine power relationships. After the initial crisis, young people are taught these myths, and the resulting political Thesis builds until it faces a crisis for which its myth has no answer.