The Doctor has dealt with crises from a little girl with a psycho-active imagination, to genocidal extinction and universe-threatening cataclysms. He looks like a little, fussy man in a bowtie, but is a 1,000 year old alien with vast storehouses of knowledge and a very non-human perspective.

There are many ways this could be explored; where the Doctor has to do the right thing, which isn't necessarily the good thing. I also wish that the plot line they had in mind for Colin Baker's Doctor could have been done properly, instead of being mangled about by writer's strikes etc. For its time, it was quite revolutionary - the idea that the Doctor's regeneration had gone subtly wrong, leaving him more like the Master than the Doctor. The Sixth Doctor's arc was meant to be a slow descent into hell for the character, and any companions unfortunate enough to get caught up in his self-destruction, before his realisation that it had all gone wrong, and his deliberate suicide, in the hope that the next regeneration would correct the problem, because he was too dangerous to leave running around.

That arc would have made the Sixth Doctor a damaged and tragic figure in the Who mythos, not just the 'bit of a twat' he's generally regarded as, which I feel is a bit unfair to Colin Baker.

The problem isn't just higher frequencies, which as you say getting to optical frequencies will be really hard, but not impossible. The rest of the problem is bandwidth. I can't find the source article for this, but I'd bet the bandwidth is tiny. Visible light covers and entire octave of bandwidth. I've seen zero sign that metamaterials will ever have close to that much bandwidth. Increasing the frequency just means making things smaller. Most of the metamaterials have elements that resonate at specific frequencies.

In the Bahamas our own government chose to name something the "National Insurance Scheme" so there you go.

drew

"Every time you make a system too efficient, you reduce the number of workers but with economies it's important to have as many people working as possible."

But I have the perfect solution for that little problem and have been quietly promoting it in my country for years now:

The Department Of Beach Surveys.

The government hires people and sends them to the beach every day. They get a clipboard and a short form to fill out daily.

Date:
Location:
Survey Taker:

Did you see any sea life today? Y/N
Did you see any birds today? Y/N
Did you see any land animals on the beach today? Y/N
Was it Windy / Calm?
Was it Sunny / Rainy?
Did you encounter any tourists on the beach today? Y/N
      If Yes, did they seem to be having a good time? Y/N
Did you have an enjoyable day at the beach today? Y/N
Optionally note below anything of interest you might want to.

Perhaps if your country does not have enough beaches, you could send those workers to our country to do the surveys here.

all the best,

drew

How about you fix you?

Rather than trying to avoid horrible legacy code, admit that the world is built out of horrible legacy code. Get hold of Martin Fowler, “Refactoring” and Michael C Feathers, “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” then develop your skills at working with legacy code to turn it into better code.

After all, that new beautiful code that you wrote for that last job is now someone else's horrible legacy code.

It is a matter of perception & expectation management.

a trial is "necessary to find the truth." ???

Wouldn't an experiment or a demonstration be more in order?

Or is that what the trial is to consist of?

all the best,

drew

Distripedia - http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2009/11/distripedia.html is always available to anyone who gives up on another pedia's page.

Crowd Funding Freedom
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2012/08/crowdfundingfreedom.html

Perhaps the funding folk need to read and think.

all the best,

drew
with a little blatant self promotion.
on topic though.

"It appears, however, that criminals are well aware of the cameras and take other routes"

Careful, that makes anyone whose vehicle does not show up on the cameras possibly shady.... ~;-)

all the best,

drew

Or like an improvised play. Or like a half-written thriller novel, where you're trying to work out how it might have ended. Depends who I'm trying to explain it to, and why.

I got a job once because on the interview form, where it said to state an achievement I was most proud of, I listed a 3.5 year RPG campaign that I wrote from scratch, designed the system for and GM'med every episode on a weekly basis. When they asked me about it, I explained how this involves system design, small-team leadership, group discussion and input, fast reactions to new data and events, and a huge amount of thinking on one's feet.

What I didn't mention were the puns that could stun at 20 paces; laughing so hard that it felt like God herself had opened the top of my head and kissed my naked brain; and the ability to reduce grown men and women to genuine laughter and tears with a handful of pencilled notes on a piece of paper.

What I couldn't mention is that some things grow out of these adventures organically, and there exists no way to describe them to outsiders. There is too much context required, and you know their eyes would glaze over long before you reached the punchline. There are only a handful of people on this planet who will ever understand why: "Range to target?" "B flat!" is funny, or grok what we meant by "Warm up the anthrax cannons, the main speakers, and the rotisserie!", or know why the cry of "Death from above!" is *always* followed by the line "Chocolates from Switzerland!". And that's as it should be.

I'll never understand why anyone would care about the outcome of a game that they didn't have money riding on; the mundanes will never understand why we never stopped telling ourselves stories.