The problem is that the street lighting is done with "free electricity."
The peak demand occurs in the day time, so all of those power stations would be otherwise doing nothing at night, hence the massive amount of street lighting.
Of course you have to pay for the coal, but the bulk of the cost of coal-generated electricity is in the plant and not the fuel -- natural gas is the other way in that the plant is cheap but the fuel is expensive. And burning that coal adds to global warming and mercury pollution and asthma in kids from the fine particles, but that is not figured in to the cost of lighting up the night.
The other thing about fixtures is that while commercial fixtures are going to those flat Fresnel lens fixtures that minimuz light trespass, municipal lights are slow to adopt that approach, and residential lights and farm yard lights are a poor excuse.
Yes, you can get mail-order fixtures that are better, but you have to be motivated to seek out catalog mail-order places that have them, and you are getting that fixture sight unseen. The vast quantity of outdoor fixtures at Lowe's, Home Depot, Menards, Ace Hardware, True Value, and so on are the bad kind. I defy anyone to find a sky friendly fixture through any of those retail channels.
There is almost no excuse for not having indoor CFL's because even Wal Mart is pushing them, but when they first came out, you had to hunt high and low for them, they were expensive, and the Lights of America brand were unreliable and intolerant of all but the most ventilated fixtures or lamps. I am not suggesting outlawing non-sky friendly outdoor fixtures, but there has to be some way to get sky-friendly lights into the retail channels.
You see, Khan had 2-dimensional thinking, so the Defiant was piloted according the planar Lie group. Kirk hit upon using the Schonflies group that adds a displacement out of the plane while still keeping his ship pointed properly "up", getting the jump on Khan in the nebula.
If I had a 100-200 million dollar windfall, like winning at Powerball, my first call would be to Gilbert Levin to find out if this money could put a life-science payload on the surface of Mars, so I could go down in history as the co-discoverer of Life on Mars.
Of course, Gilbert Levin would become famous, and I would go down in the history as the lame person who parted with the 100 million.
Seriously folks, there is some kind of "deal" going on in NASA that they don't want to run another life-sciences payload. I call it a deal because I don't know if it is a proper conspiracy, but something is going on. Levin has fought with NASA to repeat the experiment, but the closest he has come was the Russians had a Mars probe that had it but ended up in the Pacific Ocean when an upper stage of a Proton rocket launcher failed, and the other was I believe the British has a life-science payload on their Polar Lander that most probably crash landed.
The official word of NASA is that Viking as much as settled the issue that there is no life on Mars (scientific consensus, you see), and they are not going to beat a dead horse by running more life-science payloads. The other way to view it is that there was so much hype for so long about sending a life-detection payload to Mars, that by the time Viking came out with its ambiguous findings along with the peroxide explanation for the tentative life findings, that NASA didn't want to come near the Life on Mars issue anymore. Kinda like Comet Kohoutek to astronomy community cautious about telling people well in advance about a possible big comet. NASA seems to be nibbling around the edges, sending geology probes to find signs of ancient water but being very cautious about being out front about claims about current water, and so on. It is like they are hoping by looking for everything but life, they hope to stumble on it.
The real conspiratorial view is that NASA doesn't want there to be life on Mars because 1) they want to do a sample return mission, and returning a piece of Mars with Martian life in it raises all kinds of Andromeda Strain worries among people, and 2) they want to land people on Mars, and finding life there may make it off limits.
Suppose a very simple but ecologically delicate life form were discovered on Mars? Wouldn't that make Mars off limits to humans until we could figure out how to go to Mars without wiping it out? Some years ago, we didn't worry about such things (Asimov's Foundation series and follow-on novels posit a galaxy where the Earth was unique to have evolved complex life, and as mankind moved out into the galaxy, simple life forms were discovered but they weren't given much heed as humans brought their own food crops and other organisms with them and didn't have an ethic about disturbing pristine ecologies). I know that the environmental ethic is not universally accepted in Earth society, but I think people's sensibilities have changed that if life were discovered on Mars that Mars be left as a kind of wilderness sanctuary for it.
I think the average person (yes, the "other guy", not just myself) does a great job of driving an automobile.
In 100 hours of general aviation flying, I don't think I ever got past the experience level of having to think through every action, much like my days of being a teen driver. If you have put 100,000 miles in a car, you are at least at 2000 hours experience level, and a 2000-hour pilot is a high-experience pilot.
So the average "non-professional" pilot is a beginner who is this short of "getting behind the airplane" (having one's attention saturated by the multiplicity and sequencing of tasks), but I doubt the average 2000-hour "non-professional" driver is ever distracted by the tasks required to simply operate the car.
That the fatality rate per hour in commercial jets is nearly the same as in your own car supports this. I mean we can argue that the jet captain is much more capable because 1) the captain is operating a much more complex set of controls, and 2) there are many more "minor" compared to fatal accidents in a car. But my argument is what kills you is not lack of skill in either normal or emergency situations but instead the complacency factor, the completely unexpected, the brain-fart where you rolled right through a stop sign or the brain-fart where you rolled on to an active runway without tower clearance.
Are you sure about the aorta injury in the case of Diana? I would think an aorta laceration would kill quickly, from blood loss or from filling the chest so the heart cannot pump.
Part of the controversy was that she didn't die right away and perhaps could have been saved by American-style emergency medicine in comparison to what they do with the ambulances in France where they regard the ambulance as already being in the ER where they can stabilize the patient. The American method is that for critical trauma cases, there is little to be done at the site, in the ambulance, or even in the ER and that the thing to do is to rush a person into surgery where such bleeding can be stopped.
The story I heard was that Diana had a laceration of a pulmonary artery, a similar injury as Ronald Reagan had when he had been shot. What President Reagan had was major life-threatening as is the laceration of any major artery, but initially he didn't realize he had been shot, and when he got to the hospital, he was conscious and didn't know what the big deal was all about, but his doctors rushed him into surgery because they figured out how badly he had been hurt. If Diana had a similar injury, there could have been the same deal as a lucid, conscious patient where they puttered around in one of those fancy ambulances where if she had gotten the express treatment as Reagan, she would have lived.
The death of Diana was not one of these single-point-failure situation but one of these cascades of bad events, if any one of which had been prevented, would have kept her alive. You had her high-profile lifestyle, combined with the mobbing by photographers, followed by the driver way over the legal limit, in conjunction with the body guard who wasn't clued into the state of the driver, in combination with the way excessive speed, with the lack of seat belt (the belted body guard was seriously hurt but lived) (is this a Jon Corzine effect where people being driven as passengers in limos and taxis almost feel it is an insult to the driver to buckle up? - I have only started searching for seatbelts in taxis after the Diana tragedy although I have buckled up in my own car for years), with the procedures of emergency medicine to remove the final chance at life.
Part of the tragedy of Diana was that she was not dead at the scene from an aortic laceration, she suffered a laceration of a smaller artery, but it was one last link in a deadly chain, the interrupting of any link could have saved her.
VB is for the most part the Gang of Four Mediator pattern. On of the means by which objects interact with each other (i.e., the Design Patterns), is the Observer pattern where the Observer hands another object a reference to itself. When some state change occurs in the observed object, it invokes a method on the Observer indicating that the state change has taken place.
The origin of the Mediator pattern is when you have a network of object that somehow need to act in response to the change of state of more than one object. One example is a GUI form where checking a box can enable or disable other controls on the form. The Mediator is a kind of master Observer, where the Form is the Mediator and it gets events (notifications of state changes) from all of the widgets on that Form.
The advantage of the Mediator pattern is that by gathering together all of the events into one place, or into multiple places, the event hooks of the main form, you can figure out all of the logic of how multiple controls interact with each othere. The disadvantage of the Mediator pattern is that by gathering together all of the events into one place, it leads to spaghetti code. The Form because the Master Control Program that has to implement all of the logic of what happens when state changes anywhere on the form. It is kind of a like a flat organizational chart where the head person has to supervise an enormous number of employees without intermediaries. Yes, form logic is split into stubs, but it is still in a global form namespace.
Apple may have a better idea in XCode with their Objective-C version of VB. Haven't looked deeply into it, but it appears to allow one of more mediators to a form (kind of like Java where you can have a single event inner class object for each control or an inner class that aggregates actions from multiple controls), only the XCode version is more visual, VBish.
As to this notion that events should be marshalled by a relational database, that sound like something Tablizer would come up with . . . wait a minute, you are Tablizer!
My version of "not developing for Windows" is to write the graphical front end in Java Swing and write the numeric back end in non-graphical C++.
Yes, you have to recompile the C++ for the different OS's, but Java Swing is everywhere -- Windows, OS-X (yeah, yeah, true believer Mac people don't like the way Swing apps look), Linux.
If I am going to leave Windows, I am going platform-independent rather than down the path of the flavor-of-the-month-GUI (cough, cough Qt, GTK). Yes, there is some degree of platform independence with those other things, but Java is everywhere these days. Much less futz factor having the target GUI layer available on other machines. There is a near universal expectation of having Java installed on network-share systems where I don't get to install those other things.
Most men as they approach sagging middle age wear their belt low over the hips with the mid section draped over the top of the belt. A number of very old men somehow manage to wear the belt draped over the top. When men make the transition between these modes is not known to science.
I was at a classical music concert on campus when beforehand some young women were having an animated conversation about over-the-top-belt-wearing men and how ridiculous they looked. Normally one doesn't interrupt the fun conversation of strangers, but I couldn't stop myself then. At that time, Clyde Tombaugh was nearing age 100 and his picture would show up in Sky and Telescope. Planetary scientists talk about a North Equatorial Belt and a South Equatorial Belt (of Jupiter), I told them that Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, was definitely a North Equatorial Belt kind of guy.
There is one screwball theory upon which I read a book about (yeah, yeah, there are books and books on this). The theory is that the kill shot was from an accidental discharge of a Secret Service AR-15.
Yes, Oswald was up in his sniper's nest in the Book Repository building and popped off some shots, and his was the "magic bullet" that wounded the President and Governer Connely. As to the bullet being pristine, there is this thing about full-metal jacket military bullets that are supposed to go through you instead of fragment or mushroom, and it was not pristine but rather deformed, and high-energy 22 cal bullets can take strange paths through body tissue.
The big mystery is how Oswald could have popped off the "single bullet" and then the kill shot -- was he that good a marksman at a moving target or was he lucky and the rest of the world so unlucky? The theory is no, the kill shot came from somewhere else -- the commotion of the shooting, a Secret Service agent dropped what was at that time an experimental AR-15, the thing discharged (in front and below the President), and the peculiar ammo inflicted the horrific, fatal wound on the President.
Government coverup? You bet! How could the government admit to the President being killed by his own bodyguards, althought that is what happened to Huey Long -- also an accident. Oswald the lone killer? Also true -- that the fatal shot was an accident in response to someone trying to kill the President doesn't let Oswald off the hood.
Of course if you add throttle, the manifold vacuum goes down, and you use more gas. At some point of the driving cycle you have to add energy to the car by applying power, and the engine actually is more efficient at delivering power at reduced manifold vacuum (higher manifold absolute pressure), especially in the mid RPM range. If you never depressed the throttle, reduced the manifold vacuum, and increased fuel flow, you would never go anywhere and you would just sit on the road idling the motor not getting any kind of fuel economy at all.
There are all of these useless tips "you have to keep the manifold vacuum high because if the vacuum is low, you are burning a lot of gas." Of course you are burning more gas when you add power -- if you never added power, you would never go anywhere. The question is to have the driving skill in traffic to add power wisely -- never accelerate like crazy when you know you have to step on the brakes right away, and if you add power, you want the engine to be in an efficient power band, which is actually at low manifold vacuum and lower engine revs.
Now for most production cars, the peak fuel economy will be at a somewhat higher manifold vacuum than wide-open-throttle -- Harry Ricardo commented that since cars are usually operated at part load, it is better to design the engine with higher compression ratio for the fuel you are using so that a little bit of manifold vacuum is required to prevent spark knock, and at wide open throttle, you retard the spark and operate a little bit less efficiently. If you have ever seen an RPM vs MAP engine map, there is an island of maximum fuel efficiency in the mid RPM range somewhat below but not much below wide open throttle.
But that does not mean for max fuel economy you need to be out there blocking traffic watching a vacuum (or a fuel flow gauge) that you accelerate so slowly that the gauge never comes out of the "green." That kind of driving is just plain sillyness.
I never understood this business of driving frugal using a vacuum gauge.
There are energy inputs into the system (giving it the gas) and energy outputs (drag, having to hit the brakes for traffic). I can understand where slower highway speeds save gas (your aerodynamic TransAm with a way oversized engine and tall gearing is a special case). I can understand where anticipating lights, flowing with traffic, and trying to coast as much as possible saves gas (less brakes, more of energy inputs dissipated in drag of car instead of wasted in braking). But I never understood this business of granny driving on acceleration and obsessing about a low vacuum reading at all times as having anything to do with saving gas.
If you do readline-reving starts all the time, yes you will waste gas. The engined pushed to max power is somewhat less efficient than at about 60-70 percent load and 2000-2500 RPM, but a lot of the energy wastage of "jack rabbit starts" is that people who drive that way also tend to be on the brakes a lot too.
Perhaps the one reason for granny starts is that you can spend more time in the efficient power band doing slow accels and less time coasting. But if you accelerate a car keeping engine revs in the 2000-3000 band (at low manifold vacuum where the engine is producing power with low pumping loss), and try to coast at other times as much as possible, I don't see how you can improve upon that with any tricks.
The professional drivers who run the EPA test cycles on the rollers upshift pretty aggressively to save gas on the test. The EPA said, "No way anyone drives that way" so I think that applied yet another deduction to the test numbers of EPA mileage for stick-shift cars to account for the opposite extreme of the lamer who allow the engine to fully rev before each shift. I didn't think they told the test drivers what the shift points should be but instead applied a deduction to account for non-geek drivers who don't know about engine maps.
The loophole around that deduction was if you had an E-light (economy) or U-light (for upshift), you could get a waiver from the mandatory deduction and hence report higher gas mileage for your model of car.
If you drive the E-light, it does feel like you are lugging the engine and putting more stress on the bearings, but the object of the gas mileage test was to shift in such a way as to optimize gas mileage, not engine life. I have driven with an E-light, and it is annoying because even if you know what you are doing, it keeps nagging you with flashes, but keep in mind that it has to do with government regs and is not a serious driving aid, although it can tell you how much upshifting the engineers had in mind.
If I told someone "set a breakpoint" and the answer came back "what is a breakpoint", I would set aside a couple of minutes and say "here, let me show you" and demonstrate how it is done in the tools we were using.
If after training someone how to "do things, the way they are done around here" and if they are still flailing around or if a person gives attitude about adopting the standards and procedures of a workplace, I would consider firing someone.
There are lots of reasons not to use debuggers. In many environments, various kinds of logging or "print" statements is all you have. You may be working with DLL's or ActiveX controls where it was never explained how to trace into them with a debugger (you can even trace mixed C++/Java programs connected through JNI, but you need the right tools and figure out how to use them).
Also, debuggers are not a cure all for many kinds of errors -- they can sometimes place you in the neighborhood of where something goes bad, but it may require a kind of gestalt insight to see what the problem is. Many people regard debuggers as a kind of crutch and discourage their use -- you can go down the road where someone never properly designs their app and devises test cases, and they fall back on the debugger to patch and patch again as problems crop op.
So I hope you meant it as a joke that you fired this person or perhaps that this person was dismissed because they were not performing in some more serious way. I know what people are thinking, he "lied" about qualifications calling himself a programmer when he never set a breakpoint. Give me a break. People can be trained to the methods, processes, standards, and practices of a work place, and if you didn't have time, you could order your employee "we use debuggers and breakpoints around here -- go look up how to do this, report back when you have located your bug."
Power reactor fusion has the same problem as Edward Teller's original hydrogen bomb concept.
The original hydrogen bomb was known as the "Super" before it was called a hydrogen bomb, and the idea is what every wide-eyed geek in elementary school imagines the H-bomb to be -- put an A-bomb next to a vat of deuterium, and the A-bomb blasts the deuterium hot enough to make it fuse.
As the dudes as Los Alamos started building computers to do numerical models of fluids and radiation and everything, it became apparent that Teller's Super was a dud. The physics of radiation were such that simply sticking a fission bomb next to a pile of heavy hydrogen was simply not going to do anything. What if you sweetened the deuterium with tritium -- then what? As it turned out, you would need gobs of tritium, so the whole thing was a non-starter.
As it turns out, Stanislaw Ulam came up with the idea of a staged atom bomb -- a small atom bomb would provide the shock to compress a big freepin pile of plutonium to make a big honkin atom bomb, and Teller got ahold of that idea to make the staged H-bomb. The staged H-bomb used to be a very dark secret, but the combination of Richard Rhodes "Dark Sun" and that Progressive Magazine article kind of let out at least the general H-bomb concept. Teller's stamp on the staged bomb was that prompt x-rays from the atom bomb would be the way of getting compression instead of Ulam's original idea of the shock wave, but that the radiation would act first is obvious once anyone with physics knowledge starts working on a staged design, and Teller kind of took all the credit.
But the actual staged H-bomb not only focuses A-bomb radiation to compress a pile of deuterium, it also compresses a plutonium "spark plug" in the middle to make Ulam's staged A-bomb. The combination of heat and pressure from the radiation compression along with the flood of fast neutrons from the plutonium spark plug manage to fuse the deuterium, which produces its yield mainly in the form of yet more neutrons, which provides fission of a U-238 blanket to provide much of the explosive power of the bomb.
Fusion is really, really hard, even with the heat and pressure from an atom bomb, and the real H-bomb is a Rube Goldberg set of multiple effects which use fission-driven neutrons to produce fusion neutrons to produce gobs of explosive power from non-critical fission of U-238. Fusion is really, really hard, even for the Sun, because while the Sun is not using deuterium but straight hydrogen, for all of the intense heat and pressure in the interior of the Sun, the reaction rates are really, really low, which is a good thing, because otherwise the Sun wouldn't have lasted 5 billion years to allow us to be here.
So back to the fusion power reactor. All of the claims of imminent fusion power are based on using lots of tritium for D-T fusion for the same reason that Teller's Classical Super would have needed gobs of tritium and for the same reason that the actual H-bomb that burns D-D needs three stages of fission to get its explosive power. Just as the need for tons of T made Teller's Super a non-starter, the need for tritium means that the current frontier of fusion power is a non-starter. Yes, you breed tritium in the lithium blanket, but you have to compare the breeding doubling time with the half life of tritium and wonder how much seed tritium will you need to get a fusion power economy going and how many decades of breeding tritium will be required to switch the economy over the fusion power before the oil runs out.
You can't get modded up beyond 5, so I will simply comment to endorse what you are saying.
The only thing I would add concerns the trepidation about developing for Linux GUIs. As far as I can tell, there is nothing wrong with Qt+ or GTK. My question is that if I am leaving a platform GUI such as Windows, why do I want to embrace another platform GUI such as Qt+ or GTK?
True, Qt+ is a somewhat portable GUI is that there is a Windows version, but then you have the famous developer seat-license fees, and there is some version of GTK under Windows of some controversial level of capability. I am betting on Java Swing. Of all of the non-Windows window managers, widget collections, and graphics libraries, it seems to be farthest along in offering everything GDI can do in terms of hardware-accelerated graphics, and it has FOSS support (check out the FreeHEP VectorGraphics package for generating publication-ready EPS output from Java Swing plots -- simply awesome)
I really think the GUI should be an independent layer on top of the OS because while I will get "locked in" to that GUI layer, I won't get locked in to the underlying OS, and I don't care if that OS is Windows, OS-X, Linux, Solaris, whatever. There are other independent GUI layers (Python-wxWindows, Python-TK, GTK and Qt+ to a degree), but Java Swing is the most capable of them all.
Commoditize the complement to what you are selling.
If you are primarily selling services, software that you need to provide those services is a cost. If you commoditize software, you create more opportunity to make money from services. Those fancy four-color graphs are simply restating something Joel On Software said a while back in words.
That pretty much describes the world of C/C++/Java/scripting glue with the Unix-y tools of makefiles, vi, building in dependencies on other software built on the same model. And people think stuff like Delphi, IDE's, and form designers are for wimps. It is either wimpitude or you can take your pain and suffering like a man.
It has never been clear to me the tradeoff between very gentle and more moderate levels of acceleration in gas mileage. There is the usual admonishment "avoid jack rabbit starts." Many high gas mileage driving tips talk about requiring a very light foot on the gas pedal, imagining that you are trying not to crush an egg shell. How much of this is valid and how much mythology?
So it makes sense that you want to cruise with as few engine RPM's as possible, and automakers reporting big V-6 gas mileage (Impala, Malibu, V6 Camry, Avalon) have very tall gearing. But do you want to accelerate in Granny fashion? The optimal efficiency is somewhere in the 2000-2500 RPM zone. Perhaps if you accelerate very slowly you can keep the engine at a more efficient load longer and keep your average speed down as well to reduce losses?
The other interesting thing is that pulse driving around 25 MPH gives better gas mileage in a hybrid than steady driving at 25 MPH -- seems to contradict the advice of a steady foot on the gas pedal. I guess even with the small, electric-assisted gas engine in a hybrid, that engine is oversized for constant cruise speed too and you benefit by cycling it on and off. I suppose someone could program the control system to cycle the engine on and off and be constantly alternating between gas and electric operation, but they don't do that because it would either be bad for emissions, annoying to the customer, hard on the battery, or not effective on gas mileage because the round trip of energy from the gas engine through generator through the battery to the motor.
If pulse driving where you try to switch the gas engine on and off with involving the electrics is optimal, it will be interesting what can be achieved with the GM belt-alternator-startor "mild hybrids." Some in the hybrid enthusiast community have derided the GM effort as being window dressing and not a proper hybrid, but if the GM BAS hybrids have motor stop or fuel cutoff during coast, there may be a way to get high gas mileage out of those using such techniques.
Some form of pulse-glide seems to be effective in my gas engine non-hybrid Camry, perhaps for a 10-20 percent pickup in gas mileage in city driving. While the motor doesn't shut off, the transmission is set up to freewheel during coast at low engine RPM's. Applying short bursts of engine power together with coasting as much as possible seems to be better than a steady cruise application of the gas at speeds of 25-35 MPH based on Scan Gauge gas mileage readings.
I have looked to see if pulse-glide has wider applicability than just the Prius. On one hand you don't want to drive in a way to be dangerous or obstructing traffic. But on the other hand, in traffic you are always adjusting speed to match conditions, and if you can get better mileage through better understanding of engine operation, that is useful.
Never had any direct experience with BeOS, but the story I keep hearing is that it was really responsive and able to do audio and multimedia in a way that we are beginning to approach with a lot of processor power.
Windows never claims to be "real time", soft, hard or otherwise. The problem is that Windows can "go away" for tens of milliseconds (perhaps less with modern, faster hardware) to do things like disk accesses and what not without being responsive to interrupts or time slice preemption. The explanation is that they are trying to maximize throughput according to some metric than absolute millisecond-level responsiveness, which is what you need to do multimedia without sporadic frame hops. The other thing is that their time slice scheduling is quite course and if you are doing multi-threading (at least on single processors), you almost need to simulate a co-routine type of swapping back and forth by cross waiting and signalling of threads -- the time slices are too coarse to respond at the millisecond level.
The story I kept hearing about BeOS (and to a certain extent OS 2 as well) is that not only were these systems more finely grained, either in not having low-level non-preemptible tasks or having having less coarse time slices, the use of threads and the use of waits when one thread stalled and signals for waiting threads to proceed permeated programming GUI apps.
Windows, OS-X, the various Linux window managers, Java Swing, are pretty much all based on a message-passing non-preemptive cooperative multi-tasking type GUI that runs on a single thread. Yes you can use worker threads to help compute-bound or other apps, but the GUI runs a single thread and those worker threads have to synchronize with that GUI thread to display results.
Do OS-2, BeOS have multi-threaded GUI's? What were they like from the developer side? Were they a PITA to develop functioning GUI apps, or was the application-level multi-threading doable with the tools and protocols provided? Is there anything to learn from BeOS from the way they did GUI apps compared to the Windows, OS-X, Linux, Java Swing, and everybody else way of single-threaded GUI's?
You can start with http://info.borland.com/devsupport/delphi/, and I tried the Delphi 6 Update Fixes link, and I attempted login for registered user of Delphi 6 (they e-mailed me my password based on my e-mail), and I got a broken link. Maybe that is why there is so much Slashdot hostility to Borland/Codegear/whatever.
The files are D6_Upd2_Pro.exe, D6_RTL2_Pro.exe if you have the Professional version, some other name than Pro if you have the Personal Edition. I have seen sites referencing both the Pro and Personal edition Upd2 and RTL2 patches, but all of the links to them are broken, and I am sorry I am not of more help.
You just need to Project Options, Compiler Messages tab and uncheck Platform Symbols along with the group of Unsafe blah-blah warnings at the end of the list. This gets rid of the stupid scoldings about Windows API specific (that is the whole fine point of Delphi code) warnings.
If you are using Delphi to build ActiveX controls out of VCL controls, you get these stupid [Warning] TF32Ax_TLB.pas(2390): Method 'InitiateAction' hides virtual method of base type 'TControl' messages that I never figures off how to suppress. You really should be able to get clean compiles, either by fixing the problem or using the appropriate suppression flag if you want to accept the warned condition because compile cluttered with warnings you ignore can have you overlook something that really is a warning.
By the way, if you are still using Delphi 6, there was some kind of service pack to it a while ago that fixed a memory leak with Variant arrays or some such thing -- one really shouldn't use an out-of-the-box Delphi 6 unless it has been patched for this.
Where is the reference to the mine shafts? The computer that will let the dinosaurs into the mines based on preselected criteria that will favor the leadership and military classes? The 10:1 female:male dinosaur ratio in the underground community?
I guess this matter of sports and the role that competitive team sports should play in both physical and social development of school children is a very sensitive issue indeed.
In the usual sort of parent-teacher conferences, without any particular input from my part, my mother wondered out loud to the gym teacher whether I could be given a little bit more playing time. Mom was always anxious to keep her kids physically active while Dad was a lot more indifferent to whether we participated in sports or not.
The Gym teacher, attempted to justify the status quo with, "Your child will probably enter a professional career just like his father; whether your child succeeds in sports probably won't make any difference in the long term anyway" to which my father responded, "Yes, and how many of these other children are going to make it into sports as a career?"
On the flip side of this, my younger brother, while not that different in his physical characteristics, was perhaps more in tune with the social benefits of team sports and participated in the town softball league. In this very trendy-PC community, there was one of these meetings about the "needs of our children" and "all of the pressures and threats to the 'self-esteem' of our children." My mom, always the town gadfly, chimed up "Oh yeah, what about posting the kid's batting averages in the local hardware store window? I suppose that doesn't contribute to any of the pressure our kids are under." One of the coaches came up to her privately and proposed, "Hey lady, if it means that much to you, we could work something out to get your son more times at bat."
You may have a more enlightened attitude, and I may be regurgitating long-held biases about the role of competitive team sports in physical education. But some biases have a factual basis, although any attempt to ask for some reform of the system is met with the usual responses that competition is the fun part of physical activity, Gym class is already evicerated with PC, and the kids not benefiting from the system are at fault for not trying hard enough. But one is also naive to think that there are not those in Phy Ed who lose sight the purposes of the whole enterprise.
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Yes, but America continues to lead the world in object-oriented programming languages, design, and implementation . . .
The peak demand occurs in the day time, so all of those power stations would be otherwise doing nothing at night, hence the massive amount of street lighting.
Of course you have to pay for the coal, but the bulk of the cost of coal-generated electricity is in the plant and not the fuel -- natural gas is the other way in that the plant is cheap but the fuel is expensive. And burning that coal adds to global warming and mercury pollution and asthma in kids from the fine particles, but that is not figured in to the cost of lighting up the night.
The other thing about fixtures is that while commercial fixtures are going to those flat Fresnel lens fixtures that minimuz light trespass, municipal lights are slow to adopt that approach, and residential lights and farm yard lights are a poor excuse.
Yes, you can get mail-order fixtures that are better, but you have to be motivated to seek out catalog mail-order places that have them, and you are getting that fixture sight unseen. The vast quantity of outdoor fixtures at Lowe's, Home Depot, Menards, Ace Hardware, True Value, and so on are the bad kind. I defy anyone to find a sky friendly fixture through any of those retail channels.
There is almost no excuse for not having indoor CFL's because even Wal Mart is pushing them, but when they first came out, you had to hunt high and low for them, they were expensive, and the Lights of America brand were unreliable and intolerant of all but the most ventilated fixtures or lamps. I am not suggesting outlawing non-sky friendly outdoor fixtures, but there has to be some way to get sky-friendly lights into the retail channels.
You see, Khan had 2-dimensional thinking, so the Defiant was piloted according the planar Lie group. Kirk hit upon using the Schonflies group that adds a displacement out of the plane while still keeping his ship pointed properly "up", getting the jump on Khan in the nebula.
Just about every other Web site that takes outside comments recognizes blank lines as paragraph tags.
If I had a 100-200 million dollar windfall, like winning at Powerball, my first call would be to Gilbert Levin to find out if this money could put a life-science payload on the surface of Mars, so I could go down in history as the co-discoverer of Life on Mars. Of course, Gilbert Levin would become famous, and I would go down in the history as the lame person who parted with the 100 million. Seriously folks, there is some kind of "deal" going on in NASA that they don't want to run another life-sciences payload. I call it a deal because I don't know if it is a proper conspiracy, but something is going on. Levin has fought with NASA to repeat the experiment, but the closest he has come was the Russians had a Mars probe that had it but ended up in the Pacific Ocean when an upper stage of a Proton rocket launcher failed, and the other was I believe the British has a life-science payload on their Polar Lander that most probably crash landed. The official word of NASA is that Viking as much as settled the issue that there is no life on Mars (scientific consensus, you see), and they are not going to beat a dead horse by running more life-science payloads. The other way to view it is that there was so much hype for so long about sending a life-detection payload to Mars, that by the time Viking came out with its ambiguous findings along with the peroxide explanation for the tentative life findings, that NASA didn't want to come near the Life on Mars issue anymore. Kinda like Comet Kohoutek to astronomy community cautious about telling people well in advance about a possible big comet. NASA seems to be nibbling around the edges, sending geology probes to find signs of ancient water but being very cautious about being out front about claims about current water, and so on. It is like they are hoping by looking for everything but life, they hope to stumble on it. The real conspiratorial view is that NASA doesn't want there to be life on Mars because 1) they want to do a sample return mission, and returning a piece of Mars with Martian life in it raises all kinds of Andromeda Strain worries among people, and 2) they want to land people on Mars, and finding life there may make it off limits. Suppose a very simple but ecologically delicate life form were discovered on Mars? Wouldn't that make Mars off limits to humans until we could figure out how to go to Mars without wiping it out? Some years ago, we didn't worry about such things (Asimov's Foundation series and follow-on novels posit a galaxy where the Earth was unique to have evolved complex life, and as mankind moved out into the galaxy, simple life forms were discovered but they weren't given much heed as humans brought their own food crops and other organisms with them and didn't have an ethic about disturbing pristine ecologies). I know that the environmental ethic is not universally accepted in Earth society, but I think people's sensibilities have changed that if life were discovered on Mars that Mars be left as a kind of wilderness sanctuary for it.
In 100 hours of general aviation flying, I don't think I ever got past the experience level of having to think through every action, much like my days of being a teen driver. If you have put 100,000 miles in a car, you are at least at 2000 hours experience level, and a 2000-hour pilot is a high-experience pilot.
So the average "non-professional" pilot is a beginner who is this short of "getting behind the airplane" (having one's attention saturated by the multiplicity and sequencing of tasks), but I doubt the average 2000-hour "non-professional" driver is ever distracted by the tasks required to simply operate the car.
That the fatality rate per hour in commercial jets is nearly the same as in your own car supports this. I mean we can argue that the jet captain is much more capable because 1) the captain is operating a much more complex set of controls, and 2) there are many more "minor" compared to fatal accidents in a car. But my argument is what kills you is not lack of skill in either normal or emergency situations but instead the complacency factor, the completely unexpected, the brain-fart where you rolled right through a stop sign or the brain-fart where you rolled on to an active runway without tower clearance.
Part of the controversy was that she didn't die right away and perhaps could have been saved by American-style emergency medicine in comparison to what they do with the ambulances in France where they regard the ambulance as already being in the ER where they can stabilize the patient. The American method is that for critical trauma cases, there is little to be done at the site, in the ambulance, or even in the ER and that the thing to do is to rush a person into surgery where such bleeding can be stopped.
The story I heard was that Diana had a laceration of a pulmonary artery, a similar injury as Ronald Reagan had when he had been shot. What President Reagan had was major life-threatening as is the laceration of any major artery, but initially he didn't realize he had been shot, and when he got to the hospital, he was conscious and didn't know what the big deal was all about, but his doctors rushed him into surgery because they figured out how badly he had been hurt. If Diana had a similar injury, there could have been the same deal as a lucid, conscious patient where they puttered around in one of those fancy ambulances where if she had gotten the express treatment as Reagan, she would have lived.
The death of Diana was not one of these single-point-failure situation but one of these cascades of bad events, if any one of which had been prevented, would have kept her alive. You had her high-profile lifestyle, combined with the mobbing by photographers, followed by the driver way over the legal limit, in conjunction with the body guard who wasn't clued into the state of the driver, in combination with the way excessive speed, with the lack of seat belt (the belted body guard was seriously hurt but lived) (is this a Jon Corzine effect where people being driven as passengers in limos and taxis almost feel it is an insult to the driver to buckle up? - I have only started searching for seatbelts in taxis after the Diana tragedy although I have buckled up in my own car for years), with the procedures of emergency medicine to remove the final chance at life.
Part of the tragedy of Diana was that she was not dead at the scene from an aortic laceration, she suffered a laceration of a smaller artery, but it was one last link in a deadly chain, the interrupting of any link could have saved her.
The origin of the Mediator pattern is when you have a network of object that somehow need to act in response to the change of state of more than one object. One example is a GUI form where checking a box can enable or disable other controls on the form. The Mediator is a kind of master Observer, where the Form is the Mediator and it gets events (notifications of state changes) from all of the widgets on that Form.
The advantage of the Mediator pattern is that by gathering together all of the events into one place, or into multiple places, the event hooks of the main form, you can figure out all of the logic of how multiple controls interact with each othere. The disadvantage of the Mediator pattern is that by gathering together all of the events into one place, it leads to spaghetti code. The Form because the Master Control Program that has to implement all of the logic of what happens when state changes anywhere on the form. It is kind of a like a flat organizational chart where the head person has to supervise an enormous number of employees without intermediaries. Yes, form logic is split into stubs, but it is still in a global form namespace.
Apple may have a better idea in XCode with their Objective-C version of VB. Haven't looked deeply into it, but it appears to allow one of more mediators to a form (kind of like Java where you can have a single event inner class object for each control or an inner class that aggregates actions from multiple controls), only the XCode version is more visual, VBish.
As to this notion that events should be marshalled by a relational database, that sound like something Tablizer would come up with . . . wait a minute, you are Tablizer!
Yes, you have to recompile the C++ for the different OS's, but Java Swing is everywhere -- Windows, OS-X (yeah, yeah, true believer Mac people don't like the way Swing apps look), Linux.
If I am going to leave Windows, I am going platform-independent rather than down the path of the flavor-of-the-month-GUI (cough, cough Qt, GTK). Yes, there is some degree of platform independence with those other things, but Java is everywhere these days. Much less futz factor having the target GUI layer available on other machines. There is a near universal expectation of having Java installed on network-share systems where I don't get to install those other things.
I was at a classical music concert on campus when beforehand some young women were having an animated conversation about over-the-top-belt-wearing men and how ridiculous they looked. Normally one doesn't interrupt the fun conversation of strangers, but I couldn't stop myself then. At that time, Clyde Tombaugh was nearing age 100 and his picture would show up in Sky and Telescope. Planetary scientists talk about a North Equatorial Belt and a South Equatorial Belt (of Jupiter), I told them that Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, was definitely a North Equatorial Belt kind of guy.
Yes, Oswald was up in his sniper's nest in the Book Repository building and popped off some shots, and his was the "magic bullet" that wounded the President and Governer Connely. As to the bullet being pristine, there is this thing about full-metal jacket military bullets that are supposed to go through you instead of fragment or mushroom, and it was not pristine but rather deformed, and high-energy 22 cal bullets can take strange paths through body tissue.
The big mystery is how Oswald could have popped off the "single bullet" and then the kill shot -- was he that good a marksman at a moving target or was he lucky and the rest of the world so unlucky? The theory is no, the kill shot came from somewhere else -- the commotion of the shooting, a Secret Service agent dropped what was at that time an experimental AR-15, the thing discharged (in front and below the President), and the peculiar ammo inflicted the horrific, fatal wound on the President.
Government coverup? You bet! How could the government admit to the President being killed by his own bodyguards, althought that is what happened to Huey Long -- also an accident. Oswald the lone killer? Also true -- that the fatal shot was an accident in response to someone trying to kill the President doesn't let Oswald off the hood.
There are all of these useless tips "you have to keep the manifold vacuum high because if the vacuum is low, you are burning a lot of gas." Of course you are burning more gas when you add power -- if you never added power, you would never go anywhere. The question is to have the driving skill in traffic to add power wisely -- never accelerate like crazy when you know you have to step on the brakes right away, and if you add power, you want the engine to be in an efficient power band, which is actually at low manifold vacuum and lower engine revs.
Now for most production cars, the peak fuel economy will be at a somewhat higher manifold vacuum than wide-open-throttle -- Harry Ricardo commented that since cars are usually operated at part load, it is better to design the engine with higher compression ratio for the fuel you are using so that a little bit of manifold vacuum is required to prevent spark knock, and at wide open throttle, you retard the spark and operate a little bit less efficiently. If you have ever seen an RPM vs MAP engine map, there is an island of maximum fuel efficiency in the mid RPM range somewhat below but not much below wide open throttle.
But that does not mean for max fuel economy you need to be out there blocking traffic watching a vacuum (or a fuel flow gauge) that you accelerate so slowly that the gauge never comes out of the "green." That kind of driving is just plain sillyness.
There are energy inputs into the system (giving it the gas) and energy outputs (drag, having to hit the brakes for traffic). I can understand where slower highway speeds save gas (your aerodynamic TransAm with a way oversized engine and tall gearing is a special case). I can understand where anticipating lights, flowing with traffic, and trying to coast as much as possible saves gas (less brakes, more of energy inputs dissipated in drag of car instead of wasted in braking). But I never understood this business of granny driving on acceleration and obsessing about a low vacuum reading at all times as having anything to do with saving gas.
If you do readline-reving starts all the time, yes you will waste gas. The engined pushed to max power is somewhat less efficient than at about 60-70 percent load and 2000-2500 RPM, but a lot of the energy wastage of "jack rabbit starts" is that people who drive that way also tend to be on the brakes a lot too.
Perhaps the one reason for granny starts is that you can spend more time in the efficient power band doing slow accels and less time coasting. But if you accelerate a car keeping engine revs in the 2000-3000 band (at low manifold vacuum where the engine is producing power with low pumping loss), and try to coast at other times as much as possible, I don't see how you can improve upon that with any tricks.
The loophole around that deduction was if you had an E-light (economy) or U-light (for upshift), you could get a waiver from the mandatory deduction and hence report higher gas mileage for your model of car.
If you drive the E-light, it does feel like you are lugging the engine and putting more stress on the bearings, but the object of the gas mileage test was to shift in such a way as to optimize gas mileage, not engine life. I have driven with an E-light, and it is annoying because even if you know what you are doing, it keeps nagging you with flashes, but keep in mind that it has to do with government regs and is not a serious driving aid, although it can tell you how much upshifting the engineers had in mind.
If after training someone how to "do things, the way they are done around here" and if they are still flailing around or if a person gives attitude about adopting the standards and procedures of a workplace, I would consider firing someone.
There are lots of reasons not to use debuggers. In many environments, various kinds of logging or "print" statements is all you have. You may be working with DLL's or ActiveX controls where it was never explained how to trace into them with a debugger (you can even trace mixed C++/Java programs connected through JNI, but you need the right tools and figure out how to use them).
Also, debuggers are not a cure all for many kinds of errors -- they can sometimes place you in the neighborhood of where something goes bad, but it may require a kind of gestalt insight to see what the problem is. Many people regard debuggers as a kind of crutch and discourage their use -- you can go down the road where someone never properly designs their app and devises test cases, and they fall back on the debugger to patch and patch again as problems crop op.
So I hope you meant it as a joke that you fired this person or perhaps that this person was dismissed because they were not performing in some more serious way. I know what people are thinking, he "lied" about qualifications calling himself a programmer when he never set a breakpoint. Give me a break. People can be trained to the methods, processes, standards, and practices of a work place, and if you didn't have time, you could order your employee "we use debuggers and breakpoints around here -- go look up how to do this, report back when you have located your bug."
The original hydrogen bomb was known as the "Super" before it was called a hydrogen bomb, and the idea is what every wide-eyed geek in elementary school imagines the H-bomb to be -- put an A-bomb next to a vat of deuterium, and the A-bomb blasts the deuterium hot enough to make it fuse.
As the dudes as Los Alamos started building computers to do numerical models of fluids and radiation and everything, it became apparent that Teller's Super was a dud. The physics of radiation were such that simply sticking a fission bomb next to a pile of heavy hydrogen was simply not going to do anything. What if you sweetened the deuterium with tritium -- then what? As it turned out, you would need gobs of tritium, so the whole thing was a non-starter.
As it turns out, Stanislaw Ulam came up with the idea of a staged atom bomb -- a small atom bomb would provide the shock to compress a big freepin pile of plutonium to make a big honkin atom bomb, and Teller got ahold of that idea to make the staged H-bomb. The staged H-bomb used to be a very dark secret, but the combination of Richard Rhodes "Dark Sun" and that Progressive Magazine article kind of let out at least the general H-bomb concept. Teller's stamp on the staged bomb was that prompt x-rays from the atom bomb would be the way of getting compression instead of Ulam's original idea of the shock wave, but that the radiation would act first is obvious once anyone with physics knowledge starts working on a staged design, and Teller kind of took all the credit.
But the actual staged H-bomb not only focuses A-bomb radiation to compress a pile of deuterium, it also compresses a plutonium "spark plug" in the middle to make Ulam's staged A-bomb. The combination of heat and pressure from the radiation compression along with the flood of fast neutrons from the plutonium spark plug manage to fuse the deuterium, which produces its yield mainly in the form of yet more neutrons, which provides fission of a U-238 blanket to provide much of the explosive power of the bomb.
Fusion is really, really hard, even with the heat and pressure from an atom bomb, and the real H-bomb is a Rube Goldberg set of multiple effects which use fission-driven neutrons to produce fusion neutrons to produce gobs of explosive power from non-critical fission of U-238. Fusion is really, really hard, even for the Sun, because while the Sun is not using deuterium but straight hydrogen, for all of the intense heat and pressure in the interior of the Sun, the reaction rates are really, really low, which is a good thing, because otherwise the Sun wouldn't have lasted 5 billion years to allow us to be here.
So back to the fusion power reactor. All of the claims of imminent fusion power are based on using lots of tritium for D-T fusion for the same reason that Teller's Classical Super would have needed gobs of tritium and for the same reason that the actual H-bomb that burns D-D needs three stages of fission to get its explosive power. Just as the need for tons of T made Teller's Super a non-starter, the need for tritium means that the current frontier of fusion power is a non-starter. Yes, you breed tritium in the lithium blanket, but you have to compare the breeding doubling time with the half life of tritium and wonder how much seed tritium will you need to get a fusion power economy going and how many decades of breeding tritium will be required to switch the economy over the fusion power before the oil runs out.
The only thing I would add concerns the trepidation about developing for Linux GUIs. As far as I can tell, there is nothing wrong with Qt+ or GTK. My question is that if I am leaving a platform GUI such as Windows, why do I want to embrace another platform GUI such as Qt+ or GTK?
True, Qt+ is a somewhat portable GUI is that there is a Windows version, but then you have the famous developer seat-license fees, and there is some version of GTK under Windows of some controversial level of capability. I am betting on Java Swing. Of all of the non-Windows window managers, widget collections, and graphics libraries, it seems to be farthest along in offering everything GDI can do in terms of hardware-accelerated graphics, and it has FOSS support (check out the FreeHEP VectorGraphics package for generating publication-ready EPS output from Java Swing plots -- simply awesome)
I really think the GUI should be an independent layer on top of the OS because while I will get "locked in" to that GUI layer, I won't get locked in to the underlying OS, and I don't care if that OS is Windows, OS-X, Linux, Solaris, whatever. There are other independent GUI layers (Python-wxWindows, Python-TK, GTK and Qt+ to a degree), but Java Swing is the most capable of them all.
If you are primarily selling services, software that you need to provide those services is a cost. If you commoditize software, you create more opportunity to make money from services. Those fancy four-color graphs are simply restating something Joel On Software said a while back in words.
That pretty much describes the world of C/C++/Java/scripting glue with the Unix-y tools of makefiles, vi, building in dependencies on other software built on the same model. And people think stuff like Delphi, IDE's, and form designers are for wimps. It is either wimpitude or you can take your pain and suffering like a man.
So it makes sense that you want to cruise with as few engine RPM's as possible, and automakers reporting big V-6 gas mileage (Impala, Malibu, V6 Camry, Avalon) have very tall gearing. But do you want to accelerate in Granny fashion? The optimal efficiency is somewhere in the 2000-2500 RPM zone. Perhaps if you accelerate very slowly you can keep the engine at a more efficient load longer and keep your average speed down as well to reduce losses?
The other interesting thing is that pulse driving around 25 MPH gives better gas mileage in a hybrid than steady driving at 25 MPH -- seems to contradict the advice of a steady foot on the gas pedal. I guess even with the small, electric-assisted gas engine in a hybrid, that engine is oversized for constant cruise speed too and you benefit by cycling it on and off. I suppose someone could program the control system to cycle the engine on and off and be constantly alternating between gas and electric operation, but they don't do that because it would either be bad for emissions, annoying to the customer, hard on the battery, or not effective on gas mileage because the round trip of energy from the gas engine through generator through the battery to the motor.
If pulse driving where you try to switch the gas engine on and off with involving the electrics is optimal, it will be interesting what can be achieved with the GM belt-alternator-startor "mild hybrids." Some in the hybrid enthusiast community have derided the GM effort as being window dressing and not a proper hybrid, but if the GM BAS hybrids have motor stop or fuel cutoff during coast, there may be a way to get high gas mileage out of those using such techniques.
Some form of pulse-glide seems to be effective in my gas engine non-hybrid Camry, perhaps for a 10-20 percent pickup in gas mileage in city driving. While the motor doesn't shut off, the transmission is set up to freewheel during coast at low engine RPM's. Applying short bursts of engine power together with coasting as much as possible seems to be better than a steady cruise application of the gas at speeds of 25-35 MPH based on Scan Gauge gas mileage readings.
I have looked to see if pulse-glide has wider applicability than just the Prius. On one hand you don't want to drive in a way to be dangerous or obstructing traffic. But on the other hand, in traffic you are always adjusting speed to match conditions, and if you can get better mileage through better understanding of engine operation, that is useful.
Windows never claims to be "real time", soft, hard or otherwise. The problem is that Windows can "go away" for tens of milliseconds (perhaps less with modern, faster hardware) to do things like disk accesses and what not without being responsive to interrupts or time slice preemption. The explanation is that they are trying to maximize throughput according to some metric than absolute millisecond-level responsiveness, which is what you need to do multimedia without sporadic frame hops. The other thing is that their time slice scheduling is quite course and if you are doing multi-threading (at least on single processors), you almost need to simulate a co-routine type of swapping back and forth by cross waiting and signalling of threads -- the time slices are too coarse to respond at the millisecond level.
The story I kept hearing about BeOS (and to a certain extent OS 2 as well) is that not only were these systems more finely grained, either in not having low-level non-preemptible tasks or having having less coarse time slices, the use of threads and the use of waits when one thread stalled and signals for waiting threads to proceed permeated programming GUI apps.
Windows, OS-X, the various Linux window managers, Java Swing, are pretty much all based on a message-passing non-preemptive cooperative multi-tasking type GUI that runs on a single thread. Yes you can use worker threads to help compute-bound or other apps, but the GUI runs a single thread and those worker threads have to synchronize with that GUI thread to display results.
Do OS-2, BeOS have multi-threaded GUI's? What were they like from the developer side? Were they a PITA to develop functioning GUI apps, or was the application-level multi-threading doable with the tools and protocols provided? Is there anything to learn from BeOS from the way they did GUI apps compared to the Windows, OS-X, Linux, Java Swing, and everybody else way of single-threaded GUI's?
The files are D6_Upd2_Pro.exe, D6_RTL2_Pro.exe if you have the Professional version, some other name than Pro if you have the Personal Edition. I have seen sites referencing both the Pro and Personal edition Upd2 and RTL2 patches, but all of the links to them are broken, and I am sorry I am not of more help.
If you are using Delphi to build ActiveX controls out of VCL controls, you get these stupid [Warning] TF32Ax_TLB.pas(2390): Method 'InitiateAction' hides virtual method of base type 'TControl' messages that I never figures off how to suppress. You really should be able to get clean compiles, either by fixing the problem or using the appropriate suppression flag if you want to accept the warned condition because compile cluttered with warnings you ignore can have you overlook something that really is a warning.
By the way, if you are still using Delphi 6, there was some kind of service pack to it a while ago that fixed a memory leak with Variant arrays or some such thing -- one really shouldn't use an out-of-the-box Delphi 6 unless it has been patched for this.
Where is the reference to the mine shafts? The computer that will let the dinosaurs into the mines based on preselected criteria that will favor the leadership and military classes? The 10:1 female:male dinosaur ratio in the underground community?
In the usual sort of parent-teacher conferences, without any particular input from my part, my mother wondered out loud to the gym teacher whether I could be given a little bit more playing time. Mom was always anxious to keep her kids physically active while Dad was a lot more indifferent to whether we participated in sports or not.
The Gym teacher, attempted to justify the status quo with, "Your child will probably enter a professional career just like his father; whether your child succeeds in sports probably won't make any difference in the long term anyway" to which my father responded, "Yes, and how many of these other children are going to make it into sports as a career?"
On the flip side of this, my younger brother, while not that different in his physical characteristics, was perhaps more in tune with the social benefits of team sports and participated in the town softball league. In this very trendy-PC community, there was one of these meetings about the "needs of our children" and "all of the pressures and threats to the 'self-esteem' of our children." My mom, always the town gadfly, chimed up "Oh yeah, what about posting the kid's batting averages in the local hardware store window? I suppose that doesn't contribute to any of the pressure our kids are under." One of the coaches came up to her privately and proposed, "Hey lady, if it means that much to you, we could work something out to get your son more times at bat."
You may have a more enlightened attitude, and I may be regurgitating long-held biases about the role of competitive team sports in physical education. But some biases have a factual basis, although any attempt to ask for some reform of the system is met with the usual responses that competition is the fun part of physical activity, Gym class is already evicerated with PC, and the kids not benefiting from the system are at fault for not trying hard enough. But one is also naive to think that there are not those in Phy Ed who lose sight the purposes of the whole enterprise.