Because oil has a very simple interface. Sure, it may take lots of chemical engineering to make a conforming oil, but what it has to do is very simple -- it needs to stay liquid, to keep dirt and water and other contaminents in suspension, and to be slippery at the temperatures, pressures, and film thicknesses in the engine.
It does not have remember the sequence of charging and discharging of your alternator and then turn off the trunk light when the battery is low. Oil can be mixed with other oil -- I can throw in a can of Shell oil with a crankcase full of Quaker state without doing serious engine damage.
There is one count on which Delphi can't be touched by any other compiled language/IDE, even Borland's own C++ builder. Delphi compiles and links faster than anything else on the planet that is not interpreted. It even compiles faster than C#.NET.
I think that part of the reason for that is that Pascal is the RISC of languages -- it was developed as a "teaching language", but it seems that it was also developed to make writing compilers for it very easy -- the declarations have to be in front so the thing lends itself to a one-pass parser. There must be also some good engineering in the Borland implementation that makes it fast even for Pascals.
Apart from operator overloading and the STL, C++ and Delphi are pretty much equivalent and mappable one into the other -- witness C++ Builder doing pretty much the same thing as Delphi, only compiling slower. I write to the Windows API using my own Delphi classes without using VCL or MFC (produces very lean programs), and I do pretty much the exact thing in C++.
I do have to admit that Pascal syntax has lost out to C syntax (witness C#, Java and to a degree, Perl). Pascal syntax was obsolete even in its day (the clunky requirements on begin-end blocks with if statements that were reformed in Modula and Ada). But Delphi, which had modules, classes, a reference-counted long-length string type, function overloading, and reference-counted interfaces with support for UIID's grafted on to it, soldiers on while Modula and Ada (meant to be extensions to Pascal done "the right way") have become largely historical footnotes.
for (int i = 0; i
is something I understand and can read in an instant. I call this a "C-ism" in that from C to C++ to Java to C# it means the same darned thing, and it occurs so often I don't have to blink when I see it.
for (int i : C) {}
or more properly
for (CMemberType cMem: C) {}
is something that I have to scratch my head about. The fact that people conflate i with c_mem and confuse a collection member with a loop index tells me that the new construct is going to give problems.
Yeah, yeah, Law of Demeter and all that style stuff, you shouldn't be pulling values out of objects and doing logic on them, you should be telling an object what to do and have it do it. But you can take all this OO purity so far, and the first way is instantly recognized by every C, C++, Java, and C# programmer.
You take all this OO purity stuff so far and you have something that looks like Objective C, Smalltalk, (God forbid) Eiffel, or C++ STL on a bad hair day. I am a Pascal person myself, but as of 2003 I am willing to concede that C-style syntax has won: there is a huge "installed-base" of programmers familiar with it. I am all in favor of staying consistent with it instead of going of inventing all kinds of bizarro syntax.
If what you want to do is have an IDE that integrated text editor and the free SDK C# compiler, it is OK. If you want the Visual Basicy kind of drag and drop on to a form and hook up events, it is still very much under development. If you want to use your legacy ActiveX controls (not a problem with VS.NET), that may be on the to-do-list but is not currently available.
Our university has this deal called "cluster hires." I guess the game is that you have to hire several people in different departments, all at once, and these people are all supposed to interact with each other in some kind of collaboration kind of deal (like hiring a materials person, a condensed-matter physicist, a EE -- they are all supposed to be working together to try to turn our Midwestern U into Silicon Cow Pasture). It is the latest administration sca^H^H^Hconcept and we are all supposed to bend our hiring around it, and since we are understaffed we will jump through any hoops to get bodies into classrooms, but all I can think of is the CF word, because a cluster hire is one big CF.
Please excuse my ignorance on the CF word. I think I kinda know what it means. I think a cluster hire is a CF if you understand all the implications of it. But what really is a CF? Is it what my parents used to call (derisively) a "three-ring circus"? Is there a rigorous definition, etymology, or example usage? I want to call something a CF and use the term correctly.
I like foam-in-a-can for patching holes too big for caulk. I am told that rodents don't like the taste of it. Only wear old clothes and shoes and perhaps disposable rubber or vinyl gloves because that foam can drip, and it is essentially crazy glue. And a little foam goes a long way because it expands as it sets, but if you over foam, you can always break off the pieces extruded from the holes you filled after it sets.
I am taking care of a place out in the country, and to solve a squirrel problem I 1) went on a major hole-filling campaign, including cutting blocks of wood to fill gaps in this old wooden basement door, 2) took to "relocating with extreme prejudice" any squirrels seen outside the house with a 20-gauge.
Recently I came under squirrel attack where one had chewed into the siding and chewed into the Styrofoam insulation board underlaying the siding -- didn't get into the house because under that are 4-inch timbers of a 100-year old log construction. Filled the hole with foam-in-a-can and the buggers started another hole in the siding. Filled that one with roofing tar and started playing NPR full-blast on the radio when I am not in the house. Crossing fingers that that works as the squirrels that are left on the property seem to know to run when I come with the 20-gauge -- the ones which would just freeze seem to be gone by a kind of Darwinian process.
There are both pros and cons to legacy support. The cons of course are the hits in performance. As to the advantages of legacy support, suppose you are to offload your FFT's, audio filters, etc. to a GPU (or to a DSP board for all that matters). You are probably going to have to write your algorithms in assembly (or even possibly in hex machine code) to absolute addresses in the GPU buffer. Then what are you going to do when the next generation of GPU comes along -- start that coding all over again? How are you going to distribute a portable application -- I mean forget about X-86 as a requirement, are you going to listen to your users whining that your software requires a particular model graphics card?
I can tell you this from experience because I was using DSP cards to do audio filtering in the 486 days. Since the Pentium-I, I have freed myself from DSP cards and never looked back.
The GPU market works the way it does because each GPU comes with graphics acceleration drivers that install with the card, and the application software developer hardly has to know about all that code running in the background. It is kind of like the Swing/SWT dichotomy. Sure SWT gets better performance, but it is more installation fuss. Yeah, yeah, Swing has to JNI down to native code too, but that is all hidden away because it is packaged in the JVM release for your platform.
Spreadsheets and browsers are one thing, but if Java is that good, we should be seeing it in "niche application" software.
Research into bird songs has resulted in this project: http://birds.cornell.edu/brp/Raven/Raven.html.
I tried it out: it is the dancing elephant; you tend not to focus on the quality of its dancing but on the fact that it dances at all. An oh yes, while the Raven UI is not exactly sluggish once it gets going, it takes ever so long to load on starup.
SWT is not platform dependent inasmuch as there is a SWT implementation for Windows and implementations for other platforms are "almost as far along."
SWT is platform dependent in the sense that you have to include a different package with your SWT app to make it work with each supported platform. This is in a way true with Swing, but since Swing is SUN-sanctioned, the customizations for a particular platform are part of the JVM for that platform so the distribution of a Swing app is more transparent.
There are two kinds of comments. There is the narrative description of what a modules or function does along with an explanation of what all the parameters are for. Then there are the types of comments that explain all of your hacks and work-arounds.
I don't think self-documenting languages will ever replace comment type 1. On the other hand, I believe that comment type 2 needs to be used very sparingly. You probably should rewrite/refactor your program if you have a lot of comment type 2 because you are trying to explain some kind of hack. Also, comment type 2 can get out of synch with code changes.
For an example of the TCK/TK/C approach to a portable app look at
WaveSurfer as an example of a scientific/graphics program that computes digital sound spectrograms. For the Java approach, look at Raven (I don't have anything to do with either of these programs -- I picked them as examples of portable software using the approaches mentioned by the parent software that are very heavily 2-D graphics oriented).
While WaveSurfer doesn't have the snap of a native Windows app doing the same thing, it is OK, but I found Raven (Java/Swing) to be a bit clunky.
First off, there are many kinds of robotics work, just as there are many kinds of AI work. The "robot swarms" at MIT is not the bulk of robotics.
I think what the robotics world is trying to accomplish is that in the animal world you have everything from flatworms or insects with very hard-wired kinds of behaviors to humans with very complex brains and reasoning. Classic AI is approaching things from the human end while the robot swarm is approaching things from the lower organisms.
Even the lower organisms do things that are beyond the state of the art of common factory machines. The idea is that figuring out what the lower organisms do is more approachable from current computing power -- perhaps some very simple rules govern these organisms and when these organisms cooperate in swarms there is some emergent behavior worth discovering.
Gilbert Levin has his Web site where he holds out for labeled release showing the presence of life, but for me the main anti-life arguments are 1) absence of Van Allen belts and ozone layer and UV and other radiation levels on the surface that would sterilize any known earth organism, 2) the dearth of organic matter coupled with Gaea -- if there is life, it would be pervasive and have a lock on maintaining its environment.
A couple things against Lovelock's ideas. Didn't the Earth have a reducing atmosphere for billions of years until "blue-green algae" (cyanobacteria) got a toehold? Don't know about Antartica, but the extremophile organisms at thermal ocean vents and in hot springs don't seem to be regressed evolution from more normal bacteria but seem to be a more primitive, ancient form of life -- the hot springs are perhaps closer to the early Earth and may have been where life started. Was life always in control of its environment from its most primitive stages, or did that kick in with the oxygen revolution?
Aren't the sandworms supposed to be silicon-based life? Or was that an extrapolation from Dune fandom and not in the Herbert novels? It would be consistent with the sandworms being hydrophobic. Herbert was supposed to be an entymologist and got his ideas for his cultural systems for 10,000 AD humans from social insects, so is it implausible that he thought through a scenario for silicon life based on its chemistry?
On the other hand, the sandworms were the source of spice, a substance that had pharmacological activity in humans. I am hard pressed that a silicon or silicon-carbon based chemical would be useful as a drug.
The Soyuz spacecraft is a blunt-body reentry vehicle that generates a small amount of lift. With the proper guidance active, that lift can mitigate the G-forces to about 4 or 5. When they make a "ballistic entry", they are going straight in and pull about 8 or 9 G's. The G forces are even higher for some abort trajectories -- I believe a long while ago they had an in-flight abort where they had to separate from a misfiring booster, and you pull a lot of G's in the steep suborbital reentry.
If things are done right, those G's are in the direction pushing you into the seat cushions (eyeballs in). An F-16 pilot pulls G's eyeball's down (towards the feet), and those are the G's that can cause blackout from blood pooling in the legs after being drained from the brain. The eyeballs-in G's don't do that -- they are merely very uncomfortable, although they can mess up your inner ear temporarily and make you headachy and dizzy.
I heard (in Aviation Week - aka AvLeak) that some dotcom entrepreneur dudes crossed over to work on a 7-person jet taxi -- the idea was for the price of first class airfare you would have a nationwide version of a ride-share cab system. They were going for some ridiculous price point (like half a million for a jet -- you can hardly get a prop plane for those bucks these days). They were going to use a pair of Williams mini fanjet engines of the type used on cruise missiles. Those Williams engines are a whole 'nother story just by themselves -- like they take solid blocks of titanium and use an NC machine to mill out the whole rotor assembly for one of these things in one piece.
Anyway, the aircraft went through its inevitable weight growth (like software bloat when you keep adding features to a package) and it has outgrown the Williams jet engines, and they begged Williams to come up with a higher thrust version, but Williams has a good thing going with the cruise missile and said nothing doing about changing their design. Trouble is that the next tier of jet engine costs ten times as much which means the half mil price tag on the jet plane is out the windows, so I don't know what is happening.
I am still running WordStar to type up my billing invoices, although I admit it is WordStar 4 rather than the original 1982 vintage PC-DOS WordStar.
By the way, the Borland IDE's (Delphi, etc) were pretty WordStar compatible for the longest time, but I haven't checked lately if they still recognize all the ^KB, ^KK, and all that.
Microsoft, bless their black little hearts, made a concerted effort to woo game developers away from DOS-mode and on to Windows by adding all kinds of features, and even then as you point out, it took Microsoft several iterations to get right.
Concorde is mach 2 when they push the throttles forward, but they have a lot of subsonic flying to do near the airports and each end of the route.
The Acella train can do 150 MPH (for a short stretch between NY and Boston), but the point-to-point speed averages only 70 MPH, and car travel is "almost as fast" (you could probably average 60 MPH if you ate in the car and held it in).
After the Concorde accident, in my Walter Mitty daydreams I wondered if there are enough Convair 990's left. The Convair 990 is kind of a skinny younger brother to the 707, and it was developed to satisfy Howard Hughs' whim to shave 20 minutes transcontinental travel time off his competitors when he was running TWA, but I think only American had them in any numbers. I remember as a kid being taken to drop my dad off for a business trip at O'Hare and seeing gate after gate with either Convair 990's or Lockheed Electras (commercial variant of P3 Orion to you young whippersnappers) in American's "Astroliner" metallic color scheme.
The idea is to take a handful of 990's (enough for daily JFK-Heathrow service), fit them with 4-across leather seats like what Midwest Express does with a DC-9, and run a Concorde-style first-class service with every amenity (free booze and gourmet food). These planes are Mach.95 capable (Whitcomb area-ruled fuselage, "shock pods" on the back of the wings), but since the speed of sound slows down in thinner air, I would fly them at around 20-25,000 feet, pedal-to-the-metal. Yes, this would burn fuel, but a whole lot less than Concorde, and while a 747 would make the trip in 6 hours, Concorde in 3, I think my service could turn in something like 4 hours and 45 minutes. Anyway, it was just an idea.
The Z-experiment or whatever they call it is the closest to the actual H-bomb of all the fusion approaches. The actual H-bomb doesn't work by simply sticking an A-bomb at the end of a tube of deuterium. Teller thought such a "classic Super" would work but computer simulations proved him wrong. Its probably a Good Thing the Classic Super doesn't work because A-bombs or H-bombs could ignite their surroundings and set off the whole Earth in a nuclear conflagration.
They got the H-bomb to work using a staged approach. Stanislaw Ulam had the original idea for a staged advice, but the final Ulam-Teller device used x-rays rather than the shock blast from the A-bomb, reflected or reemitted from a U-238 jacket, to energize, of all things, Styrofoam as an imploder. That didn't set off the fusion reaction either, but it imploded a plutonium "spark plug" that gave off enough neutrons to set off the deuterium, which in turn produced most of its energy in neutrons that acted on the U-238 jacket that gave most of the yield of the device.
I have now idea (or care to have) whether modern, compact warheads use the same principle as Ivy Mike. But I bet that the National Labs have tons of experience with variants of these Rube Goldbergesque "staged" devices. Now the Z-machine is a staged device -- instead of using x-rays, it uses buckets of electric current to implode this little wire cage surrounding a pellet. You don't apply energy directly to the deuterium but to something else which in turn implodes the deuterium.
Besides its Bomb heritage, the method has more ominuous applications. Long before this device is useful as an electric power generator, it will be useful for generating bursts of neutrons. To do what? To simulate mini H-bomb blasts of course. I believe the U.S. has signed or pledged or whatever to suspend all nuclear tests. While some believe that the people in the Bomb business are atomic-pyros who can't get enough of testing, suspending nuclear tests means that over time we are giving up are nuclear military arsenal because bombs get old and without testing you can't be sure if they are going to work as promised. There are two answers to that. One is computer simulation with clustered computers and all the Beowolf-cluster jokes on Slashdot. The other is to use the Z-machine to make little bursts of neutrons to do sub-scale H-bomb tests.
Slashdot Mirror
It does not have remember the sequence of charging and discharging of your alternator and then turn off the trunk light when the battery is low. Oil can be mixed with other oil -- I can throw in a can of Shell oil with a crankcase full of Quaker state without doing serious engine damage.
I think that part of the reason for that is that Pascal is the RISC of languages -- it was developed as a "teaching language", but it seems that it was also developed to make writing compilers for it very easy -- the declarations have to be in front so the thing lends itself to a one-pass parser. There must be also some good engineering in the Borland implementation that makes it fast even for Pascals.
Apart from operator overloading and the STL, C++ and Delphi are pretty much equivalent and mappable one into the other -- witness C++ Builder doing pretty much the same thing as Delphi, only compiling slower. I write to the Windows API using my own Delphi classes without using VCL or MFC (produces very lean programs), and I do pretty much the exact thing in C++.
I do have to admit that Pascal syntax has lost out to C syntax (witness C#, Java and to a degree, Perl). Pascal syntax was obsolete even in its day (the clunky requirements on begin-end blocks with if statements that were reformed in Modula and Ada). But Delphi, which had modules, classes, a reference-counted long-length string type, function overloading, and reference-counted interfaces with support for UIID's grafted on to it, soldiers on while Modula and Ada (meant to be extensions to Pascal done "the right way") have become largely historical footnotes.
for (int i : C) {}
or more properly
for (CMemberType cMem: C) {}
is something that I have to scratch my head about. The fact that people conflate i with c_mem and confuse a collection member with a loop index tells me that the new construct is going to give problems.
Yeah, yeah, Law of Demeter and all that style stuff, you shouldn't be pulling values out of objects and doing logic on them, you should be telling an object what to do and have it do it. But you can take all this OO purity so far, and the first way is instantly recognized by every C, C++, Java, and C# programmer.
You take all this OO purity stuff so far and you have something that looks like Objective C, Smalltalk, (God forbid) Eiffel, or C++ STL on a bad hair day. I am a Pascal person myself, but as of 2003 I am willing to concede that C-style syntax has won: there is a huge "installed-base" of programmers familiar with it. I am all in favor of staying consistent with it instead of going of inventing all kinds of bizarro syntax.
If what you want to do is have an IDE that integrated text editor and the free SDK C# compiler, it is OK. If you want the Visual Basicy kind of drag and drop on to a form and hook up events, it is still very much under development. If you want to use your legacy ActiveX controls (not a problem with VS.NET), that may be on the to-do-list but is not currently available.
Please excuse my ignorance on the CF word. I think I kinda know what it means. I think a cluster hire is a CF if you understand all the implications of it. But what really is a CF? Is it what my parents used to call (derisively) a "three-ring circus"? Is there a rigorous definition, etymology, or example usage? I want to call something a CF and use the term correctly.
I am taking care of a place out in the country, and to solve a squirrel problem I 1) went on a major hole-filling campaign, including cutting blocks of wood to fill gaps in this old wooden basement door, 2) took to "relocating with extreme prejudice" any squirrels seen outside the house with a 20-gauge.
Recently I came under squirrel attack where one had chewed into the siding and chewed into the Styrofoam insulation board underlaying the siding -- didn't get into the house because under that are 4-inch timbers of a 100-year old log construction. Filled the hole with foam-in-a-can and the buggers started another hole in the siding. Filled that one with roofing tar and started playing NPR full-blast on the radio when I am not in the house. Crossing fingers that that works as the squirrels that are left on the property seem to know to run when I come with the 20-gauge -- the ones which would just freeze seem to be gone by a kind of Darwinian process.
I can tell you this from experience because I was using DSP cards to do audio filtering in the 486 days. Since the Pentium-I, I have freed myself from DSP cards and never looked back.
The GPU market works the way it does because each GPU comes with graphics acceleration drivers that install with the card, and the application software developer hardly has to know about all that code running in the background. It is kind of like the Swing/SWT dichotomy. Sure SWT gets better performance, but it is more installation fuss. Yeah, yeah, Swing has to JNI down to native code too, but that is all hidden away because it is packaged in the JVM release for your platform.
Research into bird songs has resulted in this project: http://birds.cornell.edu/brp/Raven/Raven.html.
I tried it out: it is the dancing elephant; you tend not to focus on the quality of its dancing but on the fact that it dances at all. An oh yes, while the Raven UI is not exactly sluggish once it gets going, it takes ever so long to load on starup.
SWT is platform dependent in the sense that you have to include a different package with your SWT app to make it work with each supported platform. This is in a way true with Swing, but since Swing is SUN-sanctioned, the customizations for a particular platform are part of the JVM for that platform so the distribution of a Swing app is more transparent.
I don't think self-documenting languages will ever replace comment type 1. On the other hand, I believe that comment type 2 needs to be used very sparingly. You probably should rewrite/refactor your program if you have a lot of comment type 2 because you are trying to explain some kind of hack. Also, comment type 2 can get out of synch with code changes.
While WaveSurfer doesn't have the snap of a native Windows app doing the same thing, it is OK, but I found Raven (Java/Swing) to be a bit clunky.
I think what the robotics world is trying to accomplish is that in the animal world you have everything from flatworms or insects with very hard-wired kinds of behaviors to humans with very complex brains and reasoning. Classic AI is approaching things from the human end while the robot swarm is approaching things from the lower organisms.
Even the lower organisms do things that are beyond the state of the art of common factory machines. The idea is that figuring out what the lower organisms do is more approachable from current computing power -- perhaps some very simple rules govern these organisms and when these organisms cooperate in swarms there is some emergent behavior worth discovering.
A couple things against Lovelock's ideas. Didn't the Earth have a reducing atmosphere for billions of years until "blue-green algae" (cyanobacteria) got a toehold? Don't know about Antartica, but the extremophile organisms at thermal ocean vents and in hot springs don't seem to be regressed evolution from more normal bacteria but seem to be a more primitive, ancient form of life -- the hot springs are perhaps closer to the early Earth and may have been where life started. Was life always in control of its environment from its most primitive stages, or did that kick in with the oxygen revolution?
On the other hand, the sandworms were the source of spice, a substance that had pharmacological activity in humans. I am hard pressed that a silicon or silicon-carbon based chemical would be useful as a drug.
If things are done right, those G's are in the direction pushing you into the seat cushions (eyeballs in). An F-16 pilot pulls G's eyeball's down (towards the feet), and those are the G's that can cause blackout from blood pooling in the legs after being drained from the brain. The eyeballs-in G's don't do that -- they are merely very uncomfortable, although they can mess up your inner ear temporarily and make you headachy and dizzy.
The people who would want to do such a thing are currently helping John Ashcroft with his inquiries.
When the bad guys can buy Stingers or SAM-7's if they have enough coin, I think the hobbyist cruise missile is far down on the threat list.
Anyway, the aircraft went through its inevitable weight growth (like software bloat when you keep adding features to a package) and it has outgrown the Williams jet engines, and they begged Williams to come up with a higher thrust version, but Williams has a good thing going with the cruise missile and said nothing doing about changing their design. Trouble is that the next tier of jet engine costs ten times as much which means the half mil price tag on the jet plane is out the windows, so I don't know what is happening.
I am still running WordStar to type up my billing invoices, although I admit it is WordStar 4 rather than the original 1982 vintage PC-DOS WordStar. By the way, the Borland IDE's (Delphi, etc) were pretty WordStar compatible for the longest time, but I haven't checked lately if they still recognize all the ^KB, ^KK, and all that.
Microsoft, bless their black little hearts, made a concerted effort to woo game developers away from DOS-mode and on to Windows by adding all kinds of features, and even then as you point out, it took Microsoft several iterations to get right.
The name takes on a continuum of values based on a probability density function . . .
The Acella train can do 150 MPH (for a short stretch between NY and Boston), but the point-to-point speed averages only 70 MPH, and car travel is "almost as fast" (you could probably average 60 MPH if you ate in the car and held it in).
The idea is to take a handful of 990's (enough for daily JFK-Heathrow service), fit them with 4-across leather seats like what Midwest Express does with a DC-9, and run a Concorde-style first-class service with every amenity (free booze and gourmet food). These planes are Mach .95 capable (Whitcomb area-ruled fuselage, "shock pods" on the back of the wings), but since the speed of sound slows down in thinner air, I would fly them at around 20-25,000 feet, pedal-to-the-metal. Yes, this would burn fuel, but a whole lot less than Concorde, and while a 747 would make the trip in 6 hours, Concorde in 3, I think my service could turn in something like 4 hours and 45 minutes. Anyway, it was just an idea.
They got the H-bomb to work using a staged approach. Stanislaw Ulam had the original idea for a staged advice, but the final Ulam-Teller device used x-rays rather than the shock blast from the A-bomb, reflected or reemitted from a U-238 jacket, to energize, of all things, Styrofoam as an imploder. That didn't set off the fusion reaction either, but it imploded a plutonium "spark plug" that gave off enough neutrons to set off the deuterium, which in turn produced most of its energy in neutrons that acted on the U-238 jacket that gave most of the yield of the device.
I have now idea (or care to have) whether modern, compact warheads use the same principle as Ivy Mike. But I bet that the National Labs have tons of experience with variants of these Rube Goldbergesque "staged" devices. Now the Z-machine is a staged device -- instead of using x-rays, it uses buckets of electric current to implode this little wire cage surrounding a pellet. You don't apply energy directly to the deuterium but to something else which in turn implodes the deuterium.
Besides its Bomb heritage, the method has more ominuous applications. Long before this device is useful as an electric power generator, it will be useful for generating bursts of neutrons. To do what? To simulate mini H-bomb blasts of course. I believe the U.S. has signed or pledged or whatever to suspend all nuclear tests. While some believe that the people in the Bomb business are atomic-pyros who can't get enough of testing, suspending nuclear tests means that over time we are giving up are nuclear military arsenal because bombs get old and without testing you can't be sure if they are going to work as promised. There are two answers to that. One is computer simulation with clustered computers and all the Beowolf-cluster jokes on Slashdot. The other is to use the Z-machine to make little bursts of neutrons to do sub-scale H-bomb tests.
What are you, a Ferengi? "UUUman FEEmales wear clothes!"