First of all, 30-40,000 lines of code is not lots of code. Try, 250,000 of code.
A standard-sized novel runs about a hundred thousand words. Weightier tomes, particularly those eight-hundred-pagers from the fantasy genre, can run to two or possibly even three times that. If you figure that each sentence accomplishes one narrative 'task' and uses up about ten words, then a whole novel is about ten thousand lines of code. (Some programming languages make this sort of correlation a bit more explicit).
It's silly to quibble over less than an order of magnitude when you're using vague terms like "lots". And I'd argue that a novel's worth of code counts.
The code for the combat and the actual fight was massive. Most peoples code was a couple of pages...mine was closer to 50.
I printed it out at one point, so I could take it to dinner and work on some bug, and someone swiped it off the printer, and subsequently copied the WHOLE THING and turned it in for the assignment.
Who the hell retypes fifty pages of code just to plagiarize a two-page assignment?
Couldn't they find someone slightly less obsessive to steal code from?
My solution was to give the first assignment turned in whatever grade it deserved, and each subsequent copy a 0, and that seemed to make short work of the practice. At my current university the response would be significantly harsher.
My father once taught computer science to high school students. His approach was to grade the assignment, and divide the points equally among all the students who handed in substantially identical work. (One good assignment, total grade 90%. Handed in by three people -- everyone gets 30%.) The problem didn't usually recur.
When you get into a corporate environment, "cheating" is actually preferred. No reason to re-invent the wheel when there is existing code that gets the job done.
Need a report that's "like this one except for..."? Take the code for that report and add some mods and there ya go. Your manager would consider you an idiot if you started each project from scratch, re-writing all the functions and methods that already exist in other applications and have perhaps already gone through rigorous QA.
Ah, but when you hand it to your boss, you don't tell him that you wrote the whole thing from scratch, do you? You say "Here's the updated code. I started with Bill's TPS report, and then added the three new features we were looking for. I saved the company two weeks and several thousand dollars by reusing the code." If you don't do that, do you think that Bill is going to want to help you in the future?
Taking credit for someone else's work is slimy, whether you're in school or not.
In any event, the goals are different in the two cases. The twin purposes of school assignments are to teach concepts and techniques (and build experience in using them) and to test whether or not each student has mastered the concepts taught in the course. The purpose of writing code in a company is to make money.
Reusing Bill's code achieves the goal in the latter environment; it does nothing in the former.
The occasional reboot, under controlled circumstances, is an excellent test of what will happen in an emergency situation. Mainly, it answers the question of whether the server and required services actually will all come back up by themselves.
While true, I'd much prefer to be able to decide for myself whether or not I wish to run that test every time I patch.
Hard to get all worked up about this when the people running the program don't seem to be concerned about accomplishing anything significant. Sort of like spending untold billions on a supersonic aircraft, and after all the money is spent, flying it subsonic for a year or so, and then grounding it for another year to re-wire it.
Well, no. It sounds like they're quite concerned about doing something useful after spending those billions of euros. They still have the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth by a good margin, even if it's not up to its full design power (yet). They can do some solid science, good experiments, collect a year's worth of data and test all of their detectors and other hardware.
After that, they'll have a year with the beam turned off, in which they can actually analyze the mountains of data that were generated during a year of experimental runs. In addition to replacing the magnet interconnects, experimenters will have a year to fix any problems that come to light with detectors and other experiment hardware and software. This period of operation means that there shouldn't be any unpleasasnt surprises when they do go to full power, because they'll have had a year of 7 TeV operation to shake out all the bugs.
I seem to have heard this argument before.
The Apollo fire. The loss of the Challenger. Repairs to the Hubble.
I seem to have heard this misconception before. The Apollo fire wasn't because of a cutting-edge project taking technical risks, or making a considered judgement to accept smaller safety margins in exchange for reduced costs.
Having a mixed-gas oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere in the Apollo capsule would have increased the internal capsule pressure in orbit, requiring a beefier structure and more weight. More dangerously, it would have required the development of suitable partial-pressure sensors for the precise measurement of oxygen levels within a mixed-gas environment. That would have constituted a technical risk. In contrast, the system used in the original Apollo design required only a simple pressure gauge to ensure sufficient oxygen for the crew.
Moreover, in orbit the Apollo capsule internal pressure would be only about 5 psi - about a third of an atmosphere. While that pressure of oxygen is sufficient to support combustion, it isn't dangerously high, and all of the materials used aboard Apollo were tested for fire safety under those conditions. The big problem was that on the launch pad, the capsule contained a full atmosphere of oxygen (the excess pressure would be bled off as the capsule ascended to orbit). Nobody thought to test under those conditions. Even then, there's at least some evidence to suggest that it was the astronauts' webbing the capsule with large amounts of Velcro that allowed the fire to spread so rapidly.
Finally, the earliest design for the Apollo capsule hatch opened outwards and was equipped with explosive bolts for rapid egress. It was at the insistence of astronaut Gus Grissom (who may have been the victim of premature triggering of such a system on his Mercury capsule) that the hatch be replaced with an inward-opening, 'plug' design that lacked explosive bolts.
Both previous manned U.S. space capsules (Mercury and Gemini) had used essentially identical pure oxygen atmospheres, without concern and without any problems. Did they get lucky? Absolutely, in retrospect. Should the Apollo engineers have recognized the dangers that their predecessors had overlooked? Probably. Was the fire the result of taking 'technical risks' on a 'cutting edge project'? Nope. They thought they were sticking with a simple system that had worked for years, and didn't want to asphyxiate an astronaut by fiddling with something reliable.
As a parent I can understand those that prefer to error on the side of caution, because even with 1000 to 1 odds against it happening that is still your kid that you are risking.
Let's grant, for a moment, the completely incorrect assumption that the MMR (mumps, measles, rubella) triple vaccine actually does cause autism at a rate of 1 in 1000.
The mortality rate for measles in developed nations is about 3 in 1000, with those who survive at risk of significant morbidity - including brain damage and blindness.
The mortality rate for mumps is quite low, but about a third of adult males who are infected will develop acute inflammation of the testicles. Half of those will develop permanent testicular atrophy, and a fraction will suffer complete sterility. Infection with mumps during the first trimester of pregnancy will cause spontaneous abortion in about a quarter of women; infection may cause inflammation of the ovaries and in rare cases causes sterility in women as well.
Rubella (German measles) is generally a relatively mild disease in children and adults; its primary danger is to the unborn. Intrauterine infection of a fetus during the first or second trimester often causes congenital rubella syndrome. CRS causes deafness, blindness, and heart defects (each with more than 40 percent probability) and risks a host of other health problems.
I honestly will gladly allow them to copyright the hell out of it IF they play in arenas that were not built by any public funds. Otherwise everything NFL must be Public domain.
You want to be careful with that sort of restriction. In the interest of fairness, everything that you produce should be in the public domain as well -- unless you've never used electricity from a utility company which received public grants or subsidies for construction, you've never used public roads, public transportation, or public sidewalks to get to work, and you've never used the United States Postal Service.
Your work is subsidized in many ways by government funds, some subtle, some conspicuous. Principled stands can have some very surprising consequences.
In my experience, people tend to make spelling errors and go with the spell chedking results without actually investigating the error.
Perhaps my favorite example of this problem came from a biochemist colleague writing about gel electrophoresis. I'll elide the heavy technical details of his experiment; the short version is that in order to detect proteins, a strongly-colored protein binding dye is soaked into the slab of gel (turning the whole thing vivid blue) and then the excess washed out (leaving visible blue bands of protein on a clear background.) The first step is just called 'staining', while the second part is (appropriately enough) called 'destaining'.
Microsoft Word doesn't know the word 'destain', so "We destained the gel..." was helpfully corrected to "We disdained the gel...". While the latter statement in some cases does reflect our feelings, it may not be an appropriate level of honesty for formal publication.
One more thing -- I'm far too petty to pass up the opportunity to note the obvious typo in "spell chedking", above. If it was a troll for the spelling Nazis, or you have the sense to claim it was in retrospect, well done.
This is really a case of technology moving too fast for its own good.
Well, no. The failure was apparently in a mechanical bushing that made the physical movement of the pedal sticky under certain conditions. This hasn't got anything to do with new technology, despite the incredibly poorly-written article summary.
The fundamental concept behind Japan's quality is kaizen. This is the constant improvement on existing techniques and technology. By starting with what works, it is simpler to build in very small steps without losing any quality along the way.
That sort of general statement or philosophy should be applied with caution - unless one wants to be the manufacturer of the world's finest, most reliable horse-drawn carriages.
I liked the one scene in Avatar where a scientist slides a finger across a 3D display to a mobile device to transfer over the viewable data.
Amen. That's exactly how a touch interface ought to work. Indeed, it's such a good idea that variations have already appeared in other films, including Quantum of Solace (2008) and even Minority Report (2002).
Some people climb mountains on vacation. They're out in the cold, possibly getting rained or snowed on, sleeping on hard ground, straining muscles and risking serious injury. Yet still they call it their 'vacation', and no one argues.
This guy doesn't mind the type of work he does, and he likes the idea of helping other people in his free time. While he's doing it, he's going to visit novel places in other countries, discover new cuisines, learn about different cultures and lifestyles, and have a whole office full of new friends who are glad to see him and want to show him a good time. The locals will know the good places to eat, the fun things to do, the little hidden sights and pleasures that you can't find in your travel guide. He can pull CAT5 during the day, then walk outside and drink rum while the sun sets over the beach.
What's so bad about that? Different people relax in different ways.
...more than three dozen different combinations of chiming tones.
I wonder which engineer thought that would be a good idea.
You're assuming that a) medical personnel aren't bright enough to learn thirty or forty trivial things that can make their jobs easier in the long run; b) every person who uses the system will hear all of the codes (someone in the blood lab is never going to hear the 'incoming prescription meds' chime); and c) if someone hears a chime pattern that they don't recognize, they can't just look at the tube and see what's waiting.
I don't think that those are good assumptions.
Heck, even if you don't know the full chime code, you're still ahead of the game if all of the 'stat' codes have the same loud prefix or suffix.
I have two choices: 'Discreet structures with graph theory' (discrete math; proofs, sets, algorithms and graphs) on one side, and 'Selected math chapters' (math analysis; vectors, euclidean space, differentials) on the other.
I would like to do woodworking in the future. I am going to the hardware store, and among the tools I have two choices: a 'hammer' on the one side, and a 'screwdriver' on the other.
What you choose to put in the toolbox depends on what you want to build. As others have already observed, there are some fundamental bits and pieces and that you really won't want to do without.
And ten years from now, when you decide you'd like to hand-carve a canoe paddle, you're going to have to go out and buy a spokeshave anyway.
There are turnstile designs which are 'luggage-friendly'. I've seen transit systems which use some variant of this sort of 'leaf gate'. The glass panels slide aside, allowing a person to pass through completely unimpeded. These devices readily support the throughput of busy subway systems, so they ought to be able to cope with airport passenger traffic. Variants of the system use paired gates, making it quite unlikely that someone would pass through in the wrong direction inadvertently (and making it at least somewhat difficult - and conspicuous - for someone to travel backwards deliberately).
The downside of such a system is that it's going to cost. These devices are more complex and require more maintenance than a conventional turnstile. They have motorized, moving parts which will be prone to periodic failure. And you probably are going to have to back the turnstiles up with living, breathing security staff at some point anyway.
...no need to refine the Thorium fuel, which is the stage where the nuclear power companies currently make their money...
Fuel enrichment isn't a flat requirement for uranium reactors. Heavy water reactors (in use in Canada, India, and elsewhere for more than forty years) do not require isotope-enriched fuel. The cost of heavy water is offset by the savings on fuel.
Fans who are familiar with Terry Pratchett's works would get a well-earned giggle from his writing being mistaken for Dostoyevsky's. Is that so wrong?
Besides, the author of virtually any quotation (including the one in question here) is readily available to anyone who can cut and paste into Google. Someone unwilling to take that small step before diving into an angry and humourless response is asking for a gentle poke back.
In addition to misatrributing the writing of one of Britain's premier living humourists to Russia's preeminent depressing existentialist, there is one additional irony which ought not be overlooked. While Dostoyevsky was a faithful Orthodox Christian, Pratchett is an atheist.
It is an extreme outcome of the first past the post electoral system that the system tends to converge on two parties and the two parties remain similar in a lot of respects, eliminating voter choice.
Indeed, this is a very interesting application of Hotelling's Law from the world of economics.
I like the idea of a telescope, but there are some caveats.
Off the top, I'd tend to recommend it for kids that are a bit older than the seven- to nine-year-olds in the original question. Much of astronomy requires a certain amount of patience - waiting for your eyes to get dark adapted, learning the locations of stars and constellations, finding objects to look at, using Heavens Above, etc.
I'll echo what some others have already pointed out -- a cheap plastic Wal-Mart MAGNIFIES STARS TWO THOUSAND TIMES!!! special is a recipe for frustration and heartache. What matters is aperture (diameter of the main lens or mirrors - the amount of light you collect goes up with the square of the diameter) and quality optics. A crappy mount or tripod means images that jiggle and difficult pointing.
Another point to bear in mind is that (in much of the northern hemisphere mid-latitudes, at least) you're going to be in the dead of winter. It's going to be cold, overcast, and wet or snowy for much of the next few months. Consider the challenges of manipulating telescope components and assembling tripods while wearing gloves. If you do give a telescope to a loved one, do be considerate of their personal comfort. Freeze the kids once and you may snuff out any further interest in astronomical observation.
Finally, consider that a telescope may not need to be the first thing on the list. A smaller spotting scope, monocular, or pair of binoculars can introduce a lot of astronomical sights, and often offer good-quality optics and rugged construction at much more reasonable prices. The surface of the moon is fascinating even with a low-powered scope, and any good pair of binoculars will reveal the Galilean moons of Jupiter. Binoculars and small spotting scopes can often be mounted on a conventional camera tripod or even be hand-held; this makes it much easier to pick them up and go outside on a whim. They're also useful for watching everything from wildlife to baseball games -- meaning that even if you don't manage to kindle interest in astronomy, the gift still can still be put to good use. ~~~~
They'll usually be hesitant to give you any info about it, but they're technically supposed to give you at least a general reason.
Actually, depending on the jurisdiction you're in, they're almost certainly not required to give you a reason -- and in many companies, the legal department will often have specifically instructed them not to tell you anything beyond a bit of innocuous boilerplate. If they're willing to respond to a few quick questions, great, but don't get pushy.
Asking politely doesn't work, you've got to have your lawyer....
Wow. You recommend having your lawyer call employers to find out why you didn't get a job? Unbelievable. That seems like a brilliant way to make sure you never get an interview from that company again -- or from anyone else in town, once word gets around that you're sending threatening lawyer-mail to the companies that rejected you.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, 30-40,000 lines of code is not lots of code. Try, 250,000 of code.
A standard-sized novel runs about a hundred thousand words. Weightier tomes, particularly those eight-hundred-pagers from the fantasy genre, can run to two or possibly even three times that. If you figure that each sentence accomplishes one narrative 'task' and uses up about ten words, then a whole novel is about ten thousand lines of code. (Some programming languages make this sort of correlation a bit more explicit).
It's silly to quibble over less than an order of magnitude when you're using vague terms like "lots". And I'd argue that a novel's worth of code counts.
The code for the combat and the actual fight was massive. Most peoples code was a couple of pages...mine was closer to 50.
I printed it out at one point, so I could take it to dinner and work on some bug, and someone swiped it off the printer, and subsequently copied the WHOLE THING and turned it in for the assignment.
Who the hell retypes fifty pages of code just to plagiarize a two-page assignment?
Couldn't they find someone slightly less obsessive to steal code from?
My solution was to give the first assignment turned in whatever grade it deserved, and each subsequent copy a 0, and that seemed to make short work of the practice. At my current university the response would be significantly harsher.
My father once taught computer science to high school students. His approach was to grade the assignment, and divide the points equally among all the students who handed in substantially identical work. (One good assignment, total grade 90%. Handed in by three people -- everyone gets 30%.) The problem didn't usually recur.
When you get into a corporate environment, "cheating" is actually preferred. No reason to re-invent the wheel when there is existing code that gets the job done.
Need a report that's "like this one except for..."? Take the code for that report and add some mods and there ya go. Your manager would consider you an idiot if you started each project from scratch, re-writing all the functions and methods that already exist in other applications and have perhaps already gone through rigorous QA.
Ah, but when you hand it to your boss, you don't tell him that you wrote the whole thing from scratch, do you? You say "Here's the updated code. I started with Bill's TPS report, and then added the three new features we were looking for. I saved the company two weeks and several thousand dollars by reusing the code." If you don't do that, do you think that Bill is going to want to help you in the future?
Taking credit for someone else's work is slimy, whether you're in school or not.
In any event, the goals are different in the two cases. The twin purposes of school assignments are to teach concepts and techniques (and build experience in using them) and to test whether or not each student has mastered the concepts taught in the course. The purpose of writing code in a company is to make money.
Reusing Bill's code achieves the goal in the latter environment; it does nothing in the former.
The occasional reboot, under controlled circumstances, is an excellent test of what will happen in an emergency situation. Mainly, it answers the question of whether the server and required services actually will all come back up by themselves.
While true, I'd much prefer to be able to decide for myself whether or not I wish to run that test every time I patch.
Hard to get all worked up about this when the people running the program don't seem to be concerned about accomplishing anything significant. Sort of like spending untold billions on a supersonic aircraft, and after all the money is spent, flying it subsonic for a year or so, and then grounding it for another year to re-wire it.
Well, no. It sounds like they're quite concerned about doing something useful after spending those billions of euros. They still have the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth by a good margin, even if it's not up to its full design power (yet). They can do some solid science, good experiments, collect a year's worth of data and test all of their detectors and other hardware.
After that, they'll have a year with the beam turned off, in which they can actually analyze the mountains of data that were generated during a year of experimental runs. In addition to replacing the magnet interconnects, experimenters will have a year to fix any problems that come to light with detectors and other experiment hardware and software. This period of operation means that there shouldn't be any unpleasasnt surprises when they do go to full power, because they'll have had a year of 7 TeV operation to shake out all the bugs.
I seem to have heard this argument before.
The Apollo fire. The loss of the Challenger. Repairs to the Hubble.
I seem to have heard this misconception before. The Apollo fire wasn't because of a cutting-edge project taking technical risks, or making a considered judgement to accept smaller safety margins in exchange for reduced costs.
Having a mixed-gas oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere in the Apollo capsule would have increased the internal capsule pressure in orbit, requiring a beefier structure and more weight. More dangerously, it would have required the development of suitable partial-pressure sensors for the precise measurement of oxygen levels within a mixed-gas environment. That would have constituted a technical risk. In contrast, the system used in the original Apollo design required only a simple pressure gauge to ensure sufficient oxygen for the crew.
Moreover, in orbit the Apollo capsule internal pressure would be only about 5 psi - about a third of an atmosphere. While that pressure of oxygen is sufficient to support combustion, it isn't dangerously high, and all of the materials used aboard Apollo were tested for fire safety under those conditions. The big problem was that on the launch pad, the capsule contained a full atmosphere of oxygen (the excess pressure would be bled off as the capsule ascended to orbit). Nobody thought to test under those conditions. Even then, there's at least some evidence to suggest that it was the astronauts' webbing the capsule with large amounts of Velcro that allowed the fire to spread so rapidly.
Finally, the earliest design for the Apollo capsule hatch opened outwards and was equipped with explosive bolts for rapid egress. It was at the insistence of astronaut Gus Grissom (who may have been the victim of premature triggering of such a system on his Mercury capsule) that the hatch be replaced with an inward-opening, 'plug' design that lacked explosive bolts.
Both previous manned U.S. space capsules (Mercury and Gemini) had used essentially identical pure oxygen atmospheres, without concern and without any problems. Did they get lucky? Absolutely, in retrospect. Should the Apollo engineers have recognized the dangers that their predecessors had overlooked? Probably. Was the fire the result of taking 'technical risks' on a 'cutting edge project'? Nope. They thought they were sticking with a simple system that had worked for years, and didn't want to asphyxiate an astronaut by fiddling with something reliable.
As a parent I can understand those that prefer to error on the side of caution, because even with 1000 to 1 odds against it happening that is still your kid that you are risking.
Let's grant, for a moment, the completely incorrect assumption that the MMR (mumps, measles, rubella) triple vaccine actually does cause autism at a rate of 1 in 1000.
The mortality rate for measles in developed nations is about 3 in 1000, with those who survive at risk of significant morbidity - including brain damage and blindness.
The mortality rate for mumps is quite low, but about a third of adult males who are infected will develop acute inflammation of the testicles. Half of those will develop permanent testicular atrophy, and a fraction will suffer complete sterility. Infection with mumps during the first trimester of pregnancy will cause spontaneous abortion in about a quarter of women; infection may cause inflammation of the ovaries and in rare cases causes sterility in women as well.
Rubella (German measles) is generally a relatively mild disease in children and adults; its primary danger is to the unborn. Intrauterine infection of a fetus during the first or second trimester often causes congenital rubella syndrome. CRS causes deafness, blindness, and heart defects (each with more than 40 percent probability) and risks a host of other health problems.
How do those odds look now?
I honestly will gladly allow them to copyright the hell out of it IF they play in arenas that were not built by any public funds. Otherwise everything NFL must be Public domain.
You want to be careful with that sort of restriction. In the interest of fairness, everything that you produce should be in the public domain as well -- unless you've never used electricity from a utility company which received public grants or subsidies for construction, you've never used public roads, public transportation, or public sidewalks to get to work, and you've never used the United States Postal Service.
Your work is subsidized in many ways by government funds, some subtle, some conspicuous. Principled stands can have some very surprising consequences.
In my experience, people tend to make spelling errors and go with the spell chedking results without actually investigating the error.
Perhaps my favorite example of this problem came from a biochemist colleague writing about gel electrophoresis. I'll elide the heavy technical details of his experiment; the short version is that in order to detect proteins, a strongly-colored protein binding dye is soaked into the slab of gel (turning the whole thing vivid blue) and then the excess washed out (leaving visible blue bands of protein on a clear background.) The first step is just called 'staining', while the second part is (appropriately enough) called 'destaining'.
Microsoft Word doesn't know the word 'destain', so "We destained the gel..." was helpfully corrected to "We disdained the gel...". While the latter statement in some cases does reflect our feelings, it may not be an appropriate level of honesty for formal publication.
One more thing -- I'm far too petty to pass up the opportunity to note the obvious typo in "spell chedking", above. If it was a troll for the spelling Nazis, or you have the sense to claim it was in retrospect, well done.
This is really a case of technology moving too fast for its own good.
Well, no. The failure was apparently in a mechanical bushing that made the physical movement of the pedal sticky under certain conditions. This hasn't got anything to do with new technology, despite the incredibly poorly-written article summary.
The fundamental concept behind Japan's quality is kaizen. This is the constant improvement on existing techniques and technology. By starting with what works, it is simpler to build in very small steps without losing any quality along the way.
That sort of general statement or philosophy should be applied with caution - unless one wants to be the manufacturer of the world's finest, most reliable horse-drawn carriages.
That would have been a good idea. Canada has had public, universal health care since 1966.
Amen. That's exactly how a touch interface ought to work. Indeed, it's such a good idea that variations have already appeared in other films, including Quantum of Solace (2008) and even Minority Report (2002).
Some people climb mountains on vacation. They're out in the cold, possibly getting rained or snowed on, sleeping on hard ground, straining muscles and risking serious injury. Yet still they call it their 'vacation', and no one argues.
This guy doesn't mind the type of work he does, and he likes the idea of helping other people in his free time. While he's doing it, he's going to visit novel places in other countries, discover new cuisines, learn about different cultures and lifestyles, and have a whole office full of new friends who are glad to see him and want to show him a good time. The locals will know the good places to eat, the fun things to do, the little hidden sights and pleasures that you can't find in your travel guide. He can pull CAT5 during the day, then walk outside and drink rum while the sun sets over the beach.
What's so bad about that? Different people relax in different ways.
You're assuming that a) medical personnel aren't bright enough to learn thirty or forty trivial things that can make their jobs easier in the long run; b) every person who uses the system will hear all of the codes (someone in the blood lab is never going to hear the 'incoming prescription meds' chime); and c) if someone hears a chime pattern that they don't recognize, they can't just look at the tube and see what's waiting.
I don't think that those are good assumptions.
Heck, even if you don't know the full chime code, you're still ahead of the game if all of the 'stat' codes have the same loud prefix or suffix.
I would like to do woodworking in the future. I am going to the hardware store, and among the tools I have two choices: a 'hammer' on the one side, and a 'screwdriver' on the other.
What you choose to put in the toolbox depends on what you want to build. As others have already observed, there are some fundamental bits and pieces and that you really won't want to do without.
And ten years from now, when you decide you'd like to hand-carve a canoe paddle, you're going to have to go out and buy a spokeshave anyway.
The downside of such a system is that it's going to cost. These devices are more complex and require more maintenance than a conventional turnstile. They have motorized, moving parts which will be prone to periodic failure. And you probably are going to have to back the turnstiles up with living, breathing security staff at some point anyway.
Fuel enrichment isn't a flat requirement for uranium reactors. Heavy water reactors (in use in Canada, India, and elsewhere for more than forty years) do not require isotope-enriched fuel. The cost of heavy water is offset by the savings on fuel.
Besides, the author of virtually any quotation (including the one in question here) is readily available to anyone who can cut and paste into Google. Someone unwilling to take that small step before diving into an angry and humourless response is asking for a gentle poke back.
In addition to misatrributing the writing of one of Britain's premier living humourists to Russia's preeminent depressing existentialist, there is one additional irony which ought not be overlooked. While Dostoyevsky was a faithful Orthodox Christian, Pratchett is an atheist.
Best...mistaken...identity...ever.
Terry Pratchett.
Indeed, this is a very interesting application of Hotelling's Law from the world of economics.
Off the top, I'd tend to recommend it for kids that are a bit older than the seven- to nine-year-olds in the original question. Much of astronomy requires a certain amount of patience - waiting for your eyes to get dark adapted, learning the locations of stars and constellations, finding objects to look at, using Heavens Above, etc.
I'll echo what some others have already pointed out -- a cheap plastic Wal-Mart MAGNIFIES STARS TWO THOUSAND TIMES!!! special is a recipe for frustration and heartache. What matters is aperture (diameter of the main lens or mirrors - the amount of light you collect goes up with the square of the diameter) and quality optics. A crappy mount or tripod means images that jiggle and difficult pointing.
Another point to bear in mind is that (in much of the northern hemisphere mid-latitudes, at least) you're going to be in the dead of winter. It's going to be cold, overcast, and wet or snowy for much of the next few months. Consider the challenges of manipulating telescope components and assembling tripods while wearing gloves. If you do give a telescope to a loved one, do be considerate of their personal comfort. Freeze the kids once and you may snuff out any further interest in astronomical observation.
Finally, consider that a telescope may not need to be the first thing on the list. A smaller spotting scope, monocular, or pair of binoculars can introduce a lot of astronomical sights, and often offer good-quality optics and rugged construction at much more reasonable prices. The surface of the moon is fascinating even with a low-powered scope, and any good pair of binoculars will reveal the Galilean moons of Jupiter. Binoculars and small spotting scopes can often be mounted on a conventional camera tripod or even be hand-held; this makes it much easier to pick them up and go outside on a whim. They're also useful for watching everything from wildlife to baseball games -- meaning that even if you don't manage to kindle interest in astronomy, the gift still can still be put to good use. ~~~~
Actually, depending on the jurisdiction you're in, they're almost certainly not required to give you a reason -- and in many companies, the legal department will often have specifically instructed them not to tell you anything beyond a bit of innocuous boilerplate. If they're willing to respond to a few quick questions, great, but don't get pushy.
Wow. You recommend having your lawyer call employers to find out why you didn't get a job? Unbelievable. That seems like a brilliant way to make sure you never get an interview from that company again -- or from anyone else in town, once word gets around that you're sending threatening lawyer-mail to the companies that rejected you.
Dangerously high-pitched voices?
A valuable lesson in life and motoring, as related to me once upon a time by a driving instructor:
Never stick your nose into what you can't get your ass out of.