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I got the same feeling recently in his other thread when he basically compared the "communist Jews" to the Nazis, which would have been the perfect chance to invoke Godwyn's law. I'm not a fan of censorship at all, but there are some lines which need to be drawn. Unfortunately, my plea to the proper mods seems to have gone unanswered. Some of my best friends are Mossad agents. I don't know which ones, though.

I appreciate the response, even though I won't yet claim to have understood everything yet.... I would argue, however, that even the origin of virtue space is actually an individual trait. Everyone's virtue system is slightly different. There are no absolute scales for virtue. So it in in reality a bit more complicated because a position x,y,z in one person't virtue space will not neccessarily co-exist with position x,y,z of another person's space. I also find the combination of "measuring" virtue and human behaviour to be a mix which leads ultimately to some contradictory situations. Being guided largely (although not exclusively) by emotions and desires, our unwillingness to "slip down the scale" of virtue leads us to concoct some really abstract and illogical situations where something which is not inherently virtuous is deemd as being something "good" simply because of its neccessity. This can lead to a severely skewed and ultimately misleading grading of a person's actions. Waging war is an example. I think it's clear to everybody that war is essentially inevitable (although the arguments about when, why, how and where are endless). But does this make it virtuous? Is it a virtue to engage in extreme violent conduct in the name of one's country? In the name of anything? In any other setting it would be condemned but the neccessity for such actions (being human as we are) makes us spin a web of virtue around something which is not inherently virtuous. This is a big problem I have with any aattempts to prescribe an absolute virtue space. Due to the inevitable nature of war and the unwillingness to "slip down the scale", society moves to declare by consensus that war shouldn't be put on the negative virtue list because that would interfere with out way of doing things. This is moral relativity in it's worst form because it actually pretends to be absolute. Now, before I get flamed, I'm not saying that I'm totally anti-war. I believe it IS neccessary in certain conditions and is almost certainly largely unaviodable but I also believe it a folly to dress it up as being an act to be celebrated in any way. We should call it what it is. By relating to where a person "should" be you are automatically creating such a construct as I have outlined above where the person actually strives to climb the ladder and (being human) ends up misusing the value system to serve their own needs in an innocently selfish way. Kind of like a white lie. Personally, I tend to avoid absolute moral compasses. This was perhaps accelerated by coming from Ireland where the Catholic church WAS the absolute moral compass and has been involved in a serious and continuous stream of child abuse claims for the last 20 years or so. Some moral compass there. Even the current pope Mr. Ratzinger is being directly linked to the systematic cover-up which was performed by the church over the years. Or perhaps the ultimate christian moral compass, the decalogue, is also often conveniently ignored or bent to one's will when required. "Thou shalt not kill" seems fine, but what if someone is threatening my family's life? If I kill someone to protect my family is that a good or a bad act? For me and my family it's probably good but for the dead person it's almost certainly bad. No absolute compass to be found here. It simply does not apply in all situations. We all possess an inner sense of what is right and what is wrong in any given situation. This is independent of our background (although some can blend it out more than others) and is often very different in people who otherwise claim to share the same beliefs or absolute moral compass. To summarise, I think an moral compass can help in some situations to offer guidelines as to how to behave (and the bible offers some good examples but also some absolutely terrible examples) but regarding a sense of "absolute" good and bad, it simply does not exist and to think it does is simply fooling ourselves. So while you and I most likely share a very large part of our beliefs of what is right and wrong, I think we might very well give very different reasons as to WHY they might be right or wrong. I'd better start working otherwise my boss will point my moral compass to a state of unemployment..... Shane.

Disclaimer: I've never done Compact Field Point programs, so this is from the perspective of a desktop applications programmer. Still, I think some of the principles would apply to CFP. The two layers you're describing are strictly UI layers; they are not necessarily (and aguably shouldn't be) related to the how the application code is structured. If you tie the app's code structure too tightly to the user interface it becomes much more difficult to make UI changes when the users want to be able to do something different. I can't offer any suggestions for a specific code architecture to use as it is highly dependent on your specific requirements. Instead I'll pose some questions that will hopefully help lead you to your answer. What's your timeframe? If there's enough "play time" in your schedule, you can explore new techniques and architectures. (Be careful though, learning a new architecture can will be a time sink!) On the other hand, if your schedule is fairly tight, stick with techniques you already know even if it produces less than ideal code. How much application design experience do you have in Labview or any other programming language, and what architectures have you used for previous apps? State machines are useful, but aren't the best solution for all applications. What's the expected lifetime of this application? If you know it's going to be used for 3 weeks and then thrown away you can get by with a less-robust solution than one that's expected to be used for 3 years. In general, apps with longer expected lifetimes need more up front design work making sure it is extendable and maintainable. (And that usually means more complicated code.) How much decision-making, either user-based or code-based, does your app require? Code complexity is directly related to the number of decisions that must be made during execution. More complex requirements need more complex solutions. Assuming your app is on the complex side, will be around for a long time, and you want to make it fairly maintainable, here are some suggestions roughly in the order I would apply them: 1. Break up your application into logical modules. Don't just group all the VI's in a module in the same project folder. Create an lvlib for each module and make use of the private scope to hide the implementation details from the other parts of the program. Model-View-Controller is a powerful high-level architecture that breaks an application into user interface, business logic, and processing modules. You can also break down each of those modules down into sub-modules. (Reporting, File I/O, Valve Control, etc.) Modularity is the most important attribute for making an application extendable. 2. Within each module, use sub-modules to layer your code. Here is an article on using layering to create a Hardware Abstraction Layer. The principle applies to non-hardware functionality too. 3. Consider creating classes for key parts of your application. Note that modularity and layering can be accomplished using "traditional" Labview programming techniques (i.e. Structured Programming.) Using classes correctly can make it much easier to implement changes in the future. (Be warned, using them incorrectly will make your code harder to maintain.) One last thought... be sure to talk to your users to find out what they need to do and how they want to view and interact with the application.