My head hurts. There are 8 "cities" represented by letters A-H. Each city has 8 channels. The amoeba selected channel C1 (C is the first stop) .. B8 (B is the last stop). Since the researchers didn't actually coax that path, how did their relative light pulses work? Did channels B1 through B8 all equally have the most light when compared to the light pulses in C1 through C8? If so, how do they determine that B should be the last stop? If not, if rather all the light impulses across all 64 channels ranged from weakest in C1 through strongest in C8, then that would just show the amoeba's mechanistic response to the light impulses. I'm missing something.

Unions are at all times and all situations a bad thing. Of course it seems like the low skilled jobs are underpaid. If so, I'm guessing it's difficult to keep them filled. Good; the wages will go up naturally or the jobs will remain unfilled. That's the way a market should work and does work. Whenever unions take root, the industry and consumer suffers. Witness industries such as steel in US and Detroit auto. In the early days of the automobile, Detroit *was* Silicon Valley. Innovation flourished. Many prospered. The city thrived. Union and general collectivism in government took over. Now Detroit is hell on earth. As in literally; perhaps the world's worst 1st-world city in every way. Economics is simple; there is no free lunch. If you see an opportunity higher on the food chain, pursue it. Almost all of us will find some opportunities out of reach. Do the best you can; extortion is not a virtue.

Application responsiveness is no doubt important, but not the most important thing. Most people don't care that an application takes 100ms longer here and there.
What's more important:

• Time to market for new features.
• Robust code that makes for stable applications.

After a couple weeks using C#, I was far more productive than with years in delphi. The FCL was just as good (not speaking of UI) as the VCL and the JCL together.
I think you can do more with a little less even in C# 1.0, but there's no doubt you can do more using 2.0 (with generics and, sparingly, anonymous methods).
And with such a massive user base, C# / .net has far surpassed delphi in terms of sample code, free libraries, etc.