Adding another person adds payroll costs not directly related to hours worked. And of course, adding another person means more money spent on rent for office space. And at some point, you have to hire another manager. So until someone invents magic pixie dust that causes the incremental cost of adding a new employee to be less than the incremental cost of just having 4 people work a few more hours, this problem will not go away.
It depends highly on what state you are in, since a lot of overtime law and exempt classification law is state law. And it is enforced by state agencies.
Body builders are trying to build bulk is specific ways. They don't necessarily have aerobic fitness, or maximum strength like a competitive weight lifter -- although I once was helping a friend move and one of the other helpers was a competitive body builder, and he certainly was *very* helpful when it came time to move the piano and the china cabinet.
My daughter's track coach holds the women's indoor records for long jump, 200M, and (I think) 300M hurdles in the Master's 50-54 age group. You have never seen a more fit 51 year old woman. Heck, you rarely see 21 year old women as fit. I predict she will outlive the 51 year old waddling blobs you see at Walmart, accidents excepted.
"not widely played".... um, yes, that is certainly true. There are a few players out there. I've seen and heard a Hardanger fiddle, which is in that family.
My daughter's violin teacher, old enough to have grandchildren in college, and who played in the San Jose orchestra when *she* was in high school, uses gut strings on her main instrument - Pirastro Olive's. But she is a hold out on gut strings. When above I said "nobody uses them" I should have said "nobody except the last few hold outs". I can't think of anyone else I know using gut. Almost all our teacher's students are playing on Thomastik Dominants, which are steel core.
It is interesting that baroque era violins had a more shallow neck angle and a lower bridge. There is less overall string tension, so the top plate is generally carved much thinner. Most old instruments have had a neck reset to the modern angle, and of course have been fitted with the taller bridge that goes with it. You have to be careful with those instruments because a modern steel string like a Dominant will apply more force than the top can survive.
Somehow that doesn't make sense to me. Gut strings are somewhat delicate. They have been largely replaced by nylon cores flat-wound with flat wire (aluminum or silver) for old instruments, and more modern instruments that can stand the high tension are wound on steel cores. I thought that nylon core strings could stand higher tension that gut strings. They certainly last longer. Nobody uses gut any more.
This is what math educators refer to as the "Death March to Calculus". The problem is that a lot of more interesting and very useful math falls by the wayside to make time to do everything necessary to prepare for calculus. I agree statistics is more useful for the general population. And for computer science, discrete mathematics is more important than calculus. Still, calculus is the language of science and engineering so anyone in those disciplines needs it. We need a more thoughtful approach to math curriculum choices -- so I guess I'm agreeing with Benjamin that basic numeracy should include a sound understanding of statistics. But that doesn't do a lot of good unless coupled with good critical thinking skills, which is something that is totally missing from most education systems.
I often say that the corner office doesn't go to the person with the highest IQ, it goes to the person with the best bullshit detector. (Bullshit detector == critical thinking skills.) First we need to teach kids to *think*, then make sure they understand enough statistics to support decision making. Calculus and discrete math can be added as needed.
There are some good math texts out there. Art of Problem Solving http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/ has written a number of math text books. We homeschool, and after looking at *many* curricula chose AoPS for the spine of our daughter's math education. AoPS isn't aimed at homeschoolers -- it is aimed at kids in regular school who are not well served there. The texts are excellent, IMO. The online lecture meets once per week in a chatroom -- no video, no audio, but it *does* support direct entry of LaTeX. My daughter has thrived on it -- she is 12 years old and preparing for the AP Calc this spring (now you know why we homeschool).
The AoPS texts are available at a reasonable cost to anyone and I highly recommend them. The online classes move at a very rapid pace -- they are not for everybody. But you can take the text books at your own pace and get a great math education.
Another good set of online math lectures are put out by ThinkWell http://www.thinkwell.com/ -- the math lectures by Dr. Ed. Burger are outstanding. Burger is the math teacher you wish you had. These are not live, ThinkWell uses recorded videos. Very good and very reasonable priced.
Online classes are changing the world. Clayton Christensen (author of Innovator's Dilemma) wrote a book "Disrupting Class" about how online classes are causing a classic disruptive innovation in the world of education. I recommend it. If the world follows his time line, soon schools as we know them will go the way of the dinosaurs. About time.
NASA creates a lot of great technology. On our dime. So, it seems like we taxpayers have two competing interests. One, since we paid for it, we should have access at some reasonable cost, perhaps even free. On the other hand, it seems reasonable for the agency involved to at least collect enough in license fees to cover the cost of doing the licensing. After all, it requires work on the part of engineers to package the technology for transfer and to do the documentation, and attorneys and other business development people to negotiate the deal and execute the paperwork. So it seems reasonable to me for the recipients of the technology to, at minimum, cover the cost of executing the technology transfer, and not force taxpayers to cover that cost as well, which is essentially a subsidy to the private industry recipient.
But on to my main point -- the problem is going to be sales and pricing. I am on the board of a small educational non-profit. We were looking for lab and teaching space a while back, and looked at some space at Moffett Field. Since the Navy has moved out, NASA is the largest tenant at Moffett. The Moffett Authority, which is in charge of leasing, is delusional to the point where you keep wanting to ask them: "What planet are you from?". The space they offered was the crap of crap, and they wanted a rent 4X to 5X what better space goes for a half mile away outside the Moffett gates. Couple that with their reputation of being the most restrictive, nit-picky, slow-to-respond, bureaucratic landlord in Sili Valley and it was pretty easy to scratch them off our list.
So if that is any indication of what it is like trying to do business with NASA, where they are not in a customer role but are in the role of providing customer service at a price that provides value -- well, I don't have a lot of hope. Until someone invents a culture transplant operation, I think that having management that is clueless about how private enterprise does business and is delusional about the value of what they bring to the table dooms the concept.
The US has only existed for 340 years, give or take.
Umm.... how much are you giving and taking there? I don't think a few colonies of farmers count as "the United States". You might want to review your history and your math. My ancestors came to this continent 378 years ago, but the constitution wasn't ratified until 1788 or 1789. 340 years is a very strange number to pick.
People tend to pick July 4, 1776 as the start of the United States -- which is itself a bit of an odd choice. The Declaration of Independence was passed on July 2, and some delegates thought that should be the day that was considered the birth of the US. It was signed on July 4, when clean copies were available. It wasn't read in the public square until July 6 -- basically to give all the signers a two day head start out of town on the fastest horse they could find -- signing was a act of treason, punishable by "cruel and unusual" death -- and the court room for the highest court the King had in the colonies was right across the hall from the room they were meeting in.
I get your point. But at least freedom used to be a goal. A lot of civil rights litigation and legislation at least moved us from slavery and white-male-landowner voting to equal protection (well, de jure equal protection) and universal sufferage. We have been going seriously backwards pretty much since the Clinton administration. "Land of the Free" is aspirational, which is important in and of itself, and is a worthy goal. Even though it has never been strictly true, and even though it may never be strictly true.
What upsets me is the current direction. We need to get back on the path of perfecting civil liberties, instead of the current path of continuous encroachment and curtailment. I don't see your taking pot-shots at artifacts of history and complaining about past wrongs as productive. Learn from past mistakes, and contribute to the solution. How much money do you donate to civil liberties litigation foundations? Do you do anything active, other than post to SlashDot, to move civil liberties forward? I have my favorite foundations to send money to for civil liberties causes -- I'll let you chose your own rather than suggest that you copy me.
Really, the best thing would be a movement to amend the Constitution to allow for the peaceful secession of states.
Show me where in the Constitution it says states can't secede peacefully. Historically, of course, Lincoln led a war to prevent secession by the Confederate States. But can you point to a clause of the Constitution that says states can't change their mind after joining the union?
CCDs are one kind of sensor. I'm not very familiar with the physics. In any case, no FPGA that I know of contains CCD cells.
CMOS sensors are another way to sense light. The physics behind a CMOS sensor is that if you have a CMOS RAM cell, and expose it to light, the light depletes (IIRC, maybe it enhances??) the charge. Anyway, A CMOS image sensor is a big RAM that has been optimized for photonic effects and laid out with a geometry that makes image retrieval practical. You can take a CMOS ram chip and put a transparent lid on it and have a CMOS image sensor. It will suck, because it has been optimized for data storage and the pixels will likely have strange spacing and obnoxious addressing.
FPGA's usually have embedded RAM. They also store the logic configuration and routing in RAM. You could, in principal, put lids over the RAM blocks and block the light hitting the routing and function control cells. It would be very hard, and would yield a really bad image sensor with a useless imaging pattern.
So to answer the OP, take your choice of: A) Yes, of course. It is simple physics. B) No way, it's impossible. The results would suck, even if you could pull off the packaging challenges.
Are you nuts, in addition to being uninformed? 15 feet across is *not* a large antenna. And this is a receive-only antenna. You are right, you "don't understand quite how it all works."
This is not news. This is Google seeking a zoning variance. The land is probably zoned agricultural. Iowa zoning authorities have been paying attention to all kinds of tower and antenna placements because of the power generating windmills that are going in. I suspect the "permission" they are seeking is a zoning variance that is no more different that me asking to put a second story on my house, which in my neighborhood requires a zoning variance. *yawn*
Crop dusting is inherently dangerous to the pilot. It is by definition done only in low population areas. There are no privacy concerns. That is one application where drones are pure win.
Hell, I am the father of the house, and most stuff that happens catches me by surprise. So I can sympathize with the father mentioned at the end of TFS.
Funny you should mention that. I grew up in a small town. When my wife and I were married, one of the local retailers was on my wife's gift registry for her china pattern. This retailer knew I had a (relatively, small-town-scale) wealthy aunt who frequented the shop. So the retailer loaded up on all the wacko, high mark-up accessory pieces for my wife's china pattern and every time my aunt came into the store she would get the sales pitch for a soup tureen or something. This went on for years.
Totally agree with you about LaTeX. TeX (on which LaTeX is based) was done back in the days of punch cards -- it was the only game in town for typesetting mathematics papers on a computer. TeX is a really an amazing accomplishment, when you think about it. Score another one for Knuth. But.... it is about as far from WYSIWYG as can be imagined, with all the good and bad brought on by that circumstance.
LaTeX can be learned with effort. The learning curve is nasty, but you get very nice math typesetting as a result. My daughter does on line math classes from Art of Problem Solving. http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/ The lecture classroom is a chatroom that supports LaTeX. So it's pretty wild to see a bunch of middle-school and high-school kids blasting LaTeX into the chat. LaTeX isn't dead -- but only math nerds are fluent.
Although maybe a better idea would be for the cities on the Peninsula to become livable enough so that people don't feel a need to live in SF and commute an hour to two hours a day
Um.... typing this from Sunnyvale. Personally, for me living in SF would be Hell on Earth. Different people have different definitions of 'livable'. Not that Sunnyvale is Nirvana, I'd rather live some place like Mariposa. But at least in Sunnyvale I have easy access to places liked Halted and Weird Stuff Warehouse and life's other fundamental necessities.
I just happened to recall that the Behemoth bicycle had switches on the handlebar so that Steve could compute while cycling. http://microship.com/bike/behemoth/ It took two hands, though. He simply entered the ASCII codes directly. So he didn't find it so hard to learn 'chords'.
Did you see the bit on Leno where they had two kids texting over phones, race to hams with radios using morse code? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfyf5Y5AHNc Morse code won easily and handily by a huge margin. I know one of the hams (Chip), he said it was clear during rehearsal that morse code was going to win by a mile. It's actually pretty easy to send morse code, and as you say easy to do in a clandestine fashion. Copying, though, requires practice, practice, practice. Until it becomes a key skill in modern video games I don't see lots of kids learning the code.
There are morse characters for punctuation. I don't know most of them, just the common ones. There are also language-specific characters for Cyrillic, and some oriental languages as well. So coming up with codes isn't the issue. The data rate isn't outstanding. Experts go 30 to 35 word per minute or so. I knew one old cigar-chomping sparks who first went to sea in a WW II Liberty Ship, who claimed "49 1/2" words per minute. I watched him operate, too, with a WW II era bug, beer and ash-tray handy -- he could move the traffic, though. I think chording is always going to beat keying if implemented correctly.
BTW -- a bit off topic, but if there are any other CW ops out there that haven't read this piece by Hans Brokab, do it. Put down your drinks to protect your keyboards. You have been warned. http://mikea.ath.cx/QRQ-QRV.html
Nah. It is just practice. Just like learning to type or to use the buttons on a video game controller. For how many/.'ers are the buttons on a game controller instinctual?
It does require motivation and a pay-off. Otherwise you will never do it enough to get proficient. I know Morse code. Simply obtaining a ham license was the original motivation for the considerable work it took to get minimally proficient. Radiosport contesting using high speed Morse was my payoff. And before you ridicule my addiction to a mostly pointless exercise in communication using anachronistic technologies, explain why people spend so many hour playing video games.
So if there was a pay-off I think chord keyboards could catch on. It seems like a pretty good way to deal with modern touch screen phones and tablets. It would probably be faster and less error prone that the current generation of on-screen text entry mechanism. I think for it to catch on it requires that every device that you walked up to must use the same standard chord set.
The technology was developed by PrimeSense. Microsoft's gaming unit brought it into Microsoft. As I understand it, Primesense was initially aiming to make it part of every television as a remote control device. No longer will you lose the remote behind the couch cushions. The robotics community jumped on the Kinect right away, since high resolution distance measurement of the robot's environment is a long standing problem. Out of the box, though, I think the Kinect in its current form has trouble in outdoor environments since the sun is such a strong IR emitter. That is a generic problem with anything that depends on IR.
Slashdot Mirror
Adding another person adds payroll costs not directly related to hours worked. And of course, adding another person means more money spent on rent for office space. And at some point, you have to hire another manager. So until someone invents magic pixie dust that causes the incremental cost of adding a new employee to be less than the incremental cost of just having 4 people work a few more hours, this problem will not go away.
It depends highly on what state you are in, since a lot of overtime law and exempt classification law is state law. And it is enforced by state agencies.
With any luck that happened in at least some of these cases and the prosecutors can hang perjury charges on the individuals responsible.
*Could* hang perjury charges on the cops. But won't. The prosecutor/cop relationship doesn't work that way.
Just sayin'
Body builders are trying to build bulk is specific ways. They don't necessarily have aerobic fitness, or maximum strength like a competitive weight lifter -- although I once was helping a friend move and one of the other helpers was a competitive body builder, and he certainly was *very* helpful when it came time to move the piano and the china cabinet.
My daughter's track coach holds the women's indoor records for long jump, 200M, and (I think) 300M hurdles in the Master's 50-54 age group. You have never seen a more fit 51 year old woman. Heck, you rarely see 21 year old women as fit. I predict she will outlive the 51 year old waddling blobs you see at Walmart, accidents excepted.
"not widely played".... um, yes, that is certainly true. There are a few players out there. I've seen and heard a Hardanger fiddle, which is in that family.
My daughter's violin teacher, old enough to have grandchildren in college, and who played in the San Jose orchestra when *she* was in high school, uses gut strings on her main instrument - Pirastro Olive's. But she is a hold out on gut strings. When above I said "nobody uses them" I should have said "nobody except the last few hold outs". I can't think of anyone else I know using gut. Almost all our teacher's students are playing on Thomastik Dominants, which are steel core.
It is interesting that baroque era violins had a more shallow neck angle and a lower bridge. There is less overall string tension, so the top plate is generally carved much thinner. Most old instruments have had a neck reset to the modern angle, and of course have been fitted with the taller bridge that goes with it. You have to be careful with those instruments because a modern steel string like a Dominant will apply more force than the top can survive.
Somehow that doesn't make sense to me. Gut strings are somewhat delicate. They have been largely replaced by nylon cores flat-wound with flat wire (aluminum or silver) for old instruments, and more modern instruments that can stand the high tension are wound on steel cores. I thought that nylon core strings could stand higher tension that gut strings. They certainly last longer. Nobody uses gut any more.
This is what math educators refer to as the "Death March to Calculus". The problem is that a lot of more interesting and very useful math falls by the wayside to make time to do everything necessary to prepare for calculus. I agree statistics is more useful for the general population. And for computer science, discrete mathematics is more important than calculus. Still, calculus is the language of science and engineering so anyone in those disciplines needs it. We need a more thoughtful approach to math curriculum choices -- so I guess I'm agreeing with Benjamin that basic numeracy should include a sound understanding of statistics. But that doesn't do a lot of good unless coupled with good critical thinking skills, which is something that is totally missing from most education systems.
I often say that the corner office doesn't go to the person with the highest IQ, it goes to the person with the best bullshit detector. (Bullshit detector == critical thinking skills.) First we need to teach kids to *think*, then make sure they understand enough statistics to support decision making. Calculus and discrete math can be added as needed.
There are some good math texts out there. Art of Problem Solving http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/ has written a number of math text books. We homeschool, and after looking at *many* curricula chose AoPS for the spine of our daughter's math education. AoPS isn't aimed at homeschoolers -- it is aimed at kids in regular school who are not well served there. The texts are excellent, IMO. The online lecture meets once per week in a chatroom -- no video, no audio, but it *does* support direct entry of LaTeX. My daughter has thrived on it -- she is 12 years old and preparing for the AP Calc this spring (now you know why we homeschool).
The AoPS texts are available at a reasonable cost to anyone and I highly recommend them. The online classes move at a very rapid pace -- they are not for everybody. But you can take the text books at your own pace and get a great math education.
Another good set of online math lectures are put out by ThinkWell http://www.thinkwell.com/ -- the math lectures by Dr. Ed. Burger are outstanding. Burger is the math teacher you wish you had. These are not live, ThinkWell uses recorded videos. Very good and very reasonable priced.
Online classes are changing the world. Clayton Christensen (author of Innovator's Dilemma) wrote a book "Disrupting Class" about how online classes are causing a classic disruptive innovation in the world of education. I recommend it. If the world follows his time line, soon schools as we know them will go the way of the dinosaurs. About time.
NASA creates a lot of great technology. On our dime. So, it seems like we taxpayers have two competing interests. One, since we paid for it, we should have access at some reasonable cost, perhaps even free. On the other hand, it seems reasonable for the agency involved to at least collect enough in license fees to cover the cost of doing the licensing. After all, it requires work on the part of engineers to package the technology for transfer and to do the documentation, and attorneys and other business development people to negotiate the deal and execute the paperwork. So it seems reasonable to me for the recipients of the technology to, at minimum, cover the cost of executing the technology transfer, and not force taxpayers to cover that cost as well, which is essentially a subsidy to the private industry recipient.
But on to my main point -- the problem is going to be sales and pricing. I am on the board of a small educational non-profit. We were looking for lab and teaching space a while back, and looked at some space at Moffett Field. Since the Navy has moved out, NASA is the largest tenant at Moffett. The Moffett Authority, which is in charge of leasing, is delusional to the point where you keep wanting to ask them: "What planet are you from?". The space they offered was the crap of crap, and they wanted a rent 4X to 5X what better space goes for a half mile away outside the Moffett gates. Couple that with their reputation of being the most restrictive, nit-picky, slow-to-respond, bureaucratic landlord in Sili Valley and it was pretty easy to scratch them off our list.
So if that is any indication of what it is like trying to do business with NASA, where they are not in a customer role but are in the role of providing customer service at a price that provides value -- well, I don't have a lot of hope. Until someone invents a culture transplant operation, I think that having management that is clueless about how private enterprise does business and is delusional about the value of what they bring to the table dooms the concept.
The US has only existed for 340 years, give or take.
Umm.... how much are you giving and taking there? I don't think a few colonies of farmers count as "the United States". You might want to review your history and your math. My ancestors came to this continent 378 years ago, but the constitution wasn't ratified until 1788 or 1789. 340 years is a very strange number to pick.
People tend to pick July 4, 1776 as the start of the United States -- which is itself a bit of an odd choice. The Declaration of Independence was passed on July 2, and some delegates thought that should be the day that was considered the birth of the US. It was signed on July 4, when clean copies were available. It wasn't read in the public square until July 6 -- basically to give all the signers a two day head start out of town on the fastest horse they could find -- signing was a act of treason, punishable by "cruel and unusual" death -- and the court room for the highest court the King had in the colonies was right across the hall from the room they were meeting in.
I get your point. But at least freedom used to be a goal. A lot of civil rights litigation and legislation at least moved us from slavery and white-male-landowner voting to equal protection (well, de jure equal protection) and universal sufferage. We have been going seriously backwards pretty much since the Clinton administration. "Land of the Free" is aspirational, which is important in and of itself, and is a worthy goal. Even though it has never been strictly true, and even though it may never be strictly true.
What upsets me is the current direction. We need to get back on the path of perfecting civil liberties, instead of the current path of continuous encroachment and curtailment. I don't see your taking pot-shots at artifacts of history and complaining about past wrongs as productive. Learn from past mistakes, and contribute to the solution. How much money do you donate to civil liberties litigation foundations? Do you do anything active, other than post to SlashDot, to move civil liberties forward? I have my favorite foundations to send money to for civil liberties causes -- I'll let you chose your own rather than suggest that you copy me.
Didn't the Brits try helmet cams on constables?
Really, the best thing would be a movement to amend the Constitution to allow for the peaceful secession of states.
Show me where in the Constitution it says states can't secede peacefully. Historically, of course, Lincoln led a war to prevent secession by the Confederate States. But can you point to a clause of the Constitution that says states can't change their mind after joining the union?
Soooo much misunderstanding here, all around.
CCDs are one kind of sensor. I'm not very familiar with the physics. In any case, no FPGA that I know of contains CCD cells.
CMOS sensors are another way to sense light. The physics behind a CMOS sensor is that if you have a CMOS RAM cell, and expose it to light, the light depletes (IIRC, maybe it enhances??) the charge. Anyway, A CMOS image sensor is a big RAM that has been optimized for photonic effects and laid out with a geometry that makes image retrieval practical. You can take a CMOS ram chip and put a transparent lid on it and have a CMOS image sensor. It will suck, because it has been optimized for data storage and the pixels will likely have strange spacing and obnoxious addressing.
FPGA's usually have embedded RAM. They also store the logic configuration and routing in RAM. You could, in principal, put lids over the RAM blocks and block the light hitting the routing and function control cells. It would be very hard, and would yield a really bad image sensor with a useless imaging pattern.
So to answer the OP, take your choice of:
A) Yes, of course. It is simple physics.
B) No way, it's impossible. The results would suck, even if you could pull off the packaging challenges.
Hope that clears things up a little.
Are you nuts, in addition to being uninformed? 15 feet across is *not* a large antenna. And this is a receive-only antenna. You are right, you "don't understand quite how it all works."
This is not news. This is Google seeking a zoning variance. The land is probably zoned agricultural. Iowa zoning authorities have been paying attention to all kinds of tower and antenna placements because of the power generating windmills that are going in. I suspect the "permission" they are seeking is a zoning variance that is no more different that me asking to put a second story on my house, which in my neighborhood requires a zoning variance. *yawn*
Crop dusting is inherently dangerous to the pilot. It is by definition done only in low population areas. There are no privacy concerns. That is one application where drones are pure win.
Hell, I am the father of the house, and most stuff that happens catches me by surprise. So I can sympathize with the father mentioned at the end of TFS.
This man speaks truth.
Funny you should mention that. I grew up in a small town. When my wife and I were married, one of the local retailers was on my wife's gift registry for her china pattern. This retailer knew I had a (relatively, small-town-scale) wealthy aunt who frequented the shop. So the retailer loaded up on all the wacko, high mark-up accessory pieces for my wife's china pattern and every time my aunt came into the store she would get the sales pitch for a soup tureen or something. This went on for years.
Totally agree with you about LaTeX. TeX (on which LaTeX is based) was done back in the days of punch cards -- it was the only game in town for typesetting mathematics papers on a computer. TeX is a really an amazing accomplishment, when you think about it. Score another one for Knuth. But.... it is about as far from WYSIWYG as can be imagined, with all the good and bad brought on by that circumstance.
LaTeX can be learned with effort. The learning curve is nasty, but you get very nice math typesetting as a result. My daughter does on line math classes from Art of Problem Solving. http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/ The lecture classroom is a chatroom that supports LaTeX. So it's pretty wild to see a bunch of middle-school and high-school kids blasting LaTeX into the chat. LaTeX isn't dead -- but only math nerds are fluent.
Although maybe a better idea would be for the cities on the Peninsula to become livable enough so that people don't feel a need to live in SF and commute an hour to two hours a day
Um.... typing this from Sunnyvale. Personally, for me living in SF would be Hell on Earth. Different people have different definitions of 'livable'. Not that Sunnyvale is Nirvana, I'd rather live some place like Mariposa. But at least in Sunnyvale I have easy access to places liked Halted and Weird Stuff Warehouse and life's other fundamental necessities.
I just happened to recall that the Behemoth bicycle had switches on the handlebar so that Steve could compute while cycling. http://microship.com/bike/behemoth/ It took two hands, though. He simply entered the ASCII codes directly. So he didn't find it so hard to learn 'chords'.
Did you see the bit on Leno where they had two kids texting over phones, race to hams with radios using morse code? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfyf5Y5AHNc Morse code won easily and handily by a huge margin. I know one of the hams (Chip), he said it was clear during rehearsal that morse code was going to win by a mile. It's actually pretty easy to send morse code, and as you say easy to do in a clandestine fashion. Copying, though, requires practice, practice, practice. Until it becomes a key skill in modern video games I don't see lots of kids learning the code.
There are morse characters for punctuation. I don't know most of them, just the common ones. There are also language-specific characters for Cyrillic, and some oriental languages as well. So coming up with codes isn't the issue. The data rate isn't outstanding. Experts go 30 to 35 word per minute or so. I knew one old cigar-chomping sparks who first went to sea in a WW II Liberty Ship, who claimed "49 1/2" words per minute. I watched him operate, too, with a WW II era bug, beer and ash-tray handy -- he could move the traffic, though. I think chording is always going to beat keying if implemented correctly.
BTW -- a bit off topic, but if there are any other CW ops out there that haven't read this piece by Hans Brokab, do it. Put down your drinks to protect your keyboards. You have been warned. http://mikea.ath.cx/QRQ-QRV.html
Nah. It is just practice. Just like learning to type or to use the buttons on a video game controller. For how many /.'ers are the buttons on a game controller instinctual?
It does require motivation and a pay-off. Otherwise you will never do it enough to get proficient. I know Morse code. Simply obtaining a ham license was the original motivation for the considerable work it took to get minimally proficient. Radiosport contesting using high speed Morse was my payoff. And before you ridicule my addiction to a mostly pointless exercise in communication using anachronistic technologies, explain why people spend so many hour playing video games.
So if there was a pay-off I think chord keyboards could catch on. It seems like a pretty good way to deal with modern touch screen phones and tablets. It would probably be faster and less error prone that the current generation of on-screen text entry mechanism. I think for it to catch on it requires that every device that you walked up to must use the same standard chord set.
The technology was developed by PrimeSense. Microsoft's gaming unit brought it into Microsoft. As I understand it, Primesense was initially aiming to make it part of every television as a remote control device. No longer will you lose the remote behind the couch cushions. The robotics community jumped on the Kinect right away, since high resolution distance measurement of the robot's environment is a long standing problem. Out of the box, though, I think the Kinect in its current form has trouble in outdoor environments since the sun is such a strong IR emitter. That is a generic problem with anything that depends on IR.