Oops, I guess you're right - it's not gyroscopic forces that give lateral stability, it's steering torque. It doesn't really detract from the point, practically speaking... like a bike, a uni is easier to balance laterally at speed (for the same reason, I guess - steering torque - especially at low speeds, you can see a wobbly trail of countersteers from a wet wheel). Most of the difficulty lies in stabilizing your front to back rotation, and after a while, your body figures it our and your arms stop flailing.
With a fair amount of practice, it's possible to ride a normal unicycle without a lot of arm flailing, so it's fair to say that the same is true for this contraption.
Just like a bike, a smoothly driven uni wheel gives you lateral stability at speed (due to gyroscopic force). It's forward and back balance that keeps your arms doing funny dances at the beginning... eventually, you build core muscle memory and do it with less arm movement. The arms end up moving more or less the same way as when you are walking... in counterstep with your leg movements.
For those of you who are REALLY bored, you can pulse dial like a caveman on most analog land phones. You can generate those "click" pulses with the hook, or by rapidly opening and closing your line circuit some other way (a normally closed single pole switch on either red or green will do, or just tap a cut wire together if you are really lazy).
> Art is something made with a message or story in mind.
This isn't really true... abstract painting, experimental composition are good counterexamples. These things are art, but they contain no message or story.
I sympathize with your distaste for Britney Spears-ish pop, but it's still art - very uninspired, amateurish art masked by a high polish, but art nonetheless.
> - explosions > - oddly casted music > - some "tough guy" > - girl (the more titties the better) > - car chase scene > - gun battle where you see large sparks off bullet richochets
Hehe, don't forget that the "tough guy" is usually 5 feet tall or under 150 lbs, and uses oh-so-effective wide, swinging punches and flying spin kicks. And he's never blonde. Dirty blonde, maybe. But blonde doesn't work at the box office... Just as Dolph Lundgren.
> "Musicians", and I use that term loosely, will be tweaking their songs to score > a "hit" on this service.
Isn't this is already what they do? People who buy pop music (myself included) are already spoon-fed, more or less, and artists who make it are already deriving their success by riding trends (intentionally or not).
It might not be so bad. More bands get a shot, and more people get a listen. I would wager that the number of people who really care about music hasn't decreased because of coookie cutter pop (or "consensus-based music," if you like) - furthermore, I bet it serves as a gentle gateway into more serious forays into both composition, performance, and appreciation.
I have a Timex Ironman GPS/watch combo. The watch is programmed only to give me results. It doesn't provide any position data, but it's still a useful training tool because it provides speed info. Do you see what I'm getting at?
> Invades YOUR privacy? How about protecting the owner of the company's assets?
How about a happy medium? Is the latter all that matters?
> How does a black box in a truck, or a cellphone that you carry anyway cripple > anyone? Or did I just get trolled
Because some dude was unreasonably late with his shipments, the boss now has an excuse to track everyone. Suddenly, employees who had some flexibility (in case of a dentist's appointment or an errand to run or a 20 minute rest) are now under scrutiny. Corporations are profit motivated. If you're a guy who was perfectly filling his quotas and taking an occasional break, you are now potentially forced to fork over all of your efficiency (that which you could have earned entirely without the employers help) to the employer as profit. I am tempted to think that there is something wrong with that situation.
Employers should be able to improve their efficiencies, but not by owning a worker, balls to bones, while he's on the clock. There must be a balance struck between worker autonomy and employer control. The kind of tracking data collected as cited in the article are, in my opinion, upsetting that balance to the detriment of the worker and, ultimately, the business.
> What privacy? Seriously? I pay you work for me, then, dammit, you work for > me.
You pay me to do a job, then I do the job. You don't own me just because I'm on your payroll.
> Why is this so difficult for people to understand? Because it's antithetical to the western liberal notion that to work is to accomplish a task - not to submit our minds and bodies for contiguous chunks of time. That's not employment, that's indentured servitude.
> You can have your privacy in the john or off the clock.
Do you have the right to watch me piss if I'm on the clock? What if I piss too much? That would be unreasonable. Who defines what is reasonable and what is not? The employer? The unions? The state?
> Little things can make a big difference when multiplied by many employees. Get > used to it. Everybody working more efficiently can only boost your paycheck.
This may sound distasteful, but I'm not interested in restlessly driving up standards so that my position becomes more valuable. Not right now, anyway. When I am, I'll be eligible for a better job or a raise. Is career ambition obligatory? We could all work 15 hour days and shit in a pail and eat gruel that's piped to our desks. I think anyone who does that deserves the savings in the form of a bigger paycheck, but it's not for me. I'm not advocating the do-nothing approach, but I think the market acts as a counter-weight to that tendency to some degree.
> Note, too, that the 1984 reference is silly. We're not talking about > putting a camera in the employee's house....Sorry for the hyperbole which happens to be in the vernacular as not neccessarily connoting a macroscopic dystopia. I guess it's said for lack of a more convenient term... if it pleases you, substitute "workplace monitoring."
I agree that management is the problem, in two ways
1) (Which you alluded to) is that there is no accountability in the productivity measurements. No comparison of deliverables to hours reported. Without that, there is no data to assist decisions concerning compensation and retention.
2) Policing punishes/exploits all for the sins of few.
> Incompetent managers deserve far more to be fired than slacking workers.
I think that decision should be based solely on whether or not you fulfill the expectations for which you are being compensated, regardless of your position - which leads to the same conclusion (fire the boss/don't buy the product, etc).
> If you have a problem with your employer making sure you're doing your > bloody job, then quit.
Aren't there more black-box ways of determining whether I've done my job without gathering extraneous information that invades my privacy? I see problems with the Big Brother approach as not dealing with root cause.
Example: At my workplace, we have a loser who is significantly less productive than his counterparts. He pisses his day away looking at the Internet, talking at the water cooler, forwarding unfunny internet apocrypha and jokes to everyone, and eating 15 meals a day.
He eventually gets his work done, but he does it so slowly, that he is not worth his salary.
Instead of enacting policy that cripples everyone else in order to deal with his particular loafing strategies, doesn't it make a lot more sense to fire him for not earning his compensation, barring a better excuse (health, etc)?
No. Why? The litigious nature of our culture? Personal feelings interfering with management objectivity? Who knows. Whatever it is, I'd like to find out so that I don't have to implement another custom snort filter or whitelist instead of just firing the loser.
The flip side of this is that it disallows me from accepting a job that is easy for me. If I choose to work at Joe's Tape Backup Emporium, and I am compensated for the duration of my time pushing catrtidges, and my work requirements are met, I don't see why I cannot read a book during the downtime (can't leave, but I'm idle). Just because I'm capable of exceeding my quota, while Johhny Newbie has to concentrate 100% just to match me at 50% effort, does not mean I should be compelled to share the benefit of my personal efficiency with my employer if he does not compensate me more than Johnny. If he's not paying me more for my efficiency, why does he care if I'm reading or staring at the screen? The right answer is that he shouldn't, but he does because people like getting shit for free. However, I see no justification of the position that you must work until it's a grind for you. And that's what pervasive monitoring could lead to, because it's always in the employers' interest to squeeze you for all you're worth at the cheapest possible price.
In fact, multitasking -- a computing term that involves doing, or trying to do, more than one thing at once -- has cemented itself into our daily lives and is intensely studied. Research has shown it to be consistently counterproductive, often foolish, unhealthy in the long run, and in the case of gabbing on the cell phone while driving, relatively dangerous. Yet it is also expected, encouraged and basically essential.
Amen. Now we need the actual studies so that we can cite them for our bosses and clients so they can stop expecting it.
Once you have some sympathy from your PHB: The best defense, in this case, is a good offense. Declare office hours. Partition your time into usable, contiguous chunks dedicated to single tasks, and stick to the plan. You'll be glad you did.
No problem - we all drive H2s in New England... we can just scramble over each other's car like ants. Driving all that will take a long time, so it's also patricularly fortunate that we are always drinking lattes.
> The author of this article obviously isn't a scientist. > 'Speeding up a rotation by 3 microseconds' is a meaningless phrase. > The unit of speed is meter per second, not second.
Well, the author isn't talking about speed... he's talking about angular speed, which is not defined in m/s. Angular speed's unit can be expresses in terms of revolutions and time. A rotation can be defined as "one complete revolution," aka, 2*pi rads. In this context, it makes sense to say "speeding up rotation by 3 microseconds" - the planet's rotation speed, 2*pi/X, is now 3 microseconds shorter, or 2*pi/(X-3^e-06). I like the way the article said it better, though.
You're right... if it's iron, a completely different story. I was going on the assumption ( based on the article) that it was a standard, garden variety, rocky meteor. They didn't make any mention of an actual composition analysis, though. I really shouldn't believe everything I read, eh?
Your first point makes sense, but re: your second point, you might want to check out the posted link - a 5m rock isn't going to qualify as a WMD anytime soon, unless it shows up in Tehran or something.
In terms of mass collected per mission, it's a fairly impressive goal. Compare the size of this rock with how much moon rock was brought back by the Apollo missions.
Sure, if you're expecting a Hollywood nuke-the-rock scenario, it's not nearly as grand. But it has novelty that can be appreciated in terms of engineering/mission objectives.
Slashdot Mirror
Hippies don't typically promote the right to carry firearms.
Oops, I guess you're right - it's not gyroscopic forces that give lateral stability, it's steering torque. It doesn't really detract from the point, practically speaking... like a bike, a uni is easier to balance laterally at speed (for the same reason, I guess - steering torque - especially at low speeds, you can see a wobbly trail of countersteers from a wet wheel). Most of the difficulty lies in stabilizing your front to back rotation, and after a while, your body figures it our and your arms stop flailing.
With a fair amount of practice, it's possible to ride a normal unicycle without a lot of arm flailing, so it's fair to say that the same is true for this contraption.
Just like a bike, a smoothly driven uni wheel gives you lateral stability at speed (due to gyroscopic force). It's forward and back balance that keeps your arms doing funny dances at the beginning... eventually, you build core muscle memory and do it with less arm movement. The arms end up moving more or less the same way as when you are walking... in counterstep with your leg movements.
Actually, the example is flawed because hair isn't made up of cells.
> An embroyo on the other hand is a life, and cutting it would be a crime.
Your example is flawed because taking life is not always a crime. If it were, I would be guilty of crimes against... um... lettuce, for example.
For those of you who are REALLY bored, you can pulse dial like a caveman on most analog land phones. You can generate those "click" pulses with the hook, or by rapidly opening and closing your line circuit some other way (a normally closed single pole switch on either red or green will do, or just tap a cut wire together if you are really lazy).
> It cannot implement public key/private key cryptography
In terms of cryptography only, quantum is next-gen. It obsoletes assymetric key crypto.
> one might as well use tremendous, digital one-time pads.
Except that OTPs are insecure without a quantum key exchange.
> generate terabytes of noise, store it on a RAID
Storing the key to a one-time pad would just be stupid.
> no amount of quantum hocus-pocus will be able to decode it.
An attacker won't need quantum hocus-pocus if you generate the key insecurely and then store it.
You know, homoeroticism is in the eye of the beholder.
What are you doing Friday after work?
Huh... I always assumed he had a 3-1/2, not a 5-1/4. Must be Ballmer I'm thinking of?
> both composition, performance, and appreciation.
Yeah, all two of them.
> Art is something made with a message or story in mind.
This isn't really true... abstract painting, experimental composition are good counterexamples. These things are art, but they contain no message or story.
I sympathize with your distaste for Britney Spears-ish pop, but it's still art - very uninspired, amateurish art masked by a high polish, but art nonetheless.
> - explosions
> - oddly casted music
> - some "tough guy"
> - girl (the more titties the better)
> - car chase scene
> - gun battle where you see large sparks off bullet richochets
Hehe, don't forget that the "tough guy" is usually 5 feet tall or under 150 lbs, and uses oh-so-effective wide, swinging punches and flying spin kicks. And he's never blonde. Dirty blonde, maybe. But blonde doesn't work at the box office... Just as Dolph Lundgren.
> "Musicians", and I use that term loosely, will be tweaking their songs to score
> a "hit" on this service.
Isn't this is already what they do? People who buy pop music (myself included) are already spoon-fed, more or less, and artists who make it are already deriving their success by riding trends (intentionally or not).
It might not be so bad. More bands get a shot, and more people get a listen. I would wager that the number of people who really care about music hasn't decreased because of coookie cutter pop (or "consensus-based music," if you like) - furthermore, I bet it serves as a gentle gateway into more serious forays into both composition, performance, and appreciation.
Just make sure the equipment displayed therein is still operational, in case of a surprise Cylon attack.
Joking aside, "I don't fear" was a supposed EP3 spoiler quote from one of the LFL production folks.
> What other black-box solution do you suggest?
I have a Timex Ironman GPS/watch combo. The watch is programmed only to give me results. It doesn't provide any position data, but it's still a useful training tool because it provides speed info. Do you see what I'm getting at?
> Invades YOUR privacy? How about protecting the owner of the company's assets?
How about a happy medium? Is the latter all that matters?
> How does a black box in a truck, or a cellphone that you carry anyway cripple
> anyone? Or did I just get trolled
Because some dude was unreasonably late with his shipments, the boss now has an excuse to track everyone. Suddenly, employees who had some flexibility (in case of a dentist's appointment or an errand to run or a 20 minute rest) are now under scrutiny. Corporations are profit motivated. If you're a guy who was perfectly filling his quotas and taking an occasional break, you are now potentially forced to fork over all of your efficiency (that which you could have earned entirely without the employers help) to the employer as profit. I am tempted to think that there is something wrong with that situation.
Employers should be able to improve their efficiencies, but not by owning a worker, balls to bones, while he's on the clock. There must be a balance struck between worker autonomy and employer control. The kind of tracking data collected as cited in the article are, in my opinion, upsetting that balance to the detriment of the worker and, ultimately, the business.
> What privacy? Seriously? I pay you work for me, then, dammit, you work for
...Sorry for the hyperbole which happens to be in the vernacular as not neccessarily connoting a macroscopic dystopia. I guess it's said for lack of a more convenient term... if it pleases you, substitute "workplace monitoring."
> me.
You pay me to do a job, then I do the job. You don't own me just because I'm on your payroll.
> Why is this so difficult for people to understand?
Because it's antithetical to the western liberal notion that to work is to accomplish a task - not to submit our minds and bodies for contiguous chunks of time. That's not employment, that's indentured servitude.
> You can have your privacy in the john or off the clock.
Do you have the right to watch me piss if I'm on the clock? What if I piss too much? That would be unreasonable. Who defines what is reasonable and what is not? The employer? The unions? The state?
> Little things can make a big difference when multiplied by many employees. Get
> used to it. Everybody working more efficiently can only boost your paycheck.
This may sound distasteful, but I'm not interested in restlessly driving up standards so that my position becomes more valuable. Not right now, anyway. When I am, I'll be eligible for a better job or a raise. Is career ambition obligatory? We could all work 15 hour days and shit in a pail and eat gruel that's piped to our desks. I think anyone who does that deserves the savings in the form of a bigger paycheck, but it's not for me. I'm not advocating the do-nothing approach, but I think the market acts as a counter-weight to that tendency to some degree.
> Note, too, that the 1984 reference is silly. We're not talking about
> putting a camera in the employee's house.
I agree that management is the problem, in two ways
1) (Which you alluded to) is that there is no accountability in the productivity measurements. No comparison of deliverables to hours reported. Without that, there is no data to assist decisions concerning compensation and retention.
2) Policing punishes/exploits all for the sins of few.
> Incompetent managers deserve far more to be fired than slacking workers.
I think that decision should be based solely on whether or not you fulfill the expectations for which you are being compensated, regardless of your position - which leads to the same conclusion (fire the boss/don't buy the product, etc).
> If you have a problem with your employer making sure you're doing your
> bloody job, then quit.
Aren't there more black-box ways of determining whether I've done my job without gathering extraneous information that invades my privacy? I see problems with the Big Brother approach as not dealing with root cause.
Example: At my workplace, we have a loser who is significantly less productive than his counterparts. He pisses his day away looking at the Internet, talking at the water cooler, forwarding unfunny internet apocrypha and jokes to everyone, and eating 15 meals a day.
He eventually gets his work done, but he does it so slowly, that he is not worth his salary.
Instead of enacting policy that cripples everyone else in order to deal with his particular loafing strategies, doesn't it make a lot more sense to fire him for not earning his compensation, barring a better excuse (health, etc)?
No. Why? The litigious nature of our culture? Personal feelings interfering with management objectivity? Who knows. Whatever it is, I'd like to find out so that I don't have to implement another custom snort filter or whitelist instead of just firing the loser.
The flip side of this is that it disallows me from accepting a job that is easy for me. If I choose to work at Joe's Tape Backup Emporium, and I am compensated for the duration of my time pushing catrtidges, and my work requirements are met, I don't see why I cannot read a book during the downtime (can't leave, but I'm idle). Just because I'm capable of exceeding my quota, while Johhny Newbie has to concentrate 100% just to match me at 50% effort, does not mean I should be compelled to share the benefit of my personal efficiency with my employer if he does not compensate me more than Johnny. If he's not paying me more for my efficiency, why does he care if I'm reading or staring at the screen? The right answer is that he shouldn't, but he does because people like getting shit for free. However, I see no justification of the position that you must work until it's a grind for you. And that's what pervasive monitoring could lead to, because it's always in the employers' interest to squeeze you for all you're worth at the cheapest possible price.
> by chopper749 (574759)
> What happened to this place?
It jumped the shark, comment-wise, way before you even signed up for your current account. Before I did, for that matter.
In fact, multitasking -- a computing term that involves doing, or trying to do, more than one thing at once -- has cemented itself into our daily lives and is intensely studied. Research has shown it to be consistently counterproductive, often foolish, unhealthy in the long run, and in the case of gabbing on the cell phone while driving, relatively dangerous. Yet it is also expected, encouraged and basically essential.
Amen. Now we need the actual studies so that we can cite them for our bosses and clients so they can stop expecting it.
Once you have some sympathy from your PHB: The best defense, in this case, is a good offense. Declare office hours. Partition your time into usable, contiguous chunks dedicated to single tasks, and stick to the plan. You'll be glad you did.
No problem - we all drive H2s in New England... we can just scramble over each other's car like ants. Driving all that will take a long time, so it's also patricularly fortunate that we are always drinking lattes.
Rhode Island? Just convince the Pats owner to build a dome with a few extra seats, and voila - your whole state is covered.
> The author of this article obviously isn't a scientist.
> 'Speeding up a rotation by 3 microseconds' is a meaningless phrase.
> The unit of speed is meter per second, not second.
Well, the author isn't talking about speed... he's talking about angular speed, which is not defined in m/s. Angular speed's unit can be expresses in terms of revolutions and time. A rotation can be defined as "one complete revolution," aka, 2*pi rads. In this context, it makes sense to say "speeding up rotation by 3 microseconds" - the planet's rotation speed, 2*pi/X, is now 3 microseconds shorter, or 2*pi/(X-3^e-06). I like the way the article said it better, though.
You're right... if it's iron, a completely different story. I was going on the assumption ( based on the article) that it was a standard, garden variety, rocky meteor. They didn't make any mention of an actual composition analysis, though. I really shouldn't believe everything I read, eh?
Your first point makes sense, but re: your second point, you might want to check out the posted link - a 5m rock isn't going to qualify as a WMD anytime soon, unless it shows up in Tehran or something.
In terms of mass collected per mission, it's a fairly impressive goal. Compare the size of this rock with how much moon rock was brought back by the Apollo missions.
Sure, if you're expecting a Hollywood nuke-the-rock scenario, it's not nearly as grand. But it has novelty that can be appreciated in terms of engineering/mission objectives.