On the negative side, there is: "I had to. Why shouldn't everyone else?" With some dyslexia, writing down 65 characters/minute was one of the hardest tests I've passed.
But, practically, it would be a shame not to promote a universal basic level of morse because:
1. You can build a transmitter with a handful of primitive components. It's cheap. It's good for the third world.
2. It's simple. Building a transmitter is a good way for kids to play with electronics.
3. It's efficient as all heck. I believe they figure it broadcasts 10 times as well as voice. A hundred watt transmitter can get you around the world comfortably where a 1000 watts might be desirable for voice. Good on several fronts.
4. It's efficiency is multipled because it's small bandwidth means many people can use the spectrum that one voice amateur takes up.
5. Simplicity is good for emergencies. If the tidal wave has arrived, that is a bad time to discover that the morse keyboard has a short. "Let's see now. H --- E --- L ---- P ---- !"
6. A good part of the reason for an amateur service is for emergencies. Isn't it the zen of every superhero to be able to whip up a temporal viewer out of "stone knives and bearskins" like Spock when the need arises?
Yes. To some extent I wonder whether it is cultural and generational. When I was at school we sat in our place in rows and talked when we were called upon. Same for study hall.
In particular, I've purposefully avoided instant messaging. If someone has an inspiration, they'll have a mature thought by the time they can see in a more scheduled opportunity.
Yeah, that's right, I'm sure they're using this to break apart people that are peacefully assembling.
People seem to keep saying this. The rub is that a peaceful assembly is a peaceful assembly until the powers that be say it isn't a lawful assembly. And it becomes a riot when the beam is turned on. You are genuinely naive enough about visual media to think the five-second TV clip on the 6:00 news will make that cause and effect clear?
If you haven't noticed, there is a class war going on in the U.S. and the rich are winning. Since it is apparently their goal to make the U.S. history's most powerful third-world nation, expect the results: riots, ransom kidnappings, car jackings, infrastructure destruction, domestic terrorist fern bar bombings. All that delightful stuff that other third-world countries enjoy. It is only what a knowledge of history and sociology would rationally predict.
On countermeasures, I think a parabolic reflector might be an interesting new accessory to any demonstration:)
Claudia Black will be a hard sell for me. She hasn't played a character I've seen that I'd want staying around on a Sunday afternoon.
Samantha Carter, on the other hand, is one of TVs archtypal nerds. How many SG-1 episodes _aren't_ outlined as:
Field research Analysis (often by Samatha Carter) Decision-making conference Action
With Doc long gone, Samantha effectively gone, the nerd factor rests on Daniel. Unless Black's character turns out to be a closet quantum physist, the central structure of the programs might be expected to devolve into bang-bang action and Black's sexual quips. Yes, without Hensen's non-humanoid aliens.
Divide their GDP by their population and you get about $7,262 per person. The USA has about 300 million people. Divide our GDP per person and you get about $39,166.66 per person.
Interesting train of thought. Since the U.S. has about the greatest class differences outside Swaziland (I've read that the top 1% own as much as the bottom 90% in the U.S.), I wonder how much closer average income would be if someone subtracted that richest top 1% from each country. Anybody know the figures?
I'm having a nasty time with kernel 2.6.X linux and udev at the moment (rant a few topics back) but, in general, I would say many linuxes are much easier to set up than OS/2. The install process was about as friendly as a Debian Woody (albeit with graphics). And a bunch of driver issues. AFAIK they never got rid of the blue tint on the WinTV driver and the zombies caused by sound clashes when you were multitasking stuff like streaming music and accidently caused another sound request could be nasty. And no file system/admin security, right?
Nonetheless, it was a beautiful OS for its time in comparison to the Win9Xes. Another vote here for anyone resurrecting the Workplace Shell -- particularly augmented with Object Desktop.
Why it never took off:
1. IBM wasn't selling to the home market. Probably smart. As I say, it wasn't a pretty install and, argue all you want about how well Quake ran, it didn't run Active X games or even do sound for DOS games like Doom beyond the arcade beeps.
2. IBM marketed stupidly. Dvorak ranted on a billboard at an airport he saw that promised "OS/2 will obliterate your hard drive!" What was that supposed to mean? They marketed a version of "Warp _FOR_ (emphasis mine) Windows". What did that mean -- OS/2 was an add-on like Microsoft Bob?
3. When Windows 3.1 was coming out it promised to run OK on 4 meg of RAM. OS/2 needed 8 meg to run decently. At that moment, Ronald Reagan decided to teach the Japanese a thing or two about dumping RAM and nearly doubled ram prices.
4. Microsoft was found guilty of monopolistically intimidating PC distributors from providing OS alternatives.
Some of the blame IBM, some MS, some other factors.
Shows that MS professionals aren't tenured philosophy professors?
I worked for a national gifted children's program some years ago. It would be exceptional within the exceptional for a nine-year-old to get a "community college admission level" SAT score -- but definitely plausible.
That's probably what it shows. That MS credentials demonstrate a tech school level of knowledge. Sounds about right.
I think the OpenCD project is a great idea. If people don't have to abandon Windows, that only leaves the remaining suspicion that something free can't be worth anything. MAYBE they will take a chance and install Firefox, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, etc. People are already installing spyware right and left -- why not give _one_ open source program a try? Firefox isn't a large commitment. It would be a plus if they would then try a _second_ OSS program.
But, man, am I primed for a topic on the future of the linux desktop right about now. I had everything with Red Hat 9 and a 2.4 kernel: accelerated video, Win4lin kernel for some legacy programs, scanner, camera, Palm, pocket pc, Zip drives, Jumpdrives, joystick, CD+RW, DVD+RW. The more elaborate OSS games and sims like Torcs, Flightgear and Cube. More importantly, I had the feeling that linux was making sure and steady progress as a solid and full-featured desktop.
But desktop progress marches on, right? If you want bluefish 1.0, for example, you better have a recent KDE or Gnome for the current graphics toolkit. And in that vein it seems like everything has gone to crap for me in experimenting with a couple recent distributions. I've lost accelerated video in three machines, either upgrades or fresh installs and I've spent hours on the net scratching my head on those. I've had to compile my first kernel to keep Win4lin working. Looks like I'll have to go back to that and see if my video cards have been deprecated in the kernel because it sure seems like I've tried everything else.
But the thing that has really thrown me into a crisis with linux is the 2.6 kernel's udev and my absolute inability to create legacy devices.
1. Is it just assumed that if all your removable media aren't USB you shouldn't be using a current 2.6 kernel? When did that memo go out? Even if I wasn't on the distribution list, what sort of way is that to run an OS?
2. The devices.txt formats out to about a nifty 50 page OpenOffice document with another 10 or so on mknod and what I could find on the net. Sure, it's a fascinating roster of detail in an area of linux architecture that I've sorely neglected, but:
a. Will grandma love wading through the device creation process in start up config files to get that legacy Zip drive working?
b. If only it _would_ work. As far as I can see, if you put mknod's in rc.local (which is about all I'm finding on Google), they just get removed before the boot is completed. And, in another case, another legacy device is saucily allocated a "g" device automatically instead of the appropriate "b" device by this marvelous udev creation. (In truth, what is the percentage breakdown of/.ers who know the difference between a "g" and "b" in the context of devices?)
It is an utter mess. Experimenting on the wife's machine first (I'm no fool), she has a couple program upgrades she really loves -- and no working Zip drive, palm, camera and more. I may have to blow everything away and move to a distribution that still allows a late 2.4 option like Debian Sarge and includes some of these improvements she's been exposed to. But there is the question: is that just delaying the inevitable along a path that has taken a very wrong direction? How many more years will I want a 2.4 kernel? Must I junk several computers I'm otherwise perfectly happy with if I want a current 2.6/udev linux?
Genuine existential OS crisis. By all tests and experience I'm not unintelligent. I was running a unix clone at home in '91 when I was UUCPing Coherent updates via dial-up to a VGA desktop. OS2 from '95-2001, but I've run linux as my and my wife's sole desktop boot (with Win4lin legacy cheating) since August 2001. I may not have a CS degree with 4 years in the linux lab but I'm really not in the mood to hear RTFM or "newbie" BS. And if one is over 12, please refrain from "what do you expect for free?" Ditto on "You fool. Obviously your search missed pimpleboy.dyndns.info/hindi/ where all your
I have no experience of education outside the US, but I can say confidently that public education in my country sucks.
I _do_ have a foreign degree. One thing that blows people's minds at admission offices in other countries is the lack of standards in U.S. primary and secondary education. How do they evaluate your qualifications for tertiary education when, for all they can tell, you may have gone to "Creationist County Sports School" in some state that funds education only slightly more than crop subsidies?
In that sense I'm not against the principle of No Child Left Behind. How can achievement be quantified except by nationally standardized testing? Works for much of the civilized world.
But No Child Left Behind is both an unfunded mandate and a program that seems to have some "one size fits all" generalizations. Local schools appear to respond to it by finding ways to get the kids who are blowing the curve out of their school. Which sort of defeats the purpose.
I guess I would first look at the national standards of the most successful countries and revamp No Child Left Behind after that. Second, I would try to wrestle more control away from local school boards, which probably means less local funding and more state and federal funding. Third, I would initiate a national "Sputnik" program to scare the crap out of America that the rest of the world is ready to eat our lunch.
Moral values are to be expressed in all human behavior. Personal lives, work and politics. It's absurd to think that if enough people join together to run organization to make money (company), moral values do not apply.
Not at all. It's the social psychology of group dynamics. Zimbardo demonstrated that people most likely will turn the knob to torture someone as a by-product of what the authority figure present tells them to do. How much easier to work faithfully destroying society's freedoms to achieve the company's quarterly goals? No, corporations must have legal restrictions with meaningful punative consequences or we can reasonably expect about anything from them.
Greater society certainly plays a role in what is acceptable. Bayer no longer advertises heroin for the aches that ail you. The U.S. thinks anti-personnel landmines, on the other hand, are perfectly legal. So morality become law is more of a patchwork than a logical system.
I agree. Let's make school as inefficient and difficult as possible with another distraction. I remember a study in the mid-80s between Kyoto, Taipai and Minneapolis/St. Paul. One striking difference about the U.S. school was not knowing where and what a significantly larger percentage of kids were doing at a given moment. So, sure. It's very "American" to add some more chaos. Heaven forbid they should all sit down together, open their book, notepad, shut up and learn something.
It will have a nice, Web-based front end for service management, which Sarge lacks.
So the distribution will install Webmin and a range of the modules by _default_? Yipee! I've been waiting for that innovation. NOW I'll be able to use linux!
I remember when I was taking the Oracle 8 DBA sequence. Instructor happens to mention that DB2 also has a particular feature. Student asks for an opinion and the instructor says DB2 is a fine product but, with a little chuckle, we're here to study Oracle. Another student says, "And what about SQLServer?" And the whole room chuckles.
It'll take more than Ballmer giving interviews to change professional opinion.
We need a "Deep Blue" competition. I propose Leo Kottke. When the machine can do "Living in the Country" with bass run and rhythme on a 12-string, he has something to worry about.
I suppose it wouldn't fly to have someone press a nipple to the computer, but the hand doesn't seem ideal. A little Japanese class bias? Nobody who works with his hands uses a computer? What about sports? Motorcycle road rash? Kitchen knife? Hand tool? Just about anything that could run a cut across that vein pattern.
Sending morse code isn't so important to amateur radio any more but here were some long-standing requirements:
5 words/minute -- novice/technician license.
13 words/minute -- general/advanced license
15 words/minute would get you highest privileges in some countries if I remember correctly
20 words/minute for a U.S. extra license
(a "word" averaging 5 characters)
There are "Q" abbreviations like "QTH" for "location" and slang like "C" for "yes". But I expect most amateurs in the day were banging out under 20 wpm with a "straight key". It's true that a "keyer" can be a one IC device. Touch pads have been used for them. So I suppose a keyer could be integrated into a phone quite easily. Ergonomics could be a factor. I don't know how well you could key on the metro.
I remember a program from a Commodore magazine to predict which of two keys you would press. When I flipped a coin to choose, it was right 50% of the time. No matter how thoughtlessly random I believed I was hitting keys, it would typically guess correctly in the 60s upward to 70% of the time.
If you could train a robo-warrior on enough parameters, you could be in a lot of trouble -- like, say, the "random" pattern you pop your head around the corner to fire off a shot.
I was cheering for Robert Tools but it looks like his experience was by far the best of the lot.
Is a simple mechanical explanation of their mediocre results applicable? Put a new pump in a rotten circulatory system and some pipes are certain to explode into strokes? If so, the whole concept really does need refinement. It could be argued that there are otherwise healthy people who could benefit but how many people with a stake through their heart survive long enough to do the switch?
I'm sure there are exceptions who would still be willing research subjects and I assume the company will get permission to do more trials with an improved technique. That seems like an appropriate compromise at this time -- with the hope that AbioCor can survive another prolonged development phase.
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"If you haven't done anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
"Deer don't know it's a deer. Wolf don't know it's a wolf. Natural born killer."
The wolves spouting words of comfort I understand. Sadly, I suspect a great number of the people who don't worry are deer.
But they annoy the hell out of me when their indifference lets the wolves in power steal our liberties.
On the negative side, there is: "I had to. Why shouldn't everyone else?" With some dyslexia, writing down 65 characters/minute was one of the hardest tests I've passed.
But, practically, it would be a shame not to promote a universal basic level of morse because:
1. You can build a transmitter with a handful of primitive components. It's cheap. It's good for the third world.
2. It's simple. Building a transmitter is a good way for kids to play with electronics.
3. It's efficient as all heck. I believe they figure it broadcasts 10 times as well as voice. A hundred watt transmitter can get you around the world comfortably where a 1000 watts might be desirable for voice. Good on several fronts.
4. It's efficiency is multipled because it's small bandwidth means many people can use the spectrum that one voice amateur takes up.
5. Simplicity is good for emergencies. If the tidal wave has arrived, that is a bad time to discover that the morse keyboard has a short. "Let's see now. H --- E --- L ---- P ---- !"
6. A good part of the reason for an amateur service is for emergencies. Isn't it the zen of every superhero to be able to whip up a temporal viewer out of "stone knives and bearskins" like Spock when the need arises?
Yes. To some extent I wonder whether it is cultural and generational. When I was at school we sat in our place in rows and talked when we were called upon. Same for study hall.
In particular, I've purposefully avoided instant messaging. If someone has an inspiration, they'll have a mature thought by the time they can see in a more scheduled opportunity.
Does it feedback to momentary states? I can see a fantastic market in war, kiddie porn and disaster vids. (Oh! That's awful!) YEAH, BABY!!!
Yeah, that's right, I'm sure they're using this to break apart people that are peacefully assembling.
:)
People seem to keep saying this. The rub is that a peaceful assembly is a peaceful assembly until the powers that be say it isn't a lawful assembly. And it becomes a riot when the beam is turned on. You are genuinely naive enough about visual media to think the five-second TV clip on the 6:00 news will make that cause and effect clear?
If you haven't noticed, there is a class war going on in the U.S. and the rich are winning. Since it is apparently their goal to make the U.S. history's most powerful third-world nation, expect the results: riots, ransom kidnappings, car jackings, infrastructure destruction, domestic terrorist fern bar bombings. All that delightful stuff that other third-world countries enjoy. It is only what a knowledge of history and sociology would rationally predict.
On countermeasures, I think a parabolic reflector might be an interesting new accessory to any demonstration
With the HTML they'll have to keep churning out, pretty soon phishing is going to seem like a real job.
Claudia Black will be a hard sell for me. She hasn't played a character I've seen that I'd want staying around on a Sunday afternoon.
Samantha Carter, on the other hand, is one of TVs archtypal nerds. How many SG-1 episodes _aren't_ outlined as:
Field research
Analysis (often by Samatha Carter)
Decision-making conference
Action
With Doc long gone, Samantha effectively gone, the nerd factor rests on Daniel. Unless Black's character turns out to be a closet quantum physist, the central structure of the programs might be expected to devolve into bang-bang action and Black's sexual quips. Yes, without Hensen's non-humanoid aliens.
Divide their GDP by their population and you get about $7,262 per person. The USA has about 300 million people. Divide our GDP per person and you get about $39,166.66 per person.
Interesting train of thought. Since the U.S. has about the greatest class differences outside Swaziland (I've read that the top 1% own as much as the bottom 90% in the U.S.), I wonder how much closer average income would be if someone subtracted that richest top 1% from each country. Anybody know the figures?
I'm having a nasty time with kernel 2.6.X linux and udev at the moment (rant a few topics back) but, in general, I would say many linuxes are much easier to set up than OS/2. The install process was about as friendly as a Debian Woody (albeit with graphics). And a bunch of driver issues. AFAIK they never got rid of the blue tint on the WinTV driver and the zombies caused by sound clashes when you were multitasking stuff like streaming music and accidently caused another sound request could be nasty. And no file system/admin security, right?
Nonetheless, it was a beautiful OS for its time in comparison to the Win9Xes. Another vote here for anyone resurrecting the Workplace Shell -- particularly augmented with Object Desktop.
Why it never took off:
1. IBM wasn't selling to the home market. Probably smart. As I say, it wasn't a pretty install and, argue all you want about how well Quake ran, it didn't run Active X games or even do sound for DOS games like Doom beyond the arcade beeps.
2. IBM marketed stupidly. Dvorak ranted on a billboard at an airport he saw that promised "OS/2 will obliterate your hard drive!" What was that supposed to mean? They marketed a version of "Warp _FOR_ (emphasis mine) Windows". What did that mean -- OS/2 was an add-on like Microsoft Bob?
3. When Windows 3.1 was coming out it promised to run OK on 4 meg of RAM. OS/2 needed 8 meg to run decently. At that moment, Ronald Reagan decided to teach the Japanese a thing or two about dumping RAM and nearly doubled ram prices.
4. Microsoft was found guilty of monopolistically intimidating PC distributors from providing OS alternatives.
Some of the blame IBM, some MS, some other factors.
Sinister of the artist to draw in a hypothetical moon. We all know how dangerous solar eclipses can be.
Shows that MS professionals aren't tenured philosophy professors?
I worked for a national gifted children's program some years ago. It would be exceptional within the exceptional for a nine-year-old to get a "community college admission level" SAT score -- but definitely plausible.
That's probably what it shows. That MS credentials demonstrate a tech school level of knowledge. Sounds about right.
I think the OpenCD project is a great idea. If people don't have to abandon Windows, that only leaves the remaining suspicion that something free can't be worth anything. MAYBE they will take a chance and install Firefox, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, etc. People are already installing spyware right and left -- why not give _one_ open source program a try? Firefox isn't a large commitment. It would be a plus if they would then try a _second_ OSS program.
/.ers who know the difference between a "g" and "b" in the context of devices?)
But, man, am I primed for a topic on the future of the linux desktop right about now. I had everything with Red Hat 9 and a 2.4 kernel: accelerated video, Win4lin kernel for some legacy programs, scanner, camera, Palm, pocket pc, Zip drives, Jumpdrives, joystick, CD+RW, DVD+RW. The more elaborate OSS games and sims like Torcs, Flightgear and Cube. More importantly, I had the feeling that linux was making sure and steady progress as a solid and full-featured desktop.
But desktop progress marches on, right? If you want bluefish 1.0, for example, you better have a recent KDE or Gnome for the current graphics toolkit. And in that vein it seems like everything has gone to crap for me in experimenting with a couple recent distributions. I've lost accelerated video in three machines, either upgrades or fresh installs and I've spent hours on the net scratching my head on those. I've had to compile my first kernel to keep Win4lin working. Looks like I'll have to go back to that and see if my video cards have been deprecated in the kernel because it sure seems like I've tried everything else.
But the thing that has really thrown me into a crisis with linux is the 2.6 kernel's udev and my absolute inability to create legacy devices.
1. Is it just assumed that if all your removable media aren't USB you shouldn't be using a current 2.6 kernel? When did that memo go out? Even if I wasn't on the distribution list, what sort of way is that to run an OS?
2. The devices.txt formats out to about a nifty 50 page OpenOffice document with another 10 or so on mknod and what I could find on the net. Sure, it's a fascinating roster of detail in an area of linux architecture that I've sorely neglected, but:
a. Will grandma love wading through the device creation process in start up config files to get that legacy Zip drive working?
b. If only it _would_ work. As far as I can see, if you put mknod's in rc.local (which is about all I'm finding on Google), they just get removed before the boot is completed. And, in another case, another legacy device is saucily allocated a "g" device automatically instead of the appropriate "b" device by this marvelous udev creation. (In truth, what is the percentage breakdown of
It is an utter mess. Experimenting on the wife's machine first (I'm no fool), she has a couple program upgrades she really loves -- and no working Zip drive, palm, camera and more. I may have to blow everything away and move to a distribution that still allows a late 2.4 option like Debian Sarge and includes some of these improvements she's been exposed to. But there is the question: is that just delaying the inevitable along a path that has taken a very wrong direction? How many more years will I want a 2.4 kernel? Must I junk several computers I'm otherwise perfectly happy with if I want a current 2.6/udev linux?
Genuine existential OS crisis. By all tests and experience I'm not unintelligent. I was running a unix clone at home in '91 when I was UUCPing Coherent updates via dial-up to a VGA desktop. OS2 from '95-2001, but I've run linux as my and my wife's sole desktop boot (with Win4lin legacy cheating) since August 2001. I may not have a CS degree with 4 years in the linux lab but I'm really not in the mood to hear RTFM or "newbie" BS. And if one is over 12, please refrain from "what do you expect for free?" Ditto on "You fool. Obviously your search missed pimpleboy.dyndns.info/hindi/ where all your
I have no experience of education outside the US, but I can say confidently that public education in my country sucks.
I _do_ have a foreign degree. One thing that blows people's minds at admission offices in other countries is the lack of standards in U.S. primary and secondary education. How do they evaluate your qualifications for tertiary education when, for all they can tell, you may have gone to "Creationist County Sports School" in some state that funds education only slightly more than crop subsidies?
In that sense I'm not against the principle of No Child Left Behind. How can achievement be quantified except by nationally standardized testing? Works for much of the civilized world.
But No Child Left Behind is both an unfunded mandate and a program that seems to have some "one size fits all" generalizations. Local schools appear to respond to it by finding ways to get the kids who are blowing the curve out of their school. Which sort of defeats the purpose.
I guess I would first look at the national standards of the most successful countries and revamp No Child Left Behind after that. Second, I would try to wrestle more control away from local school boards, which probably means less local funding and more state and federal funding. Third, I would initiate a national "Sputnik" program to scare the crap out of America that the rest of the world is ready to eat our lunch.
Moral values are to be expressed in all human behavior. Personal lives, work and politics. It's absurd to think that if enough people join together to run organization to make money (company), moral values do not apply.
Not at all. It's the social psychology of group dynamics. Zimbardo demonstrated that people most likely will turn the knob to torture someone as a by-product of what the authority figure present tells them to do. How much easier to work faithfully destroying society's freedoms to achieve the company's quarterly goals? No, corporations must have legal restrictions with meaningful punative consequences or we can reasonably expect about anything from them.
Greater society certainly plays a role in what is acceptable. Bayer no longer advertises heroin for the aches that ail you. The U.S. thinks anti-personnel landmines, on the other hand, are perfectly legal. So morality become law is more of a patchwork than a logical system.
I agree. Let's make school as inefficient and difficult as possible with another distraction. I remember a study in the mid-80s between Kyoto, Taipai and Minneapolis/St. Paul. One striking difference about the U.S. school was not knowing where and what a significantly larger percentage of kids were doing at a given moment. So, sure. It's very "American" to add some more chaos. Heaven forbid they should all sit down together, open their book, notepad, shut up and learn something.
It will have a nice, Web-based front end for service management, which Sarge lacks.
So the distribution will install Webmin and a range of the modules by _default_? Yipee! I've been waiting for that innovation. NOW I'll be able to use linux!
I remember when I was taking the Oracle 8 DBA sequence. Instructor happens to mention that DB2 also has a particular feature. Student asks for an opinion and the instructor says DB2 is a fine product but, with a little chuckle, we're here to study Oracle. Another student says, "And what about SQLServer?" And the whole room chuckles.
It'll take more than Ballmer giving interviews to change professional opinion.
We need a "Deep Blue" competition. I propose Leo Kottke. When the machine can do "Living in the Country" with bass run and rhythme on a 12-string, he has something to worry about.
Yes, on that note, social sciences. There will be no questions on the dynamics of war and the rise and fall of civilizations?
I suppose it wouldn't fly to have someone press a nipple to the computer, but the hand doesn't seem ideal. A little Japanese class bias? Nobody who works with his hands uses a computer? What about sports? Motorcycle road rash? Kitchen knife? Hand tool? Just about anything that could run a cut across that vein pattern.
People aren't born with an innate foundation in predicate calculus?
I suppose it can be a useful line of research in robotic "muscle" coordination and world interaction.
Sending morse code isn't so important to amateur radio any more but here were some long-standing requirements:
5 words/minute -- novice/technician license.
13 words/minute -- general/advanced license
15 words/minute would get you highest privileges in some countries if I remember correctly
20 words/minute for a U.S. extra license
(a "word" averaging 5 characters)
There are "Q" abbreviations like "QTH" for "location" and slang like "C" for "yes". But I expect most amateurs in the day were banging out under 20 wpm with a "straight key". It's true that a "keyer" can be a one IC device. Touch pads have been used for them. So I suppose a keyer could be integrated into a phone quite easily. Ergonomics could be a factor. I don't know how well you could key on the metro.
I remember a program from a Commodore magazine to predict which of two keys you would press. When I flipped a coin to choose, it was right 50% of the time. No matter how thoughtlessly random I believed I was hitting keys, it would typically guess correctly in the 60s upward to 70% of the time.
If you could train a robo-warrior on enough parameters, you could be in a lot of trouble -- like, say, the "random" pattern you pop your head around the corner to fire off a shot.
Will these things be marketable? "Ma, I'm not playing games, I'm training my robo-warrior!"
I was cheering for Robert Tools but it looks like his experience was by far the best of the lot.
Is a simple mechanical explanation of their mediocre results applicable? Put a new pump in a rotten circulatory system and some pipes are certain to explode into strokes? If so, the whole concept really does need refinement. It could be argued that there are otherwise healthy people who could benefit but how many people with a stake through their heart survive long enough to do the switch?
I'm sure there are exceptions who would still be willing research subjects and I assume the company will get permission to do more trials with an improved technique. That seems like an appropriate compromise at this time -- with the hope that AbioCor can survive another prolonged development phase.