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First, these people (HLS and the Gov in general) can't be trusted, you would never have known about this if they had their way.
Second, to "shelve" it means "re-brand the project" and wait a couple of months then implement it.
Last, you are going to have to do way more than complain if you want things to change, the noose is tightening everyday while most people are not even aware it's around their neck.
http://iweb.tntech.edu/kosburn...

Back in 2000, a group of NASA engineers and scientists visited Tennessee Tech. I was a student at the time and went to a meeting with some of the developers of laser ablation technology. My Calculus professor (Andrej Gutek) invited the class to attend that private meeting. Something like half a dozen showed up. If it was viable, it should have made more progress by now, but there is a chance that it got starved for funding. This event was related to the same one that Robert Zubrin spoke at and did a book signing for "A Case for Mars".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Davis

"Davis, who now lives lives in the rural Fentress County village of Pall Mall, also owns a construction business, Diversified Construction Co., which builds homes, apartments and offices. Davis and his wife Lynda, an elementary school teacher, have three daughters, Larissa, Lynn and Libby, and five grandchildren, Ashton, Alexia, Andrew, Austin and Adam."

http://www.tntech.edu/publicaffairs/rel/alums03.ht ml

"Davis, who lives in Pall Mall, also started a construction business, Diversified Construction Co., which builds homes, apartments and offices. With his business, he has provided jobs and opportunities for decades in the same district he serves.-more-

Davis and his wife, Lynda, an elementary school teacher, have three daughters, Larissa, Lynn and Libby, and five grandchildren, Ashton, Alexia, Andrew, Austin and Adam."

Certainly looks suspicious.

If you're just curious about what this new gimbal looks like, tntech.edu has a video showing how it works. Or, for those who don't like Coral cache, here's a link to the original site.

As a rocket engine gimbal, this doesn't look promising. It's a rather bulky mechanism; the linkage is much larger than the engine bell. It requires fifteen bearings, not including the three motors. The standard solution, a gimbal ring arrangement, only requires four. The bearings also have to handle off-center loads, never a good thing. Bearings in space are headaches; lubrication is tough and temperature changes can jam them.

The motors are in a weak position from a leverage standpoint; the engine thrust is applied directly to the motor shafts, so they (and their gear trains) must be strong enough to overpower the thruster. In a gimbal ring arrangement, the bearings are usually placed so that the center of thrust is at the center of the gimbal, so that the bearings, not the actuators, take almost all the thrust. Very large engines, like the Space Shuttle and Saturn V main engines, have been successfully gimballed that way.

The three motors don't seem to add redundancy; it looks like they all have to be working.

For comparison, here's a simple gimbal from Amadillo Aerospace, Carmack's rocket program.

In reality, having many fixed reaction thrusters is probably more reliable than have a few steerable ones. Fewer moving parts.

Sorry! Slashcode diddled the spaces in the URL.

Here's the working link.

Here is a video model of the joint in action. Frankly, I can't help thinking of a Rube Goldberg machine when I look at it.

You seem to missing the rather central point that you don't own and maintain the roads, which is why it's ridiculous for you to suggest you ought to be entitled to payment when people use them.

Who owns the number 123? Who owns the number 256^5000000? Who owns Avogadro's number? (Hint: Not Avogadro.)

No one, right? Numbers can't be owned, even if they're really big or really useful. A music/movie file is simply a big, useful number, like any other piece of information.

It's true that a lot of work goes into coming up with that information. A lot of work went into coming up with Avogadro's number too, as well as the circumference of the Earth, the speed of light, and larger pieces of information such as the theory of relativity. The fact that it takes effort to discover information, however, doesn't mean that the discoverer owns it.

They can bury poo as well!

Not only that, but cats have been know to seize control of the occational country. Don't give cats the vote.

Not sure about how much cats care for people. But cats do bring people presents and gifts, atleast all the cats (male and female) that I've lived with. Normally small mice, gloves, snakes, the odd balloon. But one time when I was very young, my family was poor and food as short, the cat brought home large rabit, large than it's self, large enough to feed everybody (2 adults, one 4 year old and cat) for a couple of days. Rabit pie, that helped.

frg terrorism sorry to spoil the fantasy

Frustrating as hell to know what you're doing and deal with people who don't believe that you do.

I have a 2-week-long series of emails between myself and some tech support reps and managers at a relatively large computational fluid dynamics software company.

To beat all, after we stopped the software from simply segfaulting partway in when running on a display with less than 24-bit color, it wouldn't use DNS to find its license server. I had to stick in an entry in /etc/hosts.

I'm probably missing something, and I'm definitely biased against spreadsheets in general for most scientific work (MSME here, working with grad students daily on this sort of thing).

But given that most engineering/scientific spreadsheets have a format of:

• Input parameters up top
• Lots of formula cells doing calculations below, many of them hidden when the variable isn't important
• Results cells at the bottom

I'm just not seeing the big advantage to it versus:

• Window running a shell for Python code, (or a Matlab window)
• Window with $EDITOR editing Python or Matlab code

In the spreadsheet version, your variable names tend to be cell locations. In a program, you pick meaningful names.

The complexity of writing formulas isn't terribly different, assuming you're using a language with a reasonable math/stats library (Matlab definitely qualifies, and Python should, too).

Now a spreadsheet does have mind-numbingly simple graphing, as long as you don't get too complicated. But at least in Matlab, if you have a pair of row or column matrices x and y, it's plot(x,y).

Instant gratification in a spreadsheet isn't terribly more instant than (up-arrow) (Enter) in the shell or Matlab window mentioned above.

And neither Python nor Matlab compare in learning curve to Fortran or most other languages. You could likely be competent in either of them inside of two days.

See here for one example on projectile motion. The functions aren't required to be split out, but are good practice.

If its like my school, Tennessee Tech [csc.tntech.edu] Then your first intro class teaches you basic programming, of which i had some C/Perl/Pascal under my belt before going in and still got alot out of the intro course, the professor was a good professor, as we have one terrible one( the chairman's wife ).

Also, the 2nd intro course is normally a data structures course, i.e. Binary Search Trees, Sorting, Basic Graph Theory, very very useful stuff that most homebrew programmers don't know about, i.e. check TopCoder for these details ( people in div2 are generally intro CS students or homebrew coders, source poll taken by myself ).

At my university, in my CS Department, until some of these damned professors retire, we are unlikely to improve, and personally i think we will drive away more students if our professors don't retire. We have 3-5 (Depending on their subject matter) great professors, one is a Phd. in physics and is the best professor in the dept. One is his wife, they work great together, and if you get over her lisp, is a great teacher, and covers the topics well. Third we sometimes have a Chairman, which i don't know how he got the job, when the majority of students wanted some other guy from Delaware instead of him, who turned around and hired his wife (which is the worst professor in the department). We have some older (upper 60's) aged professors of which one is good, but he only teaches our linux course, one is alright if he stays away from programming, ie. operating systems etc... (he cover real os's he covers how they basically work, good job too) and one which has lost his mind, but is fun sometimes on occasion, but is otehr than that a nap time. We have one other professor that i havn't mentioned, he doesn't have a masters, or a doctorate, he is just there and he gives too much busy work, this is college not high school you clod.

Staying anonymous to protect my GPA (some of the professors are addicted to Slashdot)

My IQ is 149 but I barely graduated high school with a lovely 2.0 GPA, made a 25 on my ACT which was the only way i made it into my university. While I was taking classes, I managed in 4 semesters to make a 1.18 GPA, due to a complete unwillingness to study & attend classes, not that I don't enjoy learning. I just never had to study in my high school to pass anything, it just wasn't important. Now I am suspened from school for a semester, and looking at how I can possibly raise my GPA so that maybe just maybe I won't have to depend on my ACM Programming Contest Awards to get a job out of College.

That's a very good point. When a school puts anything into the Code of Computing Practices (or whatever individual schools call it), you can end up in lots of trouble for violating it. Porn is one common example, and I'll bet that Napster will quickly become another.

My university (www.tntech.edu) took a different approach. We have a traffic shaper that, at times of peak usage, filters Napster, games, etc. way down on bandwidth allowance. When network usage isn't at peak (2am and such), those tasks are acceptable and nobody gets ticked. I would hope that, should Napster rebound and become a legal service, that most schools would allow it at certain times, provided it doesn't affect primary functions. While legal, there are those that argue that porn is wrong. If Napters gets the green light from the music industry, it'll be hard to argue that it's wrong as well...

My school uses a packet shaper and firewall combination. The firewall stops all incoming traffic that didn't originate from inside the firewall. Ie, i can connect to outside, but outside cannot connect in. So therefore, since i work for an ISP outside of campus, i can't get into my freebsd box to get any personal work done, while not in my dorm room(yes they block all non-originating traffic in from everything but the dorms). So therefore, Code Red would of had no effect to dorm room students, unless someone got infected on purpose. I will propose putting a limit on people, like a Gig a day or something so people won't run pr0n sites(the reason the firewall was put up).

I know at my school, i have never seen nor signed any agreement that gives them my code, but it is generally understood that i do not hold the copyright if i used any of there hardware to create/test it. I had to rewrite something that i wanted to release under the GPL from scratch just so i could release it to the public. I am trying to convince them to just GPL all of the students (assignment) source under a website so that students can still use it, but the non-free os people that warez all of there software don't like open source, go figure.

I've got some documentation on my particular settings for that sort of thing here. Debian GNU/Linux client, Win95 print server, HP Deskjet 600C printer.