Oh Jesus Christ are you really going to sit there and say that anyone could pick up a book on any subject without guidance and get the same level of education they can get in college? Do you know what I went to university for? I went for a degree in aerospace engineering. That curriculum demanded that I learn a fairly developed set of engineering genres that aren't present in many other curriculum. I've taken course in ME, EE, IME, mathematics, sciences, writing, and a dozen others. I've learned how to piece together circuits as well as solve for the internal energy within a beam under a bending load. But none of that was even the creme de le crop of my education. Nah, I also got to learn orbital mechanics and control systems development. I can write Kalman filters, state estimators, and full-state feedback systems. Some of that high level stuff that I learned couldn't be found in any old text book. Some of it I had to learn from peer reviewed journals because it was so specialized that developing an entire textbook for the topic made little sense. What's more, a lot of the stuff I could find in a textbook would have been completely and utterly incomprehensible to me without a few professors explaining key concepts and how everything tied together.
So you think that paying a ton of cash for a university level degree is a waste? Well in some cases maybe it is. There still exist, however, extraordinarily specialized fields that you do need a university curriculum to learn. I promise you that if I had just started picking up space systems books upon HS graduation it would have taken me at least seven years to learn what I learned in four because I would have been like a blind man stumbling around in the dark. Add to that the value of social experience and good times had in college and I guarantee you that my university degree was well worth every penny I spent. So don't go sitting there saying that college is like paying $100 for a $2 taco. College in many cases is more like paying $100 for a new, amazing type of meal that nobody has cooked yet.
They have had some newer chips space rated and rad hardened actually. Granted, many of NASA's older programs (like the shuttle) use very old hardware to do a job. Some of the systems that have been designed in the last decade, however, do use newer hardware if it is necessary. Computational requirements are a primary subsystem designed for in any space system. As a mission concept gets vetted out, system engineers weigh the cost vs. benefit of using newer hardware and having more processing power vs. higher cost and more risk (they haven't been used as often). Based on those trade studies, hardware is eventually selected. If a mission needs a lot of processing power (or, at least more than a 386) then NASA will pay someone to space rate the hardware they need. If the system doesn't need it, then they won't. I don't know of any quad core chips flying on mission right now, but quite honestly, that would be a lot of overkill for most spacecraft missions anyways.
Anyways, the point is, some modern missions actually do use newer CPUs. For instance, LCROSS used a relatively new commercial CPU. I think MSL is also using a pretty impressive processing suite, though I'll have to double check that. None of them use the chips released last year, but none of them really need that either.
I like most of the projects that the summary mentioned. The Shweeb one is a bit...odd...however. From their website:
We tend not to like travelling because it’s uncomfortable, there’s not much space, not enough leg room, we spend our time stuck in traffic or on a broken down train... and we are completely powerless to do anything about it.
The design principles of Shweeb aim to put you, the traveller, back in control of your own space, time and power.
Their design seems to consist of locking oneself in a suspended bubble and peddling your way to your destination. So....to clarify, they talk about the problems of transportation including not having enough leg room or space, and their solution is for you to lock yourself in a bubble....hmmmmm.
Honestly, after looking at that project, I have to ask, "Why the hell wouldn't I just walk to my destination? Or ride my bike?"
I am sad for you. You're too spineless to stick your name to your comments and yet have the gall to go on and question the realism I was raised with. If you're going to question my lifestyle, have the backbone to show your face Coward.
Now that that's out of the way, when I cross the road, I do not sit around and ponder the possibility that some maniac is going to maliciously and intentionally run me down with his car. I do, however, keep my eyes up and my gaze shifting back and forth so that I remain alert for the potential idiocy that is so prevalent in this world. Likewise, when dealing with people, I lock my gaze on their face and pay attention to how they react to my words and actions. I make a point to take mental notes if it appears that I've angered or hurt someone, and I remain even more vigilant when dealing with that person in the future. Of course, I apologize if I've overstepped a line and done something stupid myself.
I am not, nor was my father, saying that you should always assume the the worst will always happen. You misread his advice. He was saying that you should always assume that there is the potential for the worst to happen, and that you should remain vigilant for such instances. This world isn't made up of unicorns and candy canes Princess. Sometimes bad shit happens for reasons that could be avoided if all parties involved remained vigilant. A real human, a mature human, recognizes this simple fact and stands with his or her gaze leveled on the horizon.
Well, if you read the actual blog post instead of that jackass written article, you will find the blog is actually pretty light and makes little, if any offensive comments or insinuations. Really, it's pretty cut and dry and somewhat silly. So, after three posts, I've decided Gareth Halfacree is a total douchebag, and the author of the blog itself, Leslie Sobon comes off as pretty date-able. Also, I posted three separate times because everything is better in triplicates, and work is extremely slow today.
Apparently that quip about patronization was written by a fella named Gareth Halfacree, the author of the linked article. Gareth, since you're writing for a tech oriented website (at least I think that's what it is) here's some news for you. Geeks tend to have pretty crude, politically incorrect senses of humor, that include discriminatory jokes and a lot of self-deprecation. You might want to learn this soon. Otherwise I fear that writing articles about this world will bring you a DDOS attack, or tears for your fellow men.
'Who in their worst nightmares would could have thought that anyone could stoop to do what he did?
When I was growing up, my dad once told me something along the lines of, "Boy, think of the worst, meanest, most downright, terrible thing you would be willing to do to someone that you truly hated. Now, you can safely make the assumption that someone else out there could come up with something worse if you give them enough reason. Remember that."
You know, this reminded me of the work Rodney Brookes described in Flesh and Machines. In that book, Brookes spends the first few chapters describing the robotic architecture known as subsumption. Subsumption essentially tries to simulate real animal behavior by building layers of simple reactionary models on top of each other. The base foundation for this architecture involved a few bug-like robots that Brookes developed while at MIT. These bots, using carefully selected loops of transistors and servos emulated the scrambling instincts of very basic bugs (like ants, or pill bugs, or what have you). From the reading, it seemed like Brookes had pretty successfully developed a bug-bot that simulated the actual behavior of naturally evolved insects and bugs.
The disappointing part of that read, however, was that Brookes jumped from that discussion to a pseudo-futurist discussion about how increasingly complex subsumption architectures could be used to simulate human behavior one day. He went on to talk about his involvement with projects like Cog and Kismet as a result. The disappointing part was that he took such a large leap. Emulating an insect, relatively speaking, is easy. Emulating a human is incredibly difficult. So it seemed like a matter of impatience to jump from one to the other. I would love to see a firm or company dedicated to building increasing levels of complexity in individual robots. Start with the bug-brain architecture, and then evolve that just a bit to simulate something slightly more complex, like an antrohopod...a crab or a lobster maybe. From there, go up another notch and start simulating a fish, or maybe a cat or something. I don't know. The point is though, jumping from bug to human seemed like simple hubris. I would be much more excited to see 100 full-fledged simulations of lesser-complex lifeforms than a robot or 'AI' that can generate some words and appear emotional as a result (hell I can code that up in perl right now if I wanted to).
Anyways, I think it's pertinent to point out that, while the big AI claims like this one tend to be blown out of proportion, there definitely is some interesting work going on in the AI field. You just have to know where to look.
'Why would you spend a lot of money trying to build a service in Canada when Canadians don't want to give their hard earned money to a corrupt, bully-run industry of assholes who think they are above the law?'
You're right, they should have coded the whole thing in perl like Slashdot. Then they would have the Slashcode security model of nobody, not even blackhats, knowing what the hell is going on in the code. Of course, Skynet may have been the result, but that would still be better than Facebook wouldn't it?
Well I am curious if you have any specifics regarding the design parameters that keep it from being launched on an EELV rocket. I am guessing that unless the diameter of the spacecraft is too large, it could probably be adapted to attach to either. My wager is that LM designed the Orion to attach to a specialized adapter ring (the chunk of metal that bolts a capsule to a booster stack) built for the Ares-I and then said, "Hey look, it can't be bolted to an Atlas or Delta!" However, redesigning the bolt pattern on the mount locations to be compatible with a Delta or Atlas ring is probably pretty trivial. I wouldn't be surprised if LM already had the modification designs on the computers somewhere and just weren't telling anyone. After all, LM gets a bit of cash every time an Atlas launches so I highly doubt they'd completely absolve themselves from double-dipping by design.
I went to school with a few kids that have Top Secret security clearances now. I know it's a personal anecdote, but I wouldn't trust a couple of those kids to successfully identify their head from their ass. Don't get me wrong, each one was absolutely genius at whatever particular interest/field they worked in. They were not able to be classified as socially normal, non-paranoid, or generally sane individuals by most folk however. One of the things that gets you a Top Secret clearance fast is having a very strong intellect and being capable of actually working hard. One of the negative side effects of working hard and having a very strong intellect is that you tend to be under a lot of stress and pressure. Years of constant stress and pressure can have an effect on a person's mental health.
I'm not saying all these folks were total wackos. I will say, however, that enough of them were extremely eccentric in their own manner that I could easily see them making a mistake in observation and blowing it way out of proportion without thinking twice. That's just been my experience though.
So Ms. Harper, you managed to prove yourself 'vexatious' to the RIAA? Sweet! Welcome to the dark side. For that achievement alone I'll buy you a beer next time you're out in Cali. Keep up the good work and thank you.
Both the Delta IV and the Atlas V have enough thrust to place a capsule like the Orion up into orbit, or at least a manned vehicle.
Actually, it appears that they don't. At least, they don't according to publicly available specifications. It appears the the Atlas V can, indeed lift the Orion to LEO.:
Atlas V Payload Capacity to LEO: 9,750–29,420 kg (21,490–64,860 lb) (Reference)
Meanwhile, the Delta IV can only lift ~23,000 kg to LEO:
Delta IV Payload Capacity to LEO: 8,600 - 22,560 kg (18,900 - 49,740 lb) (Reference
(Though it should be noted that the Heavy variant is supposed to be able to lift up to 23,040 kg).
According to the most recent public specs that I can find, the Orion spacecraft weighs in at ~25,000 kg (Reference). The capsule alone weighs in at ~9000 kg. That said, unless the spacecraft is launched in a modular fashion on board two Delta IV vehicles, only the capsule could be launched on the Delta IV. The Atlas V, however, appears to be able to launch the entire package in one strong go.
It wouldn't surprise me if Orion could be refitted to launch on an Atlas quickly and easily. After all, before LM and Boeing merged their launch ops into the ULA team/company, Atlas was of LM design. That said, LM has access to all of the necessary specifications and data I would bet. Either way, I am going to wager that Orion gets refitted to launch on the Atlas V booster rather than the Delta IV.
Huh, that's funny. I work on my own vehicles and I just started my own website. I started posting How-To's regarding fixing various systems on my motorcycle as part of my website. I make a point to take quality pictures throughout the repair process, I label my figures, I even capture video and include warnings of dangerous parts of the repair. They probably aren't quite as quality as the HD videos that you intended to produce, but they certainly take a lot of time and hard work to put together. The difference between you and me, however, is that I started this project without the assumption that I should get paid for it. Fixing things is one of my favorite hobbies. I enjoy it, so I decided that it would be cool for other people to have access to the knowledge that I've gained by fixing things.
That being said, I wouldn't say your reluctance to go through with you project stems from the seed of potential piracy. I would say that you didn't go through with the project because you don't really enjoy the idea of doing it enough to make it worthwhile to you, by its own merit. Having motivators other than cashy money is possible in today's world you know.
I need to clarify something for my own purposes. When folks talk about creationists here on Slashdot (or maybe in general, I don't know), is it automatically taken to mean young Earth creationists? I always thought creationist was a blanket term for someone who believes the the universe was created rather than having come into existence through chance, or Big Bang, or what have you. Nonetheless, on Slashdot I see it constantly referring to Young Earthers only...
Well to be fair, in the myths you are referring to, Orion is the best hunter that ever lived according to the Greeks. He died by scorpion sting in most variants of the myth due to either boasting about his hunting abilities, or threatening to kill every beast on the surface of the Earth because he was such a great hunter. As such, various gods (usually Artemis or Gaia) designed the scorpion (either giant or tiny, depending on the variant of the myth) to prevent him from doing just that. So the only reason Orion was killed by a scorpion (in the variants where he is killed by a Scorpion) was because he was too much of a bad ass for the gods to risk leaving alive. I'd say that's a pretty cool reputation to have.
Besides, Orion is one of the most prominent and all around epic constellations in the night sky. I'd say the name has plenty of good publicity going for it. Besides, even the movie company you listed produced quite a few good films (Silence of the Lambs, Terminator etc.)
They reused the name. Specifically, Lockheed-Martin, the prime contractor on this system, chose to name their system Orion, while NASA had previously named on of its own projects Orion. So really, there's the Lockheed Orion and the NASA Orion. The Orion referred to in the article is here.
Big, very big. But that wasn't due to the batteries, that was due to the primary payload as well as some structural and control system factors. We actually had some extra room even with the batteries installed.
Your political forum is shut down the first time some kid quotes 1984.
You know I always wondered about this kind of thing with regards to online copyright infringement. I was always taught in school that you could liberally usurp text and pictures from other sources as long as you sourced the original material in an acceptable manner. Does the law support this online? If I quote someone's poem, or if I hijack a picture from someone's website, can I be held liable for infringement if I source the poem or website and the original author/creator? In other words, do all those lessons I learned about plagiarism in school have any bearing on the legal world?
It may be time to venture out and try some others once again.
Might I suggest DuckDuckGo.com? I've been using it a month or so now and for most topics it returns more relevant results to my query than Google does. However, for obscure of super-specialized searches, it does fall a bit short of Google.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh Jesus Christ are you really going to sit there and say that anyone could pick up a book on any subject without guidance and get the same level of education they can get in college? Do you know what I went to university for? I went for a degree in aerospace engineering. That curriculum demanded that I learn a fairly developed set of engineering genres that aren't present in many other curriculum. I've taken course in ME, EE, IME, mathematics, sciences, writing, and a dozen others. I've learned how to piece together circuits as well as solve for the internal energy within a beam under a bending load. But none of that was even the creme de le crop of my education. Nah, I also got to learn orbital mechanics and control systems development. I can write Kalman filters, state estimators, and full-state feedback systems. Some of that high level stuff that I learned couldn't be found in any old text book. Some of it I had to learn from peer reviewed journals because it was so specialized that developing an entire textbook for the topic made little sense. What's more, a lot of the stuff I could find in a textbook would have been completely and utterly incomprehensible to me without a few professors explaining key concepts and how everything tied together.
So you think that paying a ton of cash for a university level degree is a waste? Well in some cases maybe it is. There still exist, however, extraordinarily specialized fields that you do need a university curriculum to learn. I promise you that if I had just started picking up space systems books upon HS graduation it would have taken me at least seven years to learn what I learned in four because I would have been like a blind man stumbling around in the dark. Add to that the value of social experience and good times had in college and I guarantee you that my university degree was well worth every penny I spent. So don't go sitting there saying that college is like paying $100 for a $2 taco. College in many cases is more like paying $100 for a new, amazing type of meal that nobody has cooked yet.
They have had some newer chips space rated and rad hardened actually. Granted, many of NASA's older programs (like the shuttle) use very old hardware to do a job. Some of the systems that have been designed in the last decade, however, do use newer hardware if it is necessary. Computational requirements are a primary subsystem designed for in any space system. As a mission concept gets vetted out, system engineers weigh the cost vs. benefit of using newer hardware and having more processing power vs. higher cost and more risk (they haven't been used as often). Based on those trade studies, hardware is eventually selected. If a mission needs a lot of processing power (or, at least more than a 386) then NASA will pay someone to space rate the hardware they need. If the system doesn't need it, then they won't. I don't know of any quad core chips flying on mission right now, but quite honestly, that would be a lot of overkill for most spacecraft missions anyways.
Anyways, the point is, some modern missions actually do use newer CPUs. For instance, LCROSS used a relatively new commercial CPU. I think MSL is also using a pretty impressive processing suite, though I'll have to double check that. None of them use the chips released last year, but none of them really need that either.
We tend not to like travelling because it’s uncomfortable, there’s not much space, not enough leg room, we spend our time stuck in traffic or on a broken down train... and we are completely powerless to do anything about it.
The design principles of Shweeb aim to put you, the traveller, back in control of your own space, time and power.
Their design seems to consist of locking oneself in a suspended bubble and peddling your way to your destination. So....to clarify, they talk about the problems of transportation including not having enough leg room or space, and their solution is for you to lock yourself in a bubble....hmmmmm.
Honestly, after looking at that project, I have to ask, "Why the hell wouldn't I just walk to my destination? Or ride my bike?"
I am sad for you. You're too spineless to stick your name to your comments and yet have the gall to go on and question the realism I was raised with. If you're going to question my lifestyle, have the backbone to show your face Coward.
Now that that's out of the way, when I cross the road, I do not sit around and ponder the possibility that some maniac is going to maliciously and intentionally run me down with his car. I do, however, keep my eyes up and my gaze shifting back and forth so that I remain alert for the potential idiocy that is so prevalent in this world. Likewise, when dealing with people, I lock my gaze on their face and pay attention to how they react to my words and actions. I make a point to take mental notes if it appears that I've angered or hurt someone, and I remain even more vigilant when dealing with that person in the future. Of course, I apologize if I've overstepped a line and done something stupid myself.
I am not, nor was my father, saying that you should always assume the the worst will always happen. You misread his advice. He was saying that you should always assume that there is the potential for the worst to happen, and that you should remain vigilant for such instances. This world isn't made up of unicorns and candy canes Princess. Sometimes bad shit happens for reasons that could be avoided if all parties involved remained vigilant. A real human, a mature human, recognizes this simple fact and stands with his or her gaze leveled on the horizon.
Well, if you read the actual blog post instead of that jackass written article, you will find the blog is actually pretty light and makes little, if any offensive comments or insinuations. Really, it's pretty cut and dry and somewhat silly. So, after three posts, I've decided Gareth Halfacree is a total douchebag, and the author of the blog itself, Leslie Sobon comes off as pretty date-able. Also, I posted three separate times because everything is better in triplicates, and work is extremely slow today.
Apparently that quip about patronization was written by a fella named Gareth Halfacree, the author of the linked article. Gareth, since you're writing for a tech oriented website (at least I think that's what it is) here's some news for you. Geeks tend to have pretty crude, politically incorrect senses of humor, that include discriminatory jokes and a lot of self-deprecation. You might want to learn this soon. Otherwise I fear that writing articles about this world will bring you a DDOS attack, or tears for your fellow men.
Although clearly meant in a lighthearted way, Sobon's missive serves to patronize both her company's customers...
No, no it doesn't....It's only offensive if you're a soulless, insecure, sensitive little bitch. Get over it.
'Who in their worst nightmares would could have thought that anyone could stoop to do what he did?
When I was growing up, my dad once told me something along the lines of, "Boy, think of the worst, meanest, most downright, terrible thing you would be willing to do to someone that you truly hated. Now, you can safely make the assumption that someone else out there could come up with something worse if you give them enough reason. Remember that."
I always did.
I claim we can't simulate an average mouse
You know, this reminded me of the work Rodney Brookes described in Flesh and Machines. In that book, Brookes spends the first few chapters describing the robotic architecture known as subsumption. Subsumption essentially tries to simulate real animal behavior by building layers of simple reactionary models on top of each other. The base foundation for this architecture involved a few bug-like robots that Brookes developed while at MIT. These bots, using carefully selected loops of transistors and servos emulated the scrambling instincts of very basic bugs (like ants, or pill bugs, or what have you). From the reading, it seemed like Brookes had pretty successfully developed a bug-bot that simulated the actual behavior of naturally evolved insects and bugs.
The disappointing part of that read, however, was that Brookes jumped from that discussion to a pseudo-futurist discussion about how increasingly complex subsumption architectures could be used to simulate human behavior one day. He went on to talk about his involvement with projects like Cog and Kismet as a result. The disappointing part was that he took such a large leap. Emulating an insect, relatively speaking, is easy. Emulating a human is incredibly difficult. So it seemed like a matter of impatience to jump from one to the other. I would love to see a firm or company dedicated to building increasing levels of complexity in individual robots. Start with the bug-brain architecture, and then evolve that just a bit to simulate something slightly more complex, like an antrohopod...a crab or a lobster maybe. From there, go up another notch and start simulating a fish, or maybe a cat or something. I don't know. The point is though, jumping from bug to human seemed like simple hubris. I would be much more excited to see 100 full-fledged simulations of lesser-complex lifeforms than a robot or 'AI' that can generate some words and appear emotional as a result (hell I can code that up in perl right now if I wanted to).
Anyways, I think it's pertinent to point out that, while the big AI claims like this one tend to be blown out of proportion, there definitely is some interesting work going on in the AI field. You just have to know where to look.
'Why would you spend a lot of money trying to build a service in Canada when Canadians don't want to give their hard earned money to a corrupt, bully-run industry of assholes who think they are above the law?'
There yah go Mr. Henderson, I FTFY. Retard.
You're right, they should have coded the whole thing in perl like Slashdot. Then they would have the Slashcode security model of nobody, not even blackhats, knowing what the hell is going on in the code. Of course, Skynet may have been the result, but that would still be better than Facebook wouldn't it?
Well I am curious if you have any specifics regarding the design parameters that keep it from being launched on an EELV rocket. I am guessing that unless the diameter of the spacecraft is too large, it could probably be adapted to attach to either. My wager is that LM designed the Orion to attach to a specialized adapter ring (the chunk of metal that bolts a capsule to a booster stack) built for the Ares-I and then said, "Hey look, it can't be bolted to an Atlas or Delta!" However, redesigning the bolt pattern on the mount locations to be compatible with a Delta or Atlas ring is probably pretty trivial. I wouldn't be surprised if LM already had the modification designs on the computers somewhere and just weren't telling anyone. After all, LM gets a bit of cash every time an Atlas launches so I highly doubt they'd completely absolve themselves from double-dipping by design.
I went to school with a few kids that have Top Secret security clearances now. I know it's a personal anecdote, but I wouldn't trust a couple of those kids to successfully identify their head from their ass. Don't get me wrong, each one was absolutely genius at whatever particular interest/field they worked in. They were not able to be classified as socially normal, non-paranoid, or generally sane individuals by most folk however. One of the things that gets you a Top Secret clearance fast is having a very strong intellect and being capable of actually working hard. One of the negative side effects of working hard and having a very strong intellect is that you tend to be under a lot of stress and pressure. Years of constant stress and pressure can have an effect on a person's mental health.
I'm not saying all these folks were total wackos. I will say, however, that enough of them were extremely eccentric in their own manner that I could easily see them making a mistake in observation and blowing it way out of proportion without thinking twice. That's just been my experience though.
...is my friend.
So Ms. Harper, you managed to prove yourself 'vexatious' to the RIAA? Sweet! Welcome to the dark side. For that achievement alone I'll buy you a beer next time you're out in Cali. Keep up the good work and thank you.
Both the Delta IV and the Atlas V have enough thrust to place a capsule like the Orion up into orbit, or at least a manned vehicle.
Actually, it appears that they don't. At least, they don't according to publicly available specifications. It appears the the Atlas V can, indeed lift the Orion to LEO.:
Atlas V Payload Capacity to LEO: 9,750–29,420 kg (21,490–64,860 lb) (Reference)
Meanwhile, the Delta IV can only lift ~23,000 kg to LEO:
Delta IV Payload Capacity to LEO: 8,600 - 22,560 kg (18,900 - 49,740 lb) (Reference
(Though it should be noted that the Heavy variant is supposed to be able to lift up to 23,040 kg).
According to the most recent public specs that I can find, the Orion spacecraft weighs in at ~25,000 kg (Reference). The capsule alone weighs in at ~9000 kg. That said, unless the spacecraft is launched in a modular fashion on board two Delta IV vehicles, only the capsule could be launched on the Delta IV. The Atlas V, however, appears to be able to launch the entire package in one strong go.
It wouldn't surprise me if Orion could be refitted to launch on an Atlas quickly and easily. After all, before LM and Boeing merged their launch ops into the ULA team/company, Atlas was of LM design. That said, LM has access to all of the necessary specifications and data I would bet. Either way, I am going to wager that Orion gets refitted to launch on the Atlas V booster rather than the Delta IV.
Huh. Thanks for the clarification.
Got any ideas on how?
Huh, that's funny. I work on my own vehicles and I just started my own website. I started posting How-To's regarding fixing various systems on my motorcycle as part of my website. I make a point to take quality pictures throughout the repair process, I label my figures, I even capture video and include warnings of dangerous parts of the repair. They probably aren't quite as quality as the HD videos that you intended to produce, but they certainly take a lot of time and hard work to put together. The difference between you and me, however, is that I started this project without the assumption that I should get paid for it. Fixing things is one of my favorite hobbies. I enjoy it, so I decided that it would be cool for other people to have access to the knowledge that I've gained by fixing things.
That being said, I wouldn't say your reluctance to go through with you project stems from the seed of potential piracy. I would say that you didn't go through with the project because you don't really enjoy the idea of doing it enough to make it worthwhile to you, by its own merit. Having motivators other than cashy money is possible in today's world you know.
l337 speak. It's officially taboo to say "LOL" rather than actually laughing.
I need to clarify something for my own purposes. When folks talk about creationists here on Slashdot (or maybe in general, I don't know), is it automatically taken to mean young Earth creationists? I always thought creationist was a blanket term for someone who believes the the universe was created rather than having come into existence through chance, or Big Bang, or what have you. Nonetheless, on Slashdot I see it constantly referring to Young Earthers only...
Well to be fair, in the myths you are referring to, Orion is the best hunter that ever lived according to the Greeks. He died by scorpion sting in most variants of the myth due to either boasting about his hunting abilities, or threatening to kill every beast on the surface of the Earth because he was such a great hunter. As such, various gods (usually Artemis or Gaia) designed the scorpion (either giant or tiny, depending on the variant of the myth) to prevent him from doing just that. So the only reason Orion was killed by a scorpion (in the variants where he is killed by a Scorpion) was because he was too much of a bad ass for the gods to risk leaving alive. I'd say that's a pretty cool reputation to have.
Besides, Orion is one of the most prominent and all around epic constellations in the night sky. I'd say the name has plenty of good publicity going for it. Besides, even the movie company you listed produced quite a few good films (Silence of the Lambs, Terminator etc.)
They reused the name. Specifically, Lockheed-Martin, the prime contractor on this system, chose to name their system Orion, while NASA had previously named on of its own projects Orion. So really, there's the Lockheed Orion and the NASA Orion. The Orion referred to in the article is here.
Big, very big. But that wasn't due to the batteries, that was due to the primary payload as well as some structural and control system factors. We actually had some extra room even with the batteries installed.
Your political forum is shut down the first time some kid quotes 1984.
You know I always wondered about this kind of thing with regards to online copyright infringement. I was always taught in school that you could liberally usurp text and pictures from other sources as long as you sourced the original material in an acceptable manner. Does the law support this online? If I quote someone's poem, or if I hijack a picture from someone's website, can I be held liable for infringement if I source the poem or website and the original author/creator? In other words, do all those lessons I learned about plagiarism in school have any bearing on the legal world?
It may be time to venture out and try some others once again.
Might I suggest DuckDuckGo.com? I've been using it a month or so now and for most topics it returns more relevant results to my query than Google does. However, for obscure of super-specialized searches, it does fall a bit short of Google.