If you are going to trust a business enough to allow it to have access to your finances, then it should be a business that you can physically reach, so that if something goes seriously wrong you can call the police in your own country or go bang on their door yourself without getting a visa. If nameless employee #6363666 gets up to a bit of embezzlement, and they are in another country, it's likely that you'll never see the money again and the offender will never get extridited.
"I'm calling at international rates from Outthebackofstan, I've been on hold for three hours, and why don't you ^%#$%#^ read your email?"
"Oh, I'm sorry, you have the wrong department, this is the Pacific USA only support line. Please dial this number again in another eleven hours and the people supporting your region will be here. Have a nice day" (To co-worker: "Another commie towelhead") click."
Dictatorship in this particular context of course is that terms are being dictated to you that you are obliged under threat...
Aha! I see we are talking about different things.
Most of the world defines a dictatorship as a place where one person (a dictator) gets full control over a country without the checks and balances of that other governments have.
The government has absolute power because it has the power of violence to back up what it wants. Therefore it is a dictatorship, regardless of all the PR fluff around this fact.
I don't think we're talking about the same thing here.
Take a look at other non-dictatorships where the leaders have made very unpopular decisions. There are a range of checks and balances, and if that fails it ultimately ends with the police force or army removing that leader. If the the decision is popular with the defence force then it is a different story.
If the Prime Minister of Australia was to order a group of refugees shot he probably would be deposed by his own party before the order could be carried out, and he knows that and acts accordingly. In a dictatorship the dictator has a much greater degree of control (which is one reason I don't want to live in one).
I'd better get back to playing the ball and not the man.
Is this a sig? I don't get it.
It's a term from football; playing the man means to ignore to game and just concentrate on bashing the player (like all of the previous flames).
it should be the responsibility of the guardian of the child to decide in which fashion their child is educated, if anything government intervention in education should be restricted to making the widest amount of information possible to it's citizenry so that they may independantly pursue their educations and that of their children to whatever degree they feel that they have to.
Therein lies the class system of old - poorly educated peasants, rich people running the system without much of a clue (not cost effective to get a real education, just go to school to network) and a motivated educated middle class. Having a nationwide education system lets people look at things from a similar cultural standpoint and gives everyone a chance, it means that the girl at the supermarket checkout can add and read labels for a start.
You should never let your schooling get in the way of your education.
True, I was told once by an insightful person that the purpose of a University degree is to teach you how to learn.
Further on the subject of policing, the causes of crime should be targeted rather than the symptoms,
In some cases the cause is simply an evil greedy bastard that wants to hurt people. In other cases it is no easy task to get to the cause.
I have been mugged, at knifepoint and at gunpoint, being a hotheaded and generally angry person this merely resulted in immense pain for the mugger in question. If this were the rule rather than the exception it is far less likely that such behaviour would continue.
What do others who are less capable of defending themselves do? I don't like the idea of the rule of the strong over the weak.
No I don't mean government as metaphoric guy with gun. I mean absolute guy with gun. There are guys with guns who work for the government, but none of them have pointed them at me. Government is supposed to protect us from the absolute guy with gun and the fact that I haven't seen one yet suggests they're doing an alright job.
Never seen a cop?
I think you've missed the point slightly.
The odds that a cop in a democratic country will shoot you to take your shoes are very low. The cop also has to answer to someone that is ultimately dependant upon the will of the people to stay in power. A leader with no support at all is either out of work, exiled, jailed or dead.
Refering to an earlier post, screaming "Dictatorship" over a civil defamation case is a little silly:
1/ The government is seperated from the process - it is being dealt with by the court. Under the principle of separation of powers the government sets a law, and the courts decide how to implement it without interferance from the government. If the government wants to interfere they set mandatory sentances, but once a case is going they have to keep out.
2/ A dictatorship is a word in the dictionary with a specific meaning. If what you are describing doesn't mean that use another word.
Once again you're simply saying that because more flagrant examples of dictatorships exist, this automatically disqualifies Australia as an example of one
No, look up dictatorship and see if anything matches.
I'd better get back to playing the ball and not the man.
The documents WERE published Stateside, not in Oz. They were written in the US and uploaded to a server in the US, where it is perfectly legal to do so. I mean, duuuuh!
Hmm, that didn't work for Dmitry either.
One of the things that was decided (either in this case or previously) is that if you can read it in Victoria, Australia then it is considered to be published there. With the deformation laws in that state it is up to the defendant to prove the truth of their assertion - if they can't they lose. Still, it costs enormous amounts of money to take someone to court over defamation in Australia, so that cuts down on the number of cases.
Also, don't try to come here by boat, the government will sic the troops on you and tow you out to sea:(
I once met a teacher who described herself as a "specialist grade 3 teacher", because you need to understand fractions until grade 4! Somehow she made it through the education system on sheer apathy. Many other teachers of course are hard working and capable, I know that I learnt nothing new in mathematics in my first three years at high school only because I had good teachers in primary (==elementary) school.
In western society, scientific issues appear to be perceived as being too difficult to even attempt to understand. There is also a perception that you can't believe technical explanations when there is a simpler, emotive argument. I think this has created a situation where recently invented superstitions are more widely believed than carefully researched and established facts.
One simple example; in this city as part of the treatment process the tap water passes through six feet of sand. Many people won't drink this water until they've passed it through a filter of a couple of inches of small stones, then somehow it is safer. For some reason "they" (technical or qualifed medical people of any type) can't be trusted to provide safe water (or medicine or whatever) "for the children". A survey of bottled water in Australia a few years ago found surprising amounts of biological material, far more than you would find in any town with an adequate water supply.
A more divisive example; the debate over genetic modification of crops - it is assumed by many that they can be geneticly modified by eating these crops. Any technical argument for or against is ignored in favour of the emotive argument, fed by moralistic disater movies that tell us "Don't mess with mother nature." The ironic thing is that the people who will rush out to trample a crop that may be a secretly modified test crop eat "natural" vegetables, grown indoors to keep the insects off, and grown hydroponically in a cocktail of chemical fertilizers, because somehow that is trendier than growing them in the ground and using less fertilizer. This perception has scuttled projects like one to produce vaccines from geneticly engineered bananas. Somehow, growing your medicine is less desirable than the enormous number of pharmacuetical plants that would be required to match what you do with such a crop. Being able to breed food crops have a high yeild and require less nutrients is also a good thing. Many will argue that these crops will never get to the nations that need them, but that's a way to feel better about opposing something that could help millions.
A lot of the "folklore" that people believe is of very recent origin. My grandmother was in her thirties before the term "Ley Line" was thought of, and that was used to describe the sites of old road. The zinc=virility thing comes from the story of Cassanova (not the most reliable of info!) eating lots of oysters. Oysters are filter feeders and pick up a lot of heavy metals such as zinc in areas where mining and industry puts it in the water. Therfore, with a dab of fiction and a stroke of sympathetic magic, zinc=virility. Zinc is important for other reasons, but it comes in every green plant.
Herbs: Many are useful and have been known about for some time, but a lot of people believe (by the magical law of sympathy perhaps?) that all herbs are good, and many are superior to medical technology. I suppose that I'm lucky that I know that there is a lot of flora that will kill things that try to eat it, or sting and scratch things that get close to it. Natural != good. Strychnine is natural.
I have always found the default e themes extremely garish, overly showy, and rather clunky.
The purpose of raster's themes appears to be to show off every single feature of the window manager, so that you can see what the thing is capable of. There are a lot of themes available for each release, and each time E is released there is a lot of info on how to do your own and modify the existing themes. I used to run E on a pentium 60, and have run enlightenment 0.16.5 on a pentium 75 with 24MB. With the right theme(s) and option choices it can run without any noticeable lag on a low end box and still give you multiple desktops, a pager and an iconbox.
Linux needs a single GUI. Be it Gnome, KDE, or whatever.
Then just use KDE or gnome on top of Enlightenment. It's a window manager with a few extra bits and pieces, it's not CDE or the entire win* GUI. It's up to IT departments to choose a common interface and install it if you want consistancy across a workplace, the rest of the world will go the way it will go.
Also the current version of Enlightenment has themes that act like win*, macOS* and IRIX style GUIs, which may make things a bit easier for those that are transfering from another system. A win* interface isn't that consitent either, I'm sure that you all have seen confused looks on the faces of people that can't find the hidden taskbar on someone elses win* machine, or get confused by the start menu entries moving around. People don't come from a consistant background, so a consistant interface won't help.
All of these GUIs are being written by programmers, for programmers.
It has been very easy to create and modify themes in Enlightenment in the past, it required artistic talent and modifying a few lines in configuration files - not a task for a programmer.
Hmm, it seem like it was only a couple of years ago (maybe it was) that RMS admitted that he hadn't heard much about linux, then six months later he was asking everyone to put a gnu in front.
Maybe recent converts to linux will stop posting replies to any mention of the kernel that it should be prefixed with a gnu.
I'll say it again, the gnu operating system is called hurd. Calling linux a variant of this is a little odd. Also the linux kernel allows things like Nvidia's fine closed source graphics drivers to work with it, which appears to be the antithesis of RMS's personal philosophy. GNU tools are an essential part of working with linux, but in most cases X is as well. Although the number of MB that X takes up is enormously larger than the gnu tools on most linux boxes, no-one asks us to call it "Open Group/Linux".
I'd better get back to work, using gnu/NT4 (the cygwin tools do a lot on this box).
Good stuff above, about pattern welding, then the famous iron pillar in India was mentioned.
But then again, there are some very strange steels that have been produced (and may still be being produced) in what we would call 'very primitive conditions' in India... For example there is a very large pillar made of iron or steel (I forget which, and I forget where it is) that has peculiar corrosion resistance
The pillar in India (near Madras I believe, maybe a local can tell us a bit more) is an impressive piece of iron made from a few wedge shaped cast iron blocks hammer welded together. The corrossion rate has been estimated to be about 0.1 mm per year, due to it being smooth (rain runs off), in a dry place, and having a fairly uniform structure. Corrosion tends to happen at interfaces, you need a difference in conditions to generate a voltage - so having a pillar made of the same fairly pure iron on all of the bits that are in contact with air & water cuts down the corrosion rate.
The "primitive conditions" probably would have been equivalent to a european foundry of the eighteenth century, a lot of people and a lot of time would have gone into the casting of the portions of the pillar and forging them all together. It comes down to a big fire and a lot of guys with hammers forging it together and pushing the pillar back into the fire every now and again. Think of making the bits of the eiffel tower without steam hammers.
OpenGL can be used over X, and displays appropriately for the hardware you have at the recieving end. This is an important factor with any professional 3D software - not just rendering stuff, but CAD as well. If you want to run something on a big box or collaborate with others, you'll want to be able to do things remotely. I was running fairly involved stuff on an SGI Powerchallenge and displaying it on a pentium 75 box with a video card that could have been a lot better.
What would be great would be team based 3D game under X that gives you little windows showing the point of view of the others on your side, just like the views from the marines's cameras in "Aliens." With OpenGL it wouldn't be too much of a hassle to export the views from each machine and re-scale them.
A very important feature would be for the screens to go to static as each team member goes down:)
Ok, well at least I've ordered Rune now while it's still available. If Loki goes under it will get very hard to find - and playing new commercial games under linux will only be possible with WINE.
Sorry, my wording was bad. Obvious the steel was heated in a fire; the steel was _quenched_ in the slave's gut. (Versus water, or salt water, or oil, or any of the other things that one normally uses.)
My description wasn't that clear either: first you quench, then you temper afterwards to get the steel you want.
A modern process can do it all in one step by controlled cooling rates, but in a lot of cases (eg. welding of high carbon steels) you still need to heat the material up a second time.
In the middle ages blacksmiths worked out the correct amount of temper and forging technique for steel from each source by observation and by trial. When the crusaders brought back Damascus steel they couldn't find a blacksmith that could forge it. All kinds of interesting stories developed as to why the Arabs could make it and no-one in Christendom could.
I've been putting off buying games for a while, but now it looks like the time, before Loki goes under.
If enough of us buy their games now they will stay afloat and port more games
There's more than one kind. The pattern welded material was even used for artillery pieces early in the 1900's. It fell out of use because there are easier ways to get the same properties.
someone had "rediscovered" the secret back in 1981
Different method, same results.
The recent work, which has been going on for a few years, involved looking at original peices of that type of Damascus steel, examining the structure, then working out a technique to duplicate it.
The story about quenching it in a slave's gut is that the exact temperature necessary to give the steel its trademark temper was 98 degrees, the temperature of the human body.
Tempering:
With some steels a sudden quench will produce a steel that cracks easily. such a steel has a "bad temper" (no pun; that's where the term comes from).
Tempering is the process of heating up a quenched steel again (to a few hundred degrees, but not red heat) to soften it enough so that it will not crack as easily on impact. At 98F it would take at least a few hundred years to temper a piece of steel, at a few hundred degrees you can do it in hours.
I was under the impression that forged steel was better and stronger than cast steel.
That is true, a forged steel is always stronger than an equivalent cast steel. Cast steels can also be more brittle. Unless care is taken, large defects of various kinds can form in a casting, which makes the cast steel crack more easily.
I works like this:
An ignorant man from another land that doesn't know brass from bronze asks you the secret of your livelihood, the thing that makes you rich while all other the other blacksmiths get by making pots and pans. As long as you tell him a good enough story and hint that you will die if the secret is traced back to you, then he will go away happy.
There are a lot of wonderful stories from the middle ages about how to make quality steel. My favorite is grinding iron up, feeding it to chickens, collecting the droppings, burning off all that isn't iron and pounding the powder together. It could be done, but wouldn't do you any good.
As for the stabbing with a red hot blade story, gullable europeans found out the hard way that:
- Red hot steel isn't anywhere near as strong as cold steel, which is one reason why you heat it up to shape it. Poking people with your red hot sword isn't likely to do much for its edge.
- A red hot piece of metal that is sticking out of somebody isn't going to cool very evenly, since people are full of inconvenient parts, like bone, that transfer heat at different rates.
- You can harden the surface of steel with nitrates, it's a form of case hardening, but it takes time and temperature to do it, a few seconds at 1330K (hot steel) or months at room temperature soaking in organic liquids isn't going to do it. The nitrogen (or carbon, or boron) atoms needs time to diffuse through the steel, and the energy to move about.
The secret to the pattern welded Damascus steel was never lost, but the material described in the article (and several others by the same author) is another kind, which didn't require all the metal folding that pattern welding requires.
Why is this useful? The idea behind Damascus steel was to create a quality steel from materials that would only produce a low quality steel by conventional techniques. That is a problem that will always be with us in one form or another, the impurities in iron & coal vary, and many can have bad effects on the steel. Also, it's yet another case of showing that just because people lived a couple of thousand years ago doesn't mean that they were stupid.
It's all a cunning plan. The writers are on a go slow and not producing anything of quality until their value is realised, - hence all the rehashes of old movies and TV, plus all of the obvious mistakes that would never get past the hundreds of people employed to make a movie (the other unions must be in on it too). It must be true, they couldn't be incompetant could they?
Perhaps writers are chosen the same way many actors are chosen, by looking at photographs of faces and not reading the resume conveniently written on the back (as seen in the BBC documentary "The Face").
At least Hollywood has produced some great TV & Movies recently: Matrix, The Mummy (1&2), Dark City, Moulin Rouge, Pi, The X-Files, Millenium, Highlander, Hercules, Xena - wait a second, they were all made somewhere else.
Linux is obviously an engineer's OS and not a user's OS.
I agree with this to an extent, but I'm an engineer. Setting up linux requires a bit of knowledge unless you have bog standard hardware, and adding new software is still a bit tricky for newbies despite apt-get and rpm. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone that is not prepared to learn a few things about it.
Conversely, anyone that thinks that windows is simple has never had to edit the registry.
The idea of needing to read a 50-page manual before using a piece of software has been obsolete since 1984.
Entirely true, fifty pages is nowhere near enough to describe what you can do with a complex and powerful piece of software, and with simple applications on line help of some variety is often more useful than a manual. I should point out that I'm not talking about *nix software, but big applications in general. I'm sure that industrial scale payroll packages require a few manuals, any serious engineering software certainly does.
Apparently there are people who prefer to spend their time memorizing commands rather than using software to get something done, just as there are people who would rather tinker under their car's hoods than actually drive anywhere. I have nothing against this taste, but what seems to be missing on/. is an understanding that this inclination is and always will be in the minority.
I don't think it's in the minority on slashdot; it is after all, news for nerds, stuff that matters.
All of those greyed out menu options eventually drive us to the command line, or defeat.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm calling at international rates from Outthebackofstan, I've been on hold for three hours, and why don't you ^%#$%#^ read your email?"
"Oh, I'm sorry, you have the wrong department, this is the Pacific USA only support line. Please dial this number again in another eleven hours and the people supporting your region will be here. Have a nice day" (To co-worker: "Another commie towelhead") click."
Most of the world defines a dictatorship as a place where one person (a dictator) gets full control over a country without the checks and balances of that other governments have.
Take a look at other non-dictatorships where the leaders have made very unpopular decisions. There are a range of checks and balances, and if that fails it ultimately ends with the police force or army removing that leader. If the the decision is popular with the defence force then it is a different story.
If the Prime Minister of Australia was to order a group of refugees shot he probably would be deposed by his own party before the order could be carried out, and he knows that and acts accordingly. In a dictatorship the dictator has a much greater degree of control (which is one reason I don't want to live in one).
It's a term from football; playing the man means to ignore to game and just concentrate on bashing the player (like all of the previous flames).The odds that a cop in a democratic country will shoot you to take your shoes are very low. The cop also has to answer to someone that is ultimately dependant upon the will of the people to stay in power. A leader with no support at all is either out of work, exiled, jailed or dead.
Refering to an earlier post, screaming "Dictatorship" over a civil defamation case is a little silly:
1/ The government is seperated from the process - it is being dealt with by the court. Under the principle of separation of powers the government sets a law, and the courts decide how to implement it without interferance from the government. If the government wants to interfere they set mandatory sentances, but once a case is going they have to keep out.
2/ A dictatorship is a word in the dictionary with a specific meaning. If what you are describing doesn't mean that use another word.
No, look up dictatorship and see if anything matches.I'd better get back to playing the ball and not the man.
One of the things that was decided (either in this case or previously) is that if you can read it in Victoria, Australia then it is considered to be published there. With the deformation laws in that state it is up to the defendant to prove the truth of their assertion - if they can't they lose. Still, it costs enormous amounts of money to take someone to court over defamation in Australia, so that cuts down on the number of cases.
Also, don't try to come here by boat, the government will sic the troops on you and tow you out to sea :(
I once met a teacher who described herself as a "specialist grade 3 teacher", because you need to understand fractions until grade 4! Somehow she made it through the education system on sheer apathy. Many other teachers of course are hard working and capable, I know that I learnt nothing new in mathematics in my first three years at high school only because I had good teachers in primary (==elementary) school.
One simple example; in this city as part of the treatment process the tap water passes through six feet of sand. Many people won't drink this water until they've passed it through a filter of a couple of inches of small stones, then somehow it is safer. For some reason "they" (technical or qualifed medical people of any type) can't be trusted to provide safe water (or medicine or whatever) "for the children". A survey of bottled water in Australia a few years ago found surprising amounts of biological material, far more than you would find in any town with an adequate water supply.
A more divisive example; the debate over genetic modification of crops - it is assumed by many that they can be geneticly modified by eating these crops. Any technical argument for or against is ignored in favour of the emotive argument, fed by moralistic disater movies that tell us "Don't mess with mother nature." The ironic thing is that the people who will rush out to trample a crop that may be a secretly modified test crop eat "natural" vegetables, grown indoors to keep the insects off, and grown hydroponically in a cocktail of chemical fertilizers, because somehow that is trendier than growing them in the ground and using less fertilizer. This perception has scuttled projects like one to produce vaccines from geneticly engineered bananas. Somehow, growing your medicine is less desirable than the enormous number of pharmacuetical plants that would be required to match what you do with such a crop. Being able to breed food crops have a high yeild and require less nutrients is also a good thing. Many will argue that these crops will never get to the nations that need them, but that's a way to feel better about opposing something that could help millions.
A lot of the "folklore" that people believe is of very recent origin. My grandmother was in her thirties before the term "Ley Line" was thought of, and that was used to describe the sites of old road. The zinc=virility thing comes from the story of Cassanova (not the most reliable of info!) eating lots of oysters. Oysters are filter feeders and pick up a lot of heavy metals such as zinc in areas where mining and industry puts it in the water. Therfore, with a dab of fiction and a stroke of sympathetic magic, zinc=virility. Zinc is important for other reasons, but it comes in every green plant.
Herbs: Many are useful and have been known about for some time, but a lot of people believe (by the magical law of sympathy perhaps?) that all herbs are good, and many are superior to medical technology. I suppose that I'm lucky that I know that there is a lot of flora that will kill things that try to eat it, or sting and scratch things that get close to it. Natural != good. Strychnine is natural.
Also the current version of Enlightenment has themes that act like win*, macOS* and IRIX style GUIs, which may make things a bit easier for those that are transfering from another system. A win* interface isn't that consitent either, I'm sure that you all have seen confused looks on the faces of people that can't find the hidden taskbar on someone elses win* machine, or get confused by the start menu entries moving around. People don't come from a consistant background, so a consistant interface won't help.
It has been very easy to create and modify themes in Enlightenment in the past, it required artistic talent and modifying a few lines in configuration files - not a task for a programmer.All your codebase is belong to us!
Hmm, it seem like it was only a couple of years ago (maybe it was) that RMS admitted that he hadn't heard much about linux, then six months later he was asking everyone to put a gnu in front.
Maybe recent converts to linux will stop posting replies to any mention of the kernel that it should be prefixed with a gnu.
I'll say it again, the gnu operating system is called hurd. Calling linux a variant of this is a little odd. Also the linux kernel allows things like Nvidia's fine closed source graphics drivers to work with it, which appears to be the antithesis of RMS's personal philosophy. GNU tools are an essential part of working with linux, but in most cases X is as well. Although the number of MB that X takes up is enormously larger than the gnu tools on most linux boxes, no-one asks us to call it "Open Group/Linux".
I'd better get back to work, using gnu/NT4 (the cygwin tools do a lot on this box).
Aha - you need a garden mulcher or high temperature incinerator in that cubicle then!
The "primitive conditions" probably would have been equivalent to a european foundry of the eighteenth century, a lot of people and a lot of time would have gone into the casting of the portions of the pillar and forging them all together. It comes down to a big fire and a lot of guys with hammers forging it together and pushing the pillar back into the fire every now and again. Think of making the bits of the eiffel tower without steam hammers.
OpenGL can be used over X, and displays appropriately for the hardware you have at the recieving end. This is an important factor with any professional 3D software - not just rendering stuff, but CAD as well. If you want to run something on a big box or collaborate with others, you'll want to be able to do things remotely. I was running fairly involved stuff on an SGI Powerchallenge and displaying it on a pentium 75 box with a video card that could have been a lot better.
:)
What would be great would be team based 3D game under X that gives you little windows showing the point of view of the others on your side, just like the views from the marines's cameras in "Aliens." With OpenGL it wouldn't be too much of a hassle to export the views from each machine and re-scale them.
A very important feature would be for the screens to go to static as each team member goes down
Ok, well at least I've ordered Rune now while it's still available. If Loki goes under it will get very hard to find - and playing new commercial games under linux will only be possible with WINE.
A modern process can do it all in one step by controlled cooling rates, but in a lot of cases (eg. welding of high carbon steels) you still need to heat the material up a second time.
In the middle ages blacksmiths worked out the correct amount of temper and forging technique for steel from each source by observation and by trial. When the crusaders brought back Damascus steel they couldn't find a blacksmith that could forge it. All kinds of interesting stories developed as to why the Arabs could make it and no-one in Christendom could.
I've been putting off buying games for a while, but now it looks like the time, before Loki goes under.
If enough of us buy their games now they will stay afloat and port more games
The recent work, which has been going on for a few years, involved looking at original peices of that type of Damascus steel, examining the structure, then working out a technique to duplicate it.
Tempering is the process of heating up a quenched steel again (to a few hundred degrees, but not red heat) to soften it enough so that it will not crack as easily on impact. At 98F it would take at least a few hundred years to temper a piece of steel, at a few hundred degrees you can do it in hours.
I works like this:
An ignorant man from another land that doesn't know brass from bronze asks you the secret of your livelihood, the thing that makes you rich while all other the other blacksmiths get by making pots and pans. As long as you tell him a good enough story and hint that you will die if the secret is traced back to you, then he will go away happy.
There are a lot of wonderful stories from the middle ages about how to make quality steel. My favorite is grinding iron up, feeding it to chickens, collecting the droppings, burning off all that isn't iron and pounding the powder together. It could be done, but wouldn't do you any good.
As for the stabbing with a red hot blade story, gullable europeans found out the hard way that:
- Red hot steel isn't anywhere near as strong as cold steel, which is one reason why you heat it up to shape it. Poking people with your red hot sword isn't likely to do much for its edge.
- A red hot piece of metal that is sticking out of somebody isn't going to cool very evenly, since people are full of inconvenient parts, like bone, that transfer heat at different rates.
- You can harden the surface of steel with nitrates, it's a form of case hardening, but it takes time and temperature to do it, a few seconds at 1330K (hot steel) or months at room temperature soaking in organic liquids isn't going to do it. The nitrogen (or carbon, or boron) atoms needs time to diffuse through the steel, and the energy to move about.
The secret to the pattern welded Damascus steel was never lost, but the material described in the article (and several others by the same author) is another kind, which didn't require all the metal folding that pattern welding requires.
Why is this useful? The idea behind Damascus steel was to create a quality steel from materials that would only produce a low quality steel by conventional techniques. That is a problem that will always be with us in one form or another, the impurities in iron & coal vary, and many can have bad effects on the steel. Also, it's yet another case of showing that just because people lived a couple of thousand years ago doesn't mean that they were stupid.
It's all a cunning plan. The writers are on a go slow and not producing anything of quality until their value is realised, - hence all the rehashes of old movies and TV, plus all of the obvious mistakes that would never get past the hundreds of people employed to make a movie (the other unions must be in on it too). It must be true, they couldn't be incompetant could they?
Perhaps writers are chosen the same way many actors are chosen, by looking at photographs of faces and not reading the resume conveniently written on the back (as seen in the BBC documentary "The Face").
At least Hollywood has produced some great TV & Movies recently: Matrix, The Mummy (1&2), Dark City, Moulin Rouge, Pi, The X-Files, Millenium, Highlander, Hercules, Xena - wait a second, they were all made somewhere else.
All of those greyed out menu options eventually drive us to the command line, or defeat.