I don't know about where you are, but here (Ohio, of all places), coyotes are not all than uncommon. There are actually several that keep raiding the farmland around where my girlfriend lives.
Unfortunately, they run before than can be dealt with.
Bears, on the other hand, are a lot more difficult to just run into, though it does happen around here on occasion as well - largely because the area I grew up in has a lot of woodland.
Most people wouldn't know a good chair if they were hit over the head with it, unfortunately. Part of the problem, I think, is the "furniture police" who insist that every cube/office/etc have the same furniture and get in a snit if anything is different than what they said it should be (which is largely influenced by the fact that they made a deal with company $X to supply all of the furniture).
I've had to use some uncomfortable chairs before because of that sort of thing. The amusing thing is that I have a nice, comfortable office chair at home that didn't cost me an arm and a leg. It's a pretty well padded leather mid backed office chair that I paid all of $50 for and it's been worth every penny.
This place didn't want their dev staff to have headphones at all. They were treated basically *exactly* like the rest of the sea of humanity (whose job, as I mentioned, was to be phone jockeys).
Distractions abounded. I'm amazed that they were able to concentrate at all. Then again, this was last year, and it turns out that they were still writing their fairly complex in-house app in VB6.
From the look of it (I just spent a little time reading - shocking, I know), it would not be a good answer to my particular application as it could interfere with the temper of the blades.
I think the worst "open office" plan I've seen to date was with a company I interviewed with once.
The developers were off to the side of what I came to refer to as the "Sea of Humanity" - literally a couple *hundred* people in 4 person shoulder height cubes whose job entailed being on the phone all day. The noise was nearly deafening and I am amazed that the devs got anything done at all.
Since other people have pointed out the fact that this wouldn't burn off or rub off easily, one of the other things that this would have as an advantage over paints and powder coats is that they add thickness to the material in question and this (theoretically, at any rate) would not. That would be a big plus for precision insturments. Especially if it has any oxidation inhibiting properties.
The thing that I wonder is whether it will have the protective properties of bluing or powder coating - helping to prevent oxidation of the metal.
If it did, I'd love to have some of my blades treated with it because keeping the good carbon steel ones well oiled can be a pain at times. Also, since it apparently uses small amounts of power to acheive, I can see this used in a lot of industrial applications.
I'd say that a large part of the reason for not putting Gimli in a more warrior role had a lot to do with the fact that they had to shoot all of his scenes seperately, and getting the shot of Rhys-Davies lined up perfectly with the shot of the other main characters *and* the CGI monsters would be difficult. And then you have the scenes where the monsters are actors and that becomes even harder because fight scenes are not easy to duplicate.
I always found it kind of funny that the guy playing the dwarf was basically the biggest one in the movie. Besides, who says warriors can't also be something of a comic figure? After so many times of someone wanting to split your skull, it becomes something you start to have a bit of a sense of humor about - otherwise you crack =]
I can agree with the cooking thing. Lately, I've been teaching my girlfriend how to cook.
It can be downright hilarious at times. The fact that she doesn't want to try anything like that by herself is, in my opinion, even funnier. She doesn't experiment, but rather makes the same few things over and over again.
She tends to look forward to the weekends that I spend with her because my general line is "pick a region" as far as what we'll be cooking that weekend. I think the most recent thing that she learned is that hot sauce (and hot peppers) are not just used to burn your mouth, but can also improve flavor if used in smaller quantities. Before then, she swore that she didn't really like hot peppers.
I cooked pretty well before college - primarily standard American stuff, Chinese, and Italian because of the people I grew up around. In college, I picked up other cooking styles from international friends. We used to have one night a week where the group of us (usually 5 - 7 of us from, among other locations, China, Japan, Egypt, and Jamacia) got together, cooked, hung out, and generally enjoyed ourselves.
Regular cops, yes, but not necessarily their fellow officers. A reasonable recourse would likely be to hand them over to the highway patrol who, in my state at least, have jurisdiction over pretty much the whole state (and are more properly called State Troopers here).
Having delt with state troopers, city police from various cities, and various county sheriff offices (no, I haven't been arrested. Yes, some of them wanted to. No I didn't do the things in question - In one case, the sheriff of a particular county was trying to get me to confess to shooting someone I was giving first aid to until the ems arrived because an attempted homocide would have looked better for his career than the attempted suicide that it was), the most reasonable (and least corrupt) officers that I have met have tended to be with the State Patrol.
In fact, in the case of the attempted suicide (someone I cared for a great deal, I might add), the State Patrolmen who were first on the scene, not only got the sheriff away from me, but had to restrain themselves from beating the snot out of him because of his behavior toward me (the patrolmen had gotten part of what had happened from me as we tried to keep her alive).
The White House, National Labs, and mil installations don't fit in with my statement since I made the caveat that we were dealing with a "common use" area (library, park, etc). None of those three areas mentioned fall under that category.
Privite universities are allowed to restrict the access to students and staff only if they so desire. Public universities are supposed to be a whole other creature since they are funded and run by the state.
It's like saying you can't walk into a public library (which, really, this one is) without displaying your papers as a resident of the block that the library is on.
Showing an ID after 11 p.m. is a longstanding university policy to ensure the safety of all students. It is so routine that many of the students place their IDs on the table next to them so as not to be disturbed.
Again, I say that the university's library, being part of a state university, is public space (just like any city library would be) during its normal hours of operation. They chose to make this library's normal hours of operation to be 24 hours a day. "university policy" or not, it's still a public space being used in the proscribed manner and therefore the kid should never have to show any sort of ID in there for simply being there.
I pointed that out a bit earlier in the discussion, and I'm still trying to figure out how these people seem to have completely skipped over the state university thing.
Every state university that I have seen is treated basically the same as your average public property for the common use areas (like a library). You may have to have ID or an account to check out books, but you certainly don't need it to simply be there.
Pardon me if I'm wrong, but I would assume that the University of California is a state (and therefore public) school. That would make the campus, and by extension, the library, a public location.
It's kind of hard to be tresspassing on public property if you are in a common use area of the property unless it is after established hours of business.
I went to a state school, and I know that its library was open to the public just like any other public library, and so was the library of every other public university that I have visited.
At the bottom of the list, is a I/T graduate who does not know how to program but studied passive-aggression, Machiavelli and other such self destructing office politics practiced today.
What about a grad who can both program and has studied political and military strategy in the form of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Musashi, et al? Personally speaking, I often find the strategic studies to be as important as the technical ones for a few reasons - among which are that they help in planning projects (strategic planning is a wonderful thing to be able to pull off) and they also help in dealing with office politics so that you can acomplish what needs to be done.
It falls under the category of knowing your enemy and knowing yourself. To put it the way I used to paraphrase my old job as an admin for a non-profit at my univeristy "I show them what they think they want to see and then do what I have to do."
I admit that I'm something of a special case because of the way that I started the strategic training (I grew up training martially from a young age), but I'd be careful about making such broad generalizations about what people study. There are merits in many different diciplines and approaches.
Partially right on the curve being put in beforehand. After it was learned that the way the blade was made caused it to curve when cooled, the smiths decided to control the amount of curve, so yes they were curved somewhat before cooling, but the cooling process itself also curves the blade (with the piecewise swords. it doesn't happen with modern ones) because of the way the swords were made.
In fact, different smiths often had different amounts of curve that they put in the blade.
Have a drink for me, and thank your friend for the knife. A good one is worth more than you pay for it (so says the guy whose life has hinged on one a time or two heh)
From the photo, it does indeed look like the metal in the blade has been folded (damasced). That may or may not be the answer he's looking for. I can say that, from the up close shot, the patterning is pretty.
My master would be a better judge than I am. He's also a swordsman. One of us is better at blacksmithing (He did it professionally for quite some time and used to teach at a school) and the other is generally a better swordsman (though he'd say that was him, we both know better).
I started learning to work steel because I wanted to make my own weapons (I've trained martially since I was about 6 and got my first sword at 10). Unfortunately, things happened which caused me to stop that pursuit for the moment.
While I was there, I got to use a type of forge setup which is basically only found in a few places in the world and got to meet a lot of interesting people including a master gunsmith whose work is in the Smithsonian. It was a real trip.
*puts on his swordsman and apprentice blacksmith hats, looking funny for wearing both at the same time*
Most Japanese swords created before higher quality iron began being imported in large quantities from other countries were made from volcanic black sand (which is high in iron oxide). The sand was smelted with rice stalks and the resulting block of iron was broken into pieces and sorted by color (carbon content).
These different carbon content metals were formed into billets and used to make the different parts of the blade since katana blades were not traditionally made in one piece. They were usually made in anything from two pieces (core/edge and outer casing) to five pieces (back ridge, both sides, core, and edge - in this case usually made of harder iron recycled from old pots) with some being made in even more pieces.
Incidentally, this is also what caused them to be curved since the different metals cooled at different temps. Unfortunately, it also meant that tempering the sword was a very delicate time because if the sword had any non-minor defects or was cooled improperly, the blade would literally rend itself apart.
So, to answer your question, they were two completely different processes.
Online gambling is, in fact very different. Gambling at casinos is very tightly regulated by the government. Casinos are by no means free to do what they like unlike most businesses.
Though, that said, I have to say that I personally think the real reason the government now forbids online gambling is because they don't get the tax revenue from it.
There are several non-tech books that I'd add to the list, but they're not for everyone. Besides being a software developer, among other things, I am also a student of strategy and find that it has quite a few applications in circumstances other than combat (though it certainly helps there as well).
Then, on the lighter side of things, I'd toss in things like the following two (Carlin is always good for a laugh as well as to get you to think about some things) Brain Droppings Napalm and Silly Putty
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about where you are, but here (Ohio, of all places), coyotes are not all than uncommon. There are actually several that keep raiding the farmland around where my girlfriend lives.
Unfortunately, they run before than can be dealt with.
Bears, on the other hand, are a lot more difficult to just run into, though it does happen around here on occasion as well - largely because the area I grew up in has a lot of woodland.
Why do I get the feeling that this insurance company may be in the Cleveland area? =]
Most people wouldn't know a good chair if they were hit over the head with it, unfortunately. Part of the problem, I think, is the "furniture police" who insist that every cube/office/etc have the same furniture and get in a snit if anything is different than what they said it should be (which is largely influenced by the fact that they made a deal with company $X to supply all of the furniture).
I've had to use some uncomfortable chairs before because of that sort of thing. The amusing thing is that I have a nice, comfortable office chair at home that didn't cost me an arm and a leg. It's a pretty well padded leather mid backed office chair that I paid all of $50 for and it's been worth every penny.
This place didn't want their dev staff to have headphones at all. They were treated basically *exactly* like the rest of the sea of humanity (whose job, as I mentioned, was to be phone jockeys).
Distractions abounded. I'm amazed that they were able to concentrate at all. Then again, this was last year, and it turns out that they were still writing their fairly complex in-house app in VB6.
I had a real headache when I left.
From the look of it (I just spent a little time reading - shocking, I know), it would not be a good answer to my particular application as it could interfere with the temper of the blades.
That would be a bigger problem than rust.
I think the worst "open office" plan I've seen to date was with a company I interviewed with once.
The developers were off to the side of what I came to refer to as the "Sea of Humanity" - literally a couple *hundred* people in 4 person shoulder height cubes whose job entailed being on the phone all day. The noise was nearly deafening and I am amazed that the devs got anything done at all.
Since other people have pointed out the fact that this wouldn't burn off or rub off easily, one of the other things that this would have as an advantage over paints and powder coats is that they add thickness to the material in question and this (theoretically, at any rate) would not. That would be a big plus for precision insturments. Especially if it has any oxidation inhibiting properties.
The thing that I wonder is whether it will have the protective properties of bluing or powder coating - helping to prevent oxidation of the metal.
If it did, I'd love to have some of my blades treated with it because keeping the good carbon steel ones well oiled can be a pain at times. Also, since it apparently uses small amounts of power to acheive, I can see this used in a lot of industrial applications.
I'd say that a large part of the reason for not putting Gimli in a more warrior role had a lot to do with the fact that they had to shoot all of his scenes seperately, and getting the shot of Rhys-Davies lined up perfectly with the shot of the other main characters *and* the CGI monsters would be difficult. And then you have the scenes where the monsters are actors and that becomes even harder because fight scenes are not easy to duplicate.
I always found it kind of funny that the guy playing the dwarf was basically the biggest one in the movie. Besides, who says warriors can't also be something of a comic figure? After so many times of someone wanting to split your skull, it becomes something you start to have a bit of a sense of humor about - otherwise you crack =]
I can agree with the cooking thing. Lately, I've been teaching my girlfriend how to cook.
It can be downright hilarious at times. The fact that she doesn't want to try anything like that by herself is, in my opinion, even funnier. She doesn't experiment, but rather makes the same few things over and over again.
She tends to look forward to the weekends that I spend with her because my general line is "pick a region" as far as what we'll be cooking that weekend. I think the most recent thing that she learned is that hot sauce (and hot peppers) are not just used to burn your mouth, but can also improve flavor if used in smaller quantities. Before then, she swore that she didn't really like hot peppers.
I cooked pretty well before college - primarily standard American stuff, Chinese, and Italian because of the people I grew up around. In college, I picked up other cooking styles from international friends. We used to have one night a week where the group of us (usually 5 - 7 of us from, among other locations, China, Japan, Egypt, and Jamacia) got together, cooked, hung out, and generally enjoyed ourselves.
Regular cops, yes, but not necessarily their fellow officers. A reasonable recourse would likely be to hand them over to the highway patrol who, in my state at least, have jurisdiction over pretty much the whole state (and are more properly called State Troopers here).
Having delt with state troopers, city police from various cities, and various county sheriff offices (no, I haven't been arrested. Yes, some of them wanted to. No I didn't do the things in question - In one case, the sheriff of a particular county was trying to get me to confess to shooting someone I was giving first aid to until the ems arrived because an attempted homocide would have looked better for his career than the attempted suicide that it was), the most reasonable (and least corrupt) officers that I have met have tended to be with the State Patrol.
In fact, in the case of the attempted suicide (someone I cared for a great deal, I might add), the State Patrolmen who were first on the scene, not only got the sheriff away from me, but had to restrain themselves from beating the snot out of him because of his behavior toward me (the patrolmen had gotten part of what had happened from me as we tried to keep her alive).
The White House, National Labs, and mil installations don't fit in with my statement since I made the caveat that we were dealing with a "common use" area (library, park, etc). None of those three areas mentioned fall under that category.
Privite universities are allowed to restrict the access to students and staff only if they so desire. Public universities are supposed to be a whole other creature since they are funded and run by the state.
It's like saying you can't walk into a public library (which, really, this one is) without displaying your papers as a resident of the block that the library is on.
Showing an ID after 11 p.m. is a longstanding university policy to ensure the safety of all students. It is so routine that many of the students place their IDs on the table next to them so as not to be disturbed.
Again, I say that the university's library, being part of a state university, is public space (just like any city library would be) during its normal hours of operation. They chose to make this library's normal hours of operation to be 24 hours a day. "university policy" or not, it's still a public space being used in the proscribed manner and therefore the kid should never have to show any sort of ID in there for simply being there.
I pointed that out a bit earlier in the discussion, and I'm still trying to figure out how these people seem to have completely skipped over the state university thing.
Every state university that I have seen is treated basically the same as your average public property for the common use areas (like a library). You may have to have ID or an account to check out books, but you certainly don't need it to simply be there.
Pardon me if I'm wrong, but I would assume that the University of California is a state (and therefore public) school. That would make the campus, and by extension, the library, a public location.
It's kind of hard to be tresspassing on public property if you are in a common use area of the property unless it is after established hours of business.
I went to a state school, and I know that its library was open to the public just like any other public library, and so was the library of every other public university that I have visited.
At the bottom of the list, is a I/T graduate who does not know how to program but studied passive-aggression, Machiavelli and other such self destructing office politics practiced today.
What about a grad who can both program and has studied political and military strategy in the form of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Musashi, et al? Personally speaking, I often find the strategic studies to be as important as the technical ones for a few reasons - among which are that they help in planning projects (strategic planning is a wonderful thing to be able to pull off) and they also help in dealing with office politics so that you can acomplish what needs to be done.
It falls under the category of knowing your enemy and knowing yourself. To put it the way I used to paraphrase my old job as an admin for a non-profit at my univeristy "I show them what they think they want to see and then do what I have to do."
I admit that I'm something of a special case because of the way that I started the strategic training (I grew up training martially from a young age), but I'd be careful about making such broad generalizations about what people study. There are merits in many different diciplines and approaches.
Partially right on the curve being put in beforehand. After it was learned that the way the blade was made caused it to curve when cooled, the smiths decided to control the amount of curve, so yes they were curved somewhat before cooling, but the cooling process itself also curves the blade (with the piecewise swords. it doesn't happen with modern ones) because of the way the swords were made.
In fact, different smiths often had different amounts of curve that they put in the blade.
Actually it was a mixture of getting way too busy and then graduating from college (the forge was about 20 miles or so from campus)
Have a drink for me, and thank your friend for the knife. A good one is worth more than you pay for it (so says the guy whose life has hinged on one a time or two heh)
From the photo, it does indeed look like the metal in the blade has been folded (damasced). That may or may not be the answer he's looking for. I can say that, from the up close shot, the patterning is pretty.
My master would be a better judge than I am. He's also a swordsman. One of us is better at blacksmithing (He did it professionally for quite some time and used to teach at a school) and the other is generally a better swordsman (though he'd say that was him, we both know better).
I started learning to work steel because I wanted to make my own weapons (I've trained martially since I was about 6 and got my first sword at 10). Unfortunately, things happened which caused me to stop that pursuit for the moment.
While I was there, I got to use a type of forge setup which is basically only found in a few places in the world and got to meet a lot of interesting people including a master gunsmith whose work is in the Smithsonian. It was a real trip.
Well, you could always go overboard on the Damascus and get one of these
*puts on his swordsman and apprentice blacksmith hats, looking funny for wearing both at the same time*
Most Japanese swords created before higher quality iron began being imported in large quantities from other countries were made from volcanic black sand (which is high in iron oxide). The sand was smelted with rice stalks and the resulting block of iron was broken into pieces and sorted by color (carbon content).
These different carbon content metals were formed into billets and used to make the different parts of the blade since katana blades were not traditionally made in one piece. They were usually made in anything from two pieces (core/edge and outer casing) to five pieces (back ridge, both sides, core, and edge - in this case usually made of harder iron recycled from old pots) with some being made in even more pieces.
Incidentally, this is also what caused them to be curved since the different metals cooled at different temps. Unfortunately, it also meant that tempering the sword was a very delicate time because if the sword had any non-minor defects or was cooled improperly, the blade would literally rend itself apart.
So, to answer your question, they were two completely different processes.
Online gambling is, in fact very different. Gambling at casinos is very tightly regulated by the government. Casinos are by no means free to do what they like unlike most businesses.
Though, that said, I have to say that I personally think the real reason the government now forbids online gambling is because they don't get the tax revenue from it.
I was kind of wondering the same thing.
There are several non-tech books that I'd add to the list, but they're not for everyone. Besides being a software developer, among other things, I am also a student of strategy and find that it has quite a few applications in circumstances other than combat (though it certainly helps there as well).
Seven Military Classics of Ancient China
Thirty-six Strategies Of Ancient China
The Prince
Romance of the Three Kingdoms - While a bit on the long side, I find it to be an excellent read and it also gives examples of some of the concepts from the first two books in the list in use.
Then, on the lighter side of things, I'd toss in things like the following two (Carlin is always good for a laugh as well as to get you to think about some things)
Brain Droppings
Napalm and Silly Putty