While later Japanese swords were made by forging different metals together, very early swords were not--they were forged from a solid piece of steel. The steel was beaten flat and folded over itself several times, but it was not to impart mechanical qualities--it was to mix the carbon evenly throughout the impure metal. (Later this was accomplished through better steel manufacturing, so the folding was replaced by the multi-part welding of of different alloys as described.)
Once the sword was shaped it was quenched. However since they wanted different properties on the edge vs. the spine, they needed to cool the different parts at different rates. This was accomplished by painting the sword with varying thicknesses of clay--thick on the back for a slow quench (resulting in soft but springy steel) and thin on the edge for a fast quench (resulting in hard but brittle martensite). This differential cooling also caused some of the curvature. It also allowed a sword maker to impart a "signature" of sorts, by painting patterns into the clay. This manifests itself in the subtle wavy reflective pattern seen along the cutting edge of many katanas, called the hamon.
Finally to address the GP, the original pattern that is now called Damascus had nothing to do with folding the blade. If you look at an original Damascus blade the pattern is not alligned to the edge but runs throughout the blade. It has more to do with the steel composition and how it was forged.
It attempts to show what a society would be like when manufacturing cost is reduced to a simple utility charge, like water or electricity (due to nanoscale manufacturing). It's a fascinating book on a number of levels, though it doesn't seem as well-known as the prior work, "Snow Crash."
Author is Neal Stephenson for those who don't know (should be few here on/.)....
Is this trend really a surprise though?
on
Internet Only 1% Porn
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
User-driven content ("Web 2.0") has led to a massive increase in the parallelism of page creation. Every single story submitted to Digg becomes a new Web page, as does every Flickr page, every Wikipedia page, every Match.com profile, every Youtube video, every Myspace page, every Slashdot comment, etc.
Some porn sites allow user-generated content (pun intended, eewww...), but overall the number of people willing to share recordings of themselves having sex is probably pretty small compared to the number willing to share their favorite song or interesting link or thoughts on a subject. (At least I hope to God it is.)
That only bolsters the argument though
on
Internet Only 1% Porn
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
While it's interesting to think about, the absolute percentage of all existing Web content that is porn is not really the important question. The important question is how much porn the public sees inadvertantly, and whether federal legislation is needed to protect kids from porn when they are online. If most porn content is hidden behind logins, that lends strength to the idea that such a law is not needed.
Also I should point out that there are vast stores of Web-accessible, non-porn information hidden behind member login as well. Like all of Lexis-Nexis, for instance. Or many newspaper and magazine archives.
if you're a scientist make some testable predictions. The ones mentioned in the original article sure didn't come true.
Yes, because the ones listed in the original article were not true representations of any actual predictions. The original author lied in what he wrote--that's the whole point of today's article.
There are numerous ways to manage a debt load, but if you don't like your work your day-to-day life will be miserable. Go for the job that will make you happier.
That said, a lot of liking or disliking work has to do with the people you work with, as opposed to the work itself. Right now I'm at a job that I find interesting but not amazing...but I really, really like the people I work with. So it makes it fun to be in the office. That might be less true for developers though--I'm a manager so a lot of my job is interacting with others.
At my last job the work was truly incredible but I worked alone in an office most of the time (tiny consultancy), and worked hugely long hours. That got very old after a while.
I, personally, am happier hearing that people went and just voted according to whim than hearing that people went and voted straight ticket (I find the odds of each candidate at all levels of government for a given party just happening to line up with your opinions on each issue at each level of government to be quite low).
Have you thought very hard about what you just said? Because with only a handful of candidates (at the most) available to choose from in any particular race, I guarantee that none of them will line up with your opinions on each issue. By such criteria, no one would ever vote for anyone except for the candidates voting for themselves.
The problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the nation is governed. It's governed between the elections, not by the elections. The point of voting is not to get someone into office who agrees with you, but to get someone into office who is more likely to be influenced by you when you contact them later about your most important issues.
With that understanding, the straight ticket can make a lot of sense, if your pet issue is addressed by the national platform of that party. When that's the case, the party platform becomes a club you can wield against your elected officials. For instance if the most important issue to you is keeping abortion legal, it makes sense to vote straight Democratic. Pro-choice is in the Democratic Party Platform.
I'm saying that I doubt you have any actual proof of that claim with respect to climate change specifically.
It's possible to pull very reasonable-sounding ideas out of your head but that does not mean they are correct. If you're going to claim a correlation you should at least have a little proof to back it up.
The first is that funding shapes science whether you want it to or not. If the general consensus is that global warming is happening, you're much more likely to get funded if you decide to do research on "why global warming is going on" or "what are the major contributors to global warming" etc. However, if you were to submit a proposal along the lines of "what if any effect has global warming had on climate change", good luck.
This is a standard tactic for debunking any controversial science, but it fails because there is never any quantifiable, objective support for the sentiment. In this case I do not know of a single study that shows a correlation between degree of professed "belief" in global warming, and grant funding levels.
This is a completely made up argument and should be treated accordingly. I will happily change my tune if a reputable source for this argument can be produced, but I have yet to find one that even treats the subject in a quantitative way.
Because now there are viable alternative browsers for those other platforms, which IE would have to compete against on a level playing field. Rather than lose they choose not to compete.
Note: the answer to this question implies the real answer to number 7.
They aren't even getting a guarantee that they can play that file for the rest of their lives!
I think the "long term listening" case against iTunes files is overstated. DRM is ultimately defeatable, and there are already options out there to strip the DRM off iTunes files. As for CDs, well they don't last forever either, whether because of scratching or delaminating or just materials breaking down. There's no lifetime warranty on music no matter how you buy it. Either way you have to actively work to keep your music over the long-term.
This came out of a contest Dan Savage held in his column Savage Love, to find a gay-sex-related definition for "santorum." This was in response to Sen. Rick Santorum's comments several times that homosexuallity is a deviant behavior on par with pedophaelia.
The one they came up with truly nasty, but, apparently, a concept just oozing with a dark need for its own word.
I have not seen a dupe on Slashdot in months, and I read it almost every weekday. For a while we had the "Backslash" summaries instead, but I haven't even seen one of those for a while.
At the same time, I am seeing more and more dupes on Digg as its popularity grows. New people have no idea whether something has been covered before so they just Digg it if it seems cool. As a result I've seen the same Flash-animated-OSX Web site featured on the front page of Digg like 5 times. (No I won't link to it.)
However realize when you buy an Ipod, you're agreeing to use it the way Apple says you can. That means no changing it so it suddenly plays videos if it didn't before. You can, they likely won't hurt you, but the device itself has an agreement somewhere built into it.
The first sale doctrine says that once I buy a device I am free to use it however I see fit--it is mine.
Copyrighted materials attempt to skirt this (with mixed success) by saying that you are paying for a "license" rather than making a purchase. Thus the existence of the EULA for software.
Hardware though does not come with a EULA and even if it did, it would almost certainly be unenforcable.
iTunes has a EULA. iPods do not. It's an important distinction.
To extend the GP's point--yes that is all true, but is that necessarily the best way to do things? Of all the things you've listed, the only things that are truly required from the point of view of the science are peer review and publication. Editors and typesetting are relics left over from the time when printed journals were the only way to mass communicate, and your high page charges pay for their overhead.
Neither would be required in an online, automated system. Papers could be distributed to referees, and comments relayed back to authors, by algorithms. You would still need editors, but their job demands would be reduced. They would qualify new referees and properly characterizing them in the system, so they receive papers in their areas of expertise. And they would review disputes raised by the community.
$100 million would pay for a lot of staff, software development, and referee fees. This is doubly true if the $100 million is used as seed money to start a non-profit business. Certainly the cost structure would a lot lower, resulting in much lower page fees. Public access could be granted for free or a very low cost, perhaps subsidized by foundations.
From the 30,000 foot view, science is run a lot like a wiki, but with pre-screened participants and formal processes for posting updates to the general knowledge. There's no reason that structure could not be directly expressed online, without the legacy print journals.
I have difficulty believing that the same company that changed its entire product line from PowerPC to Intel chips in just over a year would take several years to develop a telephone.
The problems in phone development aren't necessarily the chip technology or the software code. They might include battery management (one of the keys to the iPod's success), user experience, business model development, etc--all of which would take much longer to solve due to the iterative process of solving them. When you're converting a back-end you at least have a defined experience to build to; when you're trying to redefine what it means to use a cell phone, or strike unprecedented deals with mobile operators, it takes a long time to even define achievable success.
It seems extremely likely that Apple is working on a cell phone--several executives have as much as admitted it. The real question is probably whether they can figure out a way to bring it to market that they are happy with. As others have noted, wireless carriers are extremely protective of their control over what phones on their network can do, and what they can bill for. MVNO might be the only way for Apple to deliver the experience they want, but MVNO is a loser strategy in mobile--too easy for the others to marginalize. And it would mean stepping way, way outside Apple's core competency. Running a network is nothing like designing and selling computers. No, I think they want to sell through established operators, but still let the music management happen via the Mac/PC.
Apple in fact might feel that they have to enter this market. Digital camera and PDA markets have both felt the sharp bite of the cell phone and I do not see why music would be any different. Playing music might not be something that users care about in a phone right now, but playing music is something they do care about. If someone can make it easier for them to do it they'll flock to it--just like every phone sold now has a camera built in. Reducing the number of devices to carry (iPod + phone --> iPhone) would count as making it easier.
To me it seems inevitable that phones will kill off small-storage MP3 players at some point in the next several years. Perhaps Apple figures if they're going to lose some iPod market share it might as well be to themselves.
The Constitution does not "grant rights," it limits the power of the government to infringe rights that are naturally held by all people. It's a subtle distinction, but a crucial one.
And by the way, it's up in air whether this law can actually do what it says. It has not yet been subjected to review by the Supreme Court of the U.S.--who struck down an earlier incarnation of the suspension of habeus corpus.
The other posts have done a good job pointing out some of the fallacies and mistakes in the calculations, but I'll throw in a factor I haven't see considered yet--the value of earned media. It's actually kind of tough to put a value on it because you can't buy it, but it's worth more per column inch than an advertisement because it carries a third party "trusted source" imprimature.
I'd guess that national press coverage of this initiative is likely to generate enough earned media value to cover losses into the tens of millions on the technology. For perspective consider that almost all of Google's current (very valuable) brand awareness is the result of earned media.
Slashdot Mirror
MS did actually write a check this time, instead of just rearranging Novell's living room.
While later Japanese swords were made by forging different metals together, very early swords were not--they were forged from a solid piece of steel. The steel was beaten flat and folded over itself several times, but it was not to impart mechanical qualities--it was to mix the carbon evenly throughout the impure metal. (Later this was accomplished through better steel manufacturing, so the folding was replaced by the multi-part welding of of different alloys as described.)
o ldid=69002423
Once the sword was shaped it was quenched. However since they wanted different properties on the edge vs. the spine, they needed to cool the different parts at different rates. This was accomplished by painting the sword with varying thicknesses of clay--thick on the back for a slow quench (resulting in soft but springy steel) and thin on the edge for a fast quench (resulting in hard but brittle martensite). This differential cooling also caused some of the curvature. It also allowed a sword maker to impart a "signature" of sorts, by painting patterns into the clay. This manifests itself in the subtle wavy reflective pattern seen along the cutting edge of many katanas, called the hamon.
Finally to address the GP, the original pattern that is now called Damascus had nothing to do with folding the blade. If you look at an original Damascus blade the pattern is not alligned to the edge but runs throughout the blade. It has more to do with the steel composition and how it was forged.
Sources for more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Katana&
http://www.mines.edu/Academic/met/pe/faculty/ eberhart/classes/down_loads/damascus.pdf (PDF)
It attempts to show what a society would be like when manufacturing cost is reduced to a simple utility charge, like water or electricity (due to nanoscale manufacturing). It's a fascinating book on a number of levels, though it doesn't seem as well-known as the prior work, "Snow Crash."
/.)....
Author is Neal Stephenson for those who don't know (should be few here on
User-driven content ("Web 2.0") has led to a massive increase in the parallelism of page creation. Every single story submitted to Digg becomes a new Web page, as does every Flickr page, every Wikipedia page, every Match.com profile, every Youtube video, every Myspace page, every Slashdot comment, etc.
Some porn sites allow user-generated content (pun intended, eewww...), but overall the number of people willing to share recordings of themselves having sex is probably pretty small compared to the number willing to share their favorite song or interesting link or thoughts on a subject. (At least I hope to God it is.)
While it's interesting to think about, the absolute percentage of all existing Web content that is porn is not really the important question. The important question is how much porn the public sees inadvertantly, and whether federal legislation is needed to protect kids from porn when they are online. If most porn content is hidden behind logins, that lends strength to the idea that such a law is not needed.
Also I should point out that there are vast stores of Web-accessible, non-porn information hidden behind member login as well. Like all of Lexis-Nexis, for instance. Or many newspaper and magazine archives.
Does not mean it is true.
if you're a scientist make some testable predictions. The ones mentioned in the original article sure didn't come true.
Yes, because the ones listed in the original article were not true representations of any actual predictions. The original author lied in what he wrote--that's the whole point of today's article.
There are numerous ways to manage a debt load, but if you don't like your work your day-to-day life will be miserable. Go for the job that will make you happier.
That said, a lot of liking or disliking work has to do with the people you work with, as opposed to the work itself. Right now I'm at a job that I find interesting but not amazing...but I really, really like the people I work with. So it makes it fun to be in the office. That might be less true for developers though--I'm a manager so a lot of my job is interacting with others.
At my last job the work was truly incredible but I worked alone in an office most of the time (tiny consultancy), and worked hugely long hours. That got very old after a while.
I, personally, am happier hearing that people went and just voted according to whim than hearing that people went and voted straight ticket (I find the odds of each candidate at all levels of government for a given party just happening to line up with your opinions on each issue at each level of government to be quite low).
Have you thought very hard about what you just said? Because with only a handful of candidates (at the most) available to choose from in any particular race, I guarantee that none of them will line up with your opinions on each issue. By such criteria, no one would ever vote for anyone except for the candidates voting for themselves.
The problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the nation is governed. It's governed between the elections, not by the elections. The point of voting is not to get someone into office who agrees with you, but to get someone into office who is more likely to be influenced by you when you contact them later about your most important issues.
With that understanding, the straight ticket can make a lot of sense, if your pet issue is addressed by the national platform of that party. When that's the case, the party platform becomes a club you can wield against your elected officials. For instance if the most important issue to you is keeping abortion legal, it makes sense to vote straight Democratic. Pro-choice is in the Democratic Party Platform.
Have Dwight Schrute give them a call:
http://www.theofficedvd.com/dwight/
I'm saying that I doubt you have any actual proof of that claim with respect to climate change specifically.
It's possible to pull very reasonable-sounding ideas out of your head but that does not mean they are correct. If you're going to claim a correlation you should at least have a little proof to back it up.
The first is that funding shapes science whether you want it to or not. If the general consensus is that global warming is happening, you're much more likely to get funded if you decide to do research on "why global warming is going on" or "what are the major contributors to global warming" etc. However, if you were to submit a proposal along the lines of "what if any effect has global warming had on climate change", good luck.
This is a standard tactic for debunking any controversial science, but it fails because there is never any quantifiable, objective support for the sentiment. In this case I do not know of a single study that shows a correlation between degree of professed "belief" in global warming, and grant funding levels.
This is a completely made up argument and should be treated accordingly. I will happily change my tune if a reputable source for this argument can be produced, but I have yet to find one that even treats the subject in a quantitative way.
He's obviously overcompensating for having a girl's first name and a French last name.
- Jim Danger McManly
Why did they make sense then and not now?
Because now there are viable alternative browsers for those other platforms, which IE would have to compete against on a level playing field. Rather than lose they choose not to compete.
Note: the answer to this question implies the real answer to number 7.
They aren't even getting a guarantee that they can play that file for the rest of their lives!
I think the "long term listening" case against iTunes files is overstated. DRM is ultimately defeatable, and there are already options out there to strip the DRM off iTunes files. As for CDs, well they don't last forever either, whether because of scratching or delaminating or just materials breaking down. There's no lifetime warranty on music no matter how you buy it. Either way you have to actively work to keep your music over the long-term.
This came out of a contest Dan Savage held in his column Savage Love, to find a gay-sex-related definition for "santorum." This was in response to Sen. Rick Santorum's comments several times that homosexuallity is a deviant behavior on par with pedophaelia.
The one they came up with truly nasty, but, apparently, a concept just oozing with a dark need for its own word.
Using only six words is supercalafragilisticexpialadocious.
I have not seen a dupe on Slashdot in months, and I read it almost every weekday. For a while we had the "Backslash" summaries instead, but I haven't even seen one of those for a while.
At the same time, I am seeing more and more dupes on Digg as its popularity grows. New people have no idea whether something has been covered before so they just Digg it if it seems cool. As a result I've seen the same Flash-animated-OSX Web site featured on the front page of Digg like 5 times. (No I won't link to it.)
Judged per capita of the U.S., the number is low. But that's stupid because the aid is not going to those people.
Judged per capita of the nations actually receiving the aid, the U.S. ranks quite a bit higher against other nations providing aid to the same capita.
However realize when you buy an Ipod, you're agreeing to use it the way Apple says you can. That means no changing it so it suddenly plays videos if it didn't before. You can, they likely won't hurt you, but the device itself has an agreement somewhere built into it.
The first sale doctrine says that once I buy a device I am free to use it however I see fit--it is mine.
Copyrighted materials attempt to skirt this (with mixed success) by saying that you are paying for a "license" rather than making a purchase. Thus the existence of the EULA for software.
Hardware though does not come with a EULA and even if it did, it would almost certainly be unenforcable.
iTunes has a EULA. iPods do not. It's an important distinction.
To extend the GP's point--yes that is all true, but is that necessarily the best way to do things? Of all the things you've listed, the only things that are truly required from the point of view of the science are peer review and publication. Editors and typesetting are relics left over from the time when printed journals were the only way to mass communicate, and your high page charges pay for their overhead.
Neither would be required in an online, automated system. Papers could be distributed to referees, and comments relayed back to authors, by algorithms. You would still need editors, but their job demands would be reduced. They would qualify new referees and properly characterizing them in the system, so they receive papers in their areas of expertise. And they would review disputes raised by the community.
$100 million would pay for a lot of staff, software development, and referee fees. This is doubly true if the $100 million is used as seed money to start a non-profit business. Certainly the cost structure would a lot lower, resulting in much lower page fees. Public access could be granted for free or a very low cost, perhaps subsidized by foundations.
From the 30,000 foot view, science is run a lot like a wiki, but with pre-screened participants and formal processes for posting updates to the general knowledge. There's no reason that structure could not be directly expressed online, without the legacy print journals.
There may be 40 ways to leave your lover but there are only 4 exits on this aircraft.
I laughed pretty hard at the parent, but then I started thinking: why is this so funny? I realized that for me anyway, it's the first line.
Clearly on Slashdot, it's not enough to slaughter and prepare 3 of your friends to feed the rest. No, first you have to run a sort.
I have difficulty believing that the same company that changed its entire product line from PowerPC to Intel chips in just over a year would take several years to develop a telephone.
The problems in phone development aren't necessarily the chip technology or the software code. They might include battery management (one of the keys to the iPod's success), user experience, business model development, etc--all of which would take much longer to solve due to the iterative process of solving them. When you're converting a back-end you at least have a defined experience to build to; when you're trying to redefine what it means to use a cell phone, or strike unprecedented deals with mobile operators, it takes a long time to even define achievable success.
It seems extremely likely that Apple is working on a cell phone--several executives have as much as admitted it. The real question is probably whether they can figure out a way to bring it to market that they are happy with. As others have noted, wireless carriers are extremely protective of their control over what phones on their network can do, and what they can bill for. MVNO might be the only way for Apple to deliver the experience they want, but MVNO is a loser strategy in mobile--too easy for the others to marginalize. And it would mean stepping way, way outside Apple's core competency. Running a network is nothing like designing and selling computers. No, I think they want to sell through established operators, but still let the music management happen via the Mac/PC.
Apple in fact might feel that they have to enter this market. Digital camera and PDA markets have both felt the sharp bite of the cell phone and I do not see why music would be any different. Playing music might not be something that users care about in a phone right now, but playing music is something they do care about. If someone can make it easier for them to do it they'll flock to it--just like every phone sold now has a camera built in. Reducing the number of devices to carry (iPod + phone --> iPhone) would count as making it easier.
To me it seems inevitable that phones will kill off small-storage MP3 players at some point in the next several years. Perhaps Apple figures if they're going to lose some iPod market share it might as well be to themselves.
The Constitution does not "grant rights," it limits the power of the government to infringe rights that are naturally held by all people. It's a subtle distinction, but a crucial one.
And by the way, it's up in air whether this law can actually do what it says. It has not yet been subjected to review by the Supreme Court of the U.S.--who struck down an earlier incarnation of the suspension of habeus corpus.
The other posts have done a good job pointing out some of the fallacies and mistakes in the calculations, but I'll throw in a factor I haven't see considered yet--the value of earned media. It's actually kind of tough to put a value on it because you can't buy it, but it's worth more per column inch than an advertisement because it carries a third party "trusted source" imprimature.
I'd guess that national press coverage of this initiative is likely to generate enough earned media value to cover losses into the tens of millions on the technology. For perspective consider that almost all of Google's current (very valuable) brand awareness is the result of earned media.