It's less like cutting a piece of meat than it is like snapping a twig. What really happens is that the 'cut' sword breaks. Japanese blades have done that to fencing epees in demos. a TV crew (Mythbusters?) got it to happen once or twice in tests. It can happen, but is very hard to actually do.
The folding and reforging technique the Japanese masters used produced a blade similar to what the imediate poster called out, but, that is not a true Damascus steel. It is really just a lot of welded razors. It is very sharp, but has a different pattern, waves, not speckles, and is not as strong as a true Damascus steel blade. That is why museums pay a sizable fortune for a real Damascus Steel blade.
The Japanese blades are still made, a few a year. The Damascus blades are not.
Scientific American reported over a year ago that a metallurgist and a blacksmith managed to reproduce Damascus steel. The secret was in the Wootz. Wootz is a lump of iron that was produced at the mine, then exported. The folks in India didn't know how to make it into Damascus steel, the folks in Damascus did, but the process only worked with a wootz from one particular mine in India. The mine in India played out several hundred years ago. That's why the secret died, after being a state secret for over 1000 years. It stopped working.
According to the team SA reported on, the secret is in a small amount of molybdenum. the process of manufacture used up to 50 forgings, and used acids to etch designs into the blade. The forgings cause microscopically fine strands of molybdenum to be located throughout the steel, breaking up the crystaline structure, and with it the fracture points. This also caused the famous 'watermarks' that all true Damascus steel has.
As some nanotubes result from almost any coking process, there would be nanotubes in there, (vanishingly small quantities), but the strength would come from other things.
I understand that it is now possible to buy a new Damascus steel sword again, but the price is very high. (it always was.) A flying car might be cheaper.
A control freak has been put in chargen of Thilands national phone/wireless network. He doesn't like what he doesn't own. End of story. OSS hatred is only part of what the article identified as his 'radical' change plan. Wait a couple of years and see how it changes. Part of what he wants if for all the private carriers to be 'partners' with the national system. (as in give me all your value and then shut up!).
before these guys get refuted by somebody else in the modern game of Science by Insult.
A calm gathering of evidence by both sides would be more gentlemanly, and lead to more accurate conclusions by both sides. But, we know that's not gonna happen.
A combination of magnets and charged rods can deflect nearly all of this radiation, which is really just solar wind particles bouncing between the earths north and south poles. Nasa has worked out the basics for satellite protection. The amount that then gets through is only a little more than twice the level you get living on very high mountains. People have bene doing that for millenia.
Plan on any passenger car being equiped with protective measures. The bigger problem is boredom on a week long trip up the tether. I suspect that with improvements, we will see cargo launched by tether, and people by rocket. Like now, we see cargo moved by rail, and people by airliner.
You are mixing up cause and effect. The black death was spread by ships, but the vector was rats and thier fleas. Falling temeratures and poor crops(there was the famous 'year without a summer') killed a lot of the predators. Rats muliplied, then the death spread.
The plague didn't cause the cooling, rather, it was caused by (accelerated by) the cooling.
You are in denial about the midaeval warm period, as the UN people were.
Reality is that climate is not as simple as you wish it was. nor is it static.
The Danish statistician who a few years ago did an analysis of the 'evidence' and it came up bust. He started the project to provide statistical proof of Global Warming. The response in the 'popular' scientific circles was to call him names and ignore his evidence.
Sadly, that is how both sides of this debate act. It isn't science, it's funding maneuvers.
A great many of the organizations investigating the 'warming' were the same organizations that 20 years ago were 'conclusively proving' Global Cooling. (We were to be well into the next Ice Age by now, according to the green press in the 70's. Often the same person who as a new researcher in the '70's used climate evidence to prove Global Cooling is now using the same evidence to prove Global Cooling. This time he/she is a 'senior scientist'.
It's clear that something is going on. Polar caps on both Earth and Mars are shrinking, by roughly the same percentage. In spite of all the doom sayers, sea level is not rising measurably. (Unchanged in the last 200 years, to within the margin of error.)
You should remember that a lot of the organizations on both sides of this 'debate' have an agenda. If you don't know the agenda, you won't know the 'researcher' bias. Most of the conclusions that get reported in the popular press are unrealistic. Take the headline here on Slashdot a day or two ago that in 30 years there won't be anything living in the oceans. They got there by combining a few worrisome statistics in unrealistic ways, then pontificating on how we should all adopt their politics to avoid the 'problem'. They didn't have any real solutions to the real problems of pollution and overfishing (which are very real, and not something to worry about in 30 years. They happened over 30 years ago.)
To solve these very real problems, we need real data, and then engineering analysis to create systems and policies that address the real root causes. I don't see that happening from either side of the debate.
The best solution at present seems to be more study and analysis. We don't seem to know enough yet to really fix the problem. (We aren't really sure what the problem is.) We need to make changes, but those changes have to take into account real peoples needs. If we don't, the result will be like Kyoto. Lots of camera ops, a few minor efforts, a few major hold outs, and total world wide failure.
I'm beginning to think that the real problem is politics. From all sides.
Progeny only sells support/services. If you can do the support, so much the better. Debian, while 'old' is rock solid stable. If you want 'newer' then go with testing. Also, 'old' isn't really old. It's just not the 'latest version'. That is because testing takes time.
Xandros, Mepis, Ubuntu, Knoppix and etc. have all shown that this is the way to go.
Read the article. It wasn't a conclusion. It was where they started. If it's true, what are the consequenses. It's always easier to prove something if you start with it as an asumption, and never even try to disprove it.
Still, the facts are there. Tuna supplies world wide have dropped sharply, The largest fishery in the world, the Grand Banks has nearly collapsed. Whale supplies nearly vanished until banned internationally. (three countries still support commercial whaling). Freshwater lakes can serve as models. ecological collapse can happen. Reseeding an ocean would be a daunting task.
On a side note, we may be doing that anyway, as foreign species keep popping up in the strangest places, like scorpion fish along the US Atlantic coast. I'd guess that means that the population ballances are changing, not that all species are going to dissapear.
Sorry, you're 40 years too late. For at least that long, Japanese and Norwegian trawlers have been semi-regularly confiscated for fishing in US waters without a liscense. It has to be happening in other countries too.
has always been that obscurity is fragile. Once the 'secret' is out, the security is gone.
this system is blown. It may have been published now, but was really blown over a year ago. i remember hearing of an election in California where on a light turnout, the diebold machines showed results with 125% of registered voters having cast ballots. The system does not allow for recounts or checks.
I believe that both sides had hacked the system to increase thier sides count. Kind of like Chicago, but there were no cemetary addresses. No way to check either.
Saw your comment.
Ignorance is bliss.
The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor to become the dominant navy in the Pacific, and force the US out of China (Chenault had a fair size air force fighting the Japanese for Chang Kai Shek, courtesy of the US Marine Corps), which Japan wanted to conquer. They were then the dominant navy in the far east for a little over a year. they simply couldn't build ships fast enough. The US could. Japan went from #3 to #1 in that area because the British pulled out of the Pacific to the Atlantic, and the US lost a lot of tonnage in Pearl Harbor. The US Atlantic fleets were needed to battle Germany.
After Midway, they went from #1 to #3, then #4, then #5, then pretty much out of business.
Even the Japanese admiral who planned Pearl Harbor thought it was long term suicide. He was right.
What the Pentagon (the people who really write these reports) wants is to make sure the same kind of thing doesn't happen again.
Come on, I know there is a group on Slashdot that loves to hate Bush, but the man can't really write all these reports. That's what Generals and Colonels are for. The same (or near same) reports pop up in every administration, Republican or Democrat.
It's really no different than the plans to invade (insert country here)or stop invasion by (insert country here). They have a large group of people who do nothing but come up with contingency plans for every concievable thing. Less than 1% are ever used for anything. This probably won't be used either.
What are the odds of a comgressman putting this thing in the budget, instead of some pork barrel project in his home district? Less than 0% I'd say.
Sorry guy, you're 45 years too late. The UN never did anything about it. space has had weapons up there at least that long. (For the record, the UN has never really done ANYTHING about agression of one nation against another. The US pushed it into Korea, kinda sorta. that is the most they have done, other than a few troops that watch people massacred all the time and don't get involved. See any number of missions to Africa, or the observers in Lebanon who help the Hezbollah people set up thier rockets, then complain if Israel shoots back and hits them. Why should the UN change now?)
You think the US built 137 aricraft carriers? Where did they put them. We don't have a 10th that many even today. If all your numbers are that accurate, you can be easily dismissed as just a crazy crank.
At the close of WWII the US had maybe 4 or 5 operating carriers in the entire pacific. And remember, it was largely a carrier war at sea.
reality, aircraft carriers are big and expensive.
Maybe you were referring to active carrier based aircraft? Possible inlcuded all ships in a carrier task force? For subs or smaller ships (destroyers, cruisers, etc.) you may be close to correct.
"Eisendrath, co-author of a forthcoming book, 'War in Heaven: Stopping an Arms Race in Outer Space Before It Is Too Late,' says the United States is wasting its time. 'Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says we need to protect against a 'space Pearl Harbor,'' he says. 'But we're still the dominant power there."
Sounds just like in 1942, before December 7th. The US was the dominant power in the Pacific. Sounds like Eisendrath wants us to be able to repeat that. Ive seen the call to just leave ourselves vulnerable for a long time. Chamberlain tried that in the 1930's to deal with Hitler. Didn't work then. I don't know of any time in history that it has worked.
Historicly, the only way to ever have peace is to be armed to the teeth, and make sure that every one knows you will hit them harder than they have ever been hit if they start anything. that's the way the old Pax Romana worked, that's how it still works today. Hitler left Sweden and Switzerland alone while occupying every other country in continental Europe because in those two countries everyone was armed. Planned weakness as a policy will never give anything but defeat. Why does Mr. Eisendrath want to be defeated?
'Those who are willing to sacrifice a little freedom for security deserve neither freedom nor security, and in the end will lose both." Benjamin Franklin
Open Source requires transparency, corporations require secrecy. Not until corporations realize that software is a cost center, not a profit center for them will they embrace free software. The large profits to be made are more in use of the product than in marketing it.
Open Source is just a path to Free Software (libre).
Like major shifts in science, this will be generational. Expect it to take a couple of lifetimes.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly there were worse choices that lost. A few even won.
If this was another sotry made up in the back room? Times done it before.
It's less like cutting a piece of meat than it is like snapping a twig. What really happens is that the 'cut' sword breaks. Japanese blades have done that to fencing epees in demos. a TV crew (Mythbusters?) got it to happen once or twice in tests. It can happen, but is very hard to actually do.
The folding and reforging technique the Japanese masters used produced a blade similar to what the imediate poster called out, but, that is not a true Damascus steel. It is really just a lot of welded razors. It is very sharp, but has a different pattern, waves, not speckles, and is not as strong as a true Damascus steel blade. That is why museums pay a sizable fortune for a real Damascus Steel blade. The Japanese blades are still made, a few a year. The Damascus blades are not.
Scientific American reported over a year ago that a metallurgist and a blacksmith managed to reproduce Damascus steel. The secret was in the Wootz. Wootz is a lump of iron that was produced at the mine, then exported. The folks in India didn't know how to make it into Damascus steel, the folks in Damascus did, but the process only worked with a wootz from one particular mine in India. The mine in India played out several hundred years ago. That's why the secret died, after being a state secret for over 1000 years. It stopped working.
According to the team SA reported on, the secret is in a small amount of molybdenum. the process of manufacture used up to 50 forgings, and used acids to etch designs into the blade. The forgings cause microscopically fine strands of molybdenum to be located throughout the steel, breaking up the crystaline structure, and with it the fracture points. This also caused the famous 'watermarks' that all true Damascus steel has.
As some nanotubes result from almost any coking process, there would be nanotubes in there, (vanishingly small quantities), but the strength would come from other things.
I understand that it is now possible to buy a new Damascus steel sword again, but the price is very high. (it always was.) A flying car might be cheaper.
A control freak has been put in chargen of Thilands national phone/wireless network. He doesn't like what he doesn't own. End of story. OSS hatred is only part of what the article identified as his 'radical' change plan. Wait a couple of years and see how it changes. Part of what he wants if for all the private carriers to be 'partners' with the national system. (as in give me all your value and then shut up!).
DRM has so far killed every company that has tried to stuff it down consumers throats. I expect that trend to continue.
before these guys get refuted by somebody else in the modern game of Science by Insult.
A calm gathering of evidence by both sides would be more gentlemanly, and lead to more accurate conclusions by both sides. But, we know that's not gonna happen.
A combination of magnets and charged rods can deflect nearly all of this radiation, which is really just solar wind particles bouncing between the earths north and south poles. Nasa has worked out the basics for satellite protection. The amount that then gets through is only a little more than twice the level you get living on very high mountains. People have bene doing that for millenia.
Plan on any passenger car being equiped with protective measures. The bigger problem is boredom on a week long trip up the tether. I suspect that with improvements, we will see cargo launched by tether, and people by rocket. Like now, we see cargo moved by rail, and people by airliner.
Now,let's go find something worth worrying about.
You are mixing up cause and effect. The black death was spread by ships, but the vector was rats and thier fleas. Falling temeratures and poor crops(there was the famous 'year without a summer') killed a lot of the predators. Rats muliplied, then the death spread. The plague didn't cause the cooling, rather, it was caused by (accelerated by) the cooling. You are in denial about the midaeval warm period, as the UN people were. Reality is that climate is not as simple as you wish it was. nor is it static.
But reality is that there are a lot of people with agendas on both sides.
The Danish statistician who a few years ago did an analysis of the 'evidence' and it came up bust. He started the project to provide statistical proof of Global Warming. The response in the 'popular' scientific circles was to call him names and ignore his evidence.
Sadly, that is how both sides of this debate act. It isn't science, it's funding maneuvers.
A great many of the organizations investigating the 'warming' were the same organizations that 20 years ago were 'conclusively proving' Global Cooling. (We were to be well into the next Ice Age by now, according to the green press in the 70's. Often the same person who as a new researcher in the '70's used climate evidence to prove Global Cooling is now using the same evidence to prove Global Cooling. This time he/she is a 'senior scientist'.
It's clear that something is going on. Polar caps on both Earth and Mars are shrinking, by roughly the same percentage. In spite of all the doom sayers, sea level is not rising measurably. (Unchanged in the last 200 years, to within the margin of error.)
You should remember that a lot of the organizations on both sides of this 'debate' have an agenda. If you don't know the agenda, you won't know the 'researcher' bias. Most of the conclusions that get reported in the popular press are unrealistic. Take the headline here on Slashdot a day or two ago that in 30 years there won't be anything living in the oceans. They got there by combining a few worrisome statistics in unrealistic ways, then pontificating on how we should all adopt their politics to avoid the 'problem'. They didn't have any real solutions to the real problems of pollution and overfishing (which are very real, and not something to worry about in 30 years. They happened over 30 years ago.)
To solve these very real problems, we need real data, and then engineering analysis to create systems and policies that address the real root causes. I don't see that happening from either side of the debate.
The best solution at present seems to be more study and analysis. We don't seem to know enough yet to really fix the problem. (We aren't really sure what the problem is.) We need to make changes, but those changes have to take into account real peoples needs. If we don't, the result will be like Kyoto. Lots of camera ops, a few minor efforts, a few major hold outs, and total world wide failure.
I'm beginning to think that the real problem is politics. From all sides.
Progeny only sells support/services. If you can do the support, so much the better. Debian, while 'old' is rock solid stable. If you want 'newer' then go with testing. Also, 'old' isn't really old. It's just not the 'latest version'. That is because testing takes time.
Xandros, Mepis, Ubuntu, Knoppix and etc. have all shown that this is the way to go.
Loosing RPM Hell is a good benefit too.
Certification might be a bugaboo for you though.
Read the article. It wasn't a conclusion. It was where they started. If it's true, what are the consequenses. It's always easier to prove something if you start with it as an asumption, and never even try to disprove it.
Still, the facts are there. Tuna supplies world wide have dropped sharply, The largest fishery in the world, the Grand Banks has nearly collapsed. Whale supplies nearly vanished until banned internationally. (three countries still support commercial whaling). Freshwater lakes can serve as models. ecological collapse can happen. Reseeding an ocean would be a daunting task.
On a side note, we may be doing that anyway, as foreign species keep popping up in the strangest places, like scorpion fish along the US Atlantic coast. I'd guess that means that the population ballances are changing, not that all species are going to dissapear.
Sorry, you're 40 years too late. For at least that long, Japanese and Norwegian trawlers have been semi-regularly confiscated for fishing in US waters without a liscense. It has to be happening in other countries too.
Leftist magazine doesn't like what a non leftist President does.
Why is this news?
has always been that obscurity is fragile. Once the 'secret' is out, the security is gone.
this system is blown. It may have been published now, but was really blown over a year ago. i remember hearing of an election in California where on a light turnout, the diebold machines showed results with 125% of registered voters having cast ballots. The system does not allow for recounts or checks.
I believe that both sides had hacked the system to increase thier sides count. Kind of like Chicago, but there were no cemetary addresses. No way to check either.
Saw your comment. Ignorance is bliss. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor to become the dominant navy in the Pacific, and force the US out of China (Chenault had a fair size air force fighting the Japanese for Chang Kai Shek, courtesy of the US Marine Corps), which Japan wanted to conquer. They were then the dominant navy in the far east for a little over a year. they simply couldn't build ships fast enough. The US could. Japan went from #3 to #1 in that area because the British pulled out of the Pacific to the Atlantic, and the US lost a lot of tonnage in Pearl Harbor. The US Atlantic fleets were needed to battle Germany. After Midway, they went from #1 to #3, then #4, then #5, then pretty much out of business. Even the Japanese admiral who planned Pearl Harbor thought it was long term suicide. He was right. What the Pentagon (the people who really write these reports) wants is to make sure the same kind of thing doesn't happen again. Come on, I know there is a group on Slashdot that loves to hate Bush, but the man can't really write all these reports. That's what Generals and Colonels are for. The same (or near same) reports pop up in every administration, Republican or Democrat. It's really no different than the plans to invade (insert country here)or stop invasion by (insert country here). They have a large group of people who do nothing but come up with contingency plans for every concievable thing. Less than 1% are ever used for anything. This probably won't be used either. What are the odds of a comgressman putting this thing in the budget, instead of some pork barrel project in his home district? Less than 0% I'd say.
Sorry guy, you're 45 years too late. The UN never did anything about it. space has had weapons up there at least that long. (For the record, the UN has never really done ANYTHING about agression of one nation against another. The US pushed it into Korea, kinda sorta. that is the most they have done, other than a few troops that watch people massacred all the time and don't get involved. See any number of missions to Africa, or the observers in Lebanon who help the Hezbollah people set up thier rockets, then complain if Israel shoots back and hits them. Why should the UN change now?)
You think the US built 137 aricraft carriers? Where did they put them. We don't have a 10th that many even today. If all your numbers are that accurate, you can be easily dismissed as just a crazy crank. At the close of WWII the US had maybe 4 or 5 operating carriers in the entire pacific. And remember, it was largely a carrier war at sea. reality, aircraft carriers are big and expensive. Maybe you were referring to active carrier based aircraft? Possible inlcuded all ships in a carrier task force? For subs or smaller ships (destroyers, cruisers, etc.) you may be close to correct.
Where are you from? Where I live, there are only 3 dimensions that people use.
So, do you know of any time that the UZ has destroyed another countries sattelite in orbit? or are you just venting your spleen? It'd be nice to know.
"Eisendrath, co-author of a forthcoming book, 'War in Heaven: Stopping an Arms Race in Outer Space Before It Is Too Late,' says the United States is wasting its time. 'Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says we need to protect against a 'space Pearl Harbor,'' he says. 'But we're still the dominant power there."
Sounds just like in 1942, before December 7th. The US was the dominant power in the Pacific. Sounds like Eisendrath wants us to be able to repeat that. Ive seen the call to just leave ourselves vulnerable for a long time. Chamberlain tried that in the 1930's to deal with Hitler. Didn't work then. I don't know of any time in history that it has worked.
Historicly, the only way to ever have peace is to be armed to the teeth, and make sure that every one knows you will hit them harder than they have ever been hit if they start anything. that's the way the old Pax Romana worked, that's how it still works today. Hitler left Sweden and Switzerland alone while occupying every other country in continental Europe because in those two countries everyone was armed. Planned weakness as a policy will never give anything but defeat. Why does Mr. Eisendrath want to be defeated?
'Those who are willing to sacrifice a little freedom for security deserve neither freedom nor security, and in the end will lose both." Benjamin Franklin
Open Source requires transparency, corporations require secrecy. Not until corporations realize that software is a cost center, not a profit center for them will they embrace free software. The large profits to be made are more in use of the product than in marketing it.
Open Source is just a path to Free Software (libre).
Like major shifts in science, this will be generational. Expect it to take a couple of lifetimes.
All the experts have agreed for years now.
... Oops, 6% ... Oops, 8%, Oops ... 10% ...
Firefox will never reach 4%
Looks like an expert trend.