Usenet isn't dying, it just turned into Reddit.

In any case there is still not a shave to be found which is better than that of a straight razor. As with many of the old traditions which used to be passed down from father to son much of the knowledge of how to use a straight razor has been lost to the majority. So I have put here the extent of my limited experience with straight razor shaving.

Rule one of straight razor shaving: Never move the blade parallel to the blade. Always move it perpendicular to the blade, like you are trying to sweep something up with it.

Rule two of straight razor shaving: Always move the blade perpendicular to the edge, like sweeping. To do otherwise will leave you horribly scarred.

The key to a good, close shave is the sharpness of the blade and the smoothness of the cutting motion. A sharp blade cuts the hair without pulling it, resulting in the hair being cut level with the skin and not below the skin. The smoothness of the cutting motion is important to keep the skin from bunching up.

There are four keys to a nice smooth shaving motion:

1. Practice. The following tips will help, but nothing beats practice. Without a steady hand you aren't going to have a smooth shave no matter what you do.

2. Pull the skin. As you shave a region just tug on the skin a little bit to tighten it slightly. This will prevent bunching of the skin by ensuring there is less loose skin to bunch.

3. Before you shave you must soak the hairs in hot water. This will soften the hairs, which makes them easier to cut through as well as opening the pores, which pushes the hairs slightly outwards from the skin. Shaving straight out of a hot shower is recommended, but if that isn't possible a hot towel will suffice. Use the hottest water in the towel that you can stand and keep the towels on the face for no less than five minutes, ten is better. If the towel starts to get cool you will need to use another towel.

   I also recommend that you shave in a hot, humid room, such as the bathroom after a hot shower, in order to keep the pores open as much as possible and to prevent the hairs from drying out. How much a problem these two are depends on your particular characteristics.

4. Shaving soap. Sure you see ads all over the place for shaving creams which promise you the world. Don't believe them, they lie. The major reason to use shaving cream and the like is to lubricate the skin. If your shaving cream isn't doing that you are using the wrong stuff.

   I recommend proper shaving soap. This is soap which is high in glycerin. Properly lathered this soap will further soften the hairs, lubricate and clean out the pores.

   To use shaving soap (or other high glycerin soap) you must first lather it. To do so put some soap into the lathering cup. I prefer to buy shaving soap which comes already in a suitable container, but you can us a regular cup if you wish and then just cut some soap into it. You don't need much soap for each shave as the secret is in lathering it. Now you will need a badger hair lather brush, accept no substitutes. You take the brush and dip it shallowly into hot water. Then you lather the soap using this brush in a circular motion in the lather cup. You only want to use a little water, I dip my brush about a quarter of an inch, as too much water will prevent lathering and you can always add more water if you aren't seeing the results you desire. Lathering should only take a minute or two and you should end up with a rich, thick lather which sticks to the brush and the side of the cup.

   Now that you have the lather you apply it to the skin using the brush in long strokes. For the most part these strokes should be up and down like you are painting the skin. You should cover all the skin you intend to shave and then a little bit. If you are a slow shaver or the temperature and humidity of the room does not allow you may wish to lather only part of the area at any one time. The lather must still be thick when you go to shave the area. If you need to reapply the soap you can give the soap a few quick lathering motions first to ensure a good lather.

   Once you have finished shaving it is important to clean the lather brush properly or its performance will degrade. The proper way to clean a badger hair brush is to run it under slightly warm water while gently squeezing it with your hands. The action is allowing water to soak in and the squeezing the soaping water out. Continue this until no more soap soap comes out. Then you should get the majority of the water out of the brush with a couple gentle squeezes and then a small number of wrist flicks. It is ideal to then hang the brush in a well ventilated area so dry, but I've not had trouble with standing the brush up on its handle.

   A good shaving soap is very important to a good shave. In fact, I have had excellent results with cheap disposable razors as long as I have used proper shaving soap with a good lather. A good shaving soap will also prevent or greatly reduce razor burn by reducing the friction of shaving.

The magic of a straight razor is the sharpness of the blade. This is why the single blade of a straight razor can provide a superior shave to the multibladed razors of the modern age. Unfortunately I have no good advice on sharpening a straight razor, I ruined my blade on my first attempt. I can only suggest finding some old man who has great experience hand sharpening blades to extreme keenness or to attempt proper knife sharpening system. As far as I can tell the razors should be sharpened to 17 degree angle.

Though I can offer no great advice on sharpening a straight razor I can tell you how to keep one sharp. To keep a straight razor sharp there are really three things to keep in mind:

1. Follow the recommendations for a smooth shaving motion above. The best way to keep a blade sharp is to not dull it in the first place. Most of those recommendations, but especially the hot water soak, are important for softening the hairs and making them easier to cut through. The softer the hairs the less wear on the blade edge.

2. Rest your razor. As you shave the edge of the razor gets slightly bent through the resistance of the hairs. Resting the razor is simply not using it for a time. Gentlemen of times past used to have one straight razor for each day of the week to ensure that the razors stayed sharp as long as possible. This is because the bent edge will return to almost the original position is not bent to severely and given time to rest.

   If using a personal razor you should have no problem resting the razor at least a day between uses. Resting it longer will reduce the wear and so if possible it may be advisable to either shave on alternating days or to rotate between multiple razors. Additionally if you are shaving large areas of skin, such as legs, with a straight razor you might consider using several razors in one shaving session to reduce the wear.

3. As resting the razor undoes some of the wear so does stropping. Stropping should be done on conditioned leather only. There are two common types of strops, solid ones which are made on wood blocks and flexible ones. Which you use really depends on the layout of the shaving space. I prefer the flexible ones, though they require something to hang one end off.

   Stropping should be done only at the beginning of shaving, never after shaving. You can strop during shaving if the razor is no longer sharp enough, but that will cause dulling and I recommend against it if possible. To strop you simply ensure that the strop is straight or nearly straight and lightly drag the razor along the strop, blunt end first. You should strop alternating sides of the razor. The easiest way to do this is to lightly place the razor on the strop nearest yourself with the edge pointed to you. Then drag the razor away from you towards the other end of the strop. Then when you have nearly reached the end you should flip the razor over onto its other side. Flip over the blunt edge of the razor. If you try to flip it any other way you will mess up from time to time and either cut your strop, damage the razor, dull the razor prematurely or at the very least have to spend more time stropping. You should strop each side gently about twenty times.

   If your strop is narrower than you razor you will have to strop the entire blade either by moving the blade during the stropping motion or by stropping the side nearest the tang on one trip along the strop and back and the side furthest from the tang on the next trip.

   The point of stropping is to realign the edge of the razor which was bent out of shape when you shave. If the edge only has to be moved back a little bit it is likely to bend easily. However if the edge has to be moved back too much some of it will break off, causing dulling. It is for this reason that stropping should only be done after resting the razor in order to keep the razor sharp.

There are a few more things to keep in mind about maintaining a straight razor. Firstly you must always remember that a knick in the razor is a bloody knick in your skin. As such it is critical that you take good care of the razor and keep fix all rust and edge damage as soon as possible. Secondly no matter how skillful and diligent and maintaining the sharpness of your razor it will need to be sharpened eventually. If you are taking care of the razor and shaving a face every day or two the razor should only need to be sharpened once or twice a year.

So that is all the theory about using a straight razor. As long as you remember Rule One of Straight Razor Shaving you should be able to learn without too much trouble or long lasting injury. I will now list out the steps I use when shaving with a straight razor. Use this as a suggestion, but shaving is a personal thing and you'll have to experiment some to figure out what works best for you.

1. I always try to shave directly after a shower. I always try to end the shower with nice and hot water to ensure a steamy bathroom. I find I just don't have the patience for hot towels at home. If I ever get a barber shave though, hot towels all the way. It's just a shame that most barber shops don't serve beer these days like they used to.

   When I step out of the shower I dry everything except my face. I want my face as wet as possible. I keep the door closed and try to keep the bathroom as humid as possible.

2. After ensuring a soaked face I strop the razor. This shouldn't take more than a minute or two.

3. Then I lather the soap as described above. I put on a thick coating over my entire face. I find it helps keep the hairs soft even if I have to relather later.

4. I shave, first the left side of my face with my right hand and then the right side of my face with my left hand. Being left handed has endowed me with some useful abilities. I shave in sections where each section is mostly flat. So my cheek down to the jaw line is one section. Under the jaw and on the neck is another. Special care is taken under the nose and on the chin. Always shave with the grain the first time over. If you have areas where the hair grows in circles or changes direction you will have to go over that area once for each direction. Always lather the area before shaving it.

   After every stroke of the razor I rinse the razor off with hot water. I find that this helps keep my skin warm and my pores open.

   Each stroke goes from the top of my face to the bottom of my face. The razor is held between thirty and forty degrees to the skin where zero degrees would be laying the razor flat on my skin and ninety degree would be the blade sticking straight into my skin.

   Never move the blade parallel to the blade. That is, never move the straight razor in a sawing motion. Doing so will cut straight into you and likely leave you with conversation starting scars. Always move the blade perpendicular to the blade, like you are brushing something with it. If you must turn a curve do it gradually.

5. Now that I have finished the first time over I will consider additional passes. Shaving against the grain is a way to achieve an even closer shave, but I find that I end up with ingrown hairs if I do. It appears that many men are this way so shaving against the grain is optional.

   I will, however, often find some spot which I hadn't shaved sufficiently well for my tastes. These areas I will lather with soap again and then shave again. I try to avoid shaving an area in this way more than two or three times to avoid razor burn.

6. After I am satisfied with my shave I take a towel soaked with the coldest water I can find and press the towel against my face. I do this to cool my face, close my pores and stem any bleeding from small cuts. I'll often need to soak the towel twice. Once my face is cool I use the towel to pat and wipe off any remaining soap.

   Some people suggest using aftershave at this point, but I've never seen the point. Using shaving soap ensures that any small cuts are clean along with the skin itself. The soap can also be lightly scented if you desire that. Finishing with an ice cold towel also does wonders for stopping any bleeding.

7. Then it is time to clean up. Since I lather in a lather cup I simply put the lather cup away. I rinse the lather brush and stand it up to dry. I ensure that the razor has been rinsed off and that there is no water left sitting on the blade. Patting with a towel or a couple of very careful flicks will remove the water. I rinse and wring the towel and hang it up to dry.

8. I then present my freshly shaved face to my wife for inspection. I usually pass with flying colours.

I believe that is all one can really be told about shaving with a straight razor. It is a rewarding skill, but does require practice. For somebody considering starting out shaving in this fashion I would suggest buying a new, factory sharpened razor. Though it seems counter intuitive, as long as you remember the first rule of shaving with a straight razor, a sharp razor is less dangerous and painful than a dull one.

1. Ensuring a domain is only 'registered' once

2. Allowing the owner to modify the domain at will

3. Distributing the domain information

The first is easily done by having a single master public key which signs the key of the domain with a date. The domain key with the earliest signature date is the correct one. This implies that ownership of the domain key is ownership of the domain. The central authority can only hand out ownership of a domain once. Furthermore lost keys will result in an unmodifiable domain.

The second requires that the owner of the key sign the updates with the domain key and a date. Properly signed version information with the latest date is the correct one to use.

The third requirement is more complicated, but there are several distributed hash tables out there which would seem to fit the bill. In the worst case some simple eventually consistent P2P system could be created with relative ease.

The reason such a system would work is that they do not attempt to completely replace DNS. Instead it merely replaces the root and TLD DNS servers. Each domain would be represented in this system by the same information which is already returned by a normal DNS query use in the hierarchical hostname search. That is, it would contain at least the authoritative DNS servers for the domain.

Though such a system could be extended to contain all the hostnames on the Internet it would grow quite large. It would seem that there is a low limit to the amount of data a person will deem reasonable to allocate to P2P infrastructure. Not extending it as such leaves the domain DNS servers as the first vulnerable point in the chain of viewing a webpage, but no more vulnerable than the content servers themselves.

Reliability:

• Perform the designed task successfully every time

• May exclude manual intervention

Dependability:

• Perform the prescribed task as often as possible

• Gracefully degrade under adverse conditions

• Be abusable, work on the fringe of the stated purpose

• Be amiable to jury rigging either repairs or modification

Take, for example, a ball point pen. Ball point pens are designed to write on dry, clean paper. A reliable pen will do so until the ink runs out. A dependable pen, however, will also be able to write, if with difficulty, on dirty, crumpled paper. Wet paper or things which aren't paper at all, such as wood, are also markable by a dependable pen. More so even than just marking in adverse conditions a dependable pen can be used as a small lever or to push small buttons.

These latter uses don't use the pen for it's marking ability, but instead misuse the physical properties of the pen. Dependable pens have these free variables of construction, strength of the body for example, modified to be more useful in some ways.

In general institutions desire reliability, because they will have one tool for each task, while individuals desire dependability, since they have a much wider variety of needs and circumstances.

The more detailed reasoning is based upon technical restrictions. The conceptual framework of a mesh network that I'll be using in comprised of four facts:

1. Every node is connects to a number of mediums. Any node may be connected to as few as one medium, e.g. using their one wifi card, to as many as ten media, e.g. a couple shared wifi channels and a handful of point to point links using directed wifi or Free Space Optics. Nodes connect primarily to other nodes geographically nearby.

2. Every link between nodes has approximately the same bandwidth as every other link. For the purposes of theory we can assume that every link is equally capable. For the purposes of a practical implementation we can assume that the achieved throughput ranges between 1Mbps and 100Mbps. This is a reasonable assumption as all the commonly available 802.11 Wifi protocols have achievable throughputs in this range. I deem it unlikely that a significant portion of the network will have Gigbit Ethernet links to each other.

3. Point to point links may use some private medium, such as a wire or focused laser beam. Broadcast links need to use radio spectrum. As such point to point links can assume to always have the nominal bandwidth available, where shared mediums must divide the available bandwidth among all the nodes using that medium.

4. The average distance covered by any link is 1KM. This is optimistic for regular 802.11, but perfectly possible with fixed point to point links such as directed wifi.

Let us first discuss the infeasibility of such a mesh network to support primarily real time communication, as the current Internet does. Assume, for the moment, that it takes one millisecond for a node to forward a packet. Given the assumed average link length of one kilometre the network would have a minimum round trip time of 45 milliseconds from one side of a moderately sized town to the other and back again. That isn't too bad and is slightly faster than most of the current Internet. However, most of the websites you visit aren't hosted in the same city. Most aren't even in the same province. Let us assume that you are in Calgary and wish to access a site in Vancouver. The driving distance is about 1000KM which we'll use since nobody is can afford to lay a hundred kilometre link. That means that a round trip would take two entire seconds. That isn't quite what most people consider real time.

If the problem was just latency we could all get used to it. Unfortunately we also have to deal with bandwidth. As mentioned in this paper the average number of nodes a random request must traverse is proportional to the square root of the total number of nodes in the network. This implies that the average available bandwidth for each node is the bandwidth of the link divided by the square root of the number of nodes. Take the 100Mbps assumption and scale the network to ten thousand nodes and the effective bandwidth for each node averages out to 1Mbps. Such a network would cover a small geographic area and 100Mbps is quite optimistic. More realistic may be an average link speed of 10Mbps which gives and average of 0.1Mbps, approximately 10KB/s, on a ten thousand node network. While there are certainly uses for such a network I'm not sure that people in urban areas would be willing to go back to dial up speeds.

However, if most of the network accesses can be made to traverse only a small number of nodes then the bandwidth and latency issues are dramatically reduced. This can be achieved simply by using a caching architecture where each node has a cache of the content which has passed through it. A request would then be serviced by the first node on the path which had the content cached. Unfortunately this means that real time access won't happen, but most of the web isn't real time anyways. There is still the latency problem from distant nodes in other cities or provinces with transfer of updated content taking hours. You won't be able to IM your friend in New York, but you could still email them.

So real time access isn't going to happen, that doesn't mean such a network wouldn't be useful. Local content would still be fast enough. So let us consider the requirements of setting such a mesh up. The biggest requirement for a mesh is to have the maximum possible aggregate bandwidth on each node. Since the primary factor in aggregate bandwidth of a node is the number of network mediums it uses obviously every node needs as many mediums as possible.

As explained in the assumptions there are two broad classes of mediums. Shared and private. Shared media have the benefits of being easy. All it takes is a device with a wifi card to join a shared media. Unfortunately shared media, while allowing many links between nodes, shares some fixed bandwidth among all those links and the links of other nodes using the same media. A fast 802.11n shared medium would probably only afford each link an average bandwidth of around 1Mbps unless the network was quiet. Private media, on the other hand, always provide good bandwidth to each link. Unfortunately it takes one private media for each link and additional effort for each link. A private Wifi link requires directional antennas be aimed and configuration between both ends of the link. Private media may also provide good range, such as the Free Space Optics mentioned above which are reliable out to 1.4KM.

Who has the energy and knowledge to setup numerous, or even one point to point link? Not normal users who just want to plug something into a wall and have it work. Just Geeks. I don't know that there is sufficient density of true geeks to put such a network together. You'd need at least one on every side of every apartment building and a couple on every block of houses. That's a lot of geeks talking to each other.

A successful mesh network could be built and would probably look like Freenet. Anybody want to confirm that the network assumptions are similar?