Recent Comments

Or perhaps covalent?

I feel a big part getting more users involved with voting in the pipe, and eventually story submissions, is giving better visibility on the homepage, and actively encouraging participation from readers -

• The main 'pipe' link should have a indication of how many stories are waiting. For logged-in users, ideally it would show a 'un-seen' count, similar to unread comments.

• Some method of asking readers to vote/get involved on a story without having to navigate to the Pipe page. A few ideas i had:
  • An occasional bubble, floating top bar, or inline-box suggesting a random pipe story, and asking if the viewer finds the subject interesting. Extra emphasis on occasional.
  • A small left or right UI box to list 3-6 most recent story titles, with small up-vote buttons
  • To encourage positive voting, a down-vote would be presented as 'flagging' a story (Pipe page would still present up/down.) Older, or stale stories would get a bump in display priority.
  • If the pipe fills past x-amount, a temporary (read: self-expiring) notification could be sent to all, or a random subset of users as a plea for help (I envision US Propaganda poster-style imagery - "What have you done for Pipedot today??") :D

• A notice on the Pipe page encouraging people to use the comments to suggest alternative links, corrections, etc., and clarifying that pipe comments don't publish with the story.

• I'd like to see the pipe list sort itself not primarily by date but by rating, similar to your OP pipe suggestion # 2; Higher ranked stories would rise to the top, low to the bottom.

• Down-arrows be a different color; its difficult to tell what you voted when presented with a full pipe, the green arrows blend. Personally I would prefer it to 'pop'
• I like the idea that stories could automatically publish, or delete depending on votes, or lack of votes within a defined time period. I'm a bit wary about auto-publish, as it could encourage a decline in submission quality, if left completely unedited; abuse aside.

Well, thats my 30 cents ;)

My mistake. It must just be the lack of visibility of the pipe, combined with the occasional lull in stories. I'd like to find a way to encourage the broader readership to be involved in their content.

Had another idea, i'll drop it in the recent suggestions story.

Actually, there was also a dearth of votes on the pipe for weeks and weeks before janjes dropped-in, when there were just a few stories here.

Meh. Ethyl Cyanoacrylate is better...

In its zeal to push the "see, government is inherently incompetent and inefficient" narrative, TFA completely neglects to mention the role of private contractors in all that.

TFA really isn't heavy-handed at all. They list some successes as well. But really, it's no secret that a huge number of high-profile government IT projects have failed, spectacularly, so no "zeal" nor "push" is needed to make the point. They list a few reasons for the failures. And whatever may be going on with the contracts, it doesn't change the simple fact of a history of big and expensive failures, and the terrible side-effects that harm everyone.

could you elaborate? It sounds snark, but I just wanted to be sure I knew what you were talking about.

I think lack of votes is in part due to the content of the pipe; alot of recent posts don't interest me, but not to the point of voting down either. In the past the pipe has been quite a bit more active (vote-wise), but now that the pipe is filling up, it has the wall-of-text feel, i think its easy to become disinterested and drift away.

That said, I feel its important for there to be an indicator on the homepage as to how many stories are currently in the pipe. Talk of a notification system makes me believe this will be an eventuality.

Now we have stories in the pipe, but sadly lack any interested readers to come by and vote on them. Maybe site changes will help, or maybe there just aren't enough people who care about this place at all to keep it afloat.

Anything is better than a youtube link

The pipe is not so dry anymore...

Janjes beat me to it... I didn't look at the pipe before submitting. But hey, mine is better, anyhow.

When the TPA is signed in 10 days time will this be the first bio invention to be given to America?

Ahahahaha. Big outsourcers like Accidenture will not touch a contract that holds them to account. They like to claim that in IT nothing is certain so while they can sign a 200 million dollar contract they don't agree to deliver. It has been happening for decades.

In its zeal to push the "see, government is inherently incompetent and inefficient" narrative, TFA completely neglects to mention the role of private contractors in all that. Who's landing these plums, and why aren't the contracts written with milestone payments, performance mandates, and clawback provisions for if/when the contractor fails to deliver? And we know integrating cruÅ¿ty legacy systems is no cakewalk, but there's zero analysis or technical detail of the cause of these failures. How do you spend upwards of half a billion dollars and have nothing to show for it? Who's rolling around in that money now, and why aren't they behind bars, or at least being sued?

this would be interesting for the 'Stream', but its not a story.

I want one, not that I'd have any real use for it. I have about 5 square meters of garden, a mallet, and some poles. I could deal to those weeds myself.
I think one negative thing it does, though, is remove another avenue of unskilled labor. Some people just can't upskill - and some can, but don't have an avenue for employment afterward, no matter how hard they work. Some places just have no demand for other skillsets.

Anonymity is like virginity. You don't get it back once you've lost it.

Hard to read more with youtube link. Not all of us are sitting at a pc

A link to somewhere other than youtube would be nice...

Love

Sat in the Pipe for 4 days with no constructive input from anybody. That would have been the time to make changes to it.

In fact there's a dozens of articles piled-up in the pipe right now, some almost three-weeks old, just waiting for a few users to offer up or down-votes to determine if they should go live or be closed.

Pretty badly designed Web form.

Personally, I would have preferred the article to include this link --
http://news.mit.edu/2015/shockwave-process-desalination-water-1112
The YouTube link is to someone reading the press release...in a bad accent.

As for Connery, I find it difficult to like a James Bond who rapes women during the course of his adventures...

We're too damn over-sensitized in this political-correctness charged environment, where everything from making sexist comments to being drunk is called a sex crime. We rightfully mock Saudi Arabia for it's lack of women's rights, but fail to recognize the west has gone ridiculously far in the opposite direction.

In Bond's case, using a bit of force to just KISS a woman is certainly NOT rape... though it might qualify as some other sort of assault. James Bond doesn't exactly shy away from assault... in fact he murders people. Which one would you say is worse? This kind of depiction isn't limited to Sean Connery, at least Harrison Ford in Blade Runner had a similar scene, which was far less whimsical.

Over-classifying everything as rape is both unjust and will eventually have the opposite effect of de-stigmatizing and reducing punishments on actual, possibly violent, rapists, who will become indistinguishable from the large group of average people. You can see this as far back as the unfortunate term "statutory-rape", and has now happened with sex-offenders' registries, where folks completely ignore it, because they have become worthless through overuse.

I thought Lazenby was awful, On Her Majesty's Secret Service was a very dull movie.
As for Connery, I find it difficult to like a James Bond who rapes women during the course of his adventures...

There is no bond actor I dislike. They are all pretty good, I think. I voted Connery, though.

first post!

THEY ARE MONITORING US WHOLESALE FROM SPACE>

I didn't vote (up or down), but it is fairly mundane news.

Other apps have had offline navigation for years, even some free ones like HERE... Google's offline maps support is pretty cumbersome, having to select all the areas you might ever want to go to, in a series of small squares, one at a time... Others make it one click to download entire US states, or even whole countries.

Google isn't the best online Navigation app, either... While not exactly relevant for offline navigation, it unfortunately tells you about traffic slowdowns up ahead, but never bothers trying to route you around them! Only thing Google Maps has going for it is larger volumes of POI/business info, but that is often wrong, and the bad info doesn't get fixed for years.

Incidentally, a link to a YouTube video where someone reads you the same story you just read, isn't a very good source for |. submissions, either. I'd be inclined to vote them down for that reason alone, but that's IMHO, and I've refrained from voting at all so far.

Could at least post a comment saying why

I like how super glue is in 2nd place. :)

I think Bond is who he was when you first watched. So Dalton will always seem like Bond to me. Not particular charismatic, not particularly athletic, not particularly good with the ladies. But the universe around him just gets bent to his will so effortlessly. No sweat. If I were designing a prototype secret agent, I'd want a guy like that. You wouldn't remember seeing him at a party. You wouldn't remember bumping into him. When scanning a room, you wouldn't consider him a threat.

Unfortunately, for all those reasons, people didn't like watching movies he was in. Ah well, a more realistic secret agent is too boring for movies I guess. And yeah, kind of goes against everything Bond is supposed to be.

Edit:

I kind of love the fact that he's in third place after my vote. Pipe dot, you get me.

one week later: https://thestack.com/world/2015/11/13/microsoft-open-sources-its-machine-learning-toolkit/

From that link:

For now, it's not clear from the FBI's statement which part is inaccurate: the specific payment amount or its involvement entirely.

So really, they're just trying to save face. It likely happened, but the news misses enough details for them to say "that exact thing you are talking about didn't happen." Considering how many of these types of things the FBI has done with impunity, I don't know why they even bother denying it. There is probably a large enough "for the children" voting bloc to keep this type of illegal activity going strong for generations to come.

I ran out of words about this kind of thing, and even though I'm from a different country, I'm angry as hell about it.

This has been sitting here for roughly a day with no comments. I can only presume it's because everyone is becoming desensitized to this type of news. "Government Overreach," "Warrant-less Searches," "FBI Hates Tor," are all headlines that just feel like the new norm.

Are you looking for something like these?

- http://lostintransit.se/tag/full-mesh/

- https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_topology#Mesh

You're absolutely correct about mesh performance.

However, mesh networks provide other attractive features, such as fault tolerance and independence from established infrastructure.

The research work needed to make mesh networks a reality is based on adaptive learning, AI, and graph theory. All hard core topics in CS and maths. If we can come up with clever algorithms to ensure packets can traverse the mesh in optimal time, then mesh will become a reality. Keep in mind that any backbone (or really, multiple fast p2p links) will simply be a fast node on the mesh, and the algorithm will correctly route through (or around as required) it. In this way the mesh network can provide throughput via multiple changing backbones, but maintain its fault tolerance and independence. Interesting topic that's for sure.

For years I've been searching out a link I found that gave the performance of a wireless repeater mesh in an equation. I can't remember the precise equation, but it was something like P = (N(N-1))/N where N is the number of nodes. Basically, you add a node, you lose capacity as any transmission through it needs to be repeated across any number of nodes in the path, before coming back along the path, halving the bandwidth.
I don't think a mesh is as useful as people imagine it is. We'd need a serious backbone through it.

A WiFi AP is $20, which can act as wireless repeater, router with dynamic routing protocols, etc.

Nearly all WiFi chips can do ad hoc mode, including routing with software. Then you just need to throw in Gnutella to allow chat and file sharing without extra infrastructure.

Might be better to point there: http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2015-09-21-light-based-memory-chip-first-ever-store-data-permanently

There is also the paper in Nature, but unfortunately it's paywalled: http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v9/n11/full/nphoton.2015.182.html

It's ad hoc WiFi with better range in exchange for lower bandwidth.

That is what WiMax promised us all a decade ago: consumer level WiFi with 1km range, but it got hijacked by the wireless guys and a consumer standard/product never eventuated.

The Wikipedia page for WiMax is the most useless information source I've ever read.

FIDOnet!!

Not a bad idea, actually.

Here they are ;-)

http://news.mit.edu/2015/software-converts-2-d-3-d-video-1104
https://youtu.be/l4lU8JQQWac

I'll admit that the second link by itself is not much of interest, but still informative.