Here in Aus we can only afford for one company in the entire island to do this work, badly: the NBN! Trying to install a fibre network in AU since 2009 (and failing big time!)

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a kangaroo pouch full of hard drives, hopping across the outback...

You need look no further than what happened with Wiki leaks, to see the kind of painful embargo a large country like Brazil could use against an uncooperative foreign website like Facebook:

http://www.cnet.com/news/mastercard-pulls-plug-on-wikileaks-payments/

I placed 91 orders in 2015, 'mkay? I care a lot about 2 days vs 7 days. I use Prime Video all the time. So it is a huge bargain FOR ME.

Your numbers made me curious, so I checked on mine and Amazon reports I placed 123 orders in 2015, and that's a bit lower than the previous year. All this without paying a cent for Prime, and depending on free shipping.

Of course, without a dollar figure, this isn't too revealing... One $1 item can count as an order, and Amazon often splits up a single cart into multiple orders.

I will be curious to see how the increased threshold for free shipping affects their sales this year.

Walmart is closing stores and emphasizing online ordering these days.

Walmart is only closing 3 percent of its US locations... A tiny figure. And that's after a building boom, where they were putting new Walmarts EVERYWHERE. 66 percent of the store closures are their "smallest-format [convenience] stores called Walmart Express". Nearly all (95 percent) "of the stores set to be closed in the U.S. are within 10 miles of another Walmart." There are 4 Walmarts within just 12 miles of my location. And as I said, ordering online doesn't preclude picking up your online order in-store, for free. Not to mention the many other retailers with lower free-shipping thresholds.

$50 happens to be the cutoff for Walmart online, too.

Walmart also offers free $0 in-store pickup on ALMOST anything you can order online. No such option with Amazon.

Target is just $25 for free shipping. Sears/Kmart is at $35. Frys.com is still $34 to get free shipping.

Of course many 3rd party sellers listed on Amazon have free shipping included in the price, with no minimum order size, but Amazon commonly sells the item much cheaper, if they have it available at all.

Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world. So, there are no doubt tens of millions of people who will care very, very much. If you're not one of them, no problem, just move on.

Seems like a pretty insipid non-story to me:

"We'll slowly phase out Motorola and focus on Moto."
Motorola's iconic M "batwing" logo will still be used.
Motorola said it removed its name from the packaging in 2013.

They've already been using the "Moto" naming for years, with the Moto X, Moto G, Moto E being their big products the past several years.

Sounds like one tech writer (with nothing else to report that week) is bemoaning the downfall and sale of Motorola's phone division, at 3+ years after the fact.

And FWIW, Lenovo has been pretty successful since buying Motorola, with those phones I listed above selling quite well the past several years, much better than Motorola or Google managed to do with the brand in recent years.

There are innumerable stories of programmers in Silicon Valley earning 6 figure salaries, yet homeless as they still can't pay local rents. Rent/mortgage is the biggest expense most of us have, and off grid homes can drop that to a pittance. How long could you live on a year of your salary if housing was nearly free? You might find a few short term contract gigs provide you with enough money to sustain your lifestyle. Of course that's not true for a decent number of people who just waste every extra dollar they earn on frivolous luxuries.

Living off the grid USED TO be hard, but PV solar panels and cheap turbines, along with energy-efficient appliances (e.g. LED TVs, heat-pumps, phones/tablets, etc.) have made it far more practical these days. The same goes for cellular or satellite internet access, digital OTA or satellite TV, improved and inexpensive water pumps, low flow toilets & clothes washers, etc, etc.

$40k? Yikes! A used mobile home or travel trailer cost a tiny fraction of that...

The "cool" reply address masking feature is an option that can be toggled on and off. I recommend leaving out off, because spam filtering will trigger all the time on the apparent bounced e-mail that is not a reply to anything you've sent.

Not necessarily true. $42/kW could be close to their actual cost to deliver peak power. So they earn $30,000 less, but they don't have to pay out as much to the expensive peaking power plants, and/or they can sell that generation and transmission capacity to another business in the area to recoup the loss.

That said, I wouldn't put rate increases past SDG&E... Every electric utility out there is trying to kill off net metering and impose exorbitant fees on residential solar customers, even though the numbers say they generally break-even on the arrangement. Fortunately only Nevada has caved, while PUCs, legislators and similar have refused to allow those rate increases almost universally across the country.

Works well for me with Firefox on Android. Redirects to URL:

http://m.deccanherald.com/articles.php?name=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.deccanherald.com%2Fcontent%2F494474%2Foil-droplets-turn-cells-tiny.html

complains I have JS disable

For Firefox, go into about:config and set:
accessibility.blockautorefresh to true

Lots of sites are doing nasty stuff with meta redirects, so changing that setting is a good idea. You can still click on the pop-up notice if you want to follow it.

suggests I might like to download NETSCAPE... how old is that site???

They have a banner for Netscape 7.1, which was released in 2003-2004. Yeah, the site is a bit crufty, but I'll take that over the likes of Forbes' shiny new site that breaks if you have ad blocking enabled.

Some have undetected configuration problems like out of phase audio.
I've seen one station that NEVER has had any audio,

Those problems likely have to do with station operators not wanting to pay any money to technician to properly set things up, and periodically maintain them. These are unlikely to be issues in Syria, where the guys setting these up are personally interested in having them work, and are not trying to make money on them (or just setting up the basics to maintain their FCC license), and everyone will work for food, anyhow. And with little competition on the air, listeners will no doubt tolerate whatever problems the broadcaster has, to get their news and entertainment fix.

Android doesn't have an EULA. You may have to agree to terms when linking your gmail account and first using the Play Store, but those things are optional. You can choose to use non-gmail accounts, and a 3rd party app store, without Google being involved at all, and never agreeing to their terms. The more intrusive part is OEM terms, which you can't always avoid. But since several companies make Android phones and tablets, you can shop around for the license you dislike the least.

I miss the Friday distro review. Can we do antiX next?

It can be any distro you like, if you write it up and submit it to the pipe...

You're suffering from a severe lack of context... Syria is several years into a massive and brutal civil war.

didn't mention -- output power (probably illegal if over 100mW?)

Do you know anybody who has been executed for operating a transmitter over the legal power limit? Simple survival is the major pressing concern for everyone there, right now.

operating one of these in hostile territory is asking for trouble -- like a swat team through your door.

That's where the "work autonomously" bit comes in. You go set it up, turn it on, and leave. Someone tracking it down will find a few hundred dollars worth of equipment, and no way to trace it back to anybody.

They still make a few USB flash thumb drives with write-protect switches:

http://amazon.com/Kanguru-SS3/dp/B008OGNM8E/

And you can mount the devices read-only, or otherwise disable writing in software:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/registry-hack-to-disable-writing-to-usb-drives/

Not perfect, like a write-blocker, but probably usable, and much better than nothing.

There are options, they just aren't cheap...

http://www.cru-inc.com/products/wiebetech/usb_writeblocker/

Quick search says NYC outlawed them, and most every other motorized non-car...

http://time.com/4123076/hoverboard-new-york-illegal/

|. was dying before... There were almost no community submissions, just my own, and I wasn't going to keep it up much longer. The flood of stories from Janjes can at least keep things going. If you want to keep |. alive, it's really all up to YOU.

Does the Vatican openly place a bounty for killing someone that doesn't like catholicism?

There's no such large organization for Muslims (nor for Protestants for that matter). A Pakistani politician is not comparable. There's plenty of Christian hate groups trying to kill muslims:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/man-build-ray-weapon-kill-muslims-sentenced-prison/story?id=35807538

There's much more overt anti-Muslim rhetoric from Jewish rabbis. Those "price tag attacks" against Muslims have been rather prolific.

terrorism by other factions was common in the past, but what about recently?

Everything above is quite recent. Anders Breivik's rampage was just back in 2011.

You should really have read through the links I provided and not just the HEADLINE! They do a good job answering your (loaded) questions very directly:

in 2013, there were 152 terror attacks in Europe. Only two of them were "religiously motivated," while 84 were predicated upon ethno-nationalist or separatist beliefs.
...
In December 2013, FLNC terrorists carried out simultaneous rocket attacks against police stations in two French cities. And in Greece in late 2013, the left-wing Militant Popular Revolutionary Forces shot and killed two members of the right-wing political party Golden Dawn.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/14/are-all-terrorists-muslims-it-s-not-even-close.html

.

Why don't islamic countries want islamic refugees?

Turkey is taking responsibility for fully HALF of Syrian refugees, at great expense. Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt are home to nearly all the rest. The number going to Europe is miniscule by comparison:

"In three days in September 2014, Turkey received some 130,000 refugees from Syria - more than the entire European Union had in the past three years"
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/11/20/amnesty-international-85-percent-syrian-refugees-in-turkey-living-outside.html

Successful Muslim (Gulf) countries like Saudi Arabia are JUST AS DISTANT from Syria as the EU is. Those same distant Muslim countries ARE now contributing significant amounts of money to support the current crop of Syrian refugees (though it certainly took them quite a while, and they could reasonably be doing more). They have some peculiar issues with taking in more refugees, which seem quite strange to someone in a western country:

"these countries are already overloaded with foreigners. For example, 88 percent of the population of the United Arab Emirates are foreigners. For Qatar, it's 85 and Kuwait 70 percent." http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-09-03/what-are-gulf-countries-doing-help-syrian-refugee-crisis

Lots more useful information is available here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_the_Syrian_Civil_War

His treatment of women, though, is strictly for personal enjoyment.

Unlikely. In just about every film, a Bond Girl is a crucial tool to help him accomplish his ("government agent") goals. In at least a few films, he gets tacit approval to pursue one woman or another.

So it's just a coincidence France lets a bunch of muslims in...and now has terrorist problem...right?

France has had "terrorist problems" for CENTURIES... And Germany has just as many Muslims as France, with far fewer incidents of terrorism. All those Syrian refugees aren't going to France, so Germany should have a significantly larger Muslim population in a few years.

Nearly a year-old, but directly on-the-nose:

Want to guess what percent of the terrorist attacks there were committed by Muslims over the past five years? Wrong. That is, unless you said less than 2 percent.
...
We are talking about groups like France's FLNC, which advocates an independent nation for the island of Corsica. In December 2013, FLNC terrorists carried out simultaneous rocket attacks against police stations in two French cities.
...
one of the worst terror attacks ever in Europe in 2011, when Anders Breivik slaughtered 77 people in Norway to further his anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and pro-"Christian Europe" agenda as he stated in his manifesto,
- http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/14/are-all-terrorists-muslims-it-s-not-even-close.html
- http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/01/08/3609796/islamist-terrorism-europe/

No, recently.

Anti-government, secessionists, anti-abortionists, KKK, neo-nazis, anti-secular evangelicals, conspiracy theorists, etc. Not to mention all the new anti-islamists crazies who go and murder random brown-skinned people.

Even with just mass shootings, only a tiny minority are done by Islamists.

Not a great list, but this should put things in proper perspective:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#2010.E2.80.93present

More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_terrorism#United_States

I don't mean to be US-only, just that the english Wiki doesn't do an in-depth job on much else.

Even more on-the-nose:

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/05/muslims-only-carried-out-2-5-percent-of-terrorist-attacks-on-u-s-soil-between-1970-and-2012.html

There have been more deaths in the west due to Christian terrorists, than Islamic ones.

I'm not sure I get the distinction between protecting forest ecosystems and desert ecosystems.

Compare the density of plant and animal life in a desert, with a forest. Deserts are necessarily sparse, and so you can develop far more desert land while doing much less damage. Since development isn't going to stop, the LESS destructive method is preferable.

I can tell you there are lots and lots of plants in the "mostly-empty" desert.

We won't run out of creosote bushes.

The whole idea of protecting individual animals and plants is that all species play a role in the ecosystem

Actually the popularity of the endangered species act is all about people wanting to preserve their childhood, and the animals they remember. The smaller and less significant the animal, the less public interest in protecting them. In truth, many species go extinct all the time, their impact on the ecosystem is low, and nearly nobody cares when it happens. It's only when large animals disappear that people bat an eyelash.

taking one species out threatens others in ways that are often unpredictable.

That sounds a little too much like the fear-mongering mantra of anti-chemical/vaccine/GMO/nuclear groups to me. The ecosystem of Arizona didn't collapse when the Santa Cruz Pupfish (Cyprinodon arcuatus) went extinct. In fact, can you point to ANY ecosystems that collapsed as the result of a few minor plants or animals going extinct? Particularly when we're talking about one endangered minor sub-species of an animal that's otherwise doing fine, it's hard to justify all the expensive efforts to preserve it. And in the deserts, too, there are state and federal parks and preserves which will provide sanctuary for endemic species.

Of course this isn't the first time light has been used for computer communications. IrDA was the wireless communications protocol of choice before WiFi ever appeared, with IrLAN access point-type devices allowing rooms full of PDAs to connect to the local network, and the internet, wirelessly.

While WiFi is relatively slow, much faster WiDi/Miracast/WiGig has been around in niche applications for a few years. The high frequencies used have some of the same limitations as visible light communications, which has limited adoption thus far. Since people will continue to want WiFi, WiGig will integrate much better with it.

Li-Fi has some serious limitation... Significant expense to upgrade your lights, or at least their controllers. And only one-way communications at those speeds... Your computers, laptops and smartphones will need some way to send information back. That would mean lights in your devices, and optical pickups all over the building.

Building cities outwards necessarily either requires removing farmland or destroying ecosystems, which is far and wide the largest contributor to extinctions. Since a significant goal of lower emissions is to save the environment and all its inhabitants, urban sprawl goes directly against this.

The US population keeps moving south and west... The Southwestern US is not farms or forests (except in small spots), but mostly-empty desert. While there are some endangered species there, it's a very small number. Maybe it's just me, but I can't get myself worked-up that development of thousands of square miles of desert land might eventually endanger a couple bird sub-species. Particularly in the light of so much more damage being caused if that land development was done outside the sparsely populated desert. Several (certainly not all) desert animals do much better in suburbs, anyhow.

Besides, whatever may be theoretically best, the economics show sprawl, even with commuting, is still massively more affordable than high-demand city living. People will continue to want to live without neighbors above and below them, and will want decent-sized yards that they don't have to share. Cutting-out the energy wasted by daily commuting is a net-positive result, regardless.

Building out fiber to remote areas doesn't help either as jobs continue to demand the worker be there during work hours. Look at what Yahoo did for an example.

The fact that Yahoo discontinued telecommuting, is not evidence that telecommuting doesn't work... Your link turns up opinion pieces on both sides, some saying it was a good idea, others saying it was a mistake, and most saying the number of companies who allow telecommuting keeps increasing. For Yahoo, I think it was just a tool to cut employees without as much downside as firings or layoffs.

If you exclude visible light, you are left with the sides of this, which are awful.

Your graph shows a tremendous amount of power available in the infrared. I don't see a problem.

In addition, HEAT reduces panel efficiency. So allowing lots of unused light right through will offer a small improvement in efficiency, by itself.

Why would you use solar panels at high latitude? That's another intentional handicap. Put them where the sun actually shines, maybe?

Because billions of people live at high latitudes. They need energy, too. Power lines over running thousands of kilometers have huge losses. We haven't gotten superconductors to work quite yet, and even if we did, the up-front construction costs would be huge.

there's casing and transformers and grid connections and mechanical mounts, all of which break and need maintenance. If you are on a roof, that's fine. If you are on the side of a skyscraper, it's more expensive.

The "transformers and grid connections" wouldn't be located on the sides of the skyscraper (perhaps in the dropped-ceilings), so no additional maintenance burden there. The "mounts" already exist to hold windows in place, and window washers are already routine, so no additional expenses there. There will be just a little more expense in routing electrical lines from the panels, which wouldn't be required with plain windows.

There are plenty of southern population centers to supply with cheap, dumb, efficient, boring solar panels.

Nothing wrong with that, but it's not as if these efforts will somehow slow or stop the production of traditional PV panels. People in less-than-ideal conditions for existing solar panels would like to get some of the benefits, too, and there's no reason to stop them.

Not using SD is hardly a fault.

It is if you want more than those 4GB of storage... or to easily exchange files.

HDMI on something like this would be just brain dead. You debug something like this over a serial wire.

These are high-end devices, which are quite capable of decoding HD video, and that's been a very common use of RPi hardware. You may not be interested in that use, but clearly many people are. If everything but a serial port is unnecessary, why does CHIP include composite video output?

Putting them on the wall! You no longer need to purposely cripple your panel by making it transparent to 70% of the energy in solar spectrum!

Common solar panels are only 20% efficient, anyhow. If these will work, and can be made at reasonable prices, they're not crippled at all. Things like skyscrapers, which need as much electricity as they can get, don't have any "wall" space that isn't transparent.

You know what's even better than putting solar panels on the wall? Putting them on the roof! That way you can lay them flat to catch the sun better.

Only at near the equator do solar panels laying flat "catch the sun better." The further away from the equator you go, the steeper the angle you need and the more efficient vertical mounting will be.

Putting them on the ground! That way you can put them on sun-tracking mounts, and easily walk around and make repairs/replacements as needed.

Rooftop is far better, as you're utilizing otherwise wasted and nearly-free real-estate. They should last for 30+ years before needing "repairs/replacements" and going up to a roof doesn't add much expense.

You know what's even better than putting them on the ground? Putting them on the ground in the desert! That way you don't need to pay for expensive city real-estate.

Except the city real-estate was provided free by the property owner, while the desert real estate had to be purchased, environmental studies done, endangered animal habitat relocated/mitigated, etc.

And even in the US, transmission from the deserts up to northern population centers is far too inefficient and wasteful, not to mention requiring huge up-front costs to build it out. The use case is even worse for other countries, who may not have any big empty deserts.

The lack of HDMI and SD seems like a big oversight, while being twice the price. WiFi is a nice addition, if you need it for your project, and don't need HDMI or SD.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Are you looking for something like these?

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

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

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.

I don't see where you got that, as I found your source saying precisely the opposite:

"Of the 41 separate countries classified in these two years, seven were found to show no evidence of filtering (Egypt, France, Germany, India, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States),"

Reporters Without Borders flagged the United States for their SURVEILLANCE of internet users, NOT censorship.

You're quite welcome to down-vote anything that doesn't interest you.

Submitted to the pipe on Thursday, waited there all this time for three up-votes.

The other (Google fiber) story I submitted around the same time is still waiting...

Thanks for showing solidarity by including a typo in your own subject line...

Discussed here: http://pipedot.org/2T88

I just have to ask...

Why do users need all three of /feed/ /stream/ & /reader/ ? Seems an awful lot of replication of almost the same functionality. And that's in addition to the site-wide versions. And this is all in-addition to (and separate from) the stories on the front page.

I'm pretty happy with the (native, offline) feed reader on my phone, so I can't imagine I'll be switching to (browser based, online) Pipedot's feed reader, but it does still seem confusingly almost-redundant, and doesn't really integrate together within the site (at least not yet).

So, really it's not about a greater placebo effect in the US, but longer trials that change the placebo response.

No, it definitely IS about the placebo effect. Longer trials are only one of several possible explanations as to why the effect is significant in the US. An alternative theory as to the cause is the "direct-to-consumer advertising for drugs - allowed only in the United States and New Zealand".

A third option is that this study may simply be wrong: "I don't think that controlling the placebo response will increase the number of successful trials. What drug companies have to do is to find more effective drugs." -Fabrizio Benedetti, who studies placebo responses at the University of Turin, Italy.

http://www.nature.com/news/strong-placebo-response-thwarts-painkiller-trials-1.18511

The FDA's standards for response above placebo are very, very low.

"more than 90% of potential drugs for treatment of neuropathic and cancer pain have failed at advanced phases of clinical trials"

It should be harder to make new drugs that solve the same problem as existing ones: if it's not better, why should people have to pay higher prices for it (new drugs get new patents)?

While new drugs get new patents, the old drugs remain just as cheap. If you don't have a good reason to use the newer one... don't!

But new drugs are still important. Some people have bad reactions to components of certain drugs, but do fine with others. Different drugs have different side effects. The effectiveness of new drug may be significantly better than the existing drug on specific stages of illness (e.g. diagnosis too late-stage for the cheaper medication to be effective). Of all the problems that exist in pharmaceuticals, too-many good & effective drugs isn't one of significant concern.