jurjenhaitsma

At times I feel my "behaviour" is limited by the interface - I'd like to read both comments and the article side by side so I can reference comments to particular sections in the article / site.

At other times I wished a side-by-side option was available on the front page - think of the front page as a table-of-contents, then have a frame on the right where the article (or comments) can be displayed - would save a lot of reloads, as I tend to do a session of (look at items -> look at article 1 -> back to items -> article 4 etc etc)

"The big thing coming up in October is the inclusion of CouchDB into the Ubuntu Linux distribution"

- ah, I wondered why I saw erlang being installed while updating the latest ubuntu alpha (5)... and here I was thinking that all those erlang articles a couple of weeks ago started a new trend...

I concur with your proposal and suggest fleshing it out by having 4 directional modifiers:

UP for agree (Propably the most common action)

LEFT for good contribution / insightful / well-constructed argument

DOWN for disagree

RIGHT for bad contribution / troll

This would enable rating of votes in 2 dimensions and may possibly map to a page layout (ie agree+good at top left, then the not so good but still agreed being placed further to the right)

Could alternatively have the comments coloured based on good/bad value (probably some sort of logarithmic scale) and sorted vertically by agree/disagree value, which would still allow conversation threads...

I'm just guessing here, but I'd say it is based on a similar scheme as skype - the browser opens an initial route to the opera server, which essentially stays open (think ajax) while the browser is running, and then the server can route the requests back to this link. Any NAT is taken care of in the initial connection, so as long as it isn't broken, any "incoming" request will in fact be a reply to the original open connection.

A succinct summary of a vague sense of "wrongness" that I have experienced for a while now...

With computing progressing more-or-less along moore's law, responsiveness and speed seem to stay steady or get worse - and this can't all be explained by the "extra" functionality provided... Vista anyone?

While the paper gives hope that it is up on the radar, I suspect it may be some time before we see any widespread adoption of the ideas - we're talking a paradigm shift in an ego-centric industry...

However, a great find! Definitely something to chew over...

I read about this a while ago (slashdot?) and thought it was quite intriguing myself. I believe there were some complications with withdrawal symptoms so buyer beware.

As for your request, most competent electronics hobbyists / engineers could likely build a crude version, but I could see complications arising from the vast number of electrical sources potentially disrupting your "north" signal.

Which led me to ponder a refinement - by using gps, although encoding location is quite a complication, it would be an incredible extension of the idea. A possible implementation would have latitude and longitude pads that could either vibrate at a varying frequency or (for extra leet points) activating a series of binary pads to encode the lat/long.

This is pretty choice - reminds me of untangling a circuit layout... Never really looked into it that much, but I'd imagine there must be a mathematical technique that can be applied. My first instinct has always been to put the point with the most connections in the centre, then map out from that.

It does bring up an interesting issue though - what if someone did set up a botnet, then used it for a generally beneficial purpose... sort of a modern-day take on robin hood...

This would be quite different to SETI or other similar distributed-processing apps, as it spreads itself without user intervention / specific installation. If this was used for some useful purpose (eg auto-mirroring content based on current traffic) I could see some very interesting possibilities.

However - the temptation to subvert it for nefarious purposes once it is up and running is likely to be too great for it to last long...

Waiuku, New Zealand. Bonus points if you know where it is...