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The dreaded whirring and grinding of dental drills could soon become a thing of the past as the Guardian reports that scientists at King's College London have developed a new pain-free filling that allows cavities to be repaired without drilling or injections. The tooth-rebuilding technique also does away with fillings and instead encourages teeth to repair themselves.

Around 2.3 billion people are believed to suffer from tooth decay every year, making it one of the most common preventable diseases in the world. Cavities start as a microscopic defect where minerals leak out of the tooth and the enamel is eventually undermined. The new treatment, called Electrically Accelerated and Enhanced Remineralisation (EAER), accelerates the natural movement of calcium and phosphate minerals into the damaged tooth by first preparing the damaged area of enamel, then using a tiny electric current to push minerals into the repair site. "The way we treat teeth today is not ideal. When we repair a tooth by putting in a filling, that tooth enters a cycle of drilling and refilling as, ultimately, each 'repair' fails," says Professor Nigel Pitts. "Not only is our device kinder to the patient and better for their teeth, but it's expected to be at least as cost-effective as current dental treatments. Along with fighting tooth decay, our device can also be used to whiten teeth."

There has been a lot of discussion on the site recently about the quality of the stories, the number of stories, the number of comments stories receive, and whether Soylent should slow down the flow of stories. As a frequent submitter to Soylent and someone who has submitted stories to Slashdot for over ten years, here is my two cents - a polemic if you will, designed to start some discussion on a topic that I think is critical for the long term success of Soylent News.

Quality of the Stories is the Most Important Single Factor Driving Readership

Everybody agrees that readers come to a site like Soylent for the discussion not for the stories. Now it is probably not politically correct for me to to say so, but in my opinion the quality of the stories is the single most important factor that drives readership on a site like soylent of slashdot. The quality of the stories drives the number of the comments which drives the quality of comments. It's chicken/egg. You have to have an interesting story to get the comments started before you have good comments and a good discussion.

Let's Define a Successful Submission

First let's define an objective standard of a successful submission. The purpose of a submission is always to get a critical number of comments going. To me, unless a story gets 10 comments it is a failure. A story on Soylent with twenty comments is a success. A story with thrity comments or above is a huge success. Once readers see that twenty or thirty people have posted they will see it is an interesting story and join in. It's a cummulative effect.

What Determines Story Quality?

In my opinion there are three major factors that determine the quality of the story and increase the number of comments a submission receives: the inherent interest of the story, the headline, and the story itself.

Inherent Interest of the Story Itself

The first factor in a successful submission is the inherent interest of the story itself. Readers want to be challenged, they want the author to tell them something they didn't know already, or something that challenges their view on something and makes them think. That is why I always on the lookout for stories on the internet that challenge me - I figure if a story is interesting to me, then it will be interesting to other people.The first step is the hardest - selecting the story. The right story "writes" itself. The wrong story is impossible to write.

A lot of people think the difficulty of making a submission is in writing the story. NO. Nothing could be further from the truth. The difficulty in making a good submission is in selecting the right story to submit. Once you find the right story, the story practically writes itself. I speak from experience. I've had 19 successful submissions so far in June 2014 and my stories have garnered an average of 35.6 comments each. But for each story I submit, I usually spend 20 minutes finding the right story and then ten minutes writing the story itself.

I constantly see comments on slashdot/soylent on the difficulty of making a submission. Here's a good methodology on selecting the right story that works for me. I find most of my stories on the rss feed on "Hacker News". Go down Hacker News and look for interesting stories - stories that you would be interested in reading yourself. Then go to the comments for the stories. If you see 30 or 40 comments on Hacker News then you know that it is a story that has general interest and will probably get 15 -30 comments on Soylent. If you see a story on Hacker News that only gets half a dozen comments, then it probably won't get more than 3 or 4 comments on Soylent and won't reach critical mass.

The Headline

The second factor in a successful submission is the headline. The first thing I do before I even start to write a story is write the headline. If I can't think of a good headline, then I won't proceed any further. If people don't read your headline and think "that sounds interesting" there is little chance they will read your story. I strive to present the story in the most challenging way possible and the best way to do that is with a great headline. A lot of times I will spend as much time writing and re-writing my headline as I do putting together a story. Before I even start to write a story, I have to have a good headline.

Writing the Story

The final factor in a successful submission is the story itself. Sometimes my final submission uses the same lead sentence as the original article but many times I will find the lead buried in the middle of the article. One problem is the need to condense a 1,500 words article down to 250 words submission and still have something that makes sense. My purpose is not to read a story, digest all the words in it, and then close the book, and rewrite the story in my own words. My purpose is to convey what the original author wanted to say and the best way to do that is to select the parts of the story that contain the essence of the story, put them into a cogent narrative, condense this down to a format suitable, and if possible add another link or two to the story to provide additional depth to the story to anyone who wants to follow the links. I have found that the best way to do that is to select the original author's own words but to re-order them and provide grammatical transitions to condense them down.

It goes without saying that I don't always submit stories that I agree with. My purpose is not to extol my personal philosophy, write about people I admire, or convince you to join my point of view. My purpose is to get you to comment. That means writing an interesting story, whether I agree with it or not. My only measure of success is in the number of comments a story receives - which leads to higher quality comments and a more interesting discussion.

How Often Should Soylent Publish New Stories

I think Soylent is making a mistake if the editors slow stories down too much. I think a lot of the traffic that comes to slashdot/soylent during the day is looking for new stories and checking two or three times a day to see if there is anything new. If they see the same story at the top of the page when they come back three hours later, they will get tired of the site and abandon it.

I think one story an hour is about the right flow and can slow down to one story every 1.5 hours on a slow news day. Of course, during the night, the stories can slow down to one story every two or three hours.

If you want more details on writing a submission for Slashdot/Soylent read an essay I wrote a few years ago on the subject.

Best Regards,



Hugh Pickens

The Washington Post reports that while Edward Snowden was trapped in the transit zone of Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport last year, senior officials from the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and other agencies assembled nearly every day in a desperate search for a way to apprehend the former intelligence contractor. "The best play for us is him landing in a third country," says White House homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco. "We were hoping he was going to be stupid enough to get on some kind of airplane, and then have an ally say: 'You're in our airspace. Land.'" US officials thought they saw such an opening on July 2 when Bolivian President Evo Morales, who expressed support for Snowden, left Moscow aboard his presidential aircraft. The decision to divert that plane ended in embarrassment when it was searched in Vienna and Snowden was not aboard. Diverting Morales's plane was more than a diplomatic setback. It also probably caused Snowden to abandon any idea of leaving Russia, squandering what Monaco had described as "the best play" for the United States.

A year later, Snowden appears to have moved further beyond US reach with his expiring asylum status in Russia expected to be extended this summer. "The FBI doesn't have any capability to operate in Moscow without the collaboration of the FSB," says a former senior US intelligence official who served in the Russian capital. Snowden now lives a life that is constrained by his dependence on the government that granted him asylum and according to ex-KGB Major Boris Karpichkov, spies from Russia's SVR intelligence service posing as diplomats tricked Snowden into seeking asylum in Russia. "When Snowden says that he has 'no relationship' with the Russian government, he means that he hasn't cooperated with their intelligence services in any way and that his asylum isn't conditioned on cooperation," says Snowden's attorney Ben Wizner. "Of course, the Russian government could choose to expel him at any time."

Network World reports that Microsoft has been forced to start using its global stock of IPv4 addresses to keep its Azure cloud service afloat in the US, highlighting the growing importance of making the shift to IP version 6. Microsoft doesn't mention IPv6 in its blog post, but the use of the protocol would make its address problems disappear. The newer version of the Internet Protocol adds an almost inexhaustible number of addresses thanks to a 128-bit long address field, compared to the 32 bits used by version 4. Some Azure customers may notice that for a VM deployed in a US region, when they launch a localized page on a web browser it may redirect them to an international site.

According to Microsoft "IPv4 address space has been fully assigned in the United States, meaning there is no additional IPv4 address space available. This requires Microsoft to use the IPv4 address space available to us globally for the addressing of new services. The result is that we will have to use IPv4 address space assigned to a non-US region to address services which may be in a US region. "

Lois Lerner, former director of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division, is a key figure in the IRS's controversy over the tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups. Now CBS News reports that the IRS has told congressional investigators that the IRS cannot locate many of Lois Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed that year. "Isn't it convenient for the Obama Administration that the IRS now says it has suddenly realized it lost Lois Lerner's emails requested by Congress and promised by Commissioner John Koskinen?" says House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa. "Do they really expect the American people to believe that, after having withheld these emails for a year, they're just now realizing the most critical time period is missing?

According to a veteran IT professional, the IRS' claim that the agency lost two years' worth of former IRS official Lois Lerner's emails is "simply not feasible." Norman Cillo, an Army veteran who worked in intelligence and a former program manager at Microsoft, says it is very difficult to lose emails for good and laid out reasons why he believes Congress is "being lied to" about the Lerner emails: Microsoft Exchange used by the government for their email servers have built-in exchange mail database redundancy and all servers use some form of RAID technology. However, Cillo says it's possible the IRS is telling the truth if the federal agency is "totally mismanaged and has the worst IT department ever." "I don't know of any email administrator that doesn't have at least three ways of getting that mail back. It's either on the disks or it's on a TAPE backup someplace or in an archive server. There are at least three ways the government can get those emails."

Carter Glace writes that there have been some decent video game movies, like "Prince of Persia" or one of the "Resident Evil" films but plenty of bad ones too - just remember 'Super Mario Bros'. But Doug Liman's "Edge of Tomorrow" shows how to take one of video games' most tried and true mechanics and use it to make an excellent and utterly creative film. In the film Tom Cruise plays a PR officer named Cage who, blessed with the power of infinite lives, has to continually progress through the day while figuring out how to win the battle and the war - kind of a cross between 'Groundhog Day' and 'Starship Troppers'.

"The use of the words "infinite lives" is no accident," writes Glace. The premise of the film comes from a Japanese graphic novel titled 'All You Need Is Kill', but it is steeped in the classic video game lore: restarting the game over and over until you are prepared for every conceivable threat. This is a fact director Liman openly celebrates - and it works here on countless levels. Cruise's efforts to train are all chronicled through an efficient, fun and fluid montage that serves as an excellent progression through the "levels," while cutting out the more mundane, frustrating repetition it "stands as an incredibly creative, intelligent piece of sci-fi filmmaking." "Taking inspiration from an underutilized resource, Cruise has made an incredible return to form," concludes Glace. "Unfortunately, "Edge of Tomorrow" is already a box-office dud, but I implore you to support this excellent film."

Employers in Europe may have a duty in the future to create reserved car parking spaces for obese staff, or adjust the office furniture for them as BBC reports that the European Court of Justice is considering a test case of a male nanny who says he was fired for being too fat - a ruling that could oblige employers to treat obesity as a disability. Employment expert Audrey Williams says the judges would have to decide "whether obesity itself should trigger preferential rights, or should only impact where an individual, due to obesity, has other recognized medical issues. Employers would have a duty to make reasonable adjustments to the workplace or working arrangements," says Williams. "This might include a review of where the employee is located and their seating arrangements, or even preferential access to car parking."

The US Equal Opportunity Commission already defines obesity as being a disability, under the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act. In a recent case involving morbid obesity, a Texan employee who weighed more than 680 pounds received $55,000 in compensation for being dismissed. In October 2009, the man was told to report to human resources where officials told him the company had reached the conclusion he could no longer "perform his job duties because of his weight and he was therefore terminated," the suit said. Ronald Kratz, who had gotten two promotions and high performance ratings over his 16-year-career, insists his weight did not interfere with his ability to perform his job duties as a parts sorter. Kratz, who lost over three hundred pounds since he was fired, has not be able to find another job despite sending out numerous applications, and his unemployment benefits have run out. "It has been really hard on the family."

Susanna Kim reports that author George R.R. Martin, the creator of the "Game of Thrones" series, will introduce a new character named David Goldblatt in one of his upcoming books and eventually kill him off. Goldblatt, a 30-year-old Facebook employee won the prize in a charity auction in which Martin will name a character after him in an upcoming book in the series, "A Song of Ice and Fire." Goldblatt says he viewed the first season of the HBO series on the recommendation of a friend, then he immediately read the book series in six months. "I'm just lucky enough to be in a position to do this," says Goldblatt of the $20,000 payment. "Obviously, the money is going to charity, so it's an added bonus. I didn't immediately seek to help wolf sanctuaries, but the more I read about the charities, I learned it was a worthwhile cause." Martin's project is raising money for Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary and the Food Depot of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Martin lives with his wife, Parris.

Goldblatt chose to be a "Valryian," a people group famous for their indestructible steel, as his station in Martin's literary universe. "You read some piece of fiction and for whatever reason you think one particular character or race is cool - and for whatever reason," says Goldblatt. I thought the Valyrians were cool. I'm hoping in future books we get to see more of them."

The Washington Post reports that a three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta has ruled that a warrant is required for the government to obtain an individual's stored cellphone location records. In the case, a criminal defendant named Quartavious Davis appealed a 2012 conviction for robbery and conspiracy in part on grounds that the cellphone tower records were obtained on a court order using a lesser legal standard than a warrant. "We hold that cell site location information is within the subscriber's reasonable expectation of privacy (PDF)," the panel wrote in its decision. "The obtaining of that data without a warrant is a Fourth Amendment violation."

"The appeals court's opinion is a resounding defense of the Fourth Amendment's continuing vitality in the digital age," says American Civil Liberties Union Staff Attorney Nathan Freed Wessler, who argued the cellphone issues before the panel in April. "It puts police on notice that when they want to enlist people's cellphones as tracking devices, they must get a warrant from a judge based on probable cause" that the records will provide evidence of a crime.

John Biggs writes at TechCrunch that Comcast is quietly turning on public hotspots in its customers' routers, essentially turning private homes into public hotspots. Comcast customers get free Wi-Fi wherever there is a Comcast box and the company gets to build out a private network to compete with telecoms. Fifty thousand users with Arris Touchstone Telephony Wireless Gateway Modems - essentially basic modems that cable providers drop off at your home - have already been turned into public hotspots in Houston, and there are plans to enable 150,000 more.

Bu concerns are being raised about this service. In addition to using customers' electricity for their service, some say that in areas that have lots of apartment buildings and multi-tenant dwellings within close proximity of one another, performance will slow down. Those routers are transmitting on the same channels for their 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals, leading to RF competition. "Comcast's FAQ about Xfinity's hotspots doesn't go into any details about channels and bands," writes Samara Lynn, "but the company should be clear about how adding these hotspot networks affects the performance of existing WLANs-especially in business use."