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Comment: Snow Crash (Score 5, Interesting) 316

by Misagon (#43765119) Attached to: Head-mounted displays / sensors like Google Glass are:

Google Glass-like devices were predicted in Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash.
In the book, the wearers are called "gargoyles".

Here are a couple quotes from the book that I found online.

Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter-wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think theyâ(TM)re talking to you, but theyâ(TM)re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiroâ(TM)s cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.

Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society.

Comment: Re:Missing options (Score 1) 300

by Misagon (#43698713) Attached to: Browser tabs I have open right now ...

Well, if you disable the tab bar in Firefox, then there are no tabs, are there... I also have my Firefox set up to not display any menu items for creating tabs. But these days, I use mostly Chromium, so yes, there is a tab bar that I have yet to disable ...

Mostly I open multiple windows. I often "shade" them (minimize to title-bar) and move these around in 2D on the desk. I reorder them and group them, with spaces between groups. With Window Maker, I can even select multiple windows and move them around at the same time.
You can't do that on a one-dimensional tab bar. Another benefit over tabbing is that the page titles are not cut off.

When I do open multiple tabs, all tabs in that window belong to the same site. For instance, a forum gets a tab for each forum topic that I open from the index, or a news site gets a tab for each story that I want to read.
Cross-site tabbing? Not me!

And by the way: I never maximize the browser window. I got a larger screen to get more space to do more tasks, not to read ridiculously long lines of text. I sometimes browse with two windows side by side, each filling up most of the half of the screen.

Comment: Re:Seems Odd To Me (Score 4, Informative) 367

by Misagon (#43634289) Attached to: Observed Atmospheric CO2 Hits 400 Parts Per Million

The Muana Loa observatory measures only at night, when air is descending from far up high. That air has come from across the Pacific Ocean, far from any specific CO2 sources.
At night, the volcanic gasses are trapped in a thin layer near the ground by a temperature inversion. The observatory measures the air at several towers at different altitudes and also closer to the volcano so as to get a comparative reading.

You can read more in this report.

Comment: Re:Concientious objector (Score 1) 381

While your current company may not be able to force you, the situation changes if you are laid off.
The next company you apply to could choose not to hire you because of your objection.

I choose not to use a cell phone at all, because of various reasons, the most important being that radiation kills brain cells. I find that some prospective employers don't want to hire me because of my objection, even though the work entails sitting at the same desk all the time.

Comment: Re:News for nerds? (Score 1, Offtopic) 1109

Yes. This site is part commercial and part community-driven. Discussion about the content has a place on a community-driven site.

And yes, I also answered the last Slashdot survey about what they wanted their readers to read about on Slashdot. They asked me. They want the input. That was a month or two ago, I'm sorry if you missed it.

Comment: News for nerds? (Score 0, Offtopic) 1109

I don't mean to be disrespectful to the victims of the bombings in Boston, or to those students in Cambridge, Mass. USA. who are terrified right now, but ...

Does this story really have a place on Slashdot?
You can read more about it on practically every major news site, and it is live on all news-oriented TV channels all over the world. It does not need to be on the tech sites too.

If you already are anxious, you don't need to be bombarded with more news that make you even more terrified. You need a place to relax, to help you concentrate on other matters.

Comment: I'd rather have multiple authentication realms (Score 5, Interesting) 81

The biggest thing I have against single-sign-on is that I need different levels of security for different sites, and I want to keep the sites compartmentalised from each other.
For instance, I want high security for my email account and access it only from computers/devices that I have control over.
However, I have private playlists on Youtube that I may want to show to a friend, on a third guy's (two degrees of separation) computer. I don't want to have to be afraid of logging into Youtube on that machine because that computer would also get access to my email.

When I am on my trusted home computer, having different accounts for different things can get cumbersome with those sites that force single-sign-on on you!
Yes, while I could use the Incognito mode in Chromium to separate my logins -- it does only separate [i]two[/i] sites, and I would have to login each time I need a new window in incognito mode.
It would be much more convenient if I could have different "realms" or "personas", where I could browse each site in its own realm.

WHERE CAN THE MATTER BE Oh, dear, where can the matter be When it's converted to energy? There is a slight loss of parity. Johnny's so long at the fair.

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