What would you say about my case? I open tabs when there's some news item or search result I want to know more about. I close them when I have reviewed the thing, even if it's just to decide I am no longer interested. For example, I've opened six tabs from the /. front page today. I'll read the ones that are of the highest interest immediately (there were three this time) and leave the others for possible consumption in the future, if I have time, at which point they'll either be closed or left open as a bookmark of interesting information (if there's some follow-up I think I might do). The tab for this article, for example, will remain open for a day or so as a reminder to check for any replies. I don't have a problem going back to open tabs, but there is more information in the world than time so I accept that I may never get back to some of them.

I certainly exhibit some signs of ADHD, but I don't think my approach to tab management is one of them. I don't think thousands of open tabs is necessarily an indicator.

That said, thanks for bringing it up as a possibility.

Disorganized?! Quite the reverse. Linear tab lists are how I organize things. One window per desktop, each window a different type of browsing (e.g. news/research/productivity) and then open tabs in each window. Disorganized would be somehow trying to track all of those URLs some *other* way. What, do you have thousands of bookmarks? How would you manage to relate them back to the type of task they're related to, and the time they were bookmarked?

Untrue. I run Firefox with a dozen windows each of which has hundreds of tabs. All it takes is enough RAM, but I make sure I have plenty. If RAM pressure is a problem for you then look up the BarTab extension (it's defunct, but I believe there are some active forks). Firefox absolutely can do this.

Now Chrome, that's where you'll have trouble. IT was really not designed for a large number of open tabs. Its minimum tab width is ~48px and once you have enough of those to fill the horizontal bar new tabs open on the right *hidden*. Unlikely Firefox there is no window into a current set. The only way to interact with them extra tabs is via the "Search tabs" menu, which is highly inconvenient. Chrome's UI assumes no more than about 75 tabs open at a time.

It's not laziness. I typically run at least low hundreds of tabs open, frequently up into the low thousands. I know I've cleared 5,000 before, but I'm not in the business of tracking too closely--I'm just not interested in how many there are.

Bookmarks are not the same thing as open tabs; a site can vanish but still be available in browser cache/memory. A bookmark may help you find a page you were on earlier, but it's hard to know *why* you bookmarked it, to organize them linearly, and to distinguish between an ephemeral interest and a permanent reference. Really, bookmarks are a vestigial feature of the pre-Google web. Do you remember when we all had "home page"s that given over to collections of links to commonly-used sites? That, too, has gone. In my case these have been replaced by tabs.

It's all part of an efficient workflow. I see people do something like: Google search, click a result, read some of it, click back, click the next result. This pattern is inefficient and drives me nuts; when I do a search I scan through the results and open anything that seems helpful new tabs--I may even refine my search a few times and open some tabs for each variation--, then I C-tab and begin to review. I can go from zero to 20 tabs in moments without even noticing it, then I read through them and close tabs that are irrelevant. When I get to the end of the subject I am researching I'll close most or all; I may leave open a tab with an answer or something I need to refer back to as I go back to what I was doing. With news it's the same: I open in a new tab each story that I want to read more about. I may not read them all the same day, but I leave the tabs open as a linear queue of interest and get to them eventually. It often happens that the queue grows faster than it shrinks, and that's fine. I come back through later and close out unread tabs that no longer seem interesting.

I can't imagine *not* doing this. It's not lack of window management; I currently have 11 browser windows open and they *each* have dozens or hundreds or thousands of tabs. It's *not* laziness. This is simply a way to organize information that maps well to the way my brain works.

The day that Firefox removed tab groups was a sad day indeed. There have been few tab management features which actually improved my ability to organize, but that was one of therm.

You are entirely correct. However, the public perception is that places like twitter ought to offer some protections they do not offer.

There is a simple, obvious, and clear solution to this conundrum: nationalize twitter.

The outcome of such an action will be unpleasant in many ways, but I think it will bring in to focus the problems that already exist but that we can't properly debate.

You don't need home-developed, you just need locally-controlled. For that Jabber is all fine. As much as I think XMPP has problems as a protocol, it solves all of the issues you might have from a defense point of view.

You're implying that you can't get the equivalent of BSD zones on Linux and run containers inside them. You can, it's just a lot of bother.

This. It's pretty much my take, too. Imagine: playonlinux style "what works" compatible configs *maybe even tested by the original developers* and targeting the relative stable steam runtime environment? It's a no-brainer.

Honestly, I'm waiting for some ambitious desktop environment guy to start shipping a DE package via steam. No reason why you couldn't (or shouldn't). Steam has delivered a stable *end user* environment in a way no single distro or vendor has managed before on Linux. We can all take advantage.

I wish I could mod you up. The quality of slashdot stories (and correction speeds) has become rather abysmal!

What happens in assembler, and to a great extent in C, is what the computer is really doing (more or less, it's pretty close). In higher level languages this connection is very fuzzy. Not knowing what will really happen when you write that for loop is more likely to lead to you writing pathological and otherwise buggy code. It's not *essential* that you know how computers really work, but it's a *really damn good idea* and more or less essential for any really good programmer. The only people who disagree are the ones that never did learn a low-level language (IOW where you work with memory/registers/pointers/that sort of thing).

I keep a chrome laptop around for this. It's enough for most people, and after logout everything's clean.

There is no criminal organization Anonymous.

You are as much anonymous as anyone else is. If you don't understand how that can be then *shut the fuck up* about it until you do.

I imagine I am wasting my metaphorical breath, but I'll try to explain it as much as it can be explained.

Think pranks. Think prank phone calls and pizzas you didn't order, then imagine this done in a way designed to make you feel bad, then imagine that everyone who pranked you can see your face when you feel bad and laugh at you. That's about the limit of what anonymous will organize to do. All this breaking and entering shit is largely hacktivism done by people who aren't acting as anonymous when they do it, even if they may call on anonymous for help from time to time. And LOICers... they're just idiotic hangers-on. Angry and about as effective as egging someone's house. The effective DDoS attacks come from individuals (armed with botnets) and not some imaginary criminal conspiracy.

I am not an anonymous apologist, I am anonymous (and you can too). Wherever a little kid cries because someone told him he was fat, I will be there along with the baser parts of all mankind and we will be laughing at his misery. When those baser instincts band together to laugh at everything and nothing, there you have anonymous. Anonymous aren't criminals, anonymous is the internet hate machine. It's not good, it's not evil, it's simply humans being human--including the part of being human that we are all obliged to hide from society for fear of persecution. Anonymous exists so that you can be a jerk, a deviant, a racist and make jokes in bad taste knowing that **it's okay, we understand**, we both accept and revile you, too. Unless you're furry (DIAF, plzkthxbai).

There may be a global internet-based criminal organization out there which does bad things, harms people and needs to be busted by the authorities; in fact, I'm pretty sure there are several, but none of them are called Anonymous.

I'm not confusing them, I'm well aware. Lots of normal people keep rolling with the 6 month releases for freshness and run afoul of all manner of problems. The LTS users get the moderately tested and bugfixed version, but it's no better engineered.

No.

The problem with Debian is that Debian has a non-free repository and documents this fact. Whether the user will be confused about whether or not he is installing non-free software is not the issue at all.

RMS maintains that documenting the existence of non-free software, even if the repo is not enabled by default and requires manual intervention to enable, is "suggesting" that it be used and this suggestion is tantamount to a recommendation to use non-free software, which RMS thinks is a thing that a fully freedom-loving distribution should not do.

Can a distro fully respect your freedoms and still document the existence of non-free software? I think so, but since the FSF is in the business of promoting Free software to the exclusion of all else they cannot endorse a distribution which fully respects your freedoms but mentions that non-free software exists. This is an entirely reasonable stance for the FSF; they can choose who they endorse based on any arbitrary criteria, and I respect that.

The Debian folks must necessarily take a more pragmatic view since their primary mission is not to promote Free software to the exclusion of all else. This does not mean that they are behaving in an unethical manner or in a manner which is inconsistent with the FSF principles and ideals, it's just at odds with some of their policies.

Hah. I'll contain my laughter.

Canonical releases are rarely what I would call *stable*. They're full of issues both small and large and mixing packages from outside of their main repo can quickly destabilize what you do have.

Debian sid sometimes has *package dependency issues* or regressions, but that's where its "unstable" moniker stops applying. Debian policy leads to Debian stability and which archive you pull from doesn't matter much. To get something that might be broken in Debian, other than install-time difficulty due to mismatched dependency information, you usually need to go to experimental. If you're not familiar with it that's *good*, because it's not for you.

Ubuntu is poorly put together and less reliable than Debian. Anyone who's familiar with Debian from a sysadmin point of view will probably be able to confirm this for you. The only reasons Ubuntu gets away with it are (1) its users don't do much with their computers, and (2) after 6 months you dist-upgrade, so problems from the last release go away and get replaced by problems from the new release. It's all terribly slipshod and amateurish.