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Comment Re:I'd consider a nano (Score 1) 82

The current 7th gen iPod Nano that came last year is too big to use as a watch.
Lots of people are using the 6th gen iPod Nano as a watch, but it doesn't have any features that a true "smartwatch" should have and you can't install apps on it.

Personally, I think that a smartwatch should be designed as a "dumb" terminal to a smartphone, although maybe with an interactive display so that you could move between pages of notifications/time/calendar from different apps.
In other words, it should be an accessory to the phone. You should only need to install apps on the phone and those apps would push data to the watch whenever there is an update.
Such a smartwatch would have a low-power screen and would sleep most of the time to conserve battery. The iPod Nano can't do that.

Comment Bathroom breaks (Score 1) 924

I don't understand people who want to gulp down gallons of soda while they watch movies.
Your bladder gets full and you have to either sit there for two hours in discomfort or scuffle out to get to the bathroom to relieve yourself having inconvenienced half the row on your way out.

If I want to eat candy at the movies, I bring my own. The selection is not always that good at the theatre, and the prices are horrible.

Comment Re:No updates in 6 years? (Score 3, Informative) 197

Actually, FLAC is technically similar to MP3 in a sense.
It consists of an inherently lossy encoding in the frequency domain (like MP3) plus an encoding of the difference between the lossily encoded audio and the original. The first part is a bit more straightforward than MP3 because it does not do any tricks adapted to the human ear.

Comment Re:Glue (Score 2) 121

From what I have hard, the Lego model makers use solvent to chemically weld the pieces together.

When they can get a legal permit, they use GBL -- which unfortunately would turn into the drug GHB when you add water. Otherwise they use MEK. GBL is believed by Lego to be less toxic than MEK. (Well.. you are not supposed to drink either, so this is about skin contact and fumes.)

Crime

Wikileaks Releases Docs Before Trial of TPB Founder Warg 70

Pirate Bay Founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg is to be tried starting tomorrow in Sweden, after his indictment last month for computer hacking and fraud. Wikileaks has released several documents related to his detention and the associated charges. From the summary of this material: "This material includes inter alia the interrogations with GSW and his co-accused, internal correspondence from the Swedish Foreign Minister and the Swedish embassy in Cambodia, damage assessment reports by the companies and the authorities concerned, and correspondence between GSW and Kristina Svartholm and the Swedish prison authorities. The material is formally public, but the Swedish prosecution authority has refused to provide the documents in digital format. Photocopying this volume of paper costs around £350." Notable is the refusal of Warg's request to obtain a graphing calculator while in prison.

Comment Snow Crash (Score 5, Interesting) 321

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

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

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.

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