Or they could make it a crystal that gets implanted in poor people's hands that could change color based on their payment standing, from white to yellow to green to red and then flashing red on Lastday.

Just amazing, such an incredible two-faced attitude toward whistleblowers. Alexander Litvinenko was about as clear cut example of a whistleblower as you can get. He was an FSB officer who leaked the reports that the FSB had ordered the assassination of Boris Berezovsky. He was was arrested for his leaks, but acquitted - but the government continued going after him after his acquittal, so he fled to the UK and was granted asylum. In the UK, out of reach of the Russian government, he continued writing books and giving interviews leaking more information, including claims of the Russian government's involvement in the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the Russian apartment bombings that both solidified public resolve for Russia to re-invade Chechnya and helped bring Putin to power.

And he was killed for that. By polonium. Traced straight back to a nuclear power plant in Russia via a British Airwaves jet from Moscow.

Now, let's just say that Litvinenko was just speculating wildly or BSing about everything he said about Russia. That doesn't change the fact that for whatever reason, he was asssinated by polonium traced straight back to nuclear power plant in Russia via a British Airwaves jet from Moscow.

But to you, a guy writing negative things about Putin makes him terrorist recruiter and that was justified? Seriously?

As it happens, Russia is crafting whistleblower protections right now:

Hahahaha!
Stop it, you're killing me!
All too funny.

Russia hardly even tries any more to pretend that their media isn't a bunch of scripted reports with paid actors or that they're remotely a free, fair democracy. Heck, in the last election, Chechnya had 99.59% turnout with 99.82% voting for the "Butcher of Grozny". Some precincts were apparently so eager to vote for him that they had 107% turnout. Really impressive on Putin's part! ;) It's amazing that they can still find useful idiots like you to defend them.

Except that sort -R isn't available on older versions of coreutils.

No, no, I think you simply misread his campaign literature.

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

I dunno, it seems to have worked pretty well for Putin. I mean, wake me up when Obama starts going around assassinating dissenters with polonium and forcing all popular blogs to register with national media censors.

I of course think that the US has stepped way out of bounds with a lot of stuff it's done. But I do find there's this rather curious American Exceptionalism often in play where only the US is deemed capable of moral or relevant behavior, and it's just taken as both a given and irrelevant that others take it to far worse extremes.

As a whistle blower myself, I found that the trick is to do diaphragm exercises. Lots of people focus too much on the muscles in the mouth, but the real airflow comes from the lungs. Also, get yourself a real competition-grade whistle, not a cheap piece of Chinese-made junk. I personally am fond of the late Soviet militiary whistles - not only do they have a distinctive sound, but the titanium pea is extremely efficient at transforming air pressure to sound with little resistance.

Well...

egrep ".*ism$" /usr/share/dict/words | perl -MList::Util=shuffle -e 'print shuffle();' | tail -n 10 ... tells me that the next ten things that the US is going to wage war against are:

Factionalism
Occidentalism
Aerotropism
Briticism
Rebaptism
Establishmentarianism.
Freemasonism
Achronism
Henotheism
Selenotropism

I look forward to the War on Henotheism. Make up your minds, there's either one god or there's multiple! If you don't pick between the existence of one god or multiple, then the Henotheists win!

(Side note: Slashdot, stop playing content critic with your "Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there")

I last tried a Debian install around the time of Dayton Hamvention, so a few months ago. I don't have a bug #, I tried to debug GDM for a while but didn't have enough time. I can try another install sometime soon.

Well, a Core i5 tablet with two parallel screen digitizers is an odd enough bird that you can't expect it to run on the somewhat aged Debian stable. And indeed the older GNOME there handles the touchscreen incorrectly.

Because it has a touchscreen and a separate pen digitizer on the same screen. And now with the keyboard, it also has a Cirque touchpad, for a total of three digitizers.

The Toughpad has a touchscreen and a pen (with a separate digitizer!) and the touchscreen doesn't work properly in the older GNOME in stable.

There is a video of someone throwing around my model, without the keyboard, here.

Listening to users isn't necessarily a good thing. Henry Ford said that if he'd asked his customers what they wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse. This is especially true of UI design, because most people (even power users) really don't measure what they're spending time doing and get into unproductive patterns. The problem with GNOME was that they also didn't listen to usability experts. Or even vaguely competent people who had read an HCI book. They went down a path of doing things that an uninformed user and a usability expert could both agree were stupid. Apparently they've improved recently, but it cost them a lot of users.

After something like 20 years I finally found a system that won't run Debian unstable right now. My Panasonic Toughpad FZ-G1 magnesium tablet + iKey Jumpseat magnesium keyboard. Systemd and GDM break. Bought (for less than full price) because I am a frequent traveler and speaker and really do need something you can drop from 6 feet and pour coffee over have it keep working.

But because of this bug I have ubuntu at the moment, and am not having fun and am eager to return to Debian.