Yes, this is definitely a "WTF?" moment in the history of Slashdot. I suggest that you all just move on to the next story and refuse to feed the troll by asking him questions.

Slashdot, obviously, has to innovate in order to stay current. Thus, they are now taking the next step after "Anonymous Cowards". The new "Identified Troll" feature will include interviews of people who have prostituted their personal credibility to some company's calculated disinformation campaign.

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.

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.

We are in a War on Faith, because Faith justifies anything and ISIS takes it to extremes. But in the end they are just a bigger version of Christian-dominated school boards that mess with the teaching of Evolution, or Mormon sponsors of anti-gay-marriage measures, or my Hebrew school teacher, an adult who slapped me as a 12-year-old for some unremembered offense against his faith.

Hm. The covenant of Noah is about two paragraphs before this part (King James Version) which is used for various justifications of slavery and discrimination against all sorts of people because they are said to bear the Curse of Ham. If folks wanted to use the Bible to justify anything ISIS says is justified by God's words in the Koran, they could easily do so.

18 And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.
19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.
20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:
21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

Get rid of your dictator and adopt a representative democracy and it will be over. Indeed, nobody could have thought it would go on this long.

Actually, I would be entirely happy to pay $230/year for ad-free Internet; meaning that I would continue to have access to all the sites that I want, but those sites would be directly supported by my yearly subscription, and so they wouldn't need to display ads or be otherwise beholden to advertisers. I'm sure a great many people would be willing to do so.

The problem is that such a state of affairs is impossible. If people actually started paying for subscriptions, the ads would disappear only temporarily. Eventually companies would realize "Sure, they're paying subscription fees, but if I just put a little unobtrusive link to 'related products' in the sidebar, no on will complain. And, yeah, sure, I'll get a little extra money on the side for displaying links to specific (paying) partners..." Soon enough, the ads are back (in some form or other), and we're now paying for the content twice. (We've seen this happen many times before; e.g. subscription cable-TV was supposed to be ad-free. More recently I've noticed that digital downloads from iTunes or Google Play have ads for other shows added to the beginning.) Moreover, oftentimes 'ad-free' really just means the ads are less obvious but more insidious (product placement, 'trusted' reviewers being bribed to give positive reviews, etc.).

The simple fact is that we cannot ever trust companies to actually honor the social contract of subscription models. Since they cannot stick to the rules, the only option is for end-users endure the constant ads, since at least in this case we don't have to pay subscription costs.

I travel a ton and stay in dozens of different hotels every year. Domestically, and in maybe 50% of the foreign cases, the high priced hotels had worse and slower internet up until a couple of years ago. For the last 2 years they have gotten better, on the average. Oh, I was in a 5-star Vegas resort last night that had horrible bandwidth. In the past, my joke was accurate that the difference between a Four Seasons (just an example) and a Super 8 is that at the Super 8 the internet worked and was free. The most important thing to me in a hotel is computer use. The fancy suites in major hotels are often set up for entertaining friends and DON'T even have a computer desk. I ask my wife to book me into Super 8's whenever possible.