Car dealerships have outlasted their usefulness- they're a 20th century solution for selling 20th century cars. If a Tesla can self-drive itself to my house, or if an Amazon quadcopter can drop it off here, car dealerships have no reason to be involved except for an old law that allows them to stifle competition and that will now be cemented into place.

The methane itself is relatively harmless- but usually indicates the 999 other chemicals in fracking fluid are there too, and when the methane catches fire it creates even more toxins. If the kit can detect 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol without igniting it, it's a better option.

Back in 1980 my parents got me a British ZX81 kit to assemble, with 1024 bytes of RAM. (I still have it buried in the closet along with my other antiques- AFAIK it still works.) It ran BASIC so slowly that you could actually read the code about as fast as it executed, so I was "forced" to learn assembly language. I was amazed by how fast it was- it ran a million operations in just a few seconds! (wow.) You had to start by writing a BASIC program:

10 REM AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
20 PRINT USR(16514)

Then you had to POKE each assembly instruction into the comment, starting at 16514 for the first "A". The comment line would slowly turn into "10 REM x&$bL;,$_)[vU7z#AAAAAAAA". The next line was 20 PRINT USR(16514) (printing out the return value from the BC register).

Saving any ZX81 program onto a cassette tape was excruciating- they recorded as several minutes of loud high-pitched screeching. Usually you needed to save them twice because it failed half the time. Then to load the program you had to cue the tape you had to find exactly where the start of the screeching was, rewind several seconds, play the tape, and only then could you hit enter on LOAD. (Otherwise LOAD got confused by the *click* noise when you pushed the play button on the tape player.)

You young people don't realize what an easy life you have.

I think the patient in Berlin now has a Wall to isolate himself from incorporated viral entrepreneurs.

If you live near fracking wells, using this kit is a much better way to determine if your water is safe than the alternative- holding a lit match under your faucet..

I'll leave aside the fact that most of these "charities" are tax-avoidance scams, and would probably do the world a favor by not existing.

Bill Gates gives about 40 times as much money to charities as do the Koch brothers, who together have about the same amount of money as Gates. The Koch brothers, in turn, are about 25X as generous as all the Walmart heirs combined- 85% of whose donations come from Christy and 15% from Alice. Jim and Rob also each have their $35 billion and together they donate approx. $30,000 to charity each year- i.e. 4 ppm of their total income. If I make six figures and I toss a dollar at a homeless person, I've just donated 10 ppm.

In comparison, the LDS church for example receives approx. ten billion dollars in "donations" (i.e. tithes) per year- ostensibly for charitable purposes- but spends only fifty million for charity, an overhead of approx. 99.5%. The Gates Foundation has an "overhead" of 90% (meaning 90% of his wealth is stuffed in his mattress). Charities would benefit 20X more if Mormons sent their tithe payments directly to scum-of-the-earth Bill Gates!!!!

I may actually buy an iphone... if it can run an app that immediately sells my AAPL shares whenever the phone installs an update.

Out of a sample size of ten million people, chances are very good that some of them work at Apple.

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 are lines of people at Apple stores hoping for a better reality or at least an improved reality coprocessor.

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.