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.

Where I once had a rotation of 1 or 2u racks, I now have a couple of i7 Mac Minis (with several external dual drive LaCie's in mirrored mode) running VMWare.

As I traded my consulting gig for straight employment a few years ago, I'm housing far less data, too... Nas4Free for files/media, VPN for when I'm at work (which is funny, because as soon as I'm home I VPN into work...), MySQL, GLPi and Calibre.

Other than that, I've got my workstation (probably my last custom build....) in my home office, a couple of Pi's running XBMC and my ever present MacBook Air.

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.

You know it. Carts before horses. Every year is something new and last year's new just isn't sexy enough to revisit.

We're a big operation with a small shop. I'll be wrapped in this duct tape for quite a while.

Depends on the framework... we use Brainhoney which integrates pretty well with Google Docs; which is fortunate for us as we're rolling out a pretty extensive 1:1 Chromebook initiative this year.

Don't take that as a rebuttal to your point, though -- we lucked out, truth be told. It's not as if we planned that to begin with, it was merely a happy coincidence.

As a result, we're modeling our blended learning programs around the idea of the Chromebook/Google Drive as a tool to collect and prepare content and our labs as a place to create the final presentation: Content is prepared on the go and assembled (if need be) in a lab. Of course, the side effect to all this is transitioning to a Google district (zero to ~50k accounts over the last week) and the sanity of that is up for debate.

It's also meant a myriad of third party solutions to be brought in... Gaggle (email and document discovery), Hapara (teacher dashboard), integration with our SIS, synchronizing AD with Google for accounts and passwords... all so we can transition from cheap laptops/netbooks to cheaper Chromebooks.

Sorry, rambling. Early morning coffee... I now live, breathe and eat Google. Quite a change from the last few years of iPads (and, in certain ways, welcome -- at least there are real tools available for management!).

Best of luck to your daughter. Stay involved; the whole on online learning game is a new one.

Gas lines need nonconductive sections to protect from becoming long ground loops.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.