While overgeneralising, tarring many good people with the same brush as some fanatics, and defining perfectly reasonable people as stupid, is completely reasonable. I'm as atheist as they come, but I do understand that many people are moved to faith while being able to keep a rational mind for practical purposes. Perhaps you should get your head out of the sand and try understanding why people go to church. Hint: it's generally not to plot the deaths of homos with the help of the creepy father figure in the sky.

The church (any church) has many things to answer for, true.

To be fair, they usually ask for your permission and tell you the approximate time the process will take. If you can't be arsed through it, simply don't start. Reminds me of the pirate's reasoning "This game has drm, therefore I'll pirate it".

You have no idea what religion actually is. You are tarring every people of a faith with the wacko brush. My wife is a religious catholic biochemist, involved in nervous system basic research. She doesn't doublethink. What you are confused about is that she doesn't treat the bible as a literal history, but as a book to be inspired by. She looks for love and comfort in Jesus, not astronomy. Why can you read a sci-fi history and enjoy its message, but she can't read her book and do the same?

I think the AC meant that in other countries it's just the same. Argentina and Chile, just to give examples I'm acquainted with, require photographic ID and fingerprints for many things. In Argentina, you have to give your ID number to travel to other regions, in Chile, a quick fingerprint is used to legalize contracts. Neither country has yet descended into orwellian conditions because of this (we have descended into orwellian conditions for many other reasons. You could point out that it's all part of a whole.)

India doesn't matter globally? Try googling for the meaning of BRIC.

I've used both, and other distros, and other Unixes. I don't keep on using Ubuntu just because their leaflets and CDs are shinier. I keep using it because it has less hassles, less fanbois and is more usable.

Not wasting a weekend configuring shit because it already works is a freedom.

Not finding fanbois ready to discuss that "apt is better than rpm, therefore your not debian distro sucks" for hours is a freedom.

Downloading an iso with easy instructions from a polished website, or actually having a CD come to my address for free is a freedom.

Having the system work with most of what I need in a usable configuration in half an hour is a freedom.

Do you need any more freedoms that explain why do I use Ubuntu over Debian?

Apparently, to promote your own distro with your money is a grave misdeed. Fuck me, no, it is not. Sorry you feel suckered into having been their PR, but hey, at least someone started using Linux.
Oh, and responding with 'but all Ubuntu adds over Debian is polish' will get an eye roll. Yes, it might be 'all' it adds. It's still something that Debian hasn't managed to add in years. And it's quite a lot.

So the developers left the project for better money and it's his fault for offering them jobs? Fascinating!

You're not helping your case. Is it so hard to point out what the evil was in offering money for jobs? Was the SABDFL all evil like and cackling when he said "Help me DOOM Debian and you'll get 30 silver coins each! BWAHAAHAHA"?

"He"'s killed Debian? Sorry, but he didn't point guns at anybody to get users and developers. Build a better Debian, don't give us the "it's all Shuttleworth's fault, waaaa!" crap.

... And you'd be skewing the results another way. Part of the thing is watching good teams play. When thinking about an exciting world cup match, "North Korea vs Uzbekistan" does not come to mind. Good teams mostly come from Europe, or South America. Granted, the level of play in the last few world cups has been really shoddy, but still, using the 'let's assign slots using only population metrics' is completely absurd.

"Say hello to my little friend" was Cuban.

The title 'Presidente' although not exactly correct for him (the current Italian president is Giorgio Napolitano) is usually informally attributed to the Premier too. So the GP is sort of right.

I don't think he was talking about a 'legal' religion. Downloading for free something that you should be paying to acquire is morally wrong. It might not be theft, but it's certainly stealing.

There shouldn't be a debate about drinking and driving. It's just plain stupid. Even if you mean 'a debate about the maximum quantity of alcohol you can take before driving', which by now is a pretty much solved problem everywhere.

Oh, and between an epidemic of measles, pox or rubella that wipes off half of the country, and a statistical nullity of children with autism, I'd choose the latter. Call me callous.

If they are using their spam box emails to communicate with possible employers, I'd say they deserve all they get.