Cold turkey, whether cigarettes or caffiene is murderously stupid.

Nonsense. As a smoker for 41 years, I tried almost every conceivable method of quitting: slow withdrawal, NRT, other drugs. Nothing worked. Then I read Allen Carr's book in which he recommends cold turkey as the most effective method of quitting, so I tried that. I had a few days of quite severe discomfort, followed by a week or two of intermittent cravings, but I was able to get through that, and I have now been smoke free for three years. It's a question of mental preparation.
As for coffee addiction, I don't have it. I drink 4 cups of Italian roast every working day because I like the taste and the ritual. On weekends or vacations I don't drink it at all, and have never experienced any discomfort. I suppose it's a matter of individual metabolic idiosyncracy.

Most of the footage we see follows the ball. But every so often, when there's a break in play, the camera zooms in on chicks in the crowd with great hooters, or players picking their noses, spitting or scratching their crotches. Could these folk not get something for their extra performances?

I don't understand the connection between the Freedom of Information bill and nuclear weapons; either it's a non seqitur or too subtle for me. This bill may have passed through parliament, but it will encounter a rocky road when it comes up against the inevitable constitutional challenges (Moegoeng Moegoeng notwithstanding). South Africa also has a freedom of speech clause which this law attempts to trump. In any case, if the ANC government continue to behave with the arrogance and stupidity they have been displaying of late, they will be out of government at the next election, and a DA-led coalition will lose no time repealing this Act.

In the third world bandwidth is expensive. Downloading and installing all the packages I use would cost more than a retail version of MS Office.

And they come with a coloring-in book instead of a user manual. The arseholes who drive these things NEVER turn off their fog lamps.

I worked for a company that did this. The tea lady got so rat-arsed she fell off the boat in the middle of the booze cruise.

Will their marketing department be first against the wall when the revolution comes?

It also says 'rotates' when it means 'orbits'. Not very good writing.

The SKA isn't all-or-nothing. It can start small with a few receivers (South Africa already have the MeerKAT array) and scale when funding is available. It doesn't really matter if there are delays--good science can still be done with half an SKA.

No your honor. Clearly, we were targeting American's because our website only uses American spelling and grammar. And you're all wankers.

Even in American the plural of American is Americans, not American's.

Wow, 10,000? Why don't they use chains or something to hold those bad boys down in choppy waters? Or, I don't know, built steel railings along the perimeters? Or inter-locking Lego-like attachments between containers?

They do. The two lower tiers are held down either by chains and turnbuckles or lashing bars; subsequent tiers are secured to the lower tiers by twist locks. These things don't fall overboard in "choppy" waters--they fall overboard in much worse sea conditions. Wave heights in force 12 can reach 60' (~20m) and no stabilizers can deal with the violent movement of the ship in those conditions. Weather routing is improving all the time, though, so ships find themselves in those conditions far more seldom.

Well, why not? No one forces you to go through the six-monthly agony of updating to what is, essentially, an experimental version. I'm quite happy sticking with the stable LTS version and upgrading every 2 years, and even then only after the new LTS has been available for 3 months or so, the bugs have been fixed and the whining has died down.

In my opinion WP 5.1 was the best word processor ever made. And it fitted on 2 floppies and ran on my 286 with a 10MB hard drive and all of 250k memory.

There is no latin plural of virus (it's a singularitantum meaning slime or poison), so you can make up your own.

Since we're writing in English, follow the English convention of adding an 's' to the end of the word (or, since virus already ends in 's', add 'es'). Viruses. Simple.

Microsoft Windows is everyone's first choice as an OEM system install.

It isn't a "choice", it's a lack of choice.

It is a strong seller retail boxed. It is pirated everywhere and outperforms Linux in the thieves markets and bazaars of the third world

Try not to be a moron. No one needs to 'pirate' linux. It's free.

Microsoft Windows is not crap. It is not a hell for its users. 1 to1.5 billion users world-wide

this is your opinion. Most users DO NOT KNOW that there are alternatives, let alone how much less hellish the alternatives are.

It makes no concessions whatever to the FOSS zealot's notion of ideological purity or political correctness

Non sequitur. Look it up.

MS Office Home. Paint Shop Pro. Inkscape. Irfanview. Scribus. Microsoft Security Essentials. IE 9 and IE 10 Platform Preview

Either these are available natively on linux (Inkscape, Scribus), or alternatives are available. And the rest of your rant is of similar quality. Why bother to post if you haven't the first idea of what you are talking about?