... and I'm at the end of my lifecycle.

Ah. Forget about it. TL;DR

It sounds like the Boost project might be something for you:

http://www.boost.org/

The weight of the ashes of an average male is around 3 kg.

That's much too much material for a single vinyl record. So either they throw away most of the ashes, or it's a scam altogether.

That is simply not correct. It is very, very easy to produce a non-blog website with Joomla. Wordpress is a blog system, and Drupal needs lots of work to not be one.

Microsoft is going the way of SCO. When their business started to crumble, they stopped innovating and started suing. Certain death of the company is at the end of that route.

Who's talking about blame?

DRM is more like forcing women to wear a chastity belt, but everyone who has paid you for a key can rape them...

Wow. You can glean information from the Internets. I didn't realize that.

I agree. The school could have spun it around and used this to promote science teaching. There's a great deal of interesting science in the SETI project, (although I don't believe they will ever find an signals from distant civilizations.) "Our school is searching for E.T.!" The kids would have loved that.

I've used sparklines that were updated "automatically" from the values in a database. The software in question tracked the coffee consumption pr. person in the lab, and displayed it using sparklines on a web page (no longer online). The sparkline code was a PHP snippet I found on the net somewhere. There must be plenty of prior art.

The ubuntu-desktop package is a meta-package and its only purpose is to make sure certain other packages are installed. The worst that can happen during an upgrade is that you miss out on new packages that are considered by the devs to be desired on the default desktop.
If you're worried about breakage, fake OO packages would worry me more.

No you don't. Just remove the ubuntu-desktop package.

The Gimp is in Ubuntu main (see https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gimp )

Ubuntu wants the installation to fit on a single CD. Most other distros, including Debian, distribute on DVDs, but unless you receive a hardcopy from somewhere, it can be problematic to download if you have a slow or unstable Internet connection, and basically, on the DVD image you download lots of software you don't need or want. CDs are much more manageable, and once the system has been installed, you can carry on customizing your system.

With the growing number of drivers and kernel modules, occasionally software needs to go from the CD image, and here, as in writing, the rule is: "kill your darlings." Nobody *wants* to get rid of The Gimp (like others have said, it's a seminal application) but taking a hard look at the facts, you need to admit that The Gimp is a program you need to spend lots of time with to be able to use efficiently, and users who want it can get it faster than you can say: "in a few clicks." (Well, almost :-))

OTOH, a photo app is valuable to have on the install image when you have to win the hearts and minds of users coming from other OSes... it's all a part of fixing Ubuntu bug #1.