Here in the UK Methadone has been used as a heroin substitute for some years. It's considered to be more addictive than heroin but of predictable quality and supply, hence its use.
The glaringly obvious solution of the State control and supply of heroin to addicts is apparently beyond those who make such decisions. Far better to throw money up the wall buying a substitute and then pretend you're handing out medicine.

Yes, quite right. In fact, it wasn't until all this wretched "digital storage" arrived that "protecting one's data" became such an issue. Arguably, we have become enslaved by computers.

No.

Society isn't going to pay and reward them to exercise that right.

Or put another way - any kind of dissent, disobedience or refusal to obey will be used as an excuse to deny welfare - thus breaking the basic contract between state and individual and under which taxes are collected.
This is not a good precedent.

Yet there were reports in the months afterwards that Fukushima was as much as ten times worse than Chernobyl.
Radioactivity and "hot particles" from there have been found on the opposite side of the world.
And in Fukushima, still the reactions go on unstopped.

(I am not a nuclear scientists, so merely report what I've heard).

It seems Mr Shuttleworth has become infected with the Corporate "agree with us or you're stupid" mindset.
Shame.

Personally, Unity is a mess. It's not the bugs, they're sortable. It's the abandoning of 20 years of accepted UI standards just to satisfy some delusional idea that Ubuntu can become OSX.
Add to that Mr Bacon and Mr Shuttleworth doing the rounds online, patronising and insulting anyone who disagrees with them. Apparently, they hid some of the controls in order to stimulate people's exploration because apparently we don't explore enough. When you get to that level of patronising nonsense it's time to check into the Bill Gates Clinic for the Terminally Delusional.
Killed Ubuntu stone dead for me (and I'd used every version since the first Beta and was recommending it to anyone who asked).

No matter. There are plenty of alternatives. Fusion Linux is a fine "works out of the box" Fedora based distro and it still uses Gnome 2.3. There are others. Mint etc.

A special bonza rate of tax for the little Bruces in California. Strewth!

The media has gone from regarding its job as holding power to account to helping power avoid anything it doesn't want to face up to.
And people have abandoned the media in a steady stream ever since.
Quelle surprise?

KDE on slackware 13.37 works beautifully.

My only complaint is the inclusion of the nouveau driver - which despite being present as the default driver for all NVIDIA cards, doesn't work with all NVIDIA cards. It's included in every distro I've tried recently, despite this shortcoming - a poor decision from all distros.
Not a problem with slackware as it treats its users as intelligent beings instead of clueless eyecandy junkies and installing the blacklist package is a doddle.

There's little, if any, reason to have to install the latest release of any distro - half the world is still using XP and that came out 10 years ago. Don't like Unity? (Can't say I blame you - it's a piece of filth from a design/user awareness point of view) - stick to an earlier version.

you are not entitled to picking a fight with him

You mean pick.
And yes we are.

There is no law that says that critics may only come from a select class.
Criticising things on an ideological basis is open to all.

Not mad - but rather, scripted. Deviate from the script = lose your job. It's the script writers that have killed intelligent responsiveness in the "customer interface department". No longer are people employed because of their knowledge of the subject, but because of their ability to "follow the script". Reminds me of a story of contacting BT's Tech Support on behalf of a friend. I told the woman (in India) what steps I'd tried (all the steps anyone which any person with reasonably high levels of IT literacy would try) and she then took me through scripted steps, all of which I'd already tried, all of which I told her I'd tried, and when none of them worked she said "contact your pc vendor" and hung up. She didn't know ANYTHING about computers, just how to follow the script on the screen. Not technical support at all really.

But your great, great, great, great, great grandchildren will be employed monitoring the "by-products".

Who is Earl? Sorry, from the UK here -US cultural references are lost on me.

...with a free copy just for me, I would point to the Debian logo on my t-shirt and raise one eyebrow, Spock-like.

I had CoD4 for a while - it made me extremely uneasy. I'm not sure if the Middle East or the Balkans are suitable arenas in a game. There's too much recent history, bad blood, generational resentment etc. WW2 is far enough back to be comfortable, with the added bonus of the now almost universally accepted mantra that it was "a good war", perhaps the last good war we (US/UK etc) have been engaged in. It has the potential tactical scenarios that WW1 didn't. A WW1 game would be mostly pointless unless one wanted to show the mindless horror of it. I also had the game "Vietnam", again, made me uneasy. Too recent a war perhaps but mostly too immoral to celebrate with a game version however "clean" it might portray it as. Making a game of a "war" that's still underway? Bad taste - extremely bad taste.