I believe the point was that to the average Joe user, not getting a GUI is just as good as not booting at all. Those of us who love the CLI wont have any problem debugging a broken X but my Mom would call me and tell me her computer wont boot if it barfed some errors and dumped her at a shell login prompt.

This.
The idea of giving money to another person for the sake of receiving some sort of benefit or consideration is as old as the hills. If we're going to outlaw some forms of it but not all, things get sticky. It gets worse when we rename the exceptions so as to obfuscate their intent. Lobbying is just giving someone something in exchange for them giving you some additional consideration in their decision making process.
I bet if I "lobbied" the police department in my town so as to have them decide not to ticket me the next time I was late for work I'd be accused of bribery. If I "lobby" a politician so that they make decisions that benefit me it's not? I fail to see the difference.

If I had to venture a guess about the fighter jets, it would be that they are a dramatic simulation of what the initial wars looked like, when the bugs came to Earth to attack us the first time.

That made my day. Just sayin'.

4) get shot because you are witness to nearly a million dollars in ill-gotten income and you are now a liability rather than a useful too;.

I'm not so sure about this. By the time high rolling drug dealers are trying to placate you, you must realize that you're close enough to the situation that not turning a blind eye can be very, very dangerous.

I prefer large bundles of cache to be transported very, very close to my CPU. Integrated is even better.

This.

I keep hearing "reasonable people don't do X". It may be true that it's quite uncommon, but we can't begin making accusations just because someone is doing something eccentric. I could have sworn that at one time it was normal for little old ladies to have a mattress stuffed with money because they didn't understand or trust banks.

Sure, this person isn't a little old lady and these are sketchier circumstances, but I don't think that puts the onus on Anaya to begin narcing on his clients. Especially when dealing with someone who has the potential to be as dangerous as an $800,000 wielding drug dealer.

I like the point about Canada. I, as a smoker, would support a move similar to that here to see if it helps.

As for the pot smokers operating heavy machinery that you refer to, that seems like something that company policy can control. A company can say they do not want drunk or high people running equipment and that using drugs or alcohol while on shift is an offense that can lead to termination. Governments don't need to control what some other organization can.

I wish I had mod points. Lacking that, I just have to say that I appreciate both the well constructed car metaphor and the elegantly expressed frustration with the forcible interface switches that are handed out without asking the user's consent. In this day and age of cheap storage, is there a good reason that new interfaces can't keep the legacy UI paradigms around as an option and load the correct libraries for your "theme" on demand?

That definition you have there could be used to cover this situation.
In the case of sensory deprivation, one is eliciting strength of emotion: fear, anxiety and phobia. (among other possibilities). For drugging an unwilling person, one is using physical force and possibly intimidation to administer the drug.
That being said, violence has been getting applied to a lot of interesting situations by very hippie folks and that muddies the word. Perhaps I've been polluted by the diluted definition.

I would actually argue that torture is the use of violence rather than pain and/or harm and violence comes in many varieties. Denying one permission to use the bathroom is a well known tactic. You're not preventing them from soiling themselves so it's not like they're going to be physically harmed. Instead, it's psychological violence. Does the lack of pain or harm make it not torture? I'd say torture also encompasses being compelled to answer questions under the influence of drugs. Forcing someone to go through that is violence in my eyes.

You could always switch to SRWare Iron.

My take on this is that the person being envisioned doesn't actually own the computer they are checking mail from, hence webmail and browser.

My heart just warmed a little.