The Sam Altman types, and the Thiel/Musk types especially, want technofeudalism with them on top. For some of them the "good of society" factors in but it is always after this.

We would certainly be at a disadvantage if Russia was able to copy rockets that constantly blew up shortly after launch.

Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

A direct line between County Cork and Loudon VA does not go through the east coast of Maryland on a spherical earth, that was the only point I addressed. Even if you wanted to maximize how much is laid in the ocean as opposed to land, there are still shorter distances that would land you on at least in Delaware. While I am sure there are logistical reasons to do it where they are doing, that is irrelevant to my point.

Yeah that sounds off. Probably mean digging at coastal shallower waters then just having it lay on the floor elsewhere, that's the standard.

That's assuming we live on a flat earth. A shorter line between County Cork and the US would have the US terminus much further north.

"We are crazy."

What's incredibly frustrating is how much of the craziness has been created and driven by Australians. Other countries want to push back against Trump? Go after the lunatics who fill his dementia-ridden head with all the crazy ideas, including their companies.

The Las Vegas Fry's is still vacant, too. Best Buy has this market to itself.

I like being able to pull all my mail to my main machine, filter it into folders and have it, backups too.

I do all of that on my mail server. It's then accessible over IMAP, or I can fire up Roundcube in a browser. The filters are also managed through Roundcube. The VPS it runs on costs me maybe $12 per month, and that's not even the cheapest option out there.

Embrace the power of "and."

"If Linus yells at you to stop doing something, you damn well listen, or move aside for someone else who will listen."

What if he's wrong on something?

I mean the dude is 55, mentally he's not going to be able to keep up with the really abstract stuff.

I've flown on Spirit many times and every bad thing you've heard about it is true.

Thatâ(TM)s not the only reason; the other two big ones are:

1. There is far greater parity between Windows and Linux in terms of stability and security over the past 15 years or so.
2. Linux has never had the software range MS
has had, and the best Linux software is also on MS plus a lot more.