You're not counting product placement in the "program" - which to my mind has become simply the primary ad of a endless stream of ads. Keeping in mind that I stopped watching any mainstream "entertainment" 25 years ago because of the damn ads, not just on OTA, but premium and 'exclusive' premium products. (I'm not counting being forced to go see a movie as a work 'team building' exercise). If there's a way to extract another dollar from any situation, you may be sure that the end stage capitalism we are in will find it. On the whole, I don't object to the ads in principal. I object to the stupefying ignorance and idiocy of them and their assumption that will sell me something.

The usual practice is to have rate limits on the API to prevent things like runaway ansible playbooks creating thousands of allocations. I don't recall which of the cloud providers but that API limit was usually set to no more than 50 to 100 VPS creations within 24 hours. Yes, the limit could be raised. One customer doing quite legitimate work would start spinning up thousands of VPSs at XAM their time, and spin them down at the end of their work. I am not allowed to say why, but it made sense to me, kinda. I don't know if they ever found out they would have gotten those same resources for less if they'd just leave 'em spinning or not. The customer was not one we looked forward to dealing with.

Support at [different cloud providers I worked at] would sometimes raise a ticket to allocate IPs to specific customer VPS instations. Unless it was a well established customer, such requests were usually declined but given root access to the infrastructure, it's possible to do - if there's a good enough reason to do it. Money for one. Big customer (which is another way to say "money") is another. I've even seen cases at one cloud company that would delete someone's instantiation without warning to evacuate the resources from the specific infrastructure, and pass it off to the customers as "an emergency hardware failure". Which was utter BS and would tick me off. We had tools they could use to safely and seamlessly evacuate instantations but either did not know, or did not care, or most common didn't want to justify it to the change management control process. Change Management is a pain in the neck, I know, but when dealing with hundreds of thousands to millions of servers in tens of dozens of data centers around the world, some process control is not avoidable even if it is a PITA.

I'm going to have to think about that for some time, but off the cuff, I'd say most are Catholic because that's how they were raised, not due to any specific ideology other than Religion. Recall the quote from Proverbs "Train a boy in the way he should go; even when he is old, he will not swerve from it." At what point does early inculcation and canalization preclude any other thought pattern - and can I do that myself, since I was also subjected to it? An Ouroboros contemplation there.

Used to work for a State government that used satellite brokers to get pictures of areas that were hours old. This was done for infrastructure planning and expansion and did not have "side look" capabilities like drones do. EG: a satellite can't look into your window, but a drone can. Also, Satellites have "iris control" so that the NSA or NRO can stop US based satellites from photographing areas they don't want photographed. Drones have restrictions but not the same. Drones are cheap and quick, satalite can require weeks to months for a specific mission window to be available and are NOT, repeat NOT cheap. A typical photo mission at 1 m is multiple thousands of dollars. Not sure of today's rates, my time was more than a decade ago.
Bottom line, Sat is good when you have a known time window and a need for "big picture". Drones are good for "Right Now, Right There" missions. Different tools for different needs.

The 4th Amendment states:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

So are you advocating for the repeal of all the bill off rights, or just this one?

People that are homosexual and those that object to being killed due to their skin color tend to be liberal progressives, not the type of people that support or desire right wing authoritarianism and surveillance states. Fascism is a right wing ideology that is xenophobic, homophobic and racist. Don't take my word for it, use a dictionary.

I've my github residing in many places because it's used in many places. Just push it to a git repo. May lose anything newer than your copies..... Surely no one is more than a few days behind that's a dev? I know git has restored deleted repo's, usually one's they've deleted though.

The storage is a bit more problematic Object stores may have retained undeleted but tombstoned objects due to several factors, the real world not being perfect, but I wouldn't count on anything being recoverable, or coherent. Object stores only keep copies when you DON'T tell them to delete them (Or LEO comes by with an NSA letter. That can get aggravating because it keeps billing the customer when they've issued a delete. So you have to... well, be careful!)

Just get winget working reliably and not have to do stupid stuff to kick start it on the first installation. Gee whillickers, it's not as if MS doesn't own freakin' GIT HUB!
Been working for two years with a pro bono team to get a simple code base share for windows to work without needed the user to do more than just breathe.
Because - users. It works sometimes. Most of the time there's something going with the winget server side and it breaks horribly. Bleeding bits splattered all over the bus. Oh, the humanity!

If the objective is to obliterate, yes. However, the true objective is enough to stop the enemies mission. In the case of a drone, that can be as simple as a net made with fine fishing line to foul the propulsion system.
A Drone is an effective weapon system - if it's in the right place.
So is a caltrop - if it's in the right place.
Turns out one doesn't need to blow stuff up to wreck the enemy's plans. Sometimes a bit of monofilament or a couple of pieces of bent rod does the job effectively, but Raytheon and Boeing won't get rich selling that.

I'll simply point out that the 747 in question does not have air-frame and fuselage modification to withstand a "near" nuclear blast nor is it TEMPEST complaint. Boeing, not expecting to need to build any new 747 air-frames, dismantled and recycled the jigs used to make them - also used to modify them. They will either need to rehire the retired old school machinists, or rehire them to make the jigs for a one off job.

The TEMPEST modifications - hm. Not my job to teach you that. Look it up. I watched a building being converted from standard commercial building practices to NSA complaint standards. They basically removed the building and started over. It wasn't less expensive, it took less time, justifying the expense.

In the case of the gift, it is neither less expensive nor faster to convert it for PotUS use. What it is, will you admit it or not, is ego massage for Trump. He's already the President. How much more does his ego need to be fed? Truly a wendigo.

I'll show my source of fact first:
Historic gold prices
Gold Fix
Mental book mark that, we'll return to it.

I think you've missed the point of my initial observation - it's vital that the specie in circulation be worth less as a tangible item than it's intangible (face) value as long as the specie is a "Fiat money" . Else-wise people will mine your money, convert it to a commodity, then re-sell the commodity for the true tangible value. The government would actually be giving away wealth with each tangible specie. Put at a very basic level, if I can burn a 1 dollar bill and get the same BTU energy as a barrel of oil, then the value of a barrel of oil is $1 dollar. But I can't get the same BTU out of burning a dollar.

In 1910, a model T Ford cost USD $950.00, in any color you'd like as long as it was black. $950 would get you 52.19 troy ounces of gold in 1910.
Today, 52.19 Troy ounces of .9999 gold would be about USD $175,000. But today, you can get that vehicle in chartreuse paisley if you'd like. (I don't judge.)

The US hasn't gotten more expensive - arguably, with increases in production efficiency and automation, it's actually less expensive. What's happened over time is that the specie has been devalued, sometimes by inflation, sometimes by government policy. Again, I'm not arguing that point - only that it is very, very dangerous for a fiat currency like the Dollar to have a tangible value greater than it's face value. President Trump's observation on the penny (Excuse me, one cent piece!), if it is an accurate quote HINT: it is, shows he does not grasp this point. A graduate of Wharton School of Business, twice president of the United States of America, appears to not understand the basic underpinning of the world economy.

At the moment, I really don't see a "union".
I see less populous states with political agendas that the majority do not want forcing their policy on the majority.
I see lower earning states extracting tax money from higher earning states to support their lack of fiscal and civic social duties.
I see a state with more GDP than Texas and Florida combined contribute more to the economic and social success than a multiplicity of states.

I suspected such. It would seems you'd prefer to impose the tyranny of the super minority over the tyranny of the minority. Sir, land and cattle do not vote. You should try looking at a map using a population density projection rather than a Mercator projection.

For "extra" insight, try looking at other countries - say, India and China, versus the United States or the Russian Federation.

I'm interested in your tagline

Personally, I'd be in favor of ending the Senate's representation of each state, two senators. It makes no sense for Wyoming, with half a million people, to have two votes, while California, with forty million people, has two votes.

From the Fine Article:

If it costs thirty five cents to make a one cent piece, but the cost of the metal is a fraction of one cent, then no one gets one cent pieces to melt down into base metal.

If a dollar coin has five dollars worth of metal in it, only the very stupid wouldn't go get all the dollar coins they could and melt them down for the base metal.

The cost of the base metal should be less than the face value of the coin. The cost to produce the coin is largely irrelevant. The cost to make a bill of any denomination is the same for each bill (leaving out the minor variations for printing millions of them) but only last a limited time compared to a coin. For a dollar bill about 18 months, a bit longer as the denomination goes up. But every coin wears for 20 to 30 years. Arguably if saving money is the imperative we should stop printing paper money.

Your words:

If the standard is that the coin is too low in value to bother with, I agree. The issue is that the one cent coin's value is too low for people to care if they lose one, or even a 100. Same with nickles, dimes, but quarters... now people pay a tiny bit of attention. But not for much longer, really, and the purchase power of a quarter drops ever lower. This is why we see more and more credit card vending machines. Inflation proof, and when we get to the point of needing a wheelbarrow to haul cash around the credit card makes it a simple transaction.

Back in the Day I had a job where we had to settle with the state tax authority each and every day we operated. The joke was as the tax percentage was not an integer, (EG: a fractional number) so we kept a one cent piece we'd cut in half. We'd trade it back and forth with the state guy depending on the balance due. It was always funny when we got a substitute state guy in during illness or vacation.