If you had a clue about geography (or just checked a map) you may have noticed that the cable would pass entirely in Tunisia, closer to the border with Algeria than with Libya. Both Tunisia and Algeria are relatively politically stable, although Algeria is not very democratic.

Anyway, it is possible that the project will go nowhere, but I'm pretty sure that the engineers and politicians involved will take due care to read all this Slashdot discussion and take in account your valuable expertise on the subject, they may even send you some money for the invaluable insight you have provided!

The problem of Opera (and Vivaldi) on Linux is that they do not have a license for h264, they try to grab the dynamic library codec from google chrome or firefox, but often it does not work. And the instructions to do it manually change every 3 weeks, and you have to read through 20 forum posts written by pimpled youths to find out how. So the 4 milliseconds you saved loading the page faster are wasted

Solution: just use Firefox, it is slow and ugly, but it is actually free, and it is the only browser that supports ublock on Android, and one you get used to ublock you cannot surf the normal internet any more.

Since they have ditched FirefoxOS and all that horsepiss, Firefox has begun to improve again. It will take a couple more decades before it is a good browser, now it is just the best

Do you think that switching to a *BSD is easier than just installing a distribution without systemd?

I'm not even going to comment about the obvious gnome3 fallacy

Except that many websites do not accept very long passwords, and most will require it to contain an upper case letter and/or a number, and may even bitch if you put the upper case at the beginning and the number at the end, at which point you put them somewhere else and you forget the password the moment you press "ok".

To strengthen you point: if you want to use the same browser on desktop and on your smartphone, Firefox is the only one that has proper ad-blocking on mobile. Many other mobile browsers have ad-blocking, but none of the block those intolerable "related content" fake news bottom-of-the-page spammers. Only Firefox with ublock origin properly blocks invasive ads on Android.

The other ad-blockers on mobile (integrated in the browser or not) suck so much that I'm beginning to think they are all getting money from advertisers. And of course, google chrome does not block anything at all, which is very bad considered how much android malvertising there is. There is one Android browser called Yandex, that support desktop extensions, but surprise!, ublock and adblock plus are not supported. You are stuck with its built-in adblocker, which does not block anything.

I've tried so many times to use anything else that firefox on Android, but after two days of surfing the web in a minuscule square in the center of flashing advertisement, after being redirected to the play store to install stupid games, after too many pop-overs with a minuscule x, I always go back to Firefox.

To sum up: if Firefox is noticeably slow on Android, it is much less noticeably so on any decent desktop or laptop. Also, I like syncing desktop with mobile, to avoid having to retype password on the virtual keyboard, and to quickly find in the history a page I may have visited on my phone. So Firefox be it, on mobile because it is by far the best (even if very slow) and on desktop because it does not really suck that much, and it is the only one that sync with mobile.

But the day where Chrome or Opera support proper ad-blocking on Android (and Opera can do ffmpeg decode on Linux without going crazy), or Vivaldi releases an Android version, I'm sorry for Firefox, if it has not catch up on performance, its going to be retired.

Don't play fool: you know perfectly well that I (imprecisely) used the term "manual" to refer to the gearbox based on gears with different ratio of teeth, instead of the one (usually referred as automatic) based on planetary gears.