Bullshit.

The Atlas V was designed at a time when the Soviet Union was crumbling. Using Russian engines was an American ploy to ensure world stability by keeping Russian rocket designers gainfully employed instead of leaving them fend for themselves, building God knows what for the highest bidder.

Did that work? Well, I haven't seen much progess in rocket technology by people crazy enough to start wars.

Has this tactic outlived its usefulness? Yes, in view of recent developments, it's time for a new arrangement. Oh, look, that's just what they're doing.

They use optical amplifiers. The signal stays in optical form, and is guided through a special section of fiber. A laser pumps energy into that fiber section, some of that energy ends up amplifying the signal. So it still needs power to drive the laser.

Neal Stephenson's utterly fantastic essay on the subject (all 42,000 words of it) for Wired

For each fiber, you need an amplifier every 50 (?) km. You may run into a weight limit where the amplifier pack becomes too heavy to be suspended by the cable during cable laying.

There have been experiments in this area: one design for the sleeping bag had an inflatable ring around the bag's perimeter. When inflated, it pulled the sleeping bag taut to provide some pressure on the body.

Knowing an aircraft is present is one thing, being able to shoot it down is quite another matter. You can't use these low-frequency radars in fighter aircraft or missiles, because the antenna size would be too large. So you have to use a ground station to guide your fighters to an intercept point, and get close enough to use either IR missiles or get close enough for HF radar to work. But by then your non-stealthy fighter will be far inside the detection range of the F-35 and will have gotten a couple of missiles up its ass.

If I'm not mistaken, this is the third place SpaceX is going to be building lots of infrastructure at. What advantage could this site possibly have over Cape Canaveral?

Depends on where you live. Over here (.nl) most water towers have been decommissioned by now, so water pressure does rely on electricity these days.

Off the top of my head, SpaceX already holds the record with 9 engines on a single stage. There have been stages with 8 engines (Saturn 1B?). The Soviets tried 30 engines on the N-1, but that failed 4 times in 4 attempts. There's been a Delta variant with 8 boosters clustered around the first stage. If you count engines with multiple nozzles, the number goes up (5x4 nozzles on the Soyuz, but that's only 5 engines).

The one thing Classic Theme restorer can't do is set the tab size to small values. I use the Custom Tab Width extension with a minimum tab width of 20 px; Australis' stupid tab redesign ensures that widths below ~50px are unusable.

What do you mean, 'creepy'? This is a function that automatically switches on existing systems (adaptive cruise control, lanekeeping). As ever, any action you take manually will override this.
My grandfather died in a crash because he fell asleep (or fainted, we never found out definitively) at the wheel. Had this existed 50 years ago, I might have been able to meet him.

I wish I could get my laptop to do that. It spends most of its time in a dock anyway, endlessly cycling between 100% and 95% of capacity, eating up the limited number of charge cycles to no benefit.

You forget to account for the energy storage, as you won't be using much lighting while the sun shines. And the extra air con load, depending on your local climate.

Cockpit windows in airliners are tiny. You have maybe 20 cm of clearance between the control panels below and above the cockpit windows, so you have a very limited field of view.

This Airbus proposal isn't the first windowless cockpit, by the way.
British Aerospace proposed the P.125 VTOL fighter which had the pilot sitting in a windowless cockpit buried in the fuselage.
And Charles Lindbergh had no front view on his Atlantic flight: he had to rely on a periscope and his side windows.