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.

Your honor, every smartphone currently in existence has tools built in to accommodate people with vision loss, ranging from 'increase the font size' to 'magnifying glass functionality' to 'screen reader' to 'attach a braille output screen.'

That's just under fifty 3.5" floppy discs! We're back, baby!

Me: you know, many businesses already change between summer and winter schedules; many retail stores, many services, many public transit operators.....

how the hell could they make the "just one administrator" mistake?

It's not a mistake, because it's not a 'permissions/who can be administrator' 'mistake.' It's the account owner. It's the person who's credit card is on file.

Why would Apple 'comply with a court order' that has nothing to do with them?

If the court ordered the father to disband the account, and he didn't disband the account, he needs to be taken back to court to force compliance.

That being said, the article DID make clear that there WAS a court order for him to disband the account, and even if he was using in all the right ways for all the right reasons, not-complying with a court order is extremely problematic.

Then her remedy is to go back to court and compel the target of the order, aka the ex-husband, to do as ordered, not to claim that a third party with no standing in the case is at fault.

If you and I contract that I will sell you may Ford Escape for five grand, and you give me five grand and I don't give you the keys, you don't go to Ford and ask them to make you a key. They will, correctly, say "....and what does this have to do with us?" when you wave the sale contract at them.

And nothing Apple did or didn't do prevented the mother from having that custody.

She had a remedy from day one: make new accounts for the kids. Inconvenient? Sure. But way less inconvenient than most of the stuff that goes along with 'we're separating.'

*Should* Apple develop a system to deal with this a big more gracefully? I'd say so. But to conflate this with 'they're violating a court order for custody' is utterly ridiculous.

This company's response was reported within 24hrs of the story breaking on mass media. Slashdot: stuff that mattered last week if you're lucky.

A decade ago, TheOnion touted Apple's new laptop with a scroll clickwheel instead of a keyboard.

What megalomaniacal near-trillionaire had a whole squadron of leet hackers hoovering up federal employee records just a few short months ago? I forget. It musta been somebody with pockets 30x deeper than George Soros to tunnel into those boring databases, we should launch an investigation.

No, it's well ascertained that EVs are fine for almost every civilian use case these days, but lets also remember that this probably doesn't apply for you specifically, because so much as having an app on your phone for your car (EV or not) is too much for you to handle.

Well, yes, you do, because the BMS keeps track of that.

A gas car, on the other hand....