Trying the full download now, the download link is broken and the torrent is stuck at 5MB of 127GB, so I'll give Lite a try...

Foreign language searches on DDG are abysmal. I think Google or Microsoft will win out in worldwide results. And MS has the edge with Edge.

Famouly, Cloudflare has a lava lamp random generator in a wall in its HQ, but they don't use it anymore.

I keep wondering why the EU doesn't use its infrastructure to provide services to people in authoritarian regimes - think Russia, Iran.

You could think of free-to-air EU sponsored TV/Radio channels for those countries similar to what the US did with Radio Free Europe. Another one might be a Starlink competitor operating worldwide to provide secure internet access (looks like they're only talking about connectivity in the EU for IRIS2).

The EU is sadly somewhat timid about going forward with this...

Why don't you enlighten us? GP says EU needs Ukraine for grain, parent argues against that.

All you put forward is an ad hominem attack, I prefer arguments.

But they want the cameras to always be rolling and reading plates.

"They" in this case is a company called BusPatrol and I think we can be safe in assuming they see this as a source of additional income. BusPatrol is trying to dress this up as protecting children but that is just window dressing.
Everyone is going to be totally shocked, as in shocked when this data turns out to be inadequately protected and turns up in North Korea, Greenland, Venezuela or whoever the next enemy of the month turns out to be. Nobody could have forseen that!

No, it's not. This is for requesting a new driver's license, filing your taxes, looking at your medical records, etc.

Why would I want anyone else but the government involved?

Your perspective from thousands of miles away must be spot on!

I don't know where you buy your clothes, but mine appear to have been made in S America, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam and I'm not sure where else. I've had made-in-US clothing before but the quality was pretty poor, probably because they were having to match prices with countries where wages were way lower. I suppose the same applied with clothing made in the UK, although it's been a long time since M+S dropped their "Buy British" policy.

A solution so obvious, one wonders why Canonical aren't adopting it. Even if they did that though, a week (and one which includes a Federal holiday) is totally insufficient.
I suppose it is better than what the current US Administration does, "we shuttered this service yesterday".

Yea, I have gotten a few of the "I lost my wallet/phone/etc. can you send me xx cash via WU ..." email spoofing scams

I have had two variations of this over the years, in both cases the legitimate senders had lost control of their email addresses after falling for phishing attacks. With their address books Online, what could go wrong? Anyway, what happened there was not what I understand as spoofing.

Didn't the current administration cut back on funding for the National Weather Service just over a year ago? I remember the cuts as having been directed more towards hurricane/tornado warnings but they can't be considered in isolation.

I had to look "G Suite" up because I had no idea what it was, it turns out that the only component I've ever used is gmail and that became necessary when I bought my first Android device after the "Email of death" killed Nokia's Symbian. I don't actually use gmail, it's the hook used for Android App updates.
Charging for Gmail is unthinkable, that would have so many knock-on effects.

You'd need permission for that, which you'd never get anyway. Even if you had that you'd need budget, which you'd never get anyway. The easiest way around that is to never ask for anything and do whatever you feel like.

Remember bureaucrats have the permission to say no, never yes.

In my experience with security-heavy organizations, they are so anal in some respects about security that they end making things way worse.

In one case security was so "strict" that it took months to get a login account, so people just installed their own linux boxes to work on, or shared their passwords. Password strings had to comprise of 27 (!) characters. People just ended up writing them on pieces of paper kept under their keyboards.

At one car manufacturer I worked at, security absolutely demanded that a certain security software was installed on every linux system, even though the software didn't work on linux. But hey, they could tick off a box on an Excel spreadsheet.