In Spain, power companies are untouchable - remember the power outage which took the entire electrical network down for almost two days several month ago? Well, no one has been blamed for it.The reason is very clear: When high-rank politicians retire from politics, they are hired as "consultants" by these electricity companies getting big bucks for doing essentially nothing (we call it "revolving doors"). Therefore, politicians are very careful of not bothering their "retirement angels". Approving a law which would force the electricity companies to spend money in safeguards, redundant systems, etc., might put their "golden retirement" in jeopardy.
This happens since the moment the ex-president Felipe González (supposedly "socialist") privatised the main power companies in Spain... and then became part of the Board of one of them.
Telephone operators, on the other hand, are not as involved in politics as power companies are, so they are more "vulnerable" to laws which force them to comply with minimum standards of service as they don't have a way of "retaliate" later.

Unity was the reason I switched from Ubuntu to Mint.

We don't know yet. But the European Commission has to give its approval first. On the other hand, being from different countries might dodge the anti-trust laws (IANAL, though).

This guy really put the "up" in "upload".

Just a side note FYI: In Barcelona only tourists eat paella. And it usually is fast-food paella, which tastes awful and is likely to give you an intestinal storm. Oh, wait, the bus company must be behind... Bus-Paella conspiracy, anyone?

...so for sure El Trumpo wants them down.

My (Japanese) wife and I got married in Spain. Then we just registered the "already existing" wedding in Japan, and that's it!
It can be a romantic alternative for Japanese couples: instead of getting married before the wedding trip, get married during the trip. They have Hawaii quite close, which is a very common holiday destination for them, so it shouldn't be that difficult.

640k ought to be enough for any app.

Aye, I'll pass right along with you. I've spent too many decades learning my craft. People pay me to know what I'm doing, and I'm proud of the services I'm able to provide for them.

I've forgotten the name of the company now, but there was a presentation at the Linux conference last year (two years ago, maybe?) in New Orleans that talked about this very topic, and they (or someone else that approached me afterward because I asked a question about it) said that their company was making switching hardware that did stuff in kernel-space, maybe with a proprietary module. This is key here... you can stuff a bunch of NICs in a box and use brtables or whatever and make a switch, but that's going to be dog-slow. ASICs are needed, and at least that one Linux company is making them.

Oh, I forgot to mention. I also use Kerbal Space Program for my deep space observations.
Can you prove that the Universe does not contain some part which exactly matches what you can see on KSP? We only need to find where it is, but I leave this work to people with better telescopes and more time to search.

He is an excellent astronomer, but he is totally null when it comes to computers (he says: "Computers smell fear and attack me when I'm around them"), so I usually give him a hand to setup the system to capture images and post-process them. Also, we share some excellent whisky while we observe the skies at his home (which is about 1/4 mile-400m away from mine, so we meet pretty often). This is a (not-so-good) picture of his home site, built by himself.

For sure they will not understand what you say. The more different from English, the better. For example, Arabic is a good option.

Oh, wait...

I haven't tried this, but jack is a networked sound protocol... it should be possible to export that to your end of a remote session.