Booting US intermediaries as EU payment providers - all good and well, but you didn't expect overall control to go away, did you. Every transaction monitored: that's the goal.

Anonymous transactions are a nightmare to certain people. I find it amazing how swiftly, how coherently and how pragmatically they can act under some circumstances.

Oh sure, it was very deep, no doubt. Easily missed.

Not at all paranoid.

Cash is already tracked to some extent- e.g. which notes (serial#) were drawn from what ATM, when and where. But it's incomplete.

Certain small cash transactions are still anonymous. And anonymous transactions are bad.

"unbecoming", eh?

You should use the word 'fake' sparingly, you really should.

Really, that's all there is to it, do you think?

Okey dokey.

Lua is pretty widespread actually; if you want truly ancient: Tcl

To this day, in combination with Tk, the most compact and elegant way of bringing up a GUI in no time with basically zero effort.

The present is too verbose.

Long time Linux user here: that's a silly question.

It's not just about deploying a different OS to tens of thousands of machines. Which in itself is hardly a trivial exercise.

It's not just about having them use LibreOffice instead of MS Office.

It's about a coherent ecosystem. Not perfect, not shiny: coherent. Flawed it might be, but it scales - not brilliantly, but reliably enough across tens of thousands of endpoints, thousands of servers, with existing data bases, custom software, established processes, any serious disruption of which would cause administrative mayhem up to civil crises. And you've got an endpoint to direct your ire towards if things break.

The OS itself barely fucking matters, bluntly speaking. It's the unseen infrastructure around it that does. A lot.

Impartial in their impudence. Good, good.

That sentiment doesn't come out of thin air though.

But hey, they're amongst the most influential entities on the planet. They can take jibes.

Slippery slope. Consumer protection is typically selective and specific, and, above all, exclusive instead of inclusive. As in: you must not utilise substance X, your product must not exceed energy consumption Y, it must not employ material Z etc etc.

Forcing actors to provide a specific service for the convenience of others is bad. Or rather, would be bad, because I don't think this will fly even in the EU.

Yes, Hungary does. AI summary: "Hungary’s 2011 Fundamental Law (Alaptörvény) contains a clause stating that the official currency (legal tender) of Hungary is the forint. This means the currency is embedded in the constitutional framework rather than only in ordinary legislation."

, and the outcome is not actually a foregone conclusion.

Worth remembering.

By and large: no.

My personal take (that is, my 0.05€) is that European sentiment towards the US covers the entire range from admiration over friendliness via exasperation to slight weariness. But animosity is by no means the dominant sentiment. Europans, too, understand that there is a common base here, and that a few years of a slightly runaway administration won't necessarily shift all paradigms.

Mod parent up. This has been a major grievance of mine with every desktop Linux System I've ever used. One application doing runaway memory allocation, and the entire UI invariably grinds to a complete halt with zero interactivity. It takes minutes for the OOM kill to unblock things, if ever.

I can work around such things, but hard to explain to Joe User how a 'superior' OS can fail in such a basic fasion in 2025.