Not to mention that he’ll probably realize he doesn’t care about the boring and/or high risk positions in a month or two and either re-appoint or pointlessly replace the career diplomats with someone random in order to not....lose what face he thinks he has.

yeah, that’s from someone with a lot of privilege within their field, who either has nothing in their life that people would judge them unfairly on or who has enough resources that they don’t care what potential employers think.

I was thinking that line about why they have a big signal dish/tower was to provide a cursory answer to that gaping plot question. So, in-movie justification, bandwidth; but I think they were really constrained by the limited imagination of 70s directors for information transmission technologies. A New Hope is a…

Umm....or just buy a $6 oyster knife at the fish market. If they’re selling whole oysters they should also have shucking knives. But yeah, a paring knife would not work, agreed.

You can use all of those devices if you use Amazon’s software, which regulates the copyright, keeps you from downloading more versions of the book than the license allows (this is especially grating in e-textbooks, imo), and allows them to delete/revoke your permissions to the items you paid for access to if they feel…

Read the license on your e-book; Amazon, for instance, uses the license described above. Some other e-book vendors don’t. Amazon is only able to charge the prices they do because people don’t realize they’re only buying a license to read the book on Amazon-approved platforms.