I'm in Texas, and all the local Republicans at least have a very national mindset. Part of that may be that Greg Abbott has spent the last few years excommunicating any Texas Republicans who don't follow orders to a T. Independent thought and grassroots concerns have been actively pushed out through the primary process.

If you're curious why governor Greg embarked on this project, it's because not enough Republicans were willing to defund their local schools for his private-school voucher program. Those local concerns don't matter, here. The experiment seems to have worked, so you can expect these tactics to proliferate to other states, if allowed.

The laws overall definitely need some tightening up to improve driving conditions. Get rid of the overly bright headlights mounted at eye level. Get rid of the overly loud vehicles - by confiscating property and revoking licenses if necessary.

One major problem with the speed cameras in particular is that, at least here, they don't have reasonable speed limits to enforce in the first place. Where I live has recently upgraded some 2-lane former country roads into 7-lane near-freeways, but not updated the speed limit from 35 MPH. These are roads you can easily, safely drive 50 or faster; they appear to have been designed for that, but the speed limit was never updated. Doubtless it's to give cops a cover story when they want to search someone.

Hand over your identiphone. It's the law, citizen; you will submit to scanning.

The solution to that problem is speed cameras, which people will rage over just like the Flock cameras. But it actually is the proper application of that kind of technology.

"local elections are dominated by local issues, not national issues or party politics."

This is becoming less true every year. We can't blame it all on the media... but we can blame most of it. The rest is from the politicians.

The money is coming out of state and local budgets when they pay the tax. It's a transfer of funds out of local governments and into the federal. All orchestrated by the "party of small local government" of course.

It needs to be noted that the explicit view of many in power is that the federal government isn't allowed to build anything but weapons, armies, and familial wealth for the powerful. Firefighting drones? Maybe for Mar-a-Lago, but everyone else has to pay the tithe first.

Someone else cited FLOPS per gram as the measurement where these chips excel. Grams become important in something that flies and has to balance itself.

This one can actually cause Crysis.

"Judges with Warrants" ... so last century.

New botnet spun up July 6th.

I think that reflects more on your attempts than it does on some contrived distinction between "real" and "unreal". I tried to make music in a DAW and came to the conclusion that I'm not a good musician, and would rather listen to the pros, who are very good and quite "real".

Spotify at least has a financial incentive to slow it down - most of their subscriptions come from people who are seeking specific music.

Then again, they might have supply-side incentives to speed the crap up. The entertainment industry would love to break their dependence on workers (artists).

Weren't we hearing the majority of all traffic is now bot traffic? If even a fraction of the bots manage to evade flagging, it could swarm the totality of human Linux users.

Well, I think first we should stop funding foreign governments' genocide projects. After that, sure, I'll pay a bit more in taxes.

The idea that every individual human is equal to another is not one I buy. Who is in power matters. I know fatalism and disempowerment are hip right now, but some people are better than others, and change is possible.