I have never noted that the Linux community is welcoming to newbies who are looking for help figuring things out. Quite the opposite, in fact, active hostility to basic questions that "everybody should know."

There's a considerable appeal to keeping the club exclusive.

(Not all open source communities are like this. But it's certainly common enough.)

I was just looking at that very part of the dashboard yesterday. It says this is how it works. Very specifically.

There's even less reason to have a POTS line at home. Especially since 75-80% of US homes don't have any landline these days.

It isn't a binary equation. Yes, police work was done before the modern surveillance state existed, but was not, ever, 100% efficient.

There are two questions here, that none of the political hacks will ask, much less answer:

Is police work more efficient with limited resources? In other words, is a criminal who would have gotten away with it without license plate scanners more likely to be caught with them?

And how easy and how likely is it that the technology will be abused?

The answer to the first question is almost certainly "yes, the cops will have an easier time catching perps if they have this." The answer to the second is "very likely, and most certainly." Regardless of which part is in charge, this kind of surveillance technology will be used to track political enemies.

California needs no help from anyone else in destroying themselves, and they're well on the way to total ruin.

As long as it hurts then more, it's a price I'm willing to pay.

I work with both all the time, and I agree completely. The the PUC in California is useful when the telecos get too out of hand. Not, mind you, because they give a damn about the consumers, but because they hate telcos (especially AT&T) with a passion you have to see to believe (they buy nails and crosses wholesale to crucify companies with), but it's still good for us in the end.

I find it hard to believe that you have a POTS line, no matter how basic, for $41/month. The average is about $300, priced specifically to make customers switch. (When reviewing services for a store we bought recently, we found one POTS line, that hadn't been used for anything for, probably, years, was out of contract and being billed at about $2,000/month. Even the rep I cancelled it with was appalled.)

And really, the only reason for a business to have a POTS line at all any more is because the alarm companies are struggling to convert their systems over to cell based communications.

As I said, they've done some impressive work.

But they shouldn't make shit up about it.

Who is clueless enough to believe they will?

According to the NPR story yesterday, they won't have an animal like a moa, they'll have a modified pigeon, in the same way they didn't have an animal like a dire wolf, they had a regular wolf with an odd color of fur.

While they've done some impressive work, they overstate it. By a lot.

who pretend they've resurrected the dire wolf. Not sure I take their claims 100% seriously.

That is the goal, yes.

If the internet was invented for porn (and it was), then namecalling was the 2nd use.

Wasn't that a copyright claim? That would be why they tried patents this time.

Nothing new from Nintendo. They've always been greedy, grasping, litigious douchebags.