And they'll have to pay more for it than . . . nothing for another rehash of a franchise they already own.

You're blaming me for not knowing what you refuse to tell me. Where I come from, that's one of the definitions of "asshole."

Attitudes like yours are why the "year of Linux on the desktop" is 20 years away, and always will be. Enjoy your tiny urine soaked sandbox.

High quality hallucinatory slop is still slop.

And lawsuits over false positives in 5 4 3 2 ...

Newsom doesn't give a shit. He's termed out this year, it is no longer even possible to set up a recall election in time to shorten his term by a single day.

And nothing anyone does will alter his being the next Democratic candidate for President, except, possibly, Kamala Harris deciding that the Democrats need to lose again by running (and somehow bribing or blackmailing her way back into the good graces of party leadership, which isn't likely at this point).

Plus, anybody who know their ass from a hole in the ground (which, sadly, is very few Californians) knows that the governor of this state is entirely ceremonial as long as the Democrats have a supermajority in both houses of the legislature. He can veto his heart out, and they'll just override in a straight party line vote.

Since when does the real world ability to enforce something matter in California law? It's virtue signaling, and nothing more.

Quite often, they resent being told that because they have read the manual, and it didn't make sense because open source projects don't generally have dedicated documentation writers, and programmers have little skill and less interest in writing it. And when they say that, they get called stupid and worse.

Yes, I have had that experience. And I've got 30 years experience in IT. If the documentation doesn't make sense to me, it doesn't make sense. Blaming that on the newbie makes you the asshole.

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.