leggomylibro

Oh, mostly the forest-y and nature-y states - Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, California...I would've liked to see more of Montana and Michigan, but it gets cold up there in the winters.

Mostly I drove through Texas to avoid Oklahoma (one of my least favorite states), but the Guadalupe Mountains were very nice.

I'm not sure I'd call it 'clean' though; the air seemed awfully smoggy and I saw almost as many flaring wells as I did in North Dakota. But there were lots of open spaces and the people were friendly.

Washington, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Utah get my vote for the best places to do a parks/forests vacation, depending on your interests.

Interesting - you learn something new every day.

I guess my trip was probably biased towards states with lots of parks and forests, who probably had more incentive to protect their local environments.

Yeah, I noticed these signs along the highways in Texas when I was driving around the US.

And I chuckled at how they used the "Don't mess with Texas" phrase despite having much lower littering fines than most other states.

Like with everything else in this country, it's all about the marketing.

KGB doesn't exist anymore - you might mean the FSB or GRU?

Anyways, plenty of countries have security agencies whose main job is to violently protect the local kleptocrats these days. China might be a better example to point to for even worse behavior, with their balkanized net and mass surveillance being used to carry out the mass internment and repression of ethnic minorities in regions like Xinjiang.

Isn't the Earth sort of a people tank, though?

It's pretty big, but there are only so many variations on "tree", "mountain", "valley", "cave", "swimmy thing", "flying thing", "walking thing", etc etc.

It's not like you can ever expect to walk over the next hill and see an octo-monkey spiraling across the veldt.

If you're lucky, your language/library/etc might have a fairly active IRC channel or similar. Popular languages often have a myriad of channels dedicated to different subtopics.

They're nice because like you said, discussion can be much more helpful than a single answer.

The S2 lacks Bluetooth though, doesn't it?

The second core is meant to handle the network stack, leaving the first core to focus on program logic. With ESP8266s, it can be hard to write complex applications while keeping heavy WiFi usage stable.

Although, I'll bet the 8266 firmwares and libraries have improved a lot since I was using them.

Cool - it's amazing how much easier FPGA development has gotten in recent years thanks to efforts like YoSys and these sorts of frontend projects.

RISC-V has also been maturing over the same timeframe, which is bringing mainstream open-source efforts deeper into the stack of general-purpose computers.

We still don't have an open-source VLSI fab, but costs are always falling and Magic has been open-source for decades, so maybe it's only a matter of time until samizdat-style CPUs become possible :)

I know that's what the courts say, I just think it's insane and indefensible. And that erodes my trust in our judicial system and my respect for our institutions.

Or it would, if I had any left. If the law doesn't apply equally to everyone, it's not a legal system so much as a way to selectively keep people down.

It's incredible how far we've fallen; the border exception is particularly terrible.

I was once driving along I-10, which is an 8-lane / 80mph interstate. CBP had blockaded the entire road, and were pulling every single car and truck off to be questioned and searched.

My truck had a canopy with heavily-tinted windows that could have easily fit a few people, but I don't "look foreign", so they waved me through without even glancing at my ID or vehicle. From the people who had been pulled off, it looked like their job was to hassle people with brown skin.

I can't fathom how it isn't a violation of the Constitution to (ostensibly) search every individual driving along a major highway. What ever happened to 'probabale cause'? Is living in the US considered evidence of committing a crime in the US nowadays?