The OSHA regs were probably written around the traditional industrial manipulators that have *no* sensors to detect collisions, have large mass, move verrrrry fast, and have high joint torque. They live in safety cages, and there are interlocks on the control panels for when a human needs to go into the cage.

Bringing robots "out of the cage" is a topic of current research. It involves moving slower, reducing mass, lots of sensors to detect surroundings, and having backdrivable joints so that you can just push the robot out of the way if it bunts you. Kicking Spot on the flank is not just a demonstration of it's balancing algorithms. It says you can push it out of your way if you feel like it. I'd be interested in knowing what happens of you grab one of it's feet and hold on -- how much joint torque is present in the legs?

LegoLand San Diego has a ride that consists of a couple of chairs mounted on the end of some big industrial robot arms, (Kuka's, I think). You can pick your intensify from 1 to 5 -- my daughter and I chose 3, which is the first level where you go up side down. It was very good humor. Level 5 looked intense.... Anyway, I'm thinking saddling up a few Spots for robot races could be a cool ride :)

Which is when people realized there is a difference between a transmission line and just a piece of wire.

Which Fry's is that? The one's I've seen have one aisle of the most common cruft components, and the rest of the store is "other". When it comes to electronic components, I *am* the target customer, and I would never think of shopping at Fry's first, or at Radio Shack first, either. But... it is common for me to have an order Digi-Key every month, and every couple of months an order to Mouser and SparkFun, and a couple times a year to Adafruit. And several times a year I upload gerbers to a PCB fab house. The market exists, but there is *no* brick-and-morter supplier that could possible stock a useful range. There once was a time when I bought components a Radio Shack, but that was when the components were soldered onto the bottoms of tube sockets. Times have changed.

I think that is a very interesting concept. If it is a munition, it should be covered by the second amendment. The problem you face is that ever since the Miller case, the 2A has been eroding to the point where even though something is obviously covered by the second amendment, you still might not be able to keep and bear it. From a pragmatic standpoint, it is in everyone's interest to push back on government incursions into the 2A, because those same arguments can be applied by the government to 1A and 4A, and any-other-A. If you don't like what the 2A says, then try to pass an amendment to change it -- because trying rubbery arguments to contort the meaning will eventually erode the other amendments.

And where are my mod points today. Yes. This. The Zone of Lawlessness is mostly inside the DC beltway.

George Lucas in Love https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Exactly. All that infrastructure build-out costs lots of money. You need subscribers to pay the rent on the cell site, you need coverage (cell sites) to get customers. It takes a lot of cash to bootstrap that. Coverage pulls in customers -- I'm a past T-Mobile customer -- their plans are much more subscriber friendly that the other guys, but darn I need coverage in a couple of their holes. I'm just one data point, but I'm sure others make the same decision.

Serious question. HIPPA is very strict. Or so I'm given to understand, not having done a deep dive into the details. How can they do this without violating HIPPA?

I pretty much agree with you. But the *perception* of being able to compete is important, regardless of the actual importance of said competition later in real life. The point is that college students (of both sexes) make decisions based on their perceptions of the importance of various factors, and many of those perceptions may not be well calibrated. IMHO lecturing them that their perceptions are wrong is just another way to erode their self-confidence. Making them confident in basic lab/bench skills is actually pretty easy, and should be fun for all involved, and even though they may have a skewed perception of the long-term value, the short term value of increased self-confidence at a critical moment in time is invaluable.

Well, I have a lot of theories on that. My daughter, by the way, loves pink and purple and fabric arts. She also is a whiz at surface mount soldering, designs her own P.C. bpards, and completed multi-variable calculus at age 14. She is applying to engineering schools as a freshman for next fall. You do not have to do a princess-ectomy in order to end up with an engineer.

You *do* have to give girls the confidence that they can compete. I've made sure that my daughter has good bench skills. Now, I know and you know that bench skills don't matter for diddly when you become a program manager, or a senior grade individual contributor writing the documents that another 120 people will implement. But I've seen talented girls switch out of engineering majors because they were intimidated by the fact that their lab partners had memorized the resistor color code and knew how to use an o'scope and they didn't. In the long run knowing the resistor color code does not get you the corner office. But being confident enough to stick with the major is a big deal.

What percentage of the people graduating with qualifying degrees are women? If the hiring is close to that, is there a problem?

ahhhh, no. Now, don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Central Computer. But CC is not Radio Shack of the early 1970's. If you want basic components, visit Halted.

But in the end, no store is going to have everything you want for basic electronics any more. When RS started, a nearly complete catalog of useful vacuum tubes filled a few pages in the back of the Radio Amateur's Handbook -- and you didn't need to stock inductors, just enameled wire and coil forms, because hand-wound coils were a normal part of scratch building. Contrast that to when DigiKey stopped publishing a printed catalog, it was about 3 inches thick on thinnest imaginable paper -- and now the online catalog database is truly enormous -- no brick and mortar store could stock all of that.

Also, how can you possibly staff stores coast to coast with knowledgeable people at retail wages? Anybody with the knowledge to really be of help can get better work elsewhere.

Anything else I can help you with?

I will look at it and let you know. I am happy to see there is actual source code. Too many projects in RF-land claim to be open source, but are not.

Gee... I didn't find links to the schematics and source code on their web site. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough? Where are they?

Or..... maybe it's yet another click-bait article abusing the term "open source'.

.. who doesn't have investment income?