The answer to the question that you did not ask is Pale Moon.

Insurance companies already use satellites to deal with claims. I know from recent experience that Travelers settles roof damage claims based on satellite imagery in an automated estimate system, and the results are so reliable that contractors take these jobs at face value. The 'adjuster' looks around for 15 minutes, pencil whips the claim and it's over.

No. No, they don't.

We're light-years away from near-real-time satellite photography for such small purposes as figuring out a single insurance claim, not to mention that the resolution is always piss-poor from space.

What we can do today is use existing aerial photographs taken from multiple angles, shove them into a computer, and automatically generate a 3D model of a roof which is accurate enough to generate a precise bill of materials to replace that roof. [citation]

What this means is that instead of an adjuster climbing a ladder and using a tape measure and math, he can instead do a rough visual inspection ("yep, your roof is fucked") from the ground and clickity-click his way to an estimate of the job.

What drones add to this is the ability to see damage on (e.g. flat) roofs not visible from the ground (which keeps adjusters off of ladders), while potentially supplement existing aerial photographs.

Oh, the car-without-a-dashboard-because-it-has-been-so-hacked-on hack, whereby the brakes were partially disabled with a computer and various vehicular things were controlled by someone other than the driver.

Any tool with a toolkit can do that to any car. The only "OMG!" in that article (which I did read, over a year ago when it was published) is that it happened with a Macbook.

A smarter tool can can do the partially-disabled brakes trick on any ABS-equipped vehicle using a 555 timer and a toggle switch, especially if they get to deconstruct the car first.

Give me a proper fucking citation about OBD hacks over publicly-accessible Bluetooth, as you claim to be so prevalent, or sit down at the back of the class.

Go ahead and Google it. Let me know what you find.

Thanks!

I'm not aware of any "standard" way for a keyboard to control a display's brightness through software on non-Apple hardware.

I have in my possession a 1TB WD Blue which was built in 2011.

The controller board was assembled onto the drive improperly, with the board bent over an alignment post instead of the post going through a hole.

Eventually, this caused a power issue as some SMD or other's RoHS solder joint(s) turned intermittent through years of heat-cycling: It wasn't spinning up or being recognized in BIOS.

I took it apart, looked at it funny, put it back together as properly as possible, and applied a rubber band to put some tension on things.

It worked fine. Acronis moved the partitions over, and the customer was back in business with zero loss.

Of particular note: This customer also had backups of their data. On-site, online backups (using whatever software a WD MyBook USB external comes with these days), but well-versioned and complete and up-to-date. They were already well-protected from such a failure scenario (though not a natural disaster or particularly-nasty malware).

I already trust my home router as a hardened, central hub for everything else: Why not trust it to be an IoT hub as well?

I remember when iButtons came out a million years ago, and I've actually used them. Motorola likes to use them for some of their dispatch consoles and radios for licensing software features, and in some cases as keys to access particular radio systems.

And that's...it, although they do function in those roles rather well.

The word you keep using ought to be "losing," and you ought to also forget this "loosing" concept. Immediately.

*lart*

I have the type of job with double and triple stacked meetings 8 hrs a day

\

I want a job where my main responsibility is moving from one meeting to the next under the auspices of accomplishing work.

Where do I sign up?

Spotify also works on the PS3. And Sonos. And on the $99 Android tablets that everyone got their kids a few years ago that were lousy for playing games, which are generally findable for free at this point, and often include an HDMI output (so the crappy built-in DACs aren't an issue).

The shell is another really awesome idea; a multimedia shell is something that I've actually never considered, to be totally honest, it never crossed my mind. Imagine a shell you could just live in; one in which you could browse your system, listen to music, do your email, etc. all without ever having to leave your coding environment. I know emacs exists, but it's not quite on this level - I wish other operating systems like FreeBSD or Linux had an equivalent.

Sounds a lot like how I used bash twenty years ago, before I had a machine that wouldn't fall down trying to run X.

What about the other caps? Those of the power supply, those of ancillary equipment (video card, sound card, whatever else you have plugged in)?

A bad cap anywhere can cause enough of a glitch in the works that something unexpected happens, and things freeze up.

I'm all for automation.

And I hope that if someone orders 1,000 Baxters, the price will adjust. (How muich? Who knows. Instead of $30k is it $25k? Is it $20k with 6 years of software updates, but zero hardware warranty? Mass quantities of anything are a thing that is seldom quantified on a web site.)

Cuz, I mean: If I'm buying multiple hundreds of them, I'm going to have one or two in-house support people whose primary job it is to keep them running: The parts will wear out.

I didn't say it wouldn't be useful, or that it is an unfair price.

I only said that your figure was wrong. And the only reason I bothered with pointing it out is because your first figure was better than your second one.

There was no other implication.

From your own link: $25,000 buys a basic robot with arms that does nothing useful, with a 1-year warranty on the hardware and 1 year of software updates.

If you want it to grip something with those arms, that's another $1,750 per gripper (ie: per arm).

If you want it to lift something with vacuum, that's $1,750-$2,700.

If you want a set of wheels so you can move the thing around without a forklift, that's another $3,000.

If you want software updates after a year, or more than a year worth of warranty service, that costs some quantity of additional (though not unreasonable, to my mind) thousands of dollars.

At any rate, it's a lot closer to $30k than $25k.