What Android needs is less-than-terrible audio latency.

Competent UNIX admin? Let me submit that it's just not needed to be competent with UNIX: You just need some basic knowledge of the concept of a subnet, and it might help to know what a broadcast domain is.

Anyone who can configure a venerable WRT54GL with OpenWRT or Tomato or DD-WRT and isn't afraid of a 900MHz ISM-band Ubiquiti (or other) radio can do this.

It's just Ethernet frames that happen to encapsulate IP. No big deal.

I mean, FFS: A couple of years ago I built such a system. A wealthy customer was having a party, and was having circuit issues on the bonded T1s at his house (yep, really) and Really, Really wanted his Sonos system to be reliably online to stream music for his guests.

We sent his wife to the Verizon store, and she came back with an LTE Wifi hotspot. I set up a WRT54GL running Shibby's Tomato-USB as a wireless client put the LTE hotspot in a window where it had reasonable signal. We had another WRT54GL working as a wired client off of this (triple-NAT? so what), which in turn plugged into the Sonos mesh with some Cat5.

DHCP figured out the addressing automagically; all I needed to do was make sure that each WRT54GL was issuing a unique subnet so Linux's routing tables weren't confusing itself.

And....done. It was an ugly hack thrown together late on a Saturday with parts on-hand and it got the party going just fine.

Which is the same as, or perhaps slightly more complicated than, a ProxyHam setup.

Oh, and ProxyHam is easily traceable, too: I haven't actually had my hands on Ubiquiti's 900MHz gear, but their 2.4GHz 802.11N stuff has an excellent and honest spectrum analyzer built-in with the default firmware. I would be shocked and amazed if their 900MHz parts differed in this regard.

A $100 radio, some graph paper, a directional antenna, a working brain and some mobility is all you need to use to triangulate the "isolated" end of a ProxyHam/ProxyGambit connection that is actively being used down to at least the household that the signal emanates from.

Alternatively, any spectrum analyzer that covers whatever band it is that is used to backhaul to the user's location can be used to locate them fairly easily: You can try, but at the end of the day you can never hide while broadcasting with a radio -- especially since we've largely abandoned frequency-hopping spread-spectrum (which was actually rather hard to narrow down using traditional tools).

Rather, you suck at making citations.

The functional difference between a microprocessor-controller washing machine and an electromechanically-controlled washing machine is insufficient to deem one robot, and the other not a robot.

In both cases, the use is the same: Dirty clothes go in. Time passes. Clean, damp clothes come out. Humans do the rest of the work, just as they have now for a very long time.

A modern front-load saves roughly zero human labor over a 60-year-old front-load.

The Macon-Bibb Fire Department gets 13 thousand calls per year and has to respond to all of them.

I don't see that number anywhere in the link you provided.

What I do see is that it has a population of 156,462, over 266 square miles. The FD has a budget of $25.6 million. None of that seems unreasonable.

13,000 fire calls, though? Detroit, Michigan is blatantly famous for its ongoing and recurrent structure fires with its population of ~688,000 [citation]. Even Detroit only sees 30,000 fire calls a year, of which 7,000 involve fires that are actually fought.[citation]

Give me a citation that actually supports your claim, or GTFO.

The first electric programmable computer was installed in 1943, and now there pretty ubiquitous. Give robots another decade and they'll catch up.

Or you could say they're already here. I have a robot which washes and drys my dishes, another that washes my clothes, two that make me ice. Several which play video content. One which opens and closes my garage door. Heck, they're everywhere.

You don't have robots to wash and dry your dishes, or your clothes. Or make ice. Or play videos. Or open or close your garage door.

You have a multitude of relatively dumb machines that do simple things: They spin and/or open and close valves, sometimes with a timer or a small number of sensors (turbidity, etc) to control when the valves open/close and which direction to spin the motor(s).

These dumb machines were doing most of these things way prior to 1943.

A robotic laundry machine will collect the clothes from a pile, sort them as a good housewife would, launder them as appropriate for the material and color, dry them automatically, sort them based on wearer, and stock them as household needs dictate. A good robotic dishwasher will take your stacks of dirty dishes, make them clean, dry them, and install them back in the cabinet where they belong.

These are things that aren't happening and aren't close to happening.

So why wait another decade for robots to catch up? What's special about that 10-year figure other than the fact that you pulled it directly out of your ass?

*shrug*

I've had a few incidental fr0st pists get modded to +5. You've just got to have something to say, and be able to say it quick.

Similarly, in the last 37 years since Chernobyl

The Chernobyl disaster was in 1986, which was 29 years ago...not 37.

I look forward to your reply when you get this message in the next few weeks, and hope to have your response in the next couple months!

Big words for a guy whose own figures are off by 8 years.

At very busy intersection a block from my house, drivers are presented with a green right-turn arrow at the same time as pedestrians are presented with a walk signal.

(Yes, I've almost been mowed down a few times because of a combination of this and Newtonian physics.)

And governments are perfectly capable of reigning in Google, as you can see from the fact that they can tap their private networks and force them to set up web portals (Google seems to be offering as much resistance as possible, through using encryption and notifications whenever they can).

It is a fact that if the NSA wants to put a magic box in your datacenter, you must accept their magic box into your datacenter and tell noone of its existence, under threat of treason (because terrorism).

Google's good use of HTTPS protects me from the casual middlemen, but it does not protect me from the government in a time of war (we've always been at war with Eastasia).

Me, too. I am consistently amazed at the quality and accuracy of Google Maps' traffic layer, which relies entirely upon location reporting. This data also feeds into both of Google's navigation systems (Waze and Maps).

I also use and appreciate Google's Location History, which I do use to track myself and generate accurate and accountable bills for my clients. This apparently works fine, because nobody has ever questioned any of my bills.

Now, that said: If I were up to no good, I'm also smart enough to leave the cell phone at home.

You agreed to the tracking before your phone even let you use it as a phone. You had the option to disagree. You chose differently than you might have preferred, but you still chose what you chose.

Didn't read the contract you agreed to? Cry me a fucking river. (I see that you've already begun doing that.)

Further, you don't even know what "root" means: It is nothing more than an abstraction of UID 0, and of course there are things running as UID 0. It's fucking Unix. PID 1 (aka init) is executed by the kernel with root (UID 0) privileges, and thereafter can do whatever it is programmed to do.

Get over yourself.

Did you read what you quoted, or were you just feeling disagreeable even though we already agree about that?

Srsly.

If you have an HTPC on your BFT, then why do you care? Just run Kodi or Plex or whatever and be done with it.

Me, I have plenty of old PCs around, but sadly none are up for modern HTPC duty.

I use casting to put my VPN-connected phone (which for all intents and purposes is now in the UK, because again VPN) into a state whereby I can watch the BBC freely. On the BFT. With a $23-$20(rebate-ish) Chromecast.

==win, IMHO. YMMV.