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.

Put a plug on one of the old and useless USB printer cables that we all have a million of, and use it to run your router and/or modem during a blackout.

Tie it to a solar panel to use as an emergency energy source in a blackout: Charge the battery during the day, charge the phone from the battery at night.

Power some crappy USB-operated speakers in when outside in the garden, as even crappy speakers are better than phone speakers and most of the inexpensive rechargable Bluetooth stuff is even worse.

Use it as a field supply for your next Arduino project.

etc.

Well, CRT face is (weakly) grounded, so e- kinetic energy can excite atom for subsequent photon emission, but its charge will happily leak into the ground.

There is no "ground" anywhere next to flying spacecraft!

There was no "ground" anywhere next to my computer when I had it running from a battery-powered inverter, but the CRT monitor worked fine in this arrangement and I don't glow in the dark.

Dolby does a lot of good research. That you throw them aside as a relic of the past, while at the same time discrediting them for some of the formats you praise (AAC is a thing in part due in part to Dolby's participation in creating the standard) simply shows that you have a myopic and illogical view of the world.

Add the error and difficulty of subtracting rider movement (remember, a phone's accelerometer is not something that is fixed to the chassis of the vehicle, but instead is something loosely carried by a squishy human being) and I'm going to say the answer is probably far closer to 0% than it is 92%.

And cheap USB2 keys that hold a couple hundred times as much data as a DVD don't exist. Nope, they do, and are far more convenient and resilient to damage than optical media.

A DVD is universal, and not going anywhere. It has well-established standards for dealing with audio, video, and just works.

If I hand someone a cheap USB2 key, I'm out a few dollars and the result -might- be that they get to view the thing I just handed them.

If I hand someone a DVD-R, I'm out a few pennies and the result -will- be that they get to view the thing I just handed them.