I do, actually. Well, they're more partners than customers, since we give them our code and they sell it. But, yes, I have a lot of meetings with outside parties. We convince about half of them to join our Hangouts from their laptops, the others we add to the meeting via phone. Outside of meetings, we communicate entirely via e-mail. Voicemail is still irrelevant.

At IBM, my role was entirely customer-facing. Voicemail was still fairly rare, though teleconferences were the norm. Most communication was, again, via e-mail or face to face.

Current miniature LIDAR is too heavy and uses too much power. I would guess IR (kinect) but even that is pretty damn hefty.

This is typical DARPA MO. I don't know when the RFP was issued, but they are known for ridiculously short lead times - because the reason the RFP exists at all is because someone has a working (or damn close to it) prototype.

Probably for the same reasons that NIH doesn't produce torpedo. Just a guess.

Having working in the incestuous realm of DARPA, what I can tell you is that somebody already has a proof of concept pretty much ready to go. Since I have to be billed as "fair" they put out the RFP (with a ridiculously short deadline - which is no problem for the folks with the almost working prototype). This company is in cahoots with the DARPA PM, who in all probability worked at that company in the not too distant past.

This is how it is at DARPA.

...it is going to require TWO Gumstix.

So a diamond is essentially worthless, but good upselling makes it worth a lot. This values pays for the processing and marketing of the stone. In the US, for instance, 50 years of brainwashing has made couples forgo homes and food to buy a rock. In the case of the apparently paid link, they are a delivery service. The problem is that it is hard to create enough value for delivery. Overhead, profits, and minimum wage means that someone is not going to pay a large delivery fee, the value is not going to create a viable business. Of course you could do what Uber and Lyft does, which is essentially externalize all real costs to contractors, but even in that case profit is apparently not possible without surge pricing which tricks customers into paying multiples of the expected price.

I had a lot of sympathy for people on Facebook 4-5 years ago. After several years of repeated stories in the mainstream press about privacy violations, anyone who still has an account is guilty of wilful stupidity.

I'm sure that it will use a lookup table, but it's also going to have to build those tables dynamically because due to the nature of mechanical devices. 1) no two are identical and 2) they wear while in use, especially while running near the edge of materials technology, further exacerbating point #1. You really do need a learning control system if you're not in a perfect world, or doing something hilariously easy — which this isn't.

What secure OS do you run where the video codecs have had a full security review? Google found (and fixed) around 300 exploitable holes in libavcodec / libavformat in the last year. Do you want to bet that they found them all? Do you always run video codecs in an unprivileged process?

Unfortunately, even the furnace won't function in most places without power, so electricity is a necessity. Most of our equipment is very poorly thought-out like this. When I installed a replacement on-demand water heater in this house, I could get the same model with different suffixes corresponding to three different ignition systems: a plug-in, on-demand spark ignition; a dynamo-based, on-demand spark ignition; or a tradtional pilot, with a piezo igniter. I chose the piezo igniter because I know I live in the boonies and the power can go off here, and I still want to have hot water if that happens. Of course, having flow takes a generator, but it doesn't take a whole-house generator and the pump house is significantly distant from the house.

You forgot to remove the line breaks, C&P troll.

Just what we need. When they can stamp this out for pennies, they will truly be able to spread 'democracy' to every corner of the earth.

You don't. You just expect it to be washed away, and you don't expect help. And anyone who expects to be able to depend on you in situations with heavy weather is a tool who deserves to fail. We keep propping up idiots and we wonder why the world keeps looking more and more like Idiocracy. Nobody but farmers should be living on a flood plain, and we should be farming it. Nothing but disposable (and once fallen, biodegradable) summer homes should be built on the beach. No flammable structures should be built in wildfire zones. No fragile structures in common quake zones. Yet we still have all of that. Yes, even that last one, California is still building shit-shacks made of nothing. They might not fall down in a quake, but they will slop themselves apart, and they're highly flammable even though this is wildfire country.

In short, we are not even using the most basic common sense when siting and building. It's all for profit, and there is no sense to the system whatsoever. In fact, people who try to do the right thing are usually hampered so as to continue to produce more business for the system, ye olde broken window fallacy in action.