Some of these hobby systems have GPS route-following ability. I'd consider that pretty drone-like.

Back in 2000 I wrote some code to do some funky control systems stuff for a Tokomak nuclear fusion reactor as a research project. We happened to have a spare 486 with DOS and Borland C available that had a decent A/D and D/A converter board installed. This actually turned out to be really good for realtime code because you *knew* there was nothing else running on that system.

I had to rewrite the drivers for the converter board because it couldn't give the performance we were looking for--the settling time for the A/D conversions was too long. I figured out a way to interleave the A/D and D/A conversions so that the hardware delay for one also provided the required delay for the other, essentially doubling the sampling rate relative to the stock driver.

These days it'd probably make more sense to use an Arduino...

For your main goal of being able to log into your parents' machines, have you tried TeamViewer?

As for setting up VPN, I think you should be able to do it relatively inexpensively with something like a couple of consumer-grade routers running DD-WRT. The one at location B is set up as a VPN client, and the one at location A is set up as a VPN server. You might want to set up address ranges for DHCP at location B such that they're part of the network at location A but not assigned at location A. That way you can avoid needing to do NAT at location B as well as location A.

I'm up in the Canadian prairies...farming country. We've got a 1-mile grid road system here too, and we could probably get rid of some of them as well.

If it's anything like around here, many of these roads could provide access to fields, not homes.

I live in the Canadian prairies. Around here we have a whole grid of gravel roads (roughly every mile or so). These roads are not for providing access to homes, but rather for providing access to *fields*.

Back in the day farms were a lot smaller than they are now. Since then there has been a lot of consolidation, so they could probably remove a bunch of roads going in one direction (north/south or east/west) but they'd have to leave the roads going the other direction to continue to provide access to the fields.

I worked on a telecom switch that ran processing on cards that had two CPUs in lockstep. If the output of the two ever differed the card was taken out of service and its last transaction was rolled back. Memory contents were stored in at least three places at any given time. The dataplane was inductively coupled to avoid the possibility of DC current damaging things.

We replaced it with commodity hardware and smarter software. It wasn't *quite* as reliable, but it was a whole lot cheaper and the speeds ramped up much faster.

I don't think I'd ever go to the cloud because it's cheaper or more secure or more reliable. The main benefit that I see is flexibility.

If your loads are stable and known in advance, it's likely cheaper to buy hardware and staff people to take care of it. On the other hand if loads spike wildly from one day to the next the cloud makes perfect sense. Need a thousand cores of compute power right this second? Amazon/Google/Rackspace/HP would be happy to rent it to you.

There are people with celiac (I know one) who are *incredibly* sensitive to gluten, so that actually sounds like a really great place for people with celiac to eat at. And even if it's not strictly necessary, it's an excellent way to avoid accidental contamination.

I did kernel hacking for 10 years. I've fixed bugs in Ethernet drivers and helped document (and work around) hardware errata. I've also had to deal with trying to rebuild Nvidia drivers when the binary blob was no longer compatible with the latest kernel source. Having open-source drivers is key for those of us that actually *do* work on this stuff.

We'll have to see what the benchmarks look like, but it has potential at least.

Even without DMA accesses, a USB device can pretend to be a keyboard and type commands into your current session.

I'm rocking a purchased-outright Moto G 2014. Works fine, no hassles, on a cheap no-data prepaid plan that does everything I need.

The reason why this thing uses the front legs for the initial vertical push is that the back legs are shorter than on most running animals. Notice when it's running that the back legs and front legs never overlap, while on an actual cheetah their back legs stretch forwards past the front legs in order to allow the more powerful hind muscles to do more of the work.

Sometimes the bomb squad will use a directed charge designed to shake the crap out of suspicious objects, but without blowing them to smithereens. The idea is to ensure that it can't go off, while still leaving behind evidence that can be analyzed.