All I want is Zigbee or Zwave with support for multiple controllers for redundancy.

As of 98 I was a college drop out (after two years, due to money), moved back home and figured I'd try to find a job and go to school locally instead. I ended up in the job I wanted (IT), rose quickly, and going back to school was never more than a fleeting thought. I got my foot in the door at just the right time. Friends who finished their degrees found a very different job market at that time, and those with CS degrees found themselves at minimum wage working a help desk while I was the main systems and network admin for a company with two offices, five warehouses and over 130 retail stores.

Battery technology just isn't there yet. Too expensive, too large, too heavy, too short of lifetime, too long to charge. We just aren't ready yet.

I compare this to AI. Current AI is just a mirage of what a *real* AI will be. Yeah, it gives us a little taste of what is to come, but it's not the solution everyone thinks it is...yet.

Unless you're in Star Trek Discovery, then they totally have sonar in space.

Seriously, fuck NuTrek...

My grandfather had a purple heart from the Japanese strapping a makeshift bomb vest onto a little girl and making her run into the barrack tents in Iwo Jima.

Japan was not innocent when it came to civilian casualties.

Fortunately she's up against Trump, so she might actually get those votes.

Time for the alien drive-by. Hopefully they're just as bad of shots as our own gangs.

Yeah, people have been pushing the Shield on me for as long as I've groaned about the Fire Sticks, but not enough bang for the buck.

I used various Android based devices prior to the Fire Stick, but at that point they were way underpowered. I guess I need to look at some more modern ones.

Yeah, unfortunately the HTPC route is likely the only good answer. I'd kill for something at least in the ballpark of an 'appliance' level option though.

Seriously, what is a good equivalent alternative? All I give a shit about is running Plex and maybe a Youtube replacement like SmartTubeNext with support for *265/HEVC and maybe future-proof with AV1 and the ability to properly pass through HDR, Atmos and similar content properly. I don't care about any other streaming services.

There are two main things that bother me with Fire Stick/TV devices: Ads, and the timeout/screensaver. Leave anything paused for more than a couple minutes and you get kicked out, regardless of screensaver settings.

I got my start at 2400 baud, and spent a couple years working with remote systems over multi-hop RF links. Those were annoying enough.

Honestly though non-earth-orbiting spacecraft aren't being interacted with realtime. You send a full set of commands at once and await a response. It's not like someone is typing 'l' and waiting 45 hours to type the 's' and another 45 hours to hit enter.

"Internationally" tells me you're European. You have a vastly different experience from us Americans.

First, what little time we get for vacation (the only time most of us would go the distances where we'd need to charge mid-trip), those charge times are eating into our vacation time. We want to spend that time at our destination, not sitting around waiting hours for a charge.

Second, our distances traveled are vastly larger than yours, with far less infrastructure in between. You can go 200 miles sometimes without seeing a gas station, let alone any kind of EV charger setup.

Honestly that's where I'm at with this. I have a General license, but the only reason myself and my friends did this was to have high-power radios in areas where there is no cell service, with the added benefit of being able to hit distant repeaters for emergencies. We've gotten tons of use on the first point, but fortunately never had an emergency for the latter.

I'd just like the amateur radio manufacturers to all agree on one programming standard. I want to be able to fire up Chirp and send the same stored frequency list to all of my radios using a regular USB connection.

To the point of HF, any affordable solution would be a winner, but in the end we're just WAY too small of a market in general.

For example a Triad Series 12 point of sale / inventory management system. Used to be tens of thousands of them in auto parts stores everywhere. There are probably still a few hanging on out there. I spent 1999 trying to fix all our communications with them to get Y2K workarounds in place, and a number of years migrating data off of them to modern systems.