Fun fact: the US Coast Guard used to have a base in the Oklahoma panhandle. It’s sole purpose was a LORAN transmitter.

So the copyright industry will push again for back doors that they are given the keys to.

Simple. After they gain access to the routers and realize everything is encrypted then they’ll start throwing piles of money at politicians to outlaw encryption.

Exactly. I know folks that live on the 3rd floor of an old walk-up. Stairs are the only way in & out. So if you want to replace delivery people then it would need to be a robot that can navigate narrow & windy stairs.

That applies to public spaces, yes, but not ALL spaces. I’m on the board of directors for a small non-profit organization that expanded their facility a few years ago. We had to prove for ADA compliance that one floor of our facility was restricted in its use and not for public access. If we had been required to make it publicly accessible then it would have required an elevator, which would have been so expensive that it would have put an end to that expansion project before it even started. The public spaces are all fully ADA compliant. Those private spaces are not.

Also, like most building code requirements etc. the ADA only comes into effect with new construction or when the renovations to an existing property exceed a certain threshold (I forget the specifics). There are plenty of older buildings out there that aren’t fully ADA compliant.

I know people who live on 3rd floor walkups that were likely built 100+ years ago with narrow curved stairs as the only way in or out. If you want to replace a delivery person with a robot in places like that then wheels won’t cut it.

But I want my own personal luxury car that I paid $100,000 for to go out on its own in the middle of the night while I’m asleep and have it earn money for me as a self-driving Uber…

Because the entire world is designed around the human body and the way it moves. It’s theoretically much easier to introduce a humanoid robot into an existing workspace than it is to retrofit all the doors, stairs, etc. to allow a wheeled robot to move around.

AKA greed. Why license your content to Netflix when you can have your own streaming service and lock your viewers into your piddly little hoard of content?

Just how many streaming providers are there today? That number likely changes almost daily at this point…

Any army that treats their troops as “cannon fodder” deserves not only all the casualties they rack up, but the long term social, political, and economic hardship that is pretty much a guaranteed result of such a policy.

The constant rounding up & minimal training of “cannon fodder” is expensive both in the short and long term. Better to protect well trained resources and have them continue to gain experience by using more advanced weaponry that minimizes risk to them.

I took a very cursory look at HomeKit a while ago and found its ability to create complex automations rather limited. For example, our washer & dryer are in our basement, and we can easily forget we have loads of laundry being washed/dryed when we get busy with the rest of our days.

We now have an automation that will text me and/or my wife when a laundry cycle finishes. But it only alerts us if we’re home, and only whoever is home so can go take care of it. If nobody is home when the cycle completes then it waits until one or both of us is home, and then it alerts us. It also won’t alert us overnight but will wait until morning. So if we start a load of laundry at 10pm it doesn’t wake us up at midnight but instead waits until 7am to alert us.

I’ve implemented this in both Home Assistant and Indigo without too much difficulty. Not sure how easy it would be to do in HomeKit though…

That’s one of the more complex automations I’ve created, but I have a few others that are up there as well.