Lots of cool factor. But that giant mono-foot? Gonna be trouble in a house with stairs, thresholds, cats. Legos. power cords. Potted ivy plants dangling over the side of the pot. Real places. Places with kids making messes, where you might need a household robot to help.
I wrote a programming language, some time back. You need a good reason to add to the tumult in the marketplace, and I thought I had one.
My language was for discrete control systems. You could declare samplers for data values (interval, sensor, type) and name them as variables. You could create control actions by listing a set of one or more sampler variables in brackets. Once there were 'fresh' values for all of the samplers, the action would be invoked.
It had the usual functions and i/o library stuff. In fact I wrote a tool to absorb other library headers e.g. C or C++ and product blocks that my compiler could link with, and voila your program could call those external libraries.
We used it for a couple of contracts. Some of the control engineers were enthusiastic; some not so much. One more thing to learn.
Ambulance drivers were close to medical professionals and got good, early diagnosis and care.
Taxi drivers were exposed to a wide variety of people who they conversed with, became aware of Alzheimer's symptoms and treatments and sought help early.
It seems like you could get into roles with a duty of care, logistic and deadline planning, social contact, etc.
And try to control with so many other non-transport occupations like nurses, therapists, hairdressers, air-traffic controllers, etc.
Ironically, the transport aspect reminds me of a prior correlation I read about for truck drivers and higher rates of colon cancer. There were speculative theories as to whether it was from the hours sitting or something like the chronic vibration.
That would normally make sense, but Alzheimer's treatments don't significantly prolong life. You'd also expect to see the same effect with other medical professionals.
Diagnosis helps put them into the data set. Even increased diagnosis would skew the statistics. Those that died of Alzheimer's and didn't know it, aren't in the study.
Physical possession of a machine is pretty hard to make secure. It's a different level of secure, an order of magnitude less secure than remote attackers. This is expected?
Tony Chen from Microsoft gave a talk called "Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story" and he explains that they want any sort of physical attack to cost at least the price of 10 games ($600 at the time).
Depends on the size of the system you need to secure.
If kilobytes of storage and very limited computing power works for your use case, you can get very secure (smartcards and secure elements remain essentially undefeated at the hardware level; all attacks I know happened via weak ciphers).
For an entire current-gen gaming console, you'll have a much harder time.
I'll guess at the future of this technology. They'll produce things that looked like old extinct things, and get a lot of press. Then the administration will say, well, things are never really extinct, so it's ok to quit protecting stuff. Just record the dna and put that dam in place, or strip-mine that ecosystem, no problem, we can get it back if we want so no loss.
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