"App use philosophy aside, why is it so friggen ugly? It looks like a $9.95 transistor radio from Radio Shack. Don Noman said, "Beautiful things work better." A 1980s Sony Walkman had better aesthetics."

"There was a Thrifty near my house when I was a kid in northern CA. I remember those cylindrical scoops, and they were still 5 cents in the early 1970s. It was buying one of those cones that spawned my interest in coin collecting. I bought a two-scoop cone with a quarter, getting a dime and nickel in change. But the nickel was strange, it had a buffalo on it. I complained to the cashier, this wasn't a real nickel! The cashier was a middle aged gentleman who explained it was a very old nickel, and I should keep it. No Internet back then to fact-check, so I took his word, and I still have that nickel today."

"Why do designers design their humanoid robots to be so inhuman? Just look at that thing: faceless, all metal and mechanics, every sci fi nightmare brought to life. Why? It baffles me."

"You need watch the movie Runaway. Michael Crichton has Tom Selleck chasing farm, office, and household robots run amok."

"First thing this brought to mind was the 1980s Michael Crichton/Tom Sellek film "Runaway" in which the police are inexplicably tasked with chasing down runaway robots. In one scene, a suburban home housekeeping robot, consisting of a metal box on wheels with an arm just like this one, gets ahold of Dad's .41 Magnum revolver and starts shooting at anything that moves. Most of the family manages to escape the house except the baby in the crib. Sellek must get past the berserker and save the baby (which of course he does). So I hope "handgun" is not one of the 108 recognized objects."

"The structure does not appear to be attached to the stone walls on which it rests, and therefore could be at risk of wind shifting or even toppling it. The solution was to chain large boulders to the bottom edge to hold it down. Not sure if the small rocks on the roofing are merely decorative, or contribute to the weight of the overall structure to resist wind loads. I would not want to be anywhere near this structure if there were ever an earthquake."

"Aside from being very bulky, immobile, and and only able to move the box in one axis, the biggest problem I see is it needs access to two opposing sides of the box. What if you only have access to one side, the top or the front? It seems most box handling robots have converged on suction grid manipulators. This video shows a very interesting evolution at Boston Dynamics through three configurations of box handling robots: Atlas, Handle, and Stretch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WZoVJIV9V0"

"A weapon that uses electricity as its ammunition would solve a multitude of logistic and economic problems. Star Wars seemed to take a step backward in this regard. In one of the later movies I recall a scene with heavy shipboard guns firing, and a metal shell would come clanking out after every round."

"I have a more general question: why do people design robots to be humanoid? A robot should be optimized for the task or set of tasks it is intended to perform In almost no cases does this require a humanoid shape. It is misplaced anthropomorphism, taking your design requirements from sci fi books and movies."

"So there actually is a reality TV show right now, "Stars on Mars." Take a bunch of D list celebrities and put them together in a simulated Martian habitat somewhere in the Australian outback. Big Brother meets The Martian. I watched the first episode prepared for it to be stupid, but it's actually fairly entertaining. The producers have come up with some interesting missions, and the participants seem to be taking it fairly seriously."

"I recently read the Making of Star Wars book, in which they described there was a great deal of discussion and evolution of the nose of the X-Wing so that it wouldn't appear too phallic. In 45 years it never once occurred to me that it might be phallic, but of course after reading that, now that's all I can see."

"Hope someone is working on a smaller caliber portable version of the Phalanx CIWS. Also would seem like a perfect application for a laser-based weapon."