In this day and age you need to be very careful abandoning anything in the cloud. My employer regularly contracts with HackerOne to test the security of our websites. On at least one occasion they demonstrated an exploit by creating an AWS S3 bucket with the same name as a bucket we stopped using years ago. We still had an old DNS record pointing to that old bucket if I recall correctly…

Well it won’t bother Trump supporters at all until they discover oranges suddenly cost $12 each. Then they’ll throw tantrums hoping Trump will notice and sign an executive order reducing orange prices to $0.05.

Well not immediately… Years from now when the military develops something even better then this will all become surplus and sold off to SWAT teams etc. for next to nothing.

At least it’s not 100 trillion James Bonds.

I’m sure those drives were highly specialized and protected like the “black box” data & flight recorders in aircraft. They almost certainly weren’t off the shelf drives from Seagate or Western Digital…

Have you ever seen a modern landfill? For one thing they crush the contents by constantly rolling over it with a steamroller with spiked wheels that’s designed to shred & compact the trash as much as possible. Then there’s corrosive materials in the garbage that mixes with rainwater to create a leechate that will corrode other garbage as it seeps through it.

I’d be shocked if a standard hard drive could survive a decade in such an environment.

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

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.