It's really quite-simple folks.

Yes, it's 20 minutes.  Watch it.  Distribute it.  Then enforce it.

If companies want to back those who advocate for and declare they will commit millions of murders they need to be put out of business -- lawfully, through irrevocable boycotts.  Those who support or work for any organization or firm that lend support to those advocating for millions of murders need to become unemployed -- and permanently unemployable.  No exceptions, no ifs, no ands and no buts.

There are those who say that there's a "cold civil war" going on right now culturally.  Well, maybe.  But the people on the left are not arguing for a "cold" civil war -- they are advocating, supporting and declaring intent to commit mass-murder, in America, on the scale of Rwanda -- or even Nazi Germany.

If someone tells you repeatedly and to your face that they intend to murder you what is your response? Do you actually associate with and buy products from those who state they are willing and intend to commit millions of murders to achieve a political goal?

That's what all those who support banning or registering any sort of firearm in America are actually stating.  It is a fact that some percentage of Americans believe the words of the 2nd Amendment mean what they say: shall not be infringed.  We can have whatever debate you wish on what percentage of Americans believe this but I am absolutely certain of one thing: It's not zero.  If that figure is even 0.1% of the American population then a demand to ban any gun is a declaration of intent to murder 300,000 Americans to get what you want.  If it's 1% then that number is 3.3 million murders.  And if it's 3%? Then there are 10 million people who everyone that supports such a ban is stating they intend to murder simply because those individuals believe that the Constitution is not a dead letter and means exactly what it says.

Not a single one of the people arguing for "gun bans" or "gun registration" wants to actually reduce gun violence.  It is an outrageous fraud to claim you're "against gun violence" when the actual position you are taking is that you're willing to murder millions of Americans to obtain a political goal.

That this declaration has not resulting in an immediate shooting war -- a civil war on our own soil -- is simply because with the exception of the criminally insane a simple declaration of intent to murder millions doesn't contain enough credibility for people to take it seriously.

It is a grave error to believe that this will continue beyond the point that the first people are actually murdered in furtherance of that declaration of intent.  It is a further grave error, and one that can easily lead to an actual civil war with millions of Americans lying dead on both sides of the debate, for you to fail to point this fact out every time you hear such a phrase as "common sense" gun restrictions and take corrective action to demand that those who have and do adopt such positions declare their true intent in public -- that is, to force them to publicly admit their intention to murder all who disagree while accepting the social, economic and political consequences of doing so.

You might have read this article when I published it originally.

Or, maybe not.

If not, then please do.  It lays out a pretty decent case, I think.

What I've now completed is the majority of the back-end work to make implementing a mobile app a rather trivial piece of coding -- instead of a lot of work.

Let me lay out the how and why for you on this.

The "hard way" to do a mobile app is to have it do all the work.  The easy way, every time, is for the mobile app to be little more than a terminal into something.

But this is a problem in the general sense even when there's a web server included because you then have to parse the web output.  That's somewhat of a pain in the ass.  So what you need to make mobile app development easy is a trivially-parsable reply format, preferably one that updates in real time for you.

HTML5 makes "dynamic updates" pretty easy, which is nice.  You send down a little javascript "listener" and then make a call to a resource that comes back with the MIME type "text/event-stream", and then sends updates.  Each has a tag, which matches that tag in your HTML document.  This connection can be (and should be!) persistent, in that this reduces overhead greatly.

Well, that's nice, but the persistence can be a problem from a resource consumption and management standpoint.  If you're not particularly persistent then the "retry" stanza will reconnect, so many pages and servers do exactly that -- they send the data but then allow the connection to close, relying on the connection cache ("Connection: keep-alive")  to cut down the overhead to something reasonable.  This will give you "every 3-5 seconds" updates -- good enough for most implementations such as social media and messaging.

What you want with an app, however, is an actual dynamic stream that stays open for minutes at a time because otherwise the overhead is a five-alarm pain in the butt.  Implementing true persistence on the server end gives you the ability to push updates as fast as you're willing to burn the CPU to handle.  You can get single-digit millisecond latencies (or better) if you are willing to burn the CPU for it, but getting latencies down into the couple hundred millisecond range, or ten to twenty times faster is an utterly-trivial exercise and actually cuts load since connection renegotiation frequency goes down enormously.

HomeDaemon did the first, until now.  It now has had the web code refactored to implement the second, which means that it is now very easy to add to the web backend a specific calling sequence that will output a table of units with locations, names, types and similar parameters followed by a stream of updates of status with one call that is nothing more than a glorified "GET" instance, and key it all off a given security level to match the user's privilege set.  Since SSL is in play the call (with authentication) and reply, plus the data stream that comes is secure.  And since the lifetime of a connection is now minutes where after the initial burst updates of status take just a few tens of bytes the overhead becomes extremely small -- which is fabulous both for data and power consumption on a handheld.

So there's no app for Android -- yet.  But the predicate for the back-end support for one is now 80% complete with the other 20% in process.  Yeah, implementing that was a five-alarm pain in the ass -- but now it's done.

After the back end is complete, along with the calling sequence, I'm going to teach myself how to write Android apps.

And yeah, somewhere between now and the endpoint of that the asking price is going to go way up for all the obvious reasons, so if you believe in the "MAGA" stuff and want to prove me wrong then get rich at the same time -- read this article again, then contact me.

I know delusions and feels are more "today" than facts, but there's a problem with pandering to them or worse, indulging in them: They are antithetical to professional and personal success over the intermediate and longer term.

So let's talk about facts when it comes to these "Enough" protests.

• No firearm has ever injured or killed someone since the dawn of time.  A firearm is an inanimate object, as is a car or truck, an axe, a BIC lighter, a gallon of gasoline, a pool or a baseball bat.  It is thus incapable of action, and "injure" or "kill" are actions.
  
  
• All intentional injuries and killings are committed by animate things.  In the context in question we are dealing with humans, since nobody is talking about being mauled by bears or mountain lions, or otherwise taken by wildlife.
  
  
• Since we are talking about intentional and unjustified acts we also are inherently adding the aspect of animus to the discussion; for obvious reasons nobody intentionally kills or severely injures someone they like at the moment of the act.
  
  
• There are approximately 100 murders (dead people, not acts) committed each year while utilizing as an inanimate tool the entire class of "evil firearms" that are sought to be restricted or banned.  For context there are approximately 13,000 intentional homicides in which the predominate tool used is a firearm (the rest of so-called "gun violence" are suicides) and virtually all of them involve tools in the category of handguns.
  
  
• Incidentally, since I did bring it up, there are about 200 fatal animal attacks on humans yearly in the United States and another 100 due to accidental events, usually from riding or being pulled by an animal (usually a horse.)  That is, it's twice as likely you'll be intentionally killed (e.g. by bite, goring, etc) by an animal in the US as shot by someone with an "evil black rifle" and approximately the same odds due to accident with an animal you were riding or as a passenger in a thing being pulled by same.
  
  
• To put math to that every three days the number of people murdered in a year through the employment of the tool sought to be banned are murdered using a different, but related tool.  In other words you are approximately one hundred thirty times more likely to be murdered by someone using the tool known collectively as a "handgun" rather than one known collectively as an "evil-looking black rifle."
  
  
• In virtually every such instance in which an "evil black rifle" was used in recent memory the person responsible was known to law enforcement at a federal, state or local level, and frequently at all of the above, to be dangerously unstable or to have committed felony criminal acts for which they had either served a sentence or were not prosecuted.
  
  
• It is a fact that a person who is in prison cannot kill someone who is not in said prison as that act would be a physical impossibility due to lack of concurrent location.
  
  
• It is also a fact that despite it being a severe felony involving life in prison as a punishment to run drugs into this nation and between its states in large quantities thousands of people do so every single day and we catch an inconsequential percentage of them despite spending billions every year in pursuit of same.  We thus know, factually, that it is impossible to actually prevent the importation, movement and sale of dangerous narcotics -- which are also an inanimate object, as are firearms.
  
  
• We also know, factually, that a ridiculously large percentage of the violent crimes, including murder, committed while using the tools collectively known as "firearms" are committed by persons involved in said drug trade, many of whom are not citizens or legal immigrants.
  
  
• In addition the Bureau of Justice Statistics has run studies on so-called "assault rifles"; they found that a mere 1% of the criminal use of firearms involve these tools.

So here's what we have.

17 people were murdered by a nutjob in Florida.  A couple of weeks later another nutjob murdered a young boy and tried to kill many others, severely injuring them.

The first used as his tool a firearm -- specifically, a black rifle.

The second used a knife.

In both cases the inanimate object used as a tool to commit the assaults was incapable of thought, animus or action because it is an inanimate object.

There are in fact thousands of inanimate objects that can be used to assault or murder other humans and many of them are at least as lethal as a firearm if not more-so.

Last year a religious nutjob rented a truck and intentionally ran over people in NY City, killing 8 and severely injuring nearly a dozen more.  He stopped only because he was a poor driver and rammed a bus.  This is not unique; in Europe there have been a spate of these attacks of late and some have been extraordinarily deadly -- in fact there were eight of them in 2017 alone.  This is dramatically higher than the number of school mass-shootings in the United States over the same period of time.

In 1920 someone (the perpetrator was never caught) pulled a carriage full of dynamite and scrap iron to greatly enhance the shrapnel effect up in front of JP Morgan (the bank) in NY City and blew it up.  That killed 38 people, but that wasn't anywhere near the worst attack in the last 100 years.

About 20 years ago a nutjob got 38 people drunk on spiked vodka (with phenobarabital) and then suffocated them with plastic bags.  There is much debate over whether most of the dead killed themselves via that mechanism or "had help."  Note that the tools used (booze, a severe sedative and plastic bags) did not involve any commonly associated with violent homicides.

Not long after the 1920 JP Morgan explosion an even worse mass murder occurred in Michigan.  The perpetrator killed his wife, set his farm on fire and then blew up a school at which he worked as a volunteer.  Most of the murdered were first and second graders and then as the coup-de-grace when the firemen showed up to try to put out what was left of the school he drove his truck into the middle of the rescuers and blew that up with him inside.  The death toll was 44 and again, not one firearm or knife was used.

Of course there's also McVeigh who drove a rental truck full of hand-made explosive that killed over 150 and injured nearly 700 more.

Note however, that the above cited examples are, with the exception of the comet worshippers, used a tool of destruction normally thought of as illegal and ruinous (e.g. explosives.)  This is intentionally deceptive however for these accounts easily found in the media and other references intentionally omit dozens of other mass-murder incidents that didn't use as a tool such things, including one of the worst ever recorded and not in the distant past either.

Specifically, one of the worst mass-murders ever recorded in US history occurred in 1990.  The tool used was gasoline -- about a dollar's worth, to be precise, which the assailant placed at the base of a staircase that was the only way out of a nightclub and set it on fire.

Nearly everyone inside died; on a percentage-of-dead-people .vs. those present basis this was quite-arguably the worst incident of mass-killing in United States history.  The total was 87 dead.

Nor is this the only time that has happened.  In Montreal, in 1972 three people were ejected from a bar for being excessively intoxicated, returned and did essentially the same thing, killing 37 out of roughly 200 present.

Why have I gone through all of this in such excruciating detail?

First, because there are several million of the so-called "evil rifles" in civilian ownership in the United States today.  About 100 people lose their lives to someone using one of them as the tool of their extinction a year, a rate of some 0.0033%.  This is statistically indistinguishable from zero in terms of the rate of abuse.

Approximately 3,500 people drown in non-boating related accidents annually.  To put a rate of risk on that it is more than 35 times more likely you will die by drowning than by being shot with a scary-looking black rifle and every one of those deaths is an accident.  In ten days the total number of people killed a year using such tools die from drowning, most of them children.  Yet nobody requires a license to build or erect and maintain a pool, which is where virtually all such deaths occur, and nobody is blaming pools as they are inanimate objects -- as are firearms.  Instead we (correctly) blame the adults for their inattention and failure to supervise said children who are in and around pools and die as a result.

Further, the murder and non-negligent manslaughter (that is, intentional homicide) rate has fallen from 6.8 per 100,000 in 1997 to 5.3 in 2016, a drop of about 25%.  Since the early 1990s, in short, it's down by roughly half.  This occurred despite a skyrocketing number of firearms sold in the United States which includes a couple of million "scary black rifles."

The drop in rapes has also been sizable over the same period (about 18%) and there is exactly one tool known to mankind that makes a 120lb women the near-exact equal of a 300lb 6'2" brute of a man intent on rape.  It is called a gun, and some part of that drop in violent rapes is likely due to all the guns that have been sold, many of whom are owned by said women.

The drop in robberies is even more-impressive -- close to 45%.  There is again one tool that makes a potential robbery victim the equal of the thug attempting same.  It is also called a gun.

IN OTHER WORDS THE FACTS ARE THAT THE CRIME RATE HAS GONE DOWN DRAMATICALLY OVER THE LAST 20-ODD YEARS, CONTINUING A TREND FROM THE 1980s, EVEN AS GUN SALES AND THE NUMBER OF GUNS, INCLUDING BLACK RIFLES THAT LOOK SCARY AND HAVE BIG MAGAZINES HAS RISEN DRAMATICALLY.  THE PERCENTAGE OF SUCH SCARY-LOOKING BLACK RIFLES EVER USED IN A CRIMINAL ACT IS STATISTICALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM ZERO.

These are facts folks, not opinions.

Now let's add on to the facts.

• Most of the nutjobs who choose to shoot up schools -- or commit other acts of mass-murder -- are well known to authorities long before the act is committed.  In the instant two cases -- Parkland the Stabby Muslim NutJob -- this was the case.  It was also the case in the next-most-recent circumstance in Texas.
  
  
• In the cases where the nutjobs are known to authorities in most cases existing law has been violated at a felony level prior to the offense and the authorities intentionally or negligently did not arrest the perpetrator.  This was the case with both Parkland and the recent Stabby Muslim Nutjob.
  
  
• A person in prison cannot commit murder against anyone other than another person in said prison.  Therefore but for the negligence or intentional misconduct of the authorities the offense would not have taken place.
  
  
• A person who has been "Baker Acted" (involuntarily committed for psychiatric reasons) cannot commit murder either during the time of their involuntary confinement.  Therefore to the extent that any such person had presented evidence of behavior justifying such an action and the authorities did not commit said individual we once again have an assault that took place only due to the negligent or intentional conduct of the authorities.
  
  
• The tools used to commit said acts, whether they be gasoline, knives or firearms, all have multiple legal uses and nearly everyone who acquires, owns or uses them do so legally.  A tiny percentage, indistinguishable from zero, of people who buy gasoline legally use it to commit arson.  A tiny percentage, indistinguishable from zero, of people who buy a knife legally use it to commit murder.  And a tiny percentage, statistically indistinguishable from zero (less than 0.001%) of people who own a gun use it to commit murder as well.
  

On the clear weight of the evidence there is no reason whatsoever to ban or restrict any inanimate object on the basis of these assaults.  In EVERY CASE virtually every owner of said devices, whether they be trucks, gasoline, baseball bats, pools or firearms uses them for a purpose other than committing murder.  There is no evidence to suggest that even a single such incident would have been prevented by any form of firearm restriction other than complete confiscation from law-abiding citizens which would likely lead to far greater rates of both property and serious violent crime -- and that assumes you could actually pull it off.

They are, however, many reasons to go after alleged "law enforcement", "mental health" and "other government" persons (including but not limited to school superintendents, principals and others) that have knowingly and intentionally excused, hidden and refused to prosecute felony misconduct either known or suspected by the people who later go on to commit these offenses.

In fact the evidence is that you could have prevented half or more of ALL the documented mass-shooting incidents of the last 20 years, such as in Parkland, had these government officials done their jobs with the information they had in their possession.

In addition there is large body of evidence that many of these shooters were either on or withdrawing from SSRIs, a specific class of drugs known to potentiate violence in young people with bipolar or disassociative disorders.  There is a specific warning in the prescribing information for these drugs related to this and what's worse is that these drugs are known by scientific study to be ineffective for their prescribed condition in persons under the age of 25.  It is a fact that it is almost impossible for anyone other than a psychiatrist or close associate with near-constant and frequent contact with an individual to know they have such a disorder, since during the non-depressed phases they appear to be perfectly fine.  While the risk of producing such an outcome is numerically small if you give these drugs to millions of people without adequate screening you will, statistically, produce some number of these attackers.

In short between the SSRI and government malfeasance connections you could have prevented nearly all of these attacks.

IF you are interested in actually preventing these attacks it is therefore clear that the only logical changes to make are to (1) hold government agencies and employees fully accountable, including criminally, when they fail to do their jobs through either negligence or intentional inaction and (2) stop prescribing all SSRIs and similar drugs to people under the age of 25 unless they are under institutional (and therefore continual) supervision and able to be segregated from innocent people if the risk of known bad outcomes materializes.

These are facts, not suppositions or guesses.

Now let's tie it together.

When you are hired to work for someone one of the key elements in your success if there is any cognitive process required in your job (that is, you're doing more than sweeping floors) is that you are capable and willing to take in information, evaluate it on a dispassionate, factual basis and from that draw conclusions without concealment, deceit or personal political animus.

This process is utterly essential to the operation of any commercial enterprise.

When I ran MCSNet it was an essential element of every single person's job that worked for me.  Even someone who was hired for the most-base position -- answering the front-desk phone and directing calls -- had as part of their job the utter necessity to take the call, discern what the caller was inquiring about or reporting and processing that information without pre-conceived notion, political animus or deceit and upon that analysis routing the call to the appropriate person or department.

This was, arguably, the least-skilled job description in the company.

The people who were in the customer service department had a higher level of discernment required of them.  Their job involved taking said calls passed to them in a call queue, speaking to the customer, determining exactly what they required in order to either assist them or sell to them a specific product or service and then acting on same.  Again, it was utterly essential that they be both willing and able to process the information they received from said person on the other end of the line without political animus, deceit or pre-conceived notion, acting only within the boundaries of the facts they were able to discern.  If the customer's service was off because they did not pay their bill whether they were Democrat or Republican, believed in gun rights or gay rights was utterly immaterial and to the extent that any non-factual matters intruded into their processing of information they were unemployable.

Those in technical support had an even higher level of discernment, in that they had to understand not just the complaint but also the technology behind it.  A small percentage of our customer base at the time (about 10%, more or less) preferred Macintosh computers, while nearly all of the rest had PCs running Windows (95 and later 98 at the time.)  You were unemployable if your personal or political animus drove you toward being unhappy when a PC user called because you liked Macs, or vice-versa as any expression of that to a customer was likely to result in the customer leaving.  I in fact had to fire someone over exactly this issue.

Those in sales or management positions, which were of course fewer in number, had even less room for such garbage.  For those in sales the accurate assessment of the customer's needs and what products and services we had that fit those needs, along with how to package and sell that combination of products and services, was the only determinant.  If you had a problem with gay people, black people, yellow people, green people (Martians) or gun-owning people then you had no place in my company in a management or sales role because your actions would directly damage either sales or the retention of valuable employees and possibly both.  Even worse, if in management, you might advocate for, bias reviews of, and seek to promote for political or other animated reasons rather than predicated on facts, which did double damage because not only would a less-competent (or incompetent) person get promoted the person passed over would likely quit in response!

Now you snowflakes may not understand any of this, or you may think that if you go work for some big company like Google or Amazon, where their entire culture has some sort of animus or bias, that you'll be immune to this because you're on the right side of it.

I will remind you that this is an extremely stupid position to take, for the simple reason that such firms always eventually get hosed.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but they always do.  IBM had this point of view for a long time and got away with it.  Then they paid for it as others ate their lunch and they nearly went out of business.  Microsoft was severely damaged by the same crap.  Apple nearly went under too.  NEXT, a very-promising firm with a whole bunch of this sort of crap inside it, did fail.  So have literally thousands of other such firms.

While it's certainly possible to win the bet and make enough bank before the destruction happens in your corporate or personal life the odds are against you and in an entrepreneurial environment -- that is, a smaller business where every sale counts the idea that you can inform your decisions in your personal or professional life by completely ignoring facts in favor of political animus is, and ought to be, an absolute and permanent bar on your employment.

If you walked out of school for your "17 minutes", marched on DC or participate in any such act whether physically or on social media whether now or in the future you have indelibly marked yourself as someone who cannot process facts and from them reach conclusions.

You thus have marked yourself as someone who is unemployable in any job that requires any amount of discernment or factual processing of information in order to be successful and that is virtually every job beyond sweeping floors.

Govern yourself accordingly.

Why did Parkland happen?

Because the law is not enforced; the shooter had been reported multiple times for acts that were plenty to arrest him, have him declared mentally incompetent or both.  He could not have shot up anything if in prison or a mental institution.

Why does medical care cost ten times what it does in other nations?

Because the law is not enforced; it is a felony to attempt to restrain trade, create or maintain monopolies, and price-fix.  The health care industry does all three on a daily basis.  You would not need "health insurance" for anything other than catastrophic events, Medicare and Medicaid would not be bankrupting the government and state and local pensions wouldn't be either if the law was enforced and those engaged in same were rotting in prison cells.

Why do we have an opiod epidemic?

Because the law is not enforced; it is a crime to knowingly divert or ship these drugs for other than legitimate uses, and when you ship enough pills into a town of 1,000 to give every single person there multiple doses a day it is clear they are not being used legitimately.  Yet not one pill manufacturing executive has faced indictment for what is clearly criminal behavior.

Why did an illegal invader shoot a young woman in California?

Because the law is not enforced.  He had been deported before, we let him come back in and California in particular gave him sanctuary.  In fact every single illegal invader here committed a criminal act as their first act on our soil.  Were the law to be enforced none of these crimes would have occurred.  There is an existing system to stop 90%+ of illegal invader employment, E-Verify.  Our government has refused to demand that all employers use it, under penalty of imprisonment.

Why did a man shoot 26 people in a Church in Texas?

Because the law is not enforced.  He had been court-martialed for assaulting his wife and child in New Mexico and served a 12 month sentence for same, plus a "bad conduct" discharge.  Under the Lautenberg Amendment this disqualified him from buying or owning firearms and yet nobody in the military went to prison for failing to enter his conviction into the system.

There is no law you can pass that will address any sort of violence nor any other sort of criminal conduct if it is not enforced.

There are over 50,000 gun laws alone on the books between federal, state and local legislation.  Nearly all of them, other than those directly dealing with the interstate trade in firearms, are blatantly unconstitutional.  Yet not only do we keep wanting to pass more laws we won't enforce the ones we already have, specifically when it comes to violent individuals that have been repeatedly reported or even those who have served criminal sentences.

At the same time you're robbed out of more than three trillion a year by the medical system for the exact same reason.  Laws that have existed for more than 100 years are routinely ignored by these companies because there is no risk to them in doing so.  At no time does anyone ever go to prison for outrageous violations of these laws.

A number of years ago a drug company was criminally prosecuted for off-label marketing of certain drugs to teens and children, for which there was no evidence of safety or efficacy.  It was later shown that they actually tampered with a scientific study to try to cover that up.  The scientific facts are that these drugs not only don't work in young people they actually make the risk of suicide go up instead of down and there is a small but non-zero risk of them causing homicidal rage attacks.  These drugs are implicated in many school and other "rage style" attacks, most of which are perpetrated by young people and in fact there is a warning in the prescribing information on these drugs related to this risk.  Yet not one person has gone to prison for the activities of those drug companies or for prescribing them to kids which arguably has resulted in virtually all mass-shootings of this type and what's worse is that we still allow doctors to hand these damn pills out like fucking candy to children, adolescents and young adults despite knowing they are both ineffective and unsafe.

Who's responsible for all this?

You are.  We all are.  Instead of taking the pop-up spokesman of the day out behind the woodshed when some tragedy happens and refusing to play along with that political game we fawn over them while "supporting" politicians and other "important" people who speechify and demand new laws and "action."

We never demand that the people responsible for their negligent or intentional inaction, or even worse, their complicit and blatantly illegal conduct before the fact that allows these events to occur or even potentiates them go straight to prison.

We also fail to demand that those who rob us out of more than $3 trillion dollars a year collectively, or about one dollar in six that is spent in the economy, go to prison.

Instead, we all play pity party when bad things happen and then mewl out the by-now standard: Please sir, just the tip this time and may I have a stick for my teeth first?

So what sort of practical applications does a HomeDaemon-MCP installation have -- and why would you, if you're a small business (perhaps in the homebuilder, HVAC, security or renovation space) want to buy the package and monetize it?

For the math on a plausible basis look here.

I want to focus right now, however, on the practical side of it -- the user experience side.

These are all things I'm doing right now in one way or another in my home.  If you've got a serious interest in acquiring the package I'll be more than happy to meet with you and show you -- from afar -- exactly what I'm talking about and how easy it really is.

• You're at the bar, a half-hour from the house.  You'd like to use the hottub when you get home.  So you open the page (on your phone) and hit "Hottub On." You can see the current temperature of the water and a few minutes later you get a text message that the heater has been confirmed to be working; when you get home you pop right in.  Behind the scenes the system has reset the valves on your combined pool/hottub system, put your VFD-driven pool pump (which you have saved several hundred dollars a year in power by installing) on "high" for the hottub, and monitored the heater's temperature rise to make sure it ignited.
  
  
• You get out of the hottub, having enjoyed several adult beverages, and forget to push the button to shut it off.  30 minutes later, sensing no movement in your Lanai, the system does it for you saving your a scadload of energy you would have otherwise wasted heating the water all through the overnight hours with nobody in it.
  
  
• You have your laundry machines in the utility room.  You stick a load of laundry in the washer.  When the washer finishes the cycle the system notifies you that the load is complete via both announcement on the house's speakers (over which it can also play music) and via text message, just in case you happen to be out working in the yard or relaxing by your pool.  Contrast this with the washing machine down in the basement or in the utility room and it's "weak sauce" end-of-cycle buzzer you cannot hear.  Ever leave a wet load in the washer by accident overnight this way?  Yeah, that's disgusting..... 
  
  
• You leave the house, getting in your car.  An hour later the house automatically adjusts down the A/C, saving your money, it texts you so that you know it went into the "secure" mode and in addition it starts monitoring the occupancy sensors to indicate not that someone is in a room but that someone may have broken in!  If it detects same it takes a picture through your webcams and sends it to your phone via email, and texts you immediately.  Instead of having a contract with a security company and getting fined by your local PD for false alarms if the sensors trigger you get to check it out and, if there really is a problem you can call the sheriff's department directly.  No more false alarm charges and a higher-level of security, plus good photographic evidence to use in prosecuting any actual burglar, is the result.  Oh, did I mention no "monthly fee" games from the security company either?
  
  
• You get home later, and the system detects you coming in through the garage door; it shuts off the security and returns the A/C to its former setting.  The occupancy sensors go back to turning your lights on and off for you automatically, without any user intervention.  Just to make sure it really was you the system also sends you a brief text message so you know the house has turned off it's "secure" mode.
  
  
• You aren't around for a weekend.  The system, being in "away" mode automatically, runs a reasonable simulation of an occupied dwelling, with a pattern of lighting suggesting someone is there -- during the evening hours only, of course.  When someone unexpectedly comes into the driveway the floodlights all around the home come on, perhaps providing a deterrent value should that be a burglar.
  
  
• You have a room with two lighting switches but when one is on you really would like the other to be on or off at the same time -- and at the same brightness.  You declare these as "grouped" in the system; pressing the paddle on one (whether on, off or to change the dim level) causes the other(s) to automatically follow.  You can also "group" a switch (e.g. when you have a light on you want the ceiling fan to be on, and if you shut off the light then the fan should be shut off as well) with a dimmer circuit.
  
  
• You go to bed, and push a button on your nightstand.  All the lights in the house go out and the HVAC system is adjusted to your preference for a more-comfortable sleep.  The outside perimeter motion sensors, should they be triggered during that overnight, will turn on the respective floodlights and, if motion is detected in your lanai, not only will all the lights be turned up fully there but a chime and announcement will sound inside.  Home invaders who think they'll catch you sleeping beware!
  
  
• You wake up a couple of hours earlier than normal and decide you're going to get up, which is unusual for you.  You like to sleep in a cool house, so when you went to bed you had the system turn down the heat -- and it's February.  You reach over to the nightstand and press button "3" briefly (of 4 on the wireless remote you have velcro'd to the side of your nightstand.)  The thermostat on the other side of the house is immediately set to it's normal daytime level plus two degrees and your two-stage furnace comes on, quickly warming up the house.  In a few minutes, instead of getting out of bed in a 65 degree house and walking out to the thermostat to turn it up, you have a nice toasty room in which to work your way to the bathroom and your morning shower.  An hour later the thermostat resets back to the normal daytime temperature setting all on its own; no point in wasting energy keeping the house extra-warm for the rest of the day.
  
  
• You have installed a "push button" deadbolt so your kid can come home from school without having to carry a key.  When you go to bed and everyone is home the keypad on the deadbolt is automatically disabled, so even if your kid is foolish enough to tell someone what the code is it's worthless to use in invading your home in the middle of the night.  In the morning the keypad is automatically re-enabled.
  
  
• Your cleaning lady uses the code to get into the house.  You're reasonably ok with this because you can connect to your security cameras and see what's going on at any point in time, plus motion triggers them to take pictures.  The cleaning lady only comes on Wednesdays between 10:00 and Noon; the system sets that code at 9:45 AM on Wednesday and revokes it at 2:00 PM.  The rest of the time your kid can use his code to get into the house after school, but the cleaning lady's code is worthless.  Being in secure mode when she shows up you get a text, and another when she keys the code to lock the door on the way out.  If she doesn't use the code the second time to lock the door (she forgets when she's leaving) an hour after she leaves you get a text telling you the house has "re-armed" itself automatically and the door is locked -- on its own.
  
  
• Your kid, like most, refuses to shut the lights off when he leaves a room.  The system automatically turns them on and off for him.
  
  
• You want to watch a movie and would like the living room lights on, but at a very low level.  You push a button on your phone and they all change to "nightlight" level illumination, along with modifying the light level in the nearby hallway and kitchen on motion detected in the area so your movie doesn't get interrupted with bright lighting when your kid decides to come into the adjacent kitchen and get a soda from the fridge.

• You want a very low level for the lights in your bathroom at 2:00 AM if you need to get up to pee, but in the evening you'd like a moderately higher level of lighting - and your wife wants to be able to crank it up when doing her makeup.  All automatic; if you get up to pee at 2:00 AM you get a "nightlight" level of illumination sufficient to make sure you don't try to sit down on an up toilet seat, but during the day and evening hours the level of illumination is altered appropriately.

None of this requires "programming" as you think of it.  The list of what to do and when to do them is controlled by a simple English-like language, similar to this:

[z Front Door Motion] triggered on
[v Night]
execute
cmd zset 50 Front Door Lights

Which says "if the front door motion detector just changed state to on and it's nighttime then set the front door lights to 50% brightness."

The system can handle, and will process, a nearly-unlimited number of conditions like this.

The best part of it is that other than for licensing restrictions (if whoever winds up owning this wishes to sell a time-limited right to use, much like Adobe does with their "Creative Suite") there is no connection required to any sort of "cloud resource" of any kind.  The system runs entirely independently, on the local device and yet maintains a security model that allows you, and only you and those you authorize, to access it via any web browser-capable device from anywhere.  Your phone, your tablet, the computer at your office, your laptop -- literally anywhere, all securely and under your exclusive control.  You can also define a number of access levels for that information so some people (e.g. your kid) can control things in his room but he can't screw with the light levels in your room.

Oh, and it all runs on a $35 computer without even getting it to breathe hard and boots off an SD-card, making it entirely power-fail safe.  Power consumption is roughly 5 (yes, five) watts.  Yank the cord and when you plug it back in it comes right back up as if nothing had happened.

Look to the right if the opportunity sounds juicy to you!