Goo Truther 
How are sidewalk delivery bots not legally-speaking just some discarded street garbage that anyone can take? Is it just cowardice?
@thufie whoever nicks one might need a metal box large enough to put it in (to act a a Faraday Cage) and act very quickly to disable the device (before someone comes looking for it) they will contain cameras, GNSS receiver and LTE modem so the delivery company can keep track of where they are.
Otherwise I'd have expected a lot to have gone missing by now - there's quite a few €€€ worth of components and modules/assemblies in them!
@vfrmedia yeah its got a GPS, but how is that different from leaving a couch for garbage pickup and having a tracker on that? The garbage truck is not stealing it, just taking it away.
@vfrmedia It has to be some kind of legally protected class of thing, otherwise nobody would care if it says "Piloted by robert :)" on the display, that's unattended garbage for anyone to pick up.
@thufie many jurisdictions even the trash remains someones private property *until* an authorised person (such as the binman) takes it away.
I do wonder if the delivery robots are only ever deployed in big cities with good LTE signal and CCTV (so they can constantly report back to their masters the locations, and there is some kind of alarm sent to a control centre when one "drops off the radar" or is diverted from its route, and local CCTV would be monitored. As I've never seen one in my part of England (it would be a challenge to deploy them for many reasons, including the flaky LTE comms on *all* available mobile networks, especially outside the town centres)
@vfrmedia they are a huge pain for anyone with a wagon, cane, walker, or even just a wide stride. The pictures make them look smaller than they are. They weigh about 75lbs (35kg), have a tablet display on top in an attempt to humanize their robot, and they come to a full stop as a big heavy obstacle if anything is suboptimal about their surrounding environment. If this shit was a kind of wild game it'd be hunted to extinction by now.
@vfrmedia huoungry for delivery-bot RAM sticks 
@thufie isn't there a whole fuckton of tech workers in USA who have recently been laid off and are struggling to find jobs? I'm more amazed not even one of these has been diverted and stripped for parts, there's going to be things like microcontrollers, RAM, SD-cards, batteries etc in them..