That's excellent. I wonder if it was just a training session, though? I would think if they thought it was an explosive, they'd just shoot it.

I'd be curious to see how much damage the robot actually took, too. Wonder if it was totaled or able to get back up and running with a few spare parts.

I don't know if I'd play it, but I'd watch *her* play it.

This is always the scarey part: realizing that mass murderers are in many ways just like everyone else. They wake up in the morning, they put on their pants one leg at a time, they brush their teeth and walk their dog, they kiss their kids and head out to the concentration camp to oversee the deaths of thousands.

I've always liked to say that monsters are real, and it's far worse than we ever imagined when we were kids. We thought monsters were big and hairy and had fangs. If only it were that easy! A monster like that you can recognize from a hundred meters away. A monster like that, you have a chance against. The real monsters are worse, because they look and act just like everyone else.

That's awesome. I wonder what they made the "feet" out of? Seemed like the first one was having a lot of trouble with a slippery plastic foot covering slippery plastic terrain.

I especially liked how it jabbed its foot into a ditch, then re-evaluated and placed the foot in a different spot before trying to continue. These could be the next Mars rovers.

This will be the ultimate gaming keyboard technology. Imagine if every key can display an icon or (if the resolution is good enough) a blurb of text to tell you what it does. "What button throws the grenade? Oh, maybe the one with the picture of a grenade on it."

Or you could have situational keys that are either lit or not lit depending on if you can use them. The keyboard would be a much more integrated part of the game (or any application) if the "Communications" button could actually flash on your keyboard when there was an incoming message to read.

I could also see a simple game of index-finger whack-a-mole with keys lighting up... :-p

So many possibilities come to mind.

This brings to mind the obvious question:

How come they don't have any stun guns that are built into *wallets*?

"Gimmie your wallet."
"Okay, take it easy, here's my wallet....KERZAP."

I'd go with retro-modernism, although retro-futurism is good too, depending on how you look at it. It's a modern day revisiting of a past envisioning of what the modern (or future) world was supposed to look like.

It's a fad. Like Britney Spears, it, too, will one day just be kind of sad and unattractive and pointless. I honostly don't think it's catching on. The illusion that it's catching on is probably just that you're looking for it now. If you see "steampunk" designs showing up in Walmart, then it's catching on.

I'm not knocking the style. It's cool. If I were in the mood to spend more money to turn my toaster into a really artistic looking toaster, I'd probably go with this style myself, but it's still just an artisitic fad.

Sweet, except for the fact that it apparently only holds 3 knives?

Stuff like this is already available. I think it was ThinkGeek that has one -- webcam + bot remotely controllable through the web.

This one is a whole lot better looking, though.

They should also include a dial-up function, like a motion detector, smoke detector, etc, that will text message you if it detects anything, so you can log on and look around.

Personally, I think we're a lot further off than 10 years from a fully automated combat robot.

The problem is in the image recognition, which afaik isn't coming along that quickly. Getting a computer to look at video and tell whether or not the person is carrying a gun and then whether or not they're using it in a hostile manner is a tough one. I'd be interested to hear if some company somewhere was close to solving that problem.

I'm all in favor of remote controlled robots, though. Maybe more like a squad consisting of 1 human and a bunch of robots being remote controlled from a nearby Stryker by the other humans. We should be able to beat terrorists simply by out-spending them. If the ante to do battle gets upped to the billions because you need your own robots to be any good at it, then it will be a lot harder to bankroll terrorists.

Yeah, seriously, who the hell would want to ride in that thing? Even the most basic IED would kill you. Not to mention bullets. I can only guess that there must be some need for a vehicle that's light and fast that an armored vehicle simply can't match. Can't say I see that, though.