Too bad you need to have stump hands and legs in order to fit into it. Would be worthwhile to buy it just to reverse engineer the prosthetics. I guess the voice synthesizer could help you get a bunch of voice over ad deals also.

They should announce the new site on their Facebook page.

True to its name, the Segway provided a segue into the next stage of life.

The biggest national defense use for these machines is nuclear stockpile stewardship and theoretical development of new weapons capabilities. This is a pretty big deal and is why there are export controls on Intel chips to countries like Iran. This is why all of the fastest US machines only remain unclassified during the development stage and then convert to classified status.

that false alarms will become more frequent :-)

I don't really think that we should really worry about conventional information weapons so much. What we should focus more of our fear and resources on are the infamous IWMD (Information Weapons of Mass Destruction). The development of these by axis of evil nations should be monitored and sanctioned.

Linux is a terrific operating system, and provides a functionality that is unparalleled for a great deal of technologies that do not have good support from other operating systems. Yet for years, it was just too hard to use for most people. This has finally changed with recent distros like Ubuntu, but the time that it took to get "it just works" versions into peoples hands was fueled by developer's not listening to lay users who had trouble with the OS. Here's a useful experiment... I think we are finally at a point where I could give a go live version of Ubuntu to my mother and expect her to have some success in using it though this is perhaps not yet true for many other distros.

"Then, all it takes are some simple "right of way" rules and a small amount of computing power ... needed to avoid collisions"

These simple right of way rules result in lots of collisions on the road. Air collisions are usually fatal. It would be good to see this working in 2D (cars) first before we go to 3D (planes).

I think that while the average student should just learn the science as best they can. There are often good research opportunities for the superstars. Most university and industry labs would be happy to mentor smart high school students in research projects. There are lots of summer programs set up for high school students to do research. Simply search for them in your locality or consider contacting local universities and companies doing research. They need to be willing to do some grunt work in exchange for the experience, though. Its worth noting that many of these pay wages that are much better than the average highschooler usually gets. Its still worthwhile to the company because $10 per hour is still a lot less than the $25 an hour that most postdocs get or $50 an hour that professionals get.

"You will exert all of this effort to teach an individual who is really past their learning stage a skill that requires a huge amount of infrastructure...I definitely would go for teaching young children, who would benefit (and need it) more and also be more receptive to technology. "

Yes but there is always the chance that the person you teach to use the computer will reward you handsomely in their will. Young kids are much less likely to die before you and to acquire a lot of wealth to leave you if they die before you. Hee hee.