You guys think it is ridiculous that these websites often only pay about $0.60/hr, but thats because you guys are all living in USA or the West, where $5/hr is low. But most people live in 3rd world countries, where $0.60/hr is considered a reasonable income. That's why nearly all outsourcing is done in India or other poor countries, because $0.60/hr through Internet (with a possibility of earning several dollars per hour) seems as good as working a typical fulltime job that may also pay just $0.60/hr.
So the crazy thing is not that these websites pay less than $1/hr, its that the same job in the West will pay 10 or 20 times higher than in the rest of the world!
PS: I currently live in a farming town in Philippines where the average fulltime income is about $0.50/hr, so the prospect of earning that much through Internet seems pretty good.
The PR2 robot has two eight-core i7 Xeon system servers on-board, each with 24 GB of RAM
Thats what happens when Google funds a robot: it becomes a mobile server rack!
But I must admit that its pretty impressive computing power to have on a mobile robot! Most research robots have relatively outdated embedded computing hardware compared to consumer laptops, so this will allow much more detailed algorithms to run.
"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra