The total moves required to reach a solution is usually more important than the moves per second. While the robot is slower to physically move the device, it is probably moving the cube more efficiently than many humans. For instance, I can solve the cube, but do so by only moving one square at a time. More advanced solvers can move several squares simultaneously... a good computer will come up with the most efficient moves to solve the puzzle.

I use the Chase iphone app and am perfectly happy with its security. I did not opt to store my username on the phone and therefor my security was never in a perilous state. People who chose to store their username on the phone have a SLIGHTLY less secure system, but probably chose to do so because their password is very secure or they just don't care. I think this is more about people than systems.

I would think that "amature teenage slut" would have the best chance of winning.

FYI, Mark Zuckerberg says that he ALWAYS acquires companies for the people rather than the intellectual property.

Its great that these planets probably exist, but what distance is their orbits? While, planet size gives us a good idea of how much atmosphere the planet could have, the orbital distance gives us an estimate of the surface temperature. Also important is the rotational frequency and the angle of tilt. It seems like there are a lot more variables that need to be considered in considering these probabilities.

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).