They're relying on "we tried it with a few in the same area and nothing bad happened" from the DARPA urban challenge at this point.

These tests are total BS, I have never needed more than one question to determine human vs bot: "3OOO + 1 = ?" (using O's for zeros). I don't understand why people feel computers are getting "more human", they're simply not, they're just getting more and more programming. Some bot writer will eventually get burned by this question and add the concept to his bot's programming, but has that really made it more human? I'll just switch to homophones, puns or other language devices, the possibilities are endless. In my opinion creative, original, human behavior from a program is so far off, it's depressing to think about. Also, we humans are getting "smarter" (better at solving problems), so it's not even clear to me that computers are getting "more human" faster than we're learning and differentiating ourselves from programmed behavior.

I think you're preaching to the choir here on killing x86. The x86 ops get translated to RISC ops anyway. What I wonder is why they haven't attempted to release two versions: an x86 version, and a stripped down RISC version without the x86 decoder. Obviously this would be monumental task at all levels of the design, but it would seem they could get similar performance on the RISC version without as much effort as needed for the x86 version since that overhead is removed. I would guess(and hope) that most of their design effort goes into optimizing the design in the RISC world after the instructions are translated anyway. This will never happen though because windows == x86 only. Being able to compile most of the needed applications from source gives hardware designers the freedom to shed legacy interfaces every 5 years instead of every 30. It would be a glorious future if hardware producers started realizing that open source software == greater hardware design flexibility == better performance/cost. Hopefully this is already happening with the shift from x86 to ARM on netbooks.

Call me ignorant or incompetent, but 'sudo su' gets the job done...