Shall machines do the work of man?

I just finished mowing the lawn -- actually, I just finished watching my ROBOT mow the lawn.

About a year ago, I got a lawn-mowing robot for about 80 bucks from "Woot" (a decent site to get halfway-decent prices on indecently overstocked items).

After letting it sit in its box in the garage for that year, I finally took it out and set it up.

It worked OK ... we don't get much traffic on our street, but quite a few folks driving or walking by just stopped and watched it go!

Once I had it set up properly (I forgot to set the wheel height right), the 'bot only got stuck once, when it couldn't figure out how to get around the fire hydrant. Otherwise, it mowed all by itself for two hours and did an OK job of mowing the weeds back down to a reasonable level.