These robots aren't crappy. But they do handle your crap.

As I look out over the Port of Los Angeles with its shipping cranes and waterways, I think about the 800,000 gallons of water similar in quality to drinking water lying in tanks under my feet. Less than 24 hours earlier, it had been raw sewage entering the Terminal Island Water Reclamation plant, where environmental engineer Lance Thibodeaux is showing me around so I can see high-tech filtration in action.

What made the water's transformation possible? Advanced purification systems, constantly and automatically run by a centralized computer program housed in a small office a few hundred yards away.  Read more...