British tech news website The Register has caught wind of yesterday's explosives incident in Potrero Hill and reported it with a brilliantly sensationalistic headline:

"ROBOT COP scatters LIVE GRENADES in San Francisco STREET"

The kicker: “Then runs them over when they fail to explode.” (If you go to The Register’s home page, you will note that none of the other headlines make use of all caps.)

Even if you’ve already seen the live KTVU footage of the robot slowly, slooowly running over a grenade while three commentators look on in horror, it’s worth reading Lewis Page’s article, at least until the part where he kind of makes it sound like the robot was avenging the death of “a recently deceased relative."

File this one under “what they think of us,” then see if you can find Paul Verhoeven’s number.

(by Daniel Levin Becker)