Alienware announced today their upcoming CrossFire X-enabled M17 gaming notebook. The company had been hinting at a surprise announcement for some time, and this is it. The notebook sports a 17-inch display, a Core 2 Quad / Extreme CPU, and up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM. It also features twin ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 GPUs, a WXGA+ / WUXGA panel, an optional HDTV tuner, up to 640GB of HDD space in a RAID 0 array, a dual-layer DVD writer / Blu-ray reader, WiFi, Blutooth 2.1, gigabit Ethernet and a facial recognition sensor. The unit weighs a hefty 9.5 pounds and the 12-cell battery won’t keep it charged for too long. The M17 is available soon online and retails starting at $1,399.

It’s cute and it’s small, but don’t let that fool you: the Speecys SPC-101C robot not only recognizes your face, but it can read how you’re feeling. It’s just one more step along the way toward the eventual takeover of our robotic overlords. Oh, by the way, if you want one, they’re about $3,000.

The singularity is near. Two Dutch researchers, Theo Gevers and Nicu Sebe, have developed a face recognition system that determine’s a person’s mood. Specifically, it can tell how happy a person is at a given moment in time. When the computers take over and strive to make life perfect for humankind, by their robotic standards, it’s software like this that will make their jobs a piece of cake. I suppose such technology could also be useful in test marketing new products, but that’s just boring, now isn’t it?