Even if you COULD get a script that responds almost exactly like you would, who would want to talk to it?
While it might be interesting to talk to your great grandparent or someone famous, you said this would be for someone without children or any other legacy.
Noone is going to want to talk to the dead you unless you have a some other sort of legacy that makes you interesting.

No if it could respond to responses for you while you're still alive and schedule meetups with the people you want and politely decline the
ones that you would decline and ignore the ones that you would ignore, this might be something useful but don't count on it being very useful
once you're dead.

You wouldn't need 100% agreement and also stopping an asteroid is in some ways easier
than stopping climate change. Stopping an asteroid is mostly technical while stopping climate
change has a fair amount of political. Stopping climate change requires some amount on consensus
to make it happen. Also, stopping climate change has alot of people who make money from
polution wanting to resist doing anything about it. Stopping an asteroid on the other hand
would have alot of people with money potentially profiting off of it. Mainly, the aerospace industry
could potentially profit quite a bit as well as the insurance companies while very few people
have any incentive to try to resist attempting to prevent an asteroid strike.

IF we can detect one that is in a collision course for earth and we have a decade to do something about it then we could develop the technology.
Sure, there would be the "asteroid deniers" but if the evidence was good enough that people could calculate the trajectory themself and show
that it had a high probability of wiping us out then we could do something about it.

My experience has been the exact opposite. Having gotten use to google voice search on android, I find siri very lacking.
Now that I own an iphone, I still find myself getting very frustrated with siri not giving me the right answers so I open google
on my iphone and ask the same question and get a much better response from google.

Why is that important? Placebo is placebo. For the placebo effect to work it has to be as convincing as possible to the patient.
Homeopathy accomplishes that quite well for it's followers and is pure water by the time they are done diluting it so is almost the
perfect placebo. I don't see the problem with homeopathy if it works as water is about as harmless a placebo as you can get.

I think requiring them to pay prevailing wage to the worker plus put an equal amount into a fund for STEM scholarships would work decent as well.
Even if they fudge the numbers (which they do) and say it's only a 40k position, requiring them to pay an additional 100% premium to a scholarship
fund should minimize the abuse that we're currently seeing.

This could also work for other industries like truck drivers where the complaint is there are not enough drivers when the reality is that there are
plenty of people who would be willing to drive if the pay was higher.

The odds of another tourist stealing your camera when you ask them to take a picture is pretty much 0%.
The odds of a someone (especially a poor local) who asks YOU if you would them to take a picture of you
stealing your camerais pretty much 100%. This is the same advice I give my kids. If you get lost, don't
wait for someone to approach you, instead walk up to the first person you see and ask for help. Most people
are normal law abiding citizens, if you play the odds and pick someone randomly then your chances of getting
a criminal are very small. If instead you let them approach you then they are picking you which makes the
odds of them being a criminal considerably higher.

Someone who is paying $10 for 5 stickers is not doing it for the stickers. They are
doing it for the hopeful chance that it suceeds. As they are basically doing a donation
there should be no problem with the "low stakes for high odds". For the 10% off retail
then it better be an amazing product ("good return") or a high chance of success otherwise
you need more than a 10% discount to account for the risk.

This should be the approach taken for any risky venture on kickstarter as well.
Assume that you might lose all your money. If you're only giving $10 then this isn't a big deal.
Yes, traditional investors do take risks but kickstarter does have the potential to take even
bigger risks as it can get 10k people to all give $10 to something that has a high probability of
failing but each person's risk is minimal even if it does fail.

The reason they aren't widely adopted has nothing to do with whether they are good or bad.
The reason thay aren't widely adopted is because most people just don't need one.
Alot of schools have installed smartboards. For the most part, I've never seen them use
the digitizer and defintely not enough to justify the cost. They are mostly used to show
movies and slides which could have been done at half the cost with a regular tv.

Here is a relatively economical digitizer($600) that just connects to any tv/projector: http://store.e-beam.com/ebeam-...
Here is a $500 projector that supports a light pen: http://www.mitsubishi-presenta... and I know there are many more.
There is also the wii remote which is dirt cheap if a little bit of DIY.
These are not near the resolution of a professional digitizer but would still easily match the resolution of the typical dry erase marker
and you can attach them to any tv that you have lying around.

It really depends on what your budget is and how distributed your team is. If there are only 2-3 different locations
then getting a couple dedicated OS X boxes just for a distributed whiteboard would be worth it.
I also work on a distributed team and I have considered spending a weekend playing with the wii remote hack to
see if I could get it working as a whiteboard. 40" lcds are cheap enough that if it actually worked, I could easily
justifying buying one for everyone on the team (but I probably wouldn't have to as they all probably already have
a TV available). That's really what is needed, a cheap (under $500) device like the wii remote hack that you
can plug into two or more tvs and have them all be interactive. Touch screens are expensive so it would need
to be either something like the wii remote or a webcam to remain cost effective. It would also need to be easily
installed and callibrated.

Yes, I do. Driving is relaxing to me. And being able to clock out and go home would
be beyond awesome. To an introvert, being around a bunch of people is probably
stressful but people don't bother me. Crazy deadlines and work following me home
is what the main stresses of my job are. A typical bus driver has zero responsibility
once they go home. A programmer is on the hook if anything breaks after they clock
out (if they are even allowed to clock out)

This isn't what happened to me. The first time I saw it (before I realized the controversy), it was clearly
white/gold but since then no matter how I look at it, it is clearly black/blue and I can't make it change
back to the white/gold. I tried finding the original picture I looked at which was white/gold but everything
in my history was now blue/black.

If I could get the same pay for driving a bus without the stress of programming AND get time off in the middle of the day,
I would quit my job as a programmer and become a bus driver tomorrow. Besides requiring more education, many of the
higher paying jobs also have more stress and more responsibility.