Nobody does. Of course, we have wildly different ideas of what is "reasonable."

First off--White? It'll show all the dirt in a couple of months. Should have gone with black. Second, it's a freakin' tortoise. Irony is just calling out for racing stripes or flames or something like that.

I mean, come on guys! He lost his shell! If you're going to give him a new one, at least give him something that doesn't look like a dorky science project.

This makes me laugh.

Years ago, I worked for a company in Mesa, Arizona. It's damned hot in that area, especially in the summer.

When the company tackled the thorny issue of dress codes, they wanted a unisex dress code--no double standards. The dress code ended up being, "You must be covered from shoulders to a little above the knee in clothing of good repair." Open toed shoes were okay, but no flip-flops.

That was it. No ripped jeans. No tube tops or spaghetti straps.

That said, there were some people who could just not handle hairy men's legs and, I'm told, argued vehemently against men wearing shorts. The head of HR basically said that whatever standards are there for women should also be there for men. If you want to wear skirts, you need to let men show their legs, too.

There were two other interesting things they did. One, they hung a sign in the lobby that said "This company supports a casual dress code." So you wouldn't wonder why people were wandering around in shorts. The other rule was that there were times--maybe once or twice a year--when it might be necessary to, shall we say, "dress to impress." When this happened, you would be notified by your manager--and it was up to your manager to do this and verify that you got the message--more than 24 hours before this would happen. If you were not notified and showed up dressed unimpressively, your manager was the one who caught the heat.

Well, I'm sure that the car could notify me or my significant-other if something went wrong. At the very least, the police could probably track me down at work and have me remotely unlock the car so that they could put it in neutral and move the car out of traffic. Assuming the car could not be trained to notice that the tire was flat and limp over to shoulder like a driver would do. Most cars have little detectors for tire pressure nowadays, so I'm sure it could detect that the tire was flat and deal accordingly.

If it's some kind of accident, again, I'm sure the car could notify me. In which case I'd end up taking one of those automated cabs to the location and deal with it. It's not like it's going to happen every other day.

I dunno. I would buy a Robocar in heartbeat. I like the idea of being able to sit in the car and read and do fun stuff on the trip home. I do agree that I probably wouldn't want to "rent it out" to anybody I didn't personally know.

On the other hand, it might cut down on the number of cars "needed." I have a car. My significant-other has a car. We both need a car to get to work and run errands. But I'm pretty sure we could get by with one car that would come at our beck-and-call. It could easily drive her to work, come home, drive me to work, go back down and wait for her to get off work, drive her home by way of the supermarket, and then come back down and lurk outside my office until I was ready to leave.

Yeah, it'd probably take some syncing of times and such, but nothing really difficult.

Besides the whole Uber-esque renting my car when I'm not using it thing...

If you have a family, you may end up getting more out of your car by using it within the family. Picture the husband and wife where the wife takes the car to work and the husband calls the car up if he needs it. Add in some kids who can have the car take them places as well and it could spend a lot more of it's time moving around than it would with only licensed drivers using it.

As for, "What happens if I need to use the car when my significant-other is using it?" I would assume this is something that you would work out either by communicating (eg, the SO calls up and asks, "Do you need the car for the next few hours?") or through some kind of scheduling algorithm (the car knows you need it at 5:00PM and returns to you at that time no matter what the situation it's currently in).

'scuse me, while I kiss this guy...

What about the suicide pretzel?

Too expensive to haul up, I guess.

I was just going to say, "you've got a homicidal cell roaming your body and you're giving it a laser?!"

I don't think we're talking about credit scores, though. We're talking about Credit Cards and available credit. Apple has this information through ApplePay. All they have to do is share it with the iAd team. Fortunately, they'd never do that.

Well, based on credit information, they can probably get some idea of income. Now they can sell access to you based upon your income. So if you're income isn't that great, Mercedes doesn't have to waste money advertising to you.

Do you have anything to back up your claim that Google is selling data?

This is actually a real question--not entirely facetious.

It's my understanding that Google doesn't sell your data--it's actually pretty valuable stuff. They sell access to you, much like Apple does with iAd.

Well, if the whole rocket launching thing doesn't work out, you can open up a bird restaurant. "Flash cooked in flight" and all.

There's no risk!

I haven't quite figured out the economics yet.

If you consider minerals, I would imagine that asteroid mining will certainly be less cost-effective than mining them on Earth. So there's no way they're going to be able to compete with Earth-bound mining. Short of some kind of unobtainium deposit, you're losing money. You could conceivably sell the minerals in orbit for building things up there, but that technology doesn't really exist yet and that's going to be pretty tricky to come up with.

If you consider mining ice/water for rocket fuel, you've conceivably got a chicken-or-the-egg problem. The idea is that you mine the ice and then break it up into hydrogen (a very good propellant source) and oxygen (something we humans need for breathing) and sell that. But who will buy it? Perhaps people looking to make money mining asteroids. And what's the only way to make money mining asteroids? Mining ice/water for rocket fuel! So it becomes sort of a pyramid scheme where the first people make money and suddenly there's a lot more competition, the price drops, and the bottom falls out of the market.

I like the idea, but I'm not sure I'd be investing any money in it...