I would say shelter is not "sheltery" enough. Look at the picture closely. Who do you see? Right, a guy and a girl in business suites. So as far as I understand the target audience for this scooter are office workers (it will be probably expensive so blue collar folks wont be able to afford it). The shelter shown on the picture wont protect you and your nice clothes from dirty water splashes created by passing cars. So there are 2 options: either loose the shelter and put a guy in a leather jacket/pants on it or create some kind of all around enclosure.

Are you serious Zach? Intelligent design and religion in general are not theories, they are dogmas. They have nothing to do with intelligence or thinking. If somebody tries to use them in order to explain physical world then he/she is a moron.

One of the reasons why women are weaker is that they used to spent most of their lives being pregnant (people used to live to only 30-40 max and women were giving birth to many many kids because most of them would die before becoming adults) that is unable to hunt or do other physically intense activities. So instead of building female's muscles (that they would not have been used anyway) these resources (food) were used to produce more babies or feed males. The subspecies of humans who used this kind of adaptation were more successful then the ones that did not and we are the offspring of the former ones.

OMG, never thought that engadget become a police force for political correctness. FYI, an average man IS stronger then an average woman and there is nothing wrong if a company takes this into account when they design products or in marketing. If you don't want to admit some fact only because it is not an "accepted" point of view then you are not better then all these intelligent design people (men are stronger for evolutionary reasons). Here is a quote from wikipedia:

"By the end of puberty, adult men have heavier bones and nearly twice as much skeletal muscle. Some of the bone growth (e.g., shoulder width and jaw) is disproportionately greater, resulting in noticeably different male and female skeletal shapes. The average adult male has about 150% of the lean body mass of an average female, and about 50% of the body fat."

YES, women are weaker, fatter and there is nothing wrong with this.

If you ask me Bilal is somewhat right. English language needs to update its spelling badly. Nowadays you have to remember spelling of too many words. Basically pronunciation does not correlate well with written language. If you don't believe me try to read the following poem http://www.learnenglish.de/EZine/Joke3.htm One of the problems in this poem is for example word "tear" can be pronounced in 2 different ways and mean 2 different things. Considering the fact that old people are too conservative and shortsighted to make any changes the only hope that young people on the internet will eventually "update" spelling.

Nothing new compared to sony's reader and similar devices. It is nice to have faster processor and more memory though (I would prefer to have bigger screen instead of proc power). The only concern is quality of the reader compared to sony product. In any case more choices and more competition are always better for consumers.

"How very Star Wars of us."

Exactly! How do you thing army is going to use them? You dont need lasers, particle weapon or a huge cannon to destroy an enemy satellite , it is enough to slow one down a little so that it would burn in the atmosphere after a few revolutions.

Why do you think these repair bots are autonomous? The only reason is that you can deploy say 100's of them in space in case of approaching war etc. and then trigger them when needed. The best part is that they dont fall under treaty that prohibits deploying weapons in outer space. I bet the "refueling" model is small enough to be launched by a trident rocket so that army can use existing infrustructure to deploy these satellites.