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Would they be aiming to replace all cars, though? Sounds like their test one was in an environment mixing with more traditional, human-controlled cars (and pedestrians, and bikes, and possibly cats).

Assume one day, maybe the second Tuesday of the month , there is a big glitch and none of the cars will go. How will that be any different to a Tube strike, or to the hundreds of people who get up every morning and discover that their traditional car has a fault? People will phone in, try and arrange to work from home or to use flexitime to get it fixed... those who can't will get a taxi which is affordable as a one-off.

The few people who were out in their cars when the glitch hit will be collected up by the AA/RAC or, in the less lucky cases, by ambulances. Terrible... but again, no different to normal road accidents where the wheel stops responding or the brakes don't work.

My big fear would be the one I think I recall mentioned on Top Gear when they discussed self-driving cars - the hazard of the boy racer who decides he's going to tinker with it.

I'm split on it. I want it to exist. I can't hold a driver's licence and I love the idea that in twenty or thirty years time I might be able to enjoy the convenience and independence of having a car of my own *anyway*. I also think that if asked to place a bet on what happens first - Google release a self-driving car commercially, or the entire public transport network becomes both affordable and accessible - I would be backing Google all the way.

But I think persuading "the public" to allow robots to drive cars without a fully capable and highly trained human backup driver poised and ready to take the controls at half a moments' notice is going to take quite some doing.

While there is a human driver in the front paying attention to the road, to all practical purposes, they've invented the taxi.

It's in beta!

48%, but a lot of the things they drew alerts to weren't such big calamities when I looked to see where they were.

For example it didn't like that I have some links which are set to open in a new tab or window... but those are the tiny-weeny links at the bottom to external sites (the artist who drew the pictures, the designer who put the site together, and the standard link to WordPress.org) which, realistically, very few people are going to click.

It also complained about there being an image map where only part of an image is a link... again, turns out this is the image that is at the top of every page, and the part of it which is a link is the email address.

I can live with that, and I know the site does load quickly and correctly to all sorts of smartphones including but not limited to the iPhone.

In answer to Steve's original questions, there's nothing wrong with an automatic redirect to a mobile version of the site (this is what Google and Wikipedia do - send mobiles to the mobile version which includes a link for people who'd prefer to view the "full" version.

Personally, I don't like downloading apps for websites, unless it's something that I use a LOT (like the BBC news site). Certainly if I'm visiting a site for the first time following a mobile Google search, I'm not going to bother leaving the browser and downloading a huge app just to see if a page has useful information on it - I want the website to just work! So I think an app has to be in addition to, rather than instead of, a mobile-safe web page.

To be honest, having third-rate celebrities in the ads doesn't really help the message, for me. With the possible exception of Take That, whose posters, carefully torn out of Smash Hits, were all over my early-teen bedroom walls.

I suspect a bigger part of it was the "this is not just any (item), this is an M&S (item)" campaign. Yes, we all took the mickey. Yes, it was parodied twice around the internet and into outer space. But it did fix an association of high-quality produce and M&S into the public consciousness.

I hear the official party line on why a household with a single earner of

This was best described to me as a "bus plan", as in, if person X gets hit by a bus, what happens?

With that in mind, I've laid out the procedures for how to access my emails and website and so on. But only in the sketchiest way. Like I haven't actually created form emails and a web page to be put up in case of my death and another in case of emergency hospitalisation, just the details necessary for a trusted person to use their own judgement as to what is required.

It never occurred to me to worry about all the social networking profiles, though.

I wonder if they could sync it to a 24 hour clock?

So that when you're trying to fire up a lappie out of suspended mode at a client meeting at 3pm it's hit the spacebar, BAM, we're up and running...

But when it's 8am and you're sitting down with the first cup of tea of the day, it still gives you that nice gentle minute or two to stretch your arms, sip your cuppa and centre yourself for the morning's emails?

That said, it'll be fine as long as we don't go back to 2001. I remember a routine of arriving at the office, going straight to my desk to turn the computer on... THEN taking off my coat, going to make a cuppa, sorting through the post, listening to the answerphone messages, prioritising the post-it notes, by which time, maybe, if I was lucky, the PC would be in a position where it would consent to open up Outlook. Sometimes I forget how far things have come.

It looks like two products.

It's going to be like that situation where people went to buy a computer and asked if they could just have the screen and the keyboard because they didn't think they needed "that big expensive tower bit".

I would sell it as one product - Music On Hold Complete Package at

Nah, it's like lego, except even easier, because there's only one way it'll fit. Even I've done it. Although the screws are a bit on the small side, so make sure the 3-year-old is out of the way first.