There's a very distinct difference between "rip the video, store it on your site, then display it" and embedding. Ripping/storing is a very deliberate act to copy something.

Simply embedding a video (or an image, or anything else, one would suppose) on a site makes no copies of it, and so, as per the ruling is not copyright infringement. If you're a copyright holder and have a problem with something you can see embedded on a page, go after the person/site hosting the content. That makes pretty good sense to me.

We're switching to check_mk too. Honestly though, anything with a graph will do - periodically stick something into Graphite or just stick another line onto a CSV. Then draw a graph, draw a rough trend line and there's your answer. Getting a nice email/text message with that information takes a bit more work (where check_mk might help), but so long as you can see it with enough advanced warning, checking the disk graphs weekly (or even monthly) is probably enough.

For anyone thinking that we'll never see the google car, or that autonomous vehicles will never drive on our roads - this is how it starts. At first, it's a specially designated track and a crappy car. Then it's a much bigger track, occasionally crossing legacy roads and railway tracks. Then it's a much nicer car you might actually want to sit in for more than 10 minutes, then it's able drive almost anywhere except city centres or places where it's considered too dangerous/complex, then it's about a variety of fancy cars from various manufacturers all cooperating to provide a seamless service (although maybe a tiered one). Then finally, legacy cars are side-lined, banned or otherwise taxed into oblivion.

Why larger at all? Why not make it remote controlled, small, but have a big gun on board with a handful of shots loaded in it. Then, instead of using just 10 of them, you use a couple of hundred. Sure, each one is 'easily' neutralised by relatively small weapons, but the fleet would be hard to stop, and any one member of the fleet would be sufficiently deadly to cause your enemy problems.

It's just the "google 20%" output from Microsoft. They're trying to show that they're vaguely innovative - and the problem with innovation is that quite a lot of the time it doesn't work out (seemingly for Microsoft, more times than most).

When Google came out with Wave, we all wondered why they'd bothered - they tried it, people didn't get it and so they closed it down. This is no different.

That said, Floatz looks like a particularly crap idea - if I want feedback from my friends, I'll send them an email (or get my wife to post on facebook). I suppose there's something about finding other people around me that I don't know, but I'm not so sure I'd like to ask them their opinions.

I live in the UK - in a mid sized village, and I get 17mbit/s down on an ADSL2+. I can get fibre to the cabinet and zip up to 50mbit/s for about twice the money if I want. However, there are places in the UK where you can't get broadband of any kind - you're stuck with 64k dialups from almost no providers that still run that service. Hence, there is something of a digital divide - those people can't work from home, can't use bittorrent, etc, etc. They can't realistically do all the usual fluffing about on the Internet that the rest of us do either - even electing for paperless billing and online payments for household bills isn't the no-brainer it is for the rest of us.

It's debatable how much of a problem this divide really is. However, we can be sure that in 10 years, those people might be able to access the government ordained 2mbit/s minimum broadband, but the rest of us will have more like 50-100mbit/s as standard. Those out-lying places will always be at a disadvantage, although hopefully will at least be able to leave something to download while they go off and do something else - which isn't really very feasible for them today.

So what I'm trying to say is that there is a divide, I'm not sure how terrible it really is, but in the future that divide will narrow here in the UK when everyone can get broadband of some description. Whilst 2mbit/s looks pretty rubbish to me, it's enough to hold an online meeting, or to log onto your bank and whatnot. You can't go crazy, but you can at least participate in what the rest of the world takes for granted.

If you want clothes that fit, you don't shop at Asda.

So don't pick your nose with it more than once? Okay, got it - I'll wait until I'm 'well stocked' ;-)

No. The 'print' is something akin to a hash - you can't use it to make a voice synthesiser. I'll leave it to the researchers to figure out if you could construct a synthesiser that created the same 'print', if you knew what the 'print' was to start with - I suspect that'd be possible, but non-trivial (and wouldn't sound anything like the original voice - the original may have said the words "my voice is my password" in a well chiselled English accent, but the synthesiser would only need to say "sfhjie" in a Swahili-esque accent, for example). I'd imagine it would be a similar task as creating a known hash from some data - ie. generally very hard.

About 20 years ago, Nuance did a demo where they played a recording of Margaret Thatcher, which the system identified as being her. They then asked an impersonator to do the same thing, but the system could tell they weren't Mrs T.

I'm sure these sorts of demos are part truth and part smoke-and-mirrors, but the point being that it was a long time ago and something they claimed to be able to do. You can bet they've got it sorted now so that it's considerably more accurate. I have no idea if they have a means to stop a recording being played back though - that's presumably a harder problem to solve.

So if I throw a few random things together in my shed and invent teleportation, I can't patent it (even if I have a working demonstration) because I can't explain how the physics of it work? That sort of sucks, no?

Let's say, just for a moment, that this guy has stumbled upon real, honest to goodness "cold fusion" (or any sort of miniature, controlled fusion reaction).. Just because he can't explain it doesn't mean it's not real. Lots of real physicists who spend their days trying to figure these sorts of things out can't explain it, so how can this guy be expected to do so?

That said, patents (even European ones) suck in lots of important ways (not least this one). This guy needs to mortgage his house and make a reactor somewhere. He can keep it secret if he wants, but he has to make one that makes a useful amount of electricity that could one day be connected to the grid. If he can do that, then investors will be available to help him pass the regulations and get it connected. Once it's actually doing something, then the patent will either be granted or it won't - either way, he'll be making money. I'll admit he'd need some balls to do all this, but unless he's going to put his own money on the line, I don't suppose anyone else is going to help him much.

Sounds to me like you need a better bank. If my card is used without my authorisation, that's fraud and I get a refund. Sounds like you don't...? (I'm still not going to give boobtropolis and a West African prince my credit card numbers, but normal retailers are fine - even the little ones).

I'd still rather my data to be snooped by my own country's security services than by the Americans (if though there's an awful lot of data sharing between then). As such, I might be inclined to buy services from local suppliers than from Google. That's bad news for the US, in two ways - 1) it removes a bit of revenue from American companies, and 2) it promotes non-american companies, and the technology they need. Ultimately that means places like silicon valley stop being one of the few centres of technology innovation, and instead there are lots of SVs all around the world - again, bad news for the US.

This isn't all just me making stuff up - it's already happening. Sure, the US is no where near bankrupt because of it, but it doesn't take a genius to work out that it'll mean there's less opportunity for Americans now and in the future.

If they're tottering about in CIA HQ, then I suspect neither are any of these people.

You can run your own instance - my company does (as did my previous employer). It's got a few rough edges, and a few annoying bugs, but it's a very usable wiki.

However, as noted above, anything is only as good as its content. Company wikis tend to be "write only", but definitely need a critical mass to get going.