I'm assuming when he says "I don't want to give my data away", he means he doesn't want the cloud hosting company access to his data, not that he's concerned with data transport sniffers. Of course, using a TrueCrypt container (with a strong password of course) solves both those problems.

Use dropbox with a Truecrypt encrypted container as the file which gets synchronized.

Agreed. I have a Sonos system, it is nice and works, but really is really overpriced for what you get. It was revealed to me how stingy they were when I bought one of their controller units for $300 (which they now have upgraded) and it didn't even come with a docking station, no that was another $40. Just greedy bastards. I would instead look at a squeezebox or look into these.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't Google suggest phrases combed from other websites (with fairly high pagerank) and not some 'best of' type questions people are typing directly into the google search box? If so, it's *other* websites, not google which are getting (and presumably answering) these questions, and the article is misleading about them being "popular searches".

Earth Orbit

You can be sure the "normal people" walking around malls haven't. Hell, you'd be lucky if they can name the vice president.

In this interview on Wired, Luis von Ahn explains that they do indeed warp it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PuZ55kyf7E

Your linky no worky. This one does: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PuZ55kyf7E (interview on Wired)

As Eternauta3k said, but this is the exact link:
heavens-above.com

I have a C2D Macbook Pro. I love my old wired Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical 5-button mouse.
I tried using a Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 8000 (in bluetooth mode). I had two show-stopping problems:

• If it stopped moving for more than about a second or two, when I moved it again, the cursor would hang and hesitate to move for a frustrating fraction of a second (I suppose that was the laptop and mouse reestablishing contact with each other).
• This was the only time I found my notebook *hot* in my packpack because it had been awakened somehow (maybe a mouse click), looking for that mouse, and didn't go back to sleep.

I'd at least avoid that model mouse, but very possible you will have similar probs with any bluetooth mouse on your MBP.

Even in 1988 I was using these as an aviational weather forecaster for the USAF. It was used to communicate weather watches/warnings to the tower, Base Ops, and others, and they used it for base wide announcements. It was strange to watch someone's writing style being broadcast in real-time and you could, obviously, even see differences in styles and handwriting. I thought it was funny to have such a system in place when we also had "hotline" phones which rung to all those same places as well as teletype machines, and even a PC or two, since it was sometimes hard to read because there was a lot of noise in the legibility as well as an importance in that person's penmanship.

Can you smoke in there? Is there a real risk of explosion or fire? Seems like a fad.

Just throwing out an idea for an implementation:

The uploaded blob to the cloud is encrypted. But there resides a local index for searching it.

I haven't had a need for this (as I inherently don't trust the cloud) but if someone knows of this type of implementation perhaps it's enough for the poster.

If on a Mac, here's two you may consider (neither have a web interface).

Skim is open source and is a PDF reader and note-taker for OS X.

http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/

Yep is not open source, but will scan, tag and search PDFs ("like iTunes for PDFs").

http://www.ironicsoftware.com/yep/