US President Obama has been widely quoted questioning Scottish independence. Does he have similar doubts about the Irish Republic? Ireland's decision to leave the UK was proclaimed in 1916 and ratified by elections and a decision in 1919. England finally signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, simultaneously downgrading themselves from being the British Empire to the British Commonwealth of Nations. For a small nation, Ireland packs a big punch. What does the President have to say about Free Ireland? The US Embassy in Dublin is happy to share President Obama's insights like those below:

Some wise Irish man or woman once said that broken Irish is better than clever English. So here goes: T thas orm bheith in irinn I am happy to be in Ireland! I'm happy to be with so many cairde.

Mr Obama then switches into a more personal context:

if you believe the Corrigan Brothers, there s no one more Irish than me.

He is referring to his Irish roots in the village of Moneygall. He then goes on to look at the impact the free Irish spirit had on the way Americans gained the freedom they have over their own country today:

When the father of our country, George Washington, needed an army, it was the fierce fighting of your sons that caused the British official to lament, We have lost America through the Irish.

and America's freedom to move beyond our planet too:

it was our first Irish President our first Catholic President, John F. Kennedy, who made us believe 50 years ago this week that mankind could do something big and bold and ambitious as walk on the moon. He made us dream again.

In fact, US presidents traditionally have lunch with the Irish leadership for St Patrick's day each year. This year they discussed international issues like Ukraine - maybe the complexities of Northern Ireland provide insights into the challenges of the Crimea? Will Scotland choose to sit at this table and will they bring a good Scotch with them?

London's taxi "strike" today has been so successful that Uber claims to have had an 850% increase in new customer registrations this week. Well, that is a big success if you believe the strike may have been a guerrilla marketing tactic organised by Uber itself. No sympathy Personally, I have no sympathy for the taxi drivers. There is no city I have ever visited where I haven't encountered at least one taxi driver who tried to overcharge me. Honest drivers who give their customers value for money have less to fear from new technology than those who are unscrupulous. When I broke a leg a few years ago and was getting about on crutches for 6 weeks we decided to go out for dinner one night. This was the first time I went anywhere after having a long stint in hospital followed by a period of time I was confined to the house. The taxi driver deliberately skipped two turns leading directly to the restaurant, went another 1km past it and then followed a small street that winds back and forth and eventually demanded I pay him double what the fare should have been. This is exactly the type of abusive and despicable practice that is being eradicated by Uber's live GPS mapping technology. Although not every driver behaves so shamefully, this type of abuse of the weak or vulnerable is replicated in one way or another the world over. For example, in Melbourne, Australia, wheelchair taxis that have worked out they can make more money collecting families with suitcases at the airport leave genuine wheelchair users without a ride. Will Google be targeted next week? Google has just announced a step-change in plans to build their own self driving cars. Will Google offices around the world, including London be targetted by these crude blockades too? Political protest or anti-competitive mischief? Why were taxi drivers not arrested for their protest today? Given that the roads are the place where taxis and their competitors do business, can this blockade really be considered a political protest or is it an anti-competitive practice in blatant disregard of the law? Weapons of mass destruction Before even having breakfast you could probably find 10,000 cyclists in central London willing to sign a petition declaring taxis are a weapon of mass destruction. Once again, while there are honest drivers, there is a more than trivial number of taxi drivers who are a genuine danger to the lives of cyclists, scooters, motorcycles and occasionally pedestrians. I have personally experienced one of these thugs ramming my bicycle from behind (his hard-nosed insurer eventually paid up but without admitting liability). The police who attended the incident even told me they had seen so many accidents like this they wouldn't dare cycle themselves. The web is full of examples that appear to show malicious and criminal behavior by taxi drivers, thanks to Youtube and helmet cams: Will hotels protest about AirBNB? Now the taxi drivers have had their chance to cause mayhem, will hotel operators be next? What could they do though? Will they seek out AirBNB apartments and try to obstruct them somehow? Making mischief outside somebody's home is not a good way to make a point. Chances are, they would be prosecuted or served with restraining orders. So why do the taxi drivers get to jam up whole cities and get away with it? The Uber taxi meter loophole Will the courts decide that the Uber app is a taxi meter? This is actually a tough question. Even if courts rule against apps that perform live metering, Uber could simply remove all metering functions from the app itself and perform the metering calculations in the cloud. The app would just send start and finish locations to the cloud and the cloud would send a message back to the phone confirming the charge. The phone is then nothing more than a communication and positioning device. Remember the elevator man? When the automobile was first invented, laws were made requiring every car to be accompanied through public streets by a man carrying a flag. That job, like many others, no longer exists. In the good old days, every elevator had a man or woman who would sit on a stool and press buttons to operate the doors and motors. Some up-market department stores and hotels still have an elevator man to add a touch of nostalgia. The vast majority, however, have eliminated these jobs thanks to automatic elevators. Now, even aircraft can land automatically on a ship at sea. Look at all those people manning the deck in the video and contemplate how many of them might potentially be out of a job too in 50 years time as Terminator-style automated battleships patrol the seas. Technology, like the Terminator, is not going to stop.