This sounds a lot like some of the ideas discussed in Vernor Vinge's "Deepness in the Sky". He posited that on an isolated planet, civilizations were doomed to rise and fall in a constant cycle, but could never establish lasting permanence. The Qeng Ho was an interstellar trader group established to take the best things from each civilization it encountered and persist them forever by always continuing to travel and propagate culture between the stars.

Just an idea.. if this introduces scarcity by means of computational difficulty (not to argue with caveats introduced by other comments here.. botnets, moore's law, etc), then might it not be possible to also leverage the situation and at least extract useful computational byproducts?

For example, instead of just computing primes, etc., why not use other, more useful "hard" problems, such as protein folding?

Imagine, every monetary transaction contributes to cancer and genetic research...

While personally I'd consider a perceptual hash "known technology" and, at this point, fairly obvious, apparently Shazam has no problem threatening bloggers to sue them over it. So Google should be aware of this, and either preemptively counter-sue or get ready for battle.

Of course, maybe it's a subtle point, but question for the patent-knowledgeable: if they're using it internally to recognize posted tracks and not actually offering it as a public service, do they still need to respect the patent?

Being able to apply Photoshop filters to a vector drawing is almost enough to justify the effort to learn it all by itself

You can do that in Inkscape. At least in version 0.47 included in Ubuntu 10.04. Check the "Filter" menu.

It amazes me how far, it seems, gmail is ahead of the competition when it comes to usability. It is the only web-based email client I have used that feels like a proper application, and works exactly as I'd like it to.

However, I know that at this point there _must_ be competition for it out there, open source or otherwise. Does anyone know other email services that offer a comparably usable interface?

"The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn't repair the damage he'd suffered in that Memphis hotel."

  - William Gibson, Neuromancer

"Keep registered extensions in an encrypted database which only Firefox has access to."

You mean, like DRM? Yeah, hackers will never figure that out.

(i.e., this solution would be vulnerable to the _exact_ same problem seen with media rights management.. the browser would need the key to access the database, thus it is also available to anyone who looks in the right place.)

> What do you think?

I think false dichotomies make good headlines.

He's not. The point is that he can't prove that he's not.

I always found that zones thing such a weird aspect of that book. On the one hand I found it so strange and, really, unscientific, that I didn't know whether to consider it stupid or silly. On the other hand I thought it made a really, really cool plot device. That was enough to make me want to read more books featuring this idea, but I don't know if he ever wrote any?

Btw, I thought Kurtzweil was credited with the Singularity?

Lots of negative comments here, I guess unsurprisingly. Actually no wait, surprisingly... 3D has got to be the geekiest thing to ever happen to the movie industry. As such I'd expect slashdotters to be thrilled. What do you people just hate anything that gets popular?

Anyways, I for one love watching movies in 3D. I'm really happy it is finally catching on after mostly disappearing when it was obvious the red-blue glasses from the 50's weren't the way forward.

I think the fact that it's coming now is to do with the fact that the technology for it is sort of finally "here". Of course it's not perfect, not all systems are equal (linear vs. circular polarization, the fact that you have to wear glasses at all, etc.) But I think the fact that we can now do this in color, on Imax, combined with the fact that we are reaching a stage where many, many movies have a significant portion of content that is "naturally" 3D (because it is computer-generated), combines to make this something that can finally be here to stay.

Personally I'm really happy about it, I really think it makes for a more immersive experience. It will be really something when the directors finally stop doing stupid things like throwing objects out at the audience or have poky things come at you.. when it becomes a more subtle and well-understood element of moviemaking it will really be something. (Just like CG is only finally beginning to get to that point these days..) I think any new technology takes 10 to 20 years to mature, not only in a technical sense, but an artistic one as well, as artists begin to understand how to use it.

To those who immediately say "No", I'd just like to submit this essay by William Gibson as a talking point.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson.html

I disagree that CS is just "programming and troubleshooting", but I do agree that Computer Science is a complete misnomer. It's extremely misleading, and difficult to explain to people, "I'm a computer scientist, but no I'm not actually a scientist, instead I understand how to describe formal languages in terms of strict grammar rules and transform abstract syntax trees from one representation to another."

It shouldn't be called Computer Science, it should be called Computational Mathematics, because that's what it is.

(On the other hand, there is whole branch of CS that extends very deeply into statistics called Machine Learning, but at the core I'd say it is still more mathematics than science. There is also human-machine interaction which often goes under CS, but is actually more like psychology.. so it's not so cut and dry.)

Ok, but how do I get food if all I can do each turn is run to the pub?

I'm accumulating money, but I don't seem to have time to spend it.

Anyways I'll try that.. :) Thanks.

I'm trying to play an A.I. game but after grabbing some land it just keeps looping turns for each player, where there's only enough time to run to the pub and grab some cash. How do you get the game to actually continue to the next part of the round?