Yeah, theory aside, the speaker was just multiplying by 3 modulus 89 so values less than 30 will always be followed by a higher value, a pattern that was easy to hear in the music. The speaker confused a lack of repetition of distances between notes as being a total lack of pattern.

This is a well-studied "Who watches the watchers?" web of trust type issue. While there is no perfect solution, there are a number of good approaches. This page on Advgato describes a good trust metric for reducing the impact of spam and malicious attacks. It wouldn't be that big of a deal for FaceBook to incorporate some such system. However, it would require FaceBook to actually care about about being fair to its users, which it doesn't. FaceBook exploits for financial gain the tribal desires of people to band together and be part of a group. So FaceBook's really uses its abuse policy as a way to force people to follow the rules of the bigger and more aggressive tribes. Such battles actually help FaceBook to be successful because it strengthens the tribal behaviors that benefit FaceBook's bottom line.

So all in all, no matter what brilliant, cost-effective, robust moderation/abuse system you design or crowd source, the very, very best that you can hope for is that somebody at FaceBook might pat you on the head and thank you for your efforts and say that they aren't interested in your contribution at this time.

Well, the images do have to be an integer number of pixels wide, but if the ratio between lengths approximated an irrational number you would expect long periods. Even relatively prime numbers would work. Tiles of length 7, 15, and 16 won't repeat for 1,680 pixels. Basically, if you want to create a nice, non-repetitive pattern of overlayed tiles, make certain that the smallest common multiple for all of the tile sizes is larger than your expected screen width.

Yeah, BitCoins are something of a fad like Beany Babies where an artificially restricted supply allows early adopters to make money off of late comers who foolishly think that they can make money off of people coming after them. From an economic standpoint, BitCoins are simply collector's items. Collecting BitCoins isn't much different than, say, collecting 1973 pennies. There are a limited number of them and their value is primarily determined by the demand for them from other collectors.

The rigid nature of the BitCoin supply is very appealing in today's economy as people want to acquire assets that retain value. Unfortunately, most people have a hard time understanding that value is not determined just by supply, but by demand as well. The very fact that the cash value of BitCoins is going up right now is evidence of this. Most of this demand, however, is not from people who want to use BitCoins, but from people who see them as an investment. After a while the number of new investors will peak, demand will go down, early investors will cash out, supply will go up, and the market will crash.

I doubt that BitCoins will ever see much mainstream use for conducting transactions, primarily because of the complexity of using them and because their unregulated nature will prevent them from being a stable currency. The fact that all transactions are public will discourage shadier operations from using them. They might see some use in online games where BitCoins could be used as the in-game currency.

Which is really the way it should be broken out. Computer Science should be about the math, theories, and algorithms that make up computation, and computer software engineering should be more about building applications. Sort of like how traditional engineering relates to physics.

Uhm, if the average price of goods goes down relative to the currency, that is, by definition, deflation. While you can argue that it is justified by a higher standard of living, it is still deflation and it will still have all of the problems that deflation has, namely discouraging borrowing and spending.

The real issue here for you seems to be that you want to be assured that whatever currency you manage to accumulate will have the same purchasing power tomorrow as it does today. The only way to do that with currencies subject to inflation is to put the money in a savings account or other investment vehicle whose interest rate compensates for inflation. You think that using BitCoins as a currency would get around that problem, but it doesn't. Assuming that somehow, some way the value of your BitCoins is the same tomorrow as today, then they will be worth more in inflated dollars and you will be taxed on the difference so that you will still end up with less. In fact, in any well-regulated free market, you can expect that if the demand for a fixed, nonrenewable commodity, be it BitCoins or Picasso paintings, remains the same, then its value in an inflated currency will be about the same as it would be if you had started a savings account instead.

It's all fine and dandy to not to trust the government to regulate the money supply, but I fail to see what BitCoins do to avoid the problem. If the government wanted to, it could buy up a lot of BitCoins, decreasing the supply available for market functions, and then the government could dump in BitCoins from its reserves to increase the supply. If the government is having a hard time getting enough BitCoins to build up its reserves, it could just tax people. Even if the government stayed completely out of the BitCoin market, there is nothing preventing a group of individuals getting together and doing the same thing for their own benefit.

Deflation is also a problem because it discourages spending since your BitCoin will buy more tomorrow than it does today. Moreover, if enough people used BitCoins then there will be people who loan and borrow BitCoins, thus the debt problems of deflation will arise as well.

BitCoin enthusiasts seem to fall into the same category as gold standard promoters. You can't run a modern global economy with financial instruments based on a rare commodity. Only 21 million BitCoins will be generated, which will cause deflation once that limit is reached. The only way a government could use BitCoins is the same way they used to use gold, ie. buy up enough of it to have reserves that can be used to pump money into the economy when it needs it. BitCoins won't be more stable than modern fiat currencies because they will have all the problems associated with gold, such as hoarding and dumping. BitCoins are interesting as an attempt to create an electronic form of cash, but hoping to build a stable economic platform on them is foolish.

Spammers can just load up the Bing toolbar, search on the terms that they want to point to their site, and then click on their site where ever it shows up in the results. They can write a script to do it from multiple computers multiple times to create a strong signal, strong enough to bump up their site in Bing's results, especially in searches where other signals are weak or conflicting. Even legitimate sites would be tempted to use this approach to see if they could bump up their rankings from the second page to the first page.

This does not guarantee both anonymity and security. The public database must reveal the true vote of each receipt, otherwise there is no way for third parties to verify that the public vote totals match the ballots. In that case, there is no need for icons or colors or encryption. Just give each voter a certified copy of their uniquely numbered ballot and publish a copy of all ballots after the election. Third parties can verify vote totals, voters can verify that their votes were counted, and anyone wanting to remain anonymous can shred their copy at the voting booth, losing the ability to verify their vote.

Still room to quibble with that conclusion. The study artificially changed the environment of a house by putting a Playstation in it. The residents of the house would be well aware that they were part of a study, and would attach some importance to the use of the Playstation. They might even allow homework and other academic pursuits to slide in an effort to "do well" in the study of Playstation usage.

This "Observer Awareness" affect is a real problem in studying human behavior. Television rating companies have to deal with the fact that people change their viewing habits when they know they are being studied. Anthropologists have to deal with people acting differently when they know that they are being observed.

Additionally, people treat objects that they get as a gift differently than they treat something they purchase. Perhaps most parents who purchase a Playstation do so well aware of what gaming is and how to incorporate it into their children's lives without affecting their studies, whereas parents who receive a Playstation out of the blue may not know the pitfalls.

So, while this study is not without merit, I would hesitate to say that it establishes anything more than the obvious--that playing video games can distract from academic work. A more thorough study would look into the actual amount of time spent playing video games and the types of games played. It might also look into the affects of video gaming on non-traditional academic skills like hand-eye coordination and general problem solving ability.

What the article doesn't appear to take into account is the difference between quantum computing and conventional computing. A quantum computer doesn't carry out conventional binary operations so comparing the two is tricky. Doubling the number of q-bits a quantum computer can process effectively squares the number of equivalent binary operations it can carry out in one computation, but quantum computers are limited in what kinds of binary operations they can compute simultaneously. So saying that a there is a fundamental limit on the number quantum operations per second doesn't necessarily give you a meaningful limit on the number of binary operations per second. You need more information, such as the number of linked q-bits and the types of binary operations being performed.