TheRaven64, I'm interested to find out that Adobe's Flash Player is implemented in a Smalltalk VM, but couldn't find any verification of this. Do you have any links showing the Smalltalk connection to the flash player?

No, you're not :)

It's astounding how the group that produces and supports Conficker can do so many things correctly, from cryptographically signed updates distributed P2P to blocking cleaning software and DNS access to antivirus vendors, it's pretty spectacular.

They definitely get the easy way out though, with such a narrowly defined scope. Without having to mess with users' input, GUIs, and all sorts of other peculiarities, it's a lot easier to get your code well-secured with malware than if you were writing a traditional application.

The problem you're describing is known in the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) world as content-based recommendation (CBR). There are a number of ways to do it, but they're all based on measuring similarity.

The idea is that people perceive songs as similar based on the characteristics they have, which are termed features. By representing a song's features in a model you can compare the models to see how "distant" they are, and then choose songs from a set that are least-distant. The work that my research group is pursuing represents songs based on timbral features (MFCCs) and rhythmic features (bpm, pulse clarity, syncopation, etc).

If you're interested in the approach, see http://paragchordia.com/research/cbr.html