Weekend Clippings 3

My pick of this week’s sci-tech and web culture news offerings, clipped for great justice:

• Need Some Cash? Sue Google! (Wired) | Find out who’s suing the big G, and why.

• State of Play: Man Versus Machine (BBC) | Margaret Robertson (former editor of Edge magazine) writes about hard games, and the people who design machines to play against them.

• Powerset Parses Miss South Carolina (TechCrunch) | Remember Miss South Carolina’s illuminating insight into the failings of the American education system? If not, the video is below. A new natural language search engine, Powerset, attempted to parse her answer based on the question “Who does education help?” TechCrunch reveals the response.

• Touchgraph Shows Connectivity Between Websites (TechCrunch) | TechCrunch blogs about a nifty little tool which visually represents the connections between websites using Google search results.

• Thunderbird Toolbox (Mashable) | If you use Thunderbird, then you should check out Mashable’s comprehensive list of resources.

• I’m In Ur Sewer Killing Ur Doodz (via Metafilter) | Some amazing photos of a Japanese storm drain system. Yeah, I know how nerdy that sounds, but trust me…

• Firefox Tip: If Your Browser Is Running Slowly… (via Lifehacker) | Cybernet News has a list of problematic Firefox extensions. I tried removing IETab, but it didn’t fix my slowdown. I think I need a new PC.

• The Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks (via Neatorama) | Do you feel violated when you see “signs” with ill-advised “quotation” marks? Vent/laugh here.

• Exclusive: Screenshots and Feature Overview of Del.icio.us 2.0 Preview (TechCrunch) | TechCrunch again, and Mike Arrington has a hands-on with the highly anticipated version 2.0 of everyone’s favourite social bookmarking site, del.icio.us.

• A US CERT Reminder: The Net Is A Dangerous Place (The Register) | If you’re paranoid about security and privacy online, you probably shouldn’t read this. The Reg reports on a simple attack involving authentication cookies which could give an attacker complete control over any number of web-based accounts.