I have come across some rather whiz bang neato keen technology type news lately, and once more I did not feel like waiting till Friday to share, so here they are, fresh from the cutting edge of tomorrow.

First up, we have this rather enticing press release about a game called DUST 514.

It’s by CCP, the people behind one of the Internet’s great secrets, the wide-ranging science fiction MMORPG EVE Online, and is meant to (optionally) blend seamlessly with that persistent environment, essentially acting as an extension of it into FPS territory.

But that’s not what intrigues me about it. This is : the battles in DUST 514 matter. The whole world is persistent and so you are not simply fighting relatively pointless battles for temporary bragging rights on some tournament server someplace in Korea.

No, if your side wins, you get territory. If you gain territory, you get money and power and, not to put too fine a point on it, the other people’s stuff. If you are part of a faction or work for a government, that faction or government advances its agenda. If you lose, of course, the opposite happens.

In short, it’s not just battles, it’s war, and all I can say is “finally!”.

I have barely wetted the bottom of one toe in the waters of the MMORPG world, but part of the reason for that is that I find them pointless. Even when they have a plot, the plot is individually instanced. No matter how hard I work to beat a big bad boss…. he is still there afterward, waiting for the NEXT player or group to come along and defeat him. In the grand scheme of things, I have accomplished absolutely nothing.

In single player games, there is the feeling of progress. If I kill the Snake Master of Black Mamba Swamp, that son of a bitch stays dead. I can feel good about it for the rest of the game. But not so with MMPORPGs. At least, not until now.

In short, this will be an MMORPG that I might actually play and find worthwhile. Score, achievements, levels… none of those matter enough to me to keep me interested.

But whether or not the good guys win the war…. that I can get behind.

Moving on! Next up, we have the next wave in streamlining the restaurant experience.

Seriously leveraging the modern one-two punch of extremely high detail projectors with use-anywhere touch sensing, the restaurant operates entirely by a touch menu projected right onto your table. Each person just touches here and there to select options, and when they are done, the information goes to the kitchen directly, and before you know it, there is a waiter with your food.

Does that not sound awesome?

And the best part, in terms of sheer techno-gasm capacity, is that the projectors project life-sized images of the food you are thinking of ordering directly onto the table. You can see exactly what you are getting (more or less), exactly where you will be getting it, life sized and interactive.

Sounds downright appetizing, honestly.

Of course, this begs the question : does these mean we are looking at a future without human servers? You walk in, order, and the only time you see a person is when they bring your food? ^[1]

I hope not. Don’t get me wrong, I am mostly all for this. A restaurant like that would not only be more efficient and have faster service, it could also in theory be a lot cheaper. Labour is a major portion of the operating costs of a restaurant, and if you could reduce the amount of labour needed, it could create a very attractive opportunity for an enterprising entrepreneur to create a chain of restaurants with highly competitive pricing. And nobody to tip, either.

But I would not like to lose the option of going to an “old-fashioned” restaurant, with waiters and so on. There is really no substitute for being waited on, and the quality of the staff in terms of personality and efficiency is often the difference between a restaurant I will frequent and one I will only occasional.

Finally, a quick note : seems the European music mega-server Spotify is going to make the jump across the Atlantic to the shores of America.

It is basically a music server with millions of songs already loaded on it, and it’s free. So for absolutely no money, you get access to, as Wired put it, “a magical version of iTunes in which you have already bought every song in the world. ”

And that, I am guessing, is the problem. Giving away free what massive corps like Apple and the music industry want to sell is a great way to make very powerful enemies very fast. I am guessing that the reason the service works for Europe is that traditionally, the American big dogs have not treated European markets very seriously, and have based their entire business model on North American sales, with any money at all made from markets outside the USA seen as purely after the fact.

That will not be true if they come stomping around here. Great pressure will be brought to bear to keep that from happening, including, in all likelihood, threats of copyright lawsuits and/or exorbitant fees for the rights to play the music from the big dog record music companies. After all, they are still trying to cope with the idea of selling on iTunes.

Wrapping their brains around “free” is probably beyond them.

Sadly, we here in Canada are not included in this American invasion play anyhow (typical!), so it is all academic from out point of view.

We really are America’s redheaded stepchild when it comes to all this cool Net stuff!