IS IT LIGHTS OUT YET? See an online display of how close the California power grid is to overloading.

OVER THE COUNTER DRUG WARNING! The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a public health advisory concerning the risk of hemorrhagic stroke to young women associated with phenylpropanolamine (PPA). It has requested that all drug manufacturers discontinue selling products containing PPA. See the article for details concerning which OTC cold medicines, etc. are affected.

Intel Develops World's Smallest, Fastest CMOS Transistor Intel Corporation researchers have achieved a significant breakthrough by building the world's smallest and fastest CMOS transistor. This breakthrough will allow Intel within the next five to 10 years to build microprocessors containing more than 400 million transistors, running at 10 gigahertz (10 billion cycles per second) and operating at less than one volt.

DaveNet : Desktop Websites In the centralized model for the Internet, your browser makes requests of a server that could be very far away, or slow for other reasons. Now imagine that the server is very close and you don't have to share it with anyone, it's yours and yours alone. It would be fast!

ABCNEWS.com : Mysterious Sculpture in Seattle Park Vanishes When workers went to Magnuson Park this morning, they found that the 9-foot steel monolith was gone. Park officials said only some burned candles and a rose were in its place. Parks officials were deciding whether to leave or move the object that resembled the shrieking black marker in Stanley Kubrick’s landmark movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. They were concerned it could be tipped over. No one has publicly claimed credit for installing the monolith. The structure reminded Rebecca Sargent of Machu Picchu, the ancient Incan ruins — similar vibe, she said.

Dum Dum Da-Dum: Mysterious Monolith Appears in Seattle Park Many have thought of Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey now that the titular year is upon us, but nobody expects to actually stumble across the movie's famous black monolith. Cheryl Hatch/AP Tuesday: A curious spectator touches the surface of a monolith standing on a grassy knoll in Magnuson Park in Seattle. Seattle residents were a little surprised when a 9-foot-tall steel monolith mysteriously appeared in a city park on the first day of 2001. Denny Sargent couldn't resist humming the theme to 2001 when he walked up to touch the imposing object, which stands like the movie's enigmatic extraterrestrial guardian on a grassy knoll in Magnuson Park. "I feel my intelligence increasing by the moment," he said.

DotComGuy, Gone and Forgotten Geeks across the net are bidding DotComGuy a gleeful and sarcastic goodbye. The silicon shut-in walked out of his front door Monday after spending 365 days inside a house where he was monitored round-the-clock via a couple of dozen webcams that blasted the life and times of DotComGuy over the Internet.

Ananova - Two jailed over e-mail scam which threatened internet providers Two men in Los Angeles have been jailed for two years after they sent 50 million e-mails as part of a SPAM scam which almost brought the largest internet providers to a standstill.

NY TIMES - The Dot-Com Bubble Bursts "The current sense of despair in the dot-com universe may be as overdone as last year's euphoria. The Internet, after all, really is a transforming technology that has revolutionized the way we communicate. What recent months suggest, however, is that it may not be an indiscriminate, magical new means of making money."

Microsoft Train Simulator Six highly-detailed train routes from around the world with over 600 total miles of rail, carefully recreated with accurate elevation and terrain data, to mirror the real-world scenery, industry, and towns along the routes. Routes include both historic and contemporary rail operations(they say it'll ship in "Spring 2001").

www.oreilly.com -- Predictions for 2001 Daylight hours are getting short, and it's time for technology predictions for the year 2001. Most analysts will bore you with pedantic articles about new businesses, consumer spending, investment, groundbreaking products, and connectivity speeds. Not this writer! I write about things we all really care about.

CNET.com - News - E-Business - Big Brother knocked in 2000 For privacy experts, 2000 looked more like 1984. Workplace surveillance was the leading privacy concern in 2000, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Privacy Foundation, a Denver-based nonprofit that performs research and educates the public on privacy issues.

Why Iraq's buying up Sony PlayStation 2s Both the U.S. Customs Service and the FBI are investigating the apparent transfer of large numbers of Sony PlayStation 2s to Iraq, according to military intelligence sources.

Disturbing Search Requests Ahhh yes. What do "daycare duct tape", "katie curic", and "Wallpaper Underware" all have in common? Are you sure you really want to know?

Language As A Network Protocol The internet is creating an American version of the British Empire, with the English language playing the role of the Royal Navy. In an information economy the vital protocol is language, written and spoken language.

xmloperator : an XML editor xmloperator is an XML editor. You can read and modify XML documents. xmloperator is a freeware. It can be downloaded freely and used without time limit. xmloperator is writen in Java. It runs (should be able to run) on any machine which supports the Java 2 platform. xmloperator includes an XML parser which has been developped by the Apache Software Fondation.

Scripting News: Dave's - "My Editorial" Dave Winer's take on the recent election circus. He describes it just the way I've been mumbling to myself about it, "While the Democrats mouthed the platitude "All votes must count," the Big Lie of this contest, of course they were working furiously to get Republican votes to not count. They must think we're stupid, or have no minds, or just like to vent or whatever. It worked, up to a point. However, when I heard anyone mouthe that particular homily I made a note. "There's someone who's not using their mind."

Florida Bumper Stickers:

[Order yours now--we've no idea how many are left.]

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FLORIDA: If you think we can't vote, wait till you see us drive.

FLORIDA: Home of electile dysfunction.

FLORIDA: We count more than you do.

FLORIDA: If you don't like the way we count then take I-95 and visit one of the other 56 states.

FLORIDA: We've been Gored by the bull of politics and we're Bushed.

FLORIDA: Relax, Retire, ReVote.

FLORIDA: Viagra voters do it again!

FLORIDA: What comes after 17,311?

FLORIDA: Where your vote counts and counts and counts.

FLORIDA: This is what you get for taking Elian away from us.

FLORIDA: We don't just cheat in football.

FLORIDA: We're number one! Wait! Recount!

Palm Beach County: So nice, we let you vote twice.

Palm Beach County: We put the "duh" in Florida.

Sign on I-95: Florida this way, no that way, 5 miles, wait 10 miles.

And finally:

In the spirit of biapartisanship perhaps President-elect Bush could appoint Vice-President Gore to be the Ambassador to Chad?

Foolproof Ballot for Palm Beach County Yep! This will solve all the voting problems in Palm Beach. Just ask the DNC!

The First Thanksgiving: (The Pilgrims Missed It) On April 30th four centuries ago, our ancestors, led by Don Juan de Oñate, reached the banks of El Rio Bravo (Rio Grande). The first recorded act of thanksgiving by colonizing Europeans on this continent occurred on that April day in 1598 in Nuevo Mexico, about 25 miles south of what is now El Paso, Texas. After having begun their northward trek in March of that same year, the entire caravan was gathered at this point. The 400 person expedition included soldiers, families, servants, personal belongings, and livestock . . . virtually a living village. Two thirds of the colonizers were from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal, and the Canary Islands). There was even one Greek and a man from Flanders! The rest were Mexican Indians and mestizos (mixed bloods).

EarthWeb.com Phil Zimmermann: Programmer as Celebrity Meet Phil Zimmermann, creator of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption suite and one of the world's best-known cryptographers.. Zimmermann is probably the world's best-known cryptographer. He created the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption suite in 1991. Since then, it has come to dominate the market for programming protection of online confidentiality. PGP has been heralded for its role in protecting numerous political dissidents around the world, and earned Zimmermann the prestigious Norbert Wiener Award for responsible use of technology in 1996, as well as the 1995 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and a 1998 Lifetime Achievement Award from Secure Computing Magazine, along with at least a dozen other distinctions. It also brought him into highly public patent disputes with RSA Data Security Inc., and a nightmarish multi-year criminal investigation by the United States government.

U.S. Constitution in hypertext We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Presidential Election Law JURIST: The Legal Education Network presents this Guide as a public resource for voters, citizens, and observers of the US electoral process.

Fact Sheet-By One Vote! What difference is my one vote going to make?

Privacy Weblog It's a way to keep people informed about privacy issues. It's also a way for us - the ConsentCache team - to keep track of all the articles we like to point people to!

BookNotes News No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow. Alice Walker

Speech without AccountabilityNew software makes it nearly impossible to remove illegal material from the Web--or to find out who put it there.Scientific American: October 2000

GEEK PRIDE FESTIVAL A 2 Day Celebration of the Geek Way of Life. Speakers, Quake, Music, Bouncy room, Movies, Nerf Battles for real this time, screeching violins, and a whole lot more!