CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has become the most successful, intelligent, improbable and geekiest drama on commercial network TV. Considering its setting -- Las Vegas -- and its subject matter - decomposing pigs, corpse-sucking larvae, transgender serial killers, serial killer make-up artists, murderous and skate-wielding hockey fiends -- and its near total absence of traditional TV fare like sex or shoot-em-ups, this show shatters conventional wisdom about what people want to see on TV. A year ago, CSI seemed promising. Now it's great and getting steadily better. And as CSI has become more successful, its production values have soared. At times, it's beautifully shot, a cross between the old Miami Vice and the early days of The X-Files, from which it borrows heavily.

Here's the great irony: There's more censorship -- all kinds, everywhere, involving more media and culture -- than ever before. But it's doomed to fail. As the Net and Web become more commercial, and as parents, government, schools, politicians, churches and corporations have belatedly grown interested in controlling networked computing and the speech and intellectual property therein, battles over censorship and content -- from school blocking filters to music wars to efforts to curb sexual imagery -- have raged throughout cyberspace. That's why Chicago artist Antonio Muntadas' website "The File Room" may be one of the most significant sites ever created on the Web. Despite relentless efforts to curb art, speech, software, writing, thinking and the free flow of ideas, censorship as a contemporary idea is virtually impossible. The Net killed it, and now the Web is becoming a living, global archive of ideas people want to kill.

Sure, we are being lied to by bloated, corporatized media all the time. What else is new? The great promise of the Net and Web has always been more truth: a great, hyper-linked network of diverse, individual expression, a vast, linked alternative subculture. There is hope. You can go to the Disinformation Web Site to see that idea in action, despite the AOL-ing and MSN-ing of cyberspace. This trove -- its content ranges from "The X-Men" and "Space Mutation" to "The Matrix" to pieces on the Real Jesus and Radiohead -- is what the Web is really about. It offers perspectives you definitely won't find anywhere in the mass media. Don't miss Marty Beckerman's "Death to all Cheerleaders 1." (Marty, whose piece became a book, was canned from a daily newspaper for observing that cheerleaders were "a urine stain on the toilet seat of America.")

Culture is being re-defined right before our eyes. For centuries, art and technology have been considered separate parts of culture. Now, because we live in an information society, they may be be coming together. We are, say some people who study such things, at a critical place in history, where it's sometimes impossible to distinguish between techno-scientific research and art. The creation, movement and analysis of ideas is increasingly the center of our cultural, social and economic life. And that's why a startling (and hefty) new book calls itself "Information Arts" -- because the art such a culture produces has to deal with information if it's going to remain central. So this is the first part of a series -- inspired by "Information Arts," edited by Stephen Wilson and published by the MIT Press -- which deals with the new intersection of art, science and technology. This book is onto an enormous idea, exploring the science and art from algorithms, robotics, quantum physics, coding, nanotechnologies, genetic and kinetic art to electrical music, telecommunications and A.I.

The post-9/11 action/terrorism movie is now a genre all of its own. If this movie is interesting at all, it's through the prism of September 11, a day that changed culture as much as it did politics. Our perceptions of Black Hawk Down, Behind Enemy Lines, and now, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage are shaped - nearly haunted - by the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and the subsequent military operations in Afghanistan. Some movies - Black Hawk Down - are greatly enhanced by 9/11. Because it was true and well done, it hits us between the eyes. But for poor aging action-pioneer Schwarzenegger, whose movie was postponed for three months by his nervous studio, the opposite is true. This movie comes from another time, not enlivened by reality but diminished by it. Spoilage warning: plot discussed, not ending.

From the beginning, the Net has always seemed to have a heart - a locus, a center of activity. At first the academics and defense researchers who'd created and patched together its architecture were its pulse. Then hackers in suburban bedrooms all over the country became the epicenter, followed by the free music and intellectual property guerrillas; the open source, online rights activists and advocates; the Wired magazine gurus and visionaries, and the Web creators, programmers and designers. After that, the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the dot.com capitalists took over. This culture is becoming increasingly diverse, commercial and subterranean. Where's the heart of the Net now? A.I. or AOL?

In the wake of the dot-com washout, a lot people nearly wrote off cyberspace as a retailing wasteland. But last week, Amazon reported that it had finally turned a profit, something most of us thought we'd never see, and preliminary figures show a sharp upturn in online sales despite the mild recession. Some other interesting post-Christmas tidbits are popping up, too: for the first time, more women than men are buying things online, a landmark barometer of a bright digital retailing future. Beyond that, in case you haven't noticed, online retailers are getting a lot smarter. The arrogant, customer-abusive tech world could learn a lot from these people, who offer steep discounts, stand behind their products, and actually offer real and free customer support.

Well, some of you warned me, and you were right. Kung Pow - Enter the Fist had a great premise and the trailers were tantalizing. Steve Oedekerk borrowed from Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily? to make a Kung Fu spoof patched together from a little known 1976 karate film Tiger and Crane Fists. But the result is anything but funny. Spoilage warning: plot discussed, not ending.

Do media/entertainment technologies connect or disconnect people? That Americans have become increasingly disconnected from one another and the social capital that binds people since the rise of TV and the Net is an idea much debated since Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community two years ago (the book is now out in paperback). The Net -- ironically the world' s most connective medium -- could be radically advancing that trend. Putnam cites numerous surveys that show that interaction with family, friends, and neighbors, and participation in social activities -- from joining civic groups and bowling leagues to voting -- has declined as Americans find more reasons to stay at home. Online, fragmentation abounds. People turn increasingly inward. The big open spaces of the Net have either been corporatized, flamed to death or shut down, and communications steadily turned to exclusive p2p "me media," the fragmented, often self-censored, personalized and specialized weblogs, IM programs and mailing lists that dominate much of online communications.

Music listener and Slashdot author chrisd has prepared a review of the new Nex II CF based mp3 player from Hong Kong based Frontier Labs. He declares it the best MP3 player he's owned, so read the whole review if you'd like to learn more.

Some critics have dissed Black Hawk Down as yet another Jerry Bruckheimer shoot-'em-up crammed with explosions and square-jawed heroes. I disagree. I think Black Hawk Down is an amazing movie. This story is no cartoon. It's true, which gives it enormous punch -- and it's a hell of a story. The kind of camaradarie and loyalty depicted in this movie is unknown to all but a handful of people in the world. The intensity of the battle sequences is jarring and disturbing. Black Hawk Down is a political movie about what happens when dumbass politicians and an ignorant citizenry send people off to die for no good reason anybody can think of (unlike Afghanistan). It also shows us, as military historians and soldiers have argued for centuries, why soldiers fight: for their pals, even in the most pointless of causes. For me, this movie makes Saving Private Ryan look like a TV special. Spoilage warning: plot discussed, not ending.

From the first, this has been a cornerstone idea at Apple Computers: make stuff that is cool and hip enough and it will eventually succeed. Until recently, this foolish idea permeated the hacker culture as well -- if it's neat, it's good. Initially, Apple was a welcome antidote to the elitism and cluelessness of the tech elites who designed early computers. Although that seems a long time ago, the early idea behind Apple was revolutionary -- make computing accessible to everyone, not just coders and programmers. But the recent history of software development, networked computing and the Net suggests that now just the opposite is true: being cool is nice, but it's not nearly enough. Steve Case and Bill Gates have known this for awhile. Nobody would ever label them cool, just stunningly successful.

Orange County is a strange movie, hard to categorize and, in a way, a tease. At times, (and sparked by the over-the-top Jack Black) it's hilarious and challenging. Then it tries to be a derivative teen movie, then a social satire on family, identity and college snobbery. As a result, it's a bunch of different kinds of movies thrown together. The movie also has generational significance, at least for Hollywood. It's directed by Lawrence Kasdan's kid Jake, and stars Tom Hanks' son Colin (Shaun Brumder) and Sissy Spaceks' daughter Schuyler Fisk (Ashley). Hanks looks and acts so much like his father it's distracting. But don't be fooled by the trailers -- Orange County is an ambitious movie, drawing nearly as much from American Beauty as from Clueless. Spoilage warning: plot discussed, not ending.

Charles Connell submitted this analysis on software estimation, a topic which keeps coming up because it affects so many many programmers. Read this post about J.P. Lewis's earlier piece as well, if you'd like more background information.

One of sci-fi's most enduring prophesies is finally coming to pass -- the Drone War. Visionaries from Wells to Orwell to Lucas have long predicted that warring surrogate machines would someday take the humans' place in a new kind of conflict with enormous political implications as military technology evolves. Battles by machines are entirely different -- socially, politically and culturally -- from anything in the history of warfare, as we are seeing in Afghanistan.

As promised chrisd back with his report from the expo floor at MacWorld and a brief note about what Linux can learn from the Macintosh.

LukeG writes "Squaresoft's latest instalment in the ubiquitous Final Fantasy series will mark huge departure from previous titles, as they gamble on the popularity of massively multiplayer gaming on consoles. The genre, already succesful on the PC, has yet to be tested on a console audience, but that is exactly what Square are planning with the groundbreaking release of Final Fantasy XI later this year on PS2." I'm interested to see the FF world taken to an MMORPG. If anyone can make the genre not suck, it's Square.

Slashdot author Chris DiBona took the afternoon off to watch the lightly promoted new Sci-Fi movie "Impostor," which was based on the Philip K. Dick story of the same name. In short, it's a nice bon-bon of a film with solid effects so long as you don't expect too much from it.

It's not a contradiction: Free software costs money. (That's because server space, bandwidth, coffee, electricity, computers, and workspace all cost money.) Besides which, the time it takes to code new window managers, programming libraries (and languages), web browsers, and all the other goodies which make a modern computer useful may be spent as a labor of love, but it's time that competes with real-world jobs, family time, vacations in the Riviera and sleep. Besides the relative few who work at work on their Free software projects, the programmers, project managers, web-site maintainers, documentation jockeys and QA volunteers behind the programs we enjoy every day don't seem to be in it for the money, so much as the thrill of releasing new software, a desire to make their own world a little better, and for plain old fun. The staffers and volunteers who put long hours and dedication into organizations trying to safeguard online freedoms are also obviously interested in rewards that go way beyond salaries. This New Year's, consider giving them a little money anyhow. Here are a few ideas; you're invited to point out projects and organizations that I've left out.

One of the best perks about my job is the excuse to skip out and catch the first showing of Lord of the Rings at the local theater. I did just that, and if you hit the magic link below you can read my comments on the film. I'm going to keep it short, and spoiler free. In a word? Wow.