As noxious as Washington talk shows generally are, this weekend's were significant. Watching all of the Talking Head shows out of D.C., I struggled to decipher the particular meaning, language and codes of that city's inhabitants. George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney and others were on the tube all weekend, and they seemed to be sending the same signals and saying something important. They were talking about a "new kind of war," one that re-emphasized human analysis and intelligence gathering, but also offered a central role for many involved in security technology, from electronic ID to surveillance. They were not talking about Desert Storm, but something radically different. As usual, the media offered much rhetoric, few details. And there are substantial concerns about privacy and civil liberties. People are wondering how this new kind of war might work, what it might look like. Some of you might have some ideas.

Pearl Street, Lower Manhattan -- Tuesday morning definitely marked the passage from one time to another. The Information Age is defined by images, not e-mail, and your kids and others will be asking you all of your lives where you were when the plane crashed into the World Trade Center and burst into that orange fireball and the buildings fell down. I can't help but think that this was the day when computer animation became reality. One of the most striking things about this story is the marked evolution of two media -- online and off. Politicians and pundits own the second, individual humans the first. It was odd how cool and natural all of the reporters and anchors were. Everybody said they were shocked, but nobody seemed to be. There was a lot of grave talk about how things will change forever, but most of the coverage was curiously remote and detached. Thanks to some local cops and firemen from my town, I just got to within a couple blocks of what the volunteers call "Ground Zero" -- the shockingly small pile of rubble that is all that is left of two of the biggest buildings on the planet. It's the perfect place to write about how the media -- new and old -- handled this story.(more)

E-mail, arguably the most successful of all computer applications, has grown so rapidly that it' threatens to veer out-of-control for many people. Designed as a simple communications tool, it's now used for dozens of tasks, from personal archiving to community-building and marketing. E-mail is sparking, perhaps even overwhelming, the revolutionary new model of instantaneous communications. This is the first time in human history disparate people in diverse places can communicate with one another instantaneously. But are we ready? We know surprisingly little about the social and psychological impact of e-mail, beyond usage, volume and demographics. We do know few people have workable strategies for coping, a problem that hits college students and tech and office workers especially hard. Your experiences and solutions are, as always, welcome below.

What the Internet is really for, explains one sage in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the latest in Kevin Smith's continuing series featuring the two drug-dealing, sex-obsessed slobs from central New Jersey, is so kids can slander other people anonymously. In his previous movies -- Dogma, Chasing Amy, Clerks -- Smith chronicles work, sex and blasphemy. This time the sub-theme is the Net and the waves of brainy but obnoxious adolescent jerks who have helped set its sometimes nasty tone in recent years. Many readers of this website will especially love the ending, one of the few Hollywood got right this summer. Spoilage warning: plot is discussed, but not ending.

It's obvious that Seanbaby.com is funny, weird and distinctive, a showcase example of how idiosyncratic personalities, viewpoints and sub-cultures can flourish on a free, non-corporatized Internet. It's not as clear why Seanbaby is important, a vital but endangered Web species that needs to grow and prosper in a world whose desktop is being shaped by Microsoft and AOL/Time-Warner.

I know a bit about geeky 15-year-olds; I've written a book and a number of articles about them. I get a couple of hundred e-mails from them daily. They have time, energy and particular physical and mental skills for gaming, developing software and navigating the Net. They are smart, creative, and know the inner workings of the the Net and the Web better than any other sub-set of the species. They do, in fact, have access to unprecedented amounts of information. Few parents, teachers, pols or reporters have any clear idea what these kids are doing online, or just how significant cultures like gaming and coding have become. Note: second in a series -- you can also read the first .

Adolescents thundered onto the Net over a decade ago, and the place has never been the same, for better or worse (both, really). Are brilliant 15-year-old computer geeks running the world, upending existing institutions? Does it matter that childhood sometimes ends when computers arrive? Some have argued that geeks and nerds are committing a form of social parricide, turning on their parents and almost all other elders, as clueless, hostile and incompetent. Author Michael Lewis thinks so, and he think it's great. (First in a series.)

With the possible exception of Shrek, I haven't seen an audience have as much fun all summer as the full house yukking through Rush Hour 2, a multi-cultural martial arts comedy/adventure/ cop/ buddy movie and testament to the still- growing sweep and reach of Hong Kong cinema, for which Jackie Chan deserves much credit. Lots of laughs in an unpretentious movie that stars one actor's mouth and another's feet.

In some previous columns I argued that Russian hacker gadfly and academic Dmitri Sklyarov, in a Nevada jail at the hands of federal authorities, is the victim of a serious injustice. He should not have been arrested and jailed under the DMCA in for writing software that undermined the effectiveness of Adobe's e-book encryption software. Were he not a so-called "hacker," he wouldn't have been. Sklyarov, 26, has been jailed for two weeks now. This is a perversion of copyright law and principles that have stood for more than two centuries. The arrest seriously undermines the First Amendment. Some of you disagree. But if you agree, here's a cyber petition in the spirit of the Net: rather than sign somebody else's statement, post your own reasons you think the arrest was inappropriate, and why Sklyarov should be freed. If you feel the arrest was justified, you are welcome to say so. I will see that your comments and arguments reach the appropriate federal officials. This is one of those rare battles that needs to be won. Add your ideas below:

If you have a popular file-sharing program called KaZaA on your computer and suddenly start seeing yellow links to obvious ads on some of your favorite Web sites, this is because a cunning piece of software called TopText was automatically installed on your computer along with KaZaA. Many Web site owners are upset with this alteration of their content. But there is an opt-out procedure (albeit a somewhat cumbersome one) you can use to keep TopText links from being added to your site, according to the company that markets TopText.

In the pre-Net era, aging Boomers like me often marked the phases of our lives with dumb TV shows and a handful of arresting, even ground-breaking movies or cultural offerings we remember all our lives, much the way younger folks may recall Star Wars or Myst. Planet of The Apes, released 30 years ago, a movie that morphed into a series, then a cult fad, was one of them. It looks a bit grade B these days, but at the time, it was a real and imaginative shocker that dealt directly with race, class, space and the Nuclear Age. And it ended with a conclusion that stunned audiences -- a real rarity in American movies. In fact, I can't think of another that matches it. I always pegged it at the top of the list of the era's sci-fi movies. The new one won't be. Spoilage warning: Plot discussed, but no details of the ... er ... shocking ending.

Maybe it's time to think about becoming an expatriate. Those who still harbor illusions about the accuracy of what pols and the popular media tell us about "geeks," gaming and cyber-culture ought to read one of the most interesting series of studies yet on computer games and the young, published this weekend in the Times of London. The government-funded study by the British Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), finds that computer games are giving a "young Britons a level of co-ordination and powers of concentration equivalent to those observed in top-level athletes." Beyond that, gamers are smarter, more likely to go to college, have more friends, read more, and get better-paying jobs than non-gamers.

Can Draconian Internet copyright laws be used to make criminals of people who criticize corporate products or government behavior? In the Sklyarov case -- he's in jail, charged with "trafficking" in software -- criminal felony liability has been imposed by the government at the complaint of a corporation for behavior that may not even qualify technically as copyright infringement, an ugly escalation of growing conflicts involving corporatism, free speech, intellectual property and the movement of ideas online. Does anybody believe Ralph Nader or a New York Times reporter would be in jail if he or she did what Sklyarov did? (Meanwhile, Adobe, in a classic demo of corporate morality, is running for its life.)

Minutes into Jurassic Park III, the movie I'd planned to review, I lost it. It was obvious we'd all seen this movie before, only in better-written, more vivid and original form. The bottom line is that dinosaurs keep getting smarter, while screenwriters are getting dumber. Anybody dumb enough to get on that island again deserves what he gets. The raptors are getting as familiar and menacing as Mickey Mouse. So I bolited, skipped illegally across the hallways of the megaplex to write a weekly wrap-up instead. I saw Legally Blonde, Score, and the big romantic comedy of the summer, America's Sweethearts. The latter, despite the great cast, is a near-total disaster. What can you say about a week in which the most entertaining movie was Legally Blonde? Hang on for Planet of the Apes next Friday.

For years, big media outlets have feasted on the idea that the Net is a breeding ground for thieves and degenerates who prey on innocent youth. This generally false impression has panicked a whole generation of parents about technology, resulting in the hysterical jailing and persecution of some hackers, and triggered the installation of blocking and filtering systems on home computers, as well as many purchased with federal money. So it's especially interesting to see a new level of media hypocrisy: a major network -- CBS -- using the Web as a dumping ground for leftover trash (in this case, from the show "Big Brother") too offensive to broadcast over the air. Next will be shootings, accidents and executions.

Linux won't ever be accepted as a truly mainstream OS by most vendors. The reason for this is quite simply the users. And I'm not talking about everyone, I'm talking about the 31337 h4x0r kids with the bad attitude. They're posting right here on this system, intermixed with others who often share the attitude, but also have a bit more civility. I saw this once again while learning about the Hewlett Packard 3300C flatbad scanner ... which has zippo Linux support from HP. And I don't see that changing. Keep reading and maybe I can explain why.

Ted Kaczynski predicts that humanity will easily drift into a position of such dependence on intelligent machines that it will ultimately have little choice but to accept all the machines' decisions. Steven Spielberg's vision is that we will unthinkingly create machines to try to replicate, replace or tend to human needs and emotions. MIT's Ray Kurzweil projects artificially intelligent machines evolving so rapidly in the early part of this century that they will ultimately fuse with biological beings. Many novelists and filmmakers share these dark visions. They see smart machines as inevitably replicating, and surpassing human beings in longevity, endurance, intelligence and raw power. These machines will dominate us. Truth or more techno-hype?

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is really a technological fairy tale, the story of some software that wanted to be real actors in a real movie. Not so fast. It would take a platoon of Blue Fairies to take code this far. I've never played the game, but it has to be way more fun than this movie. How sad that the first studio film ever with human leads played by non-actors is so lifeless and plastic. The voices are out-of-sync like those Japanese sci-fi movies. At least the film could have had the decency -- give Tomb Raider some credit here -- to hire a real actor and have a little fun with itself. Dr. Lara Croft understood what she was created for -- to kick a lot of butt. Dr. Aki Ross, played here by some code with too much lip balm, is more like Enya, a new age scientist whose weapons are dreams and wiggly spirits rather than guns and bombs. Bring noseplugs to this stinker. And don't worry about the ending being given away here. I couldn't tell you what it was if I wanted to.

Perhaps because science and technology have always been dominated by educated, sometimes arrogant elites, and are far beyond the attention spans or formats of conventional media, few scientific issues manage to attract the attention of large numbers of people. Gene mapping and genomics could change the nature of life itself, but few national political figures in the U.S. talk much genetics, or the impact of fertility drugs on kids and families. Spielberg raises some profound moral issues involving A.I. in his new movie, drawing a number of critical raves but proving a disappointment at the box office. And Hollywood hasn't yet even heard of nano-technologies. The emerging exception appears to be global warming, which Americans are suddenly very worried about. Maybe this is the beginning of a new era for science and politics.

As a Nobel prize-winning economist puts it, "What Information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." This technologically-driven ADD is transforming politics, entertainment, sports and culture. There is only so much attention to go around, and we are being bombarded with more information all the time. Most of us have no idea how to allocate our attention widely or productively. Those who can help us will be rich. (Second in a series).