On January 10, 1927, Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," a wildly ambitious, hugely expensive science fiction allegory of filial revolt, romantic love, alienated labor and dehumanizing technology opened in Berlin, but the movie as Lang made it has never really been seen. ... Thanks to four years of painstaking work, there is now, at long last, a "Metropolis" with a legitimate claim to being definitive.

It is estimated that there are over two billion Web pages, and thousands of newsgroups and forums, on the Internet - covering virtually every topic imaginable. However, many users find that searching the Internet can be a time consuming and tedious process.

This has driven the development of improved search and information retrieval systems. However, we now need ... to present the user only with the information they need, rather than a large set of relevant documents to read.

... community Web sites could help ... just by adopting the current generation of knowledge management systems ...

Metadata has useful role ... but it has limitations ... [XML is a] key opportunity ... good user-friendly, and "intelligent", tools will be critical ...

The success of Internet based knowledge management, and the Semantic Web, will require the development and integration of various data standards, ontology definitions, and knowledge management and agent technologies. It will take a concerted and significant effort to get there. The likely longer-term benefits are much more effective Internet searches and smart information extraction services, which present the user with concise relevant extracts.

About 500,000 people have lost their jobs. Dozens of companies have gone bankrupt. As much as half a trillion dollars in investments have evaporated. An accounting scandal threatens to bring down WorldCom Inc. and federal authorities are investigating the books of other former highfliers.

There is another casualty of the implosion of the telecommunications industry: a grand vision of the future.

At least 63 telecommunications companies have landed in bankruptcy since 2000, ... [but] the most expensive failures may still be ahead.

When Fran Lebowitz cracked, at the awards ceremony of the Council of Fashion Designers of America last month, that "homage is French for stealing," her remark got a laugh but also some yawns.

That Ms. Lebowitz's quip itself had a shopworn ring might be expected at a time when nearly every aspect of the culture somehow benefits from re-use. The idea is essential to post-modernism. In music it's called sampling. In high culture circles, where it's known as appropriation, it's ancient history.

It was two decades ago when the art critic Craig Wright observed that appropriation, accumulation, hybridization and other "diverse strategies" had come to characterize "much of the art of the present and distinguish it from its predecessors."

Now, those diverse strategies have become so institutionalized that when Moby turned Alan Lomax's 1930's tapes of Southern spirituals into a best-selling album of ambient music, he won Grammys and made millions. When Paul Thomas Anderson channeled Robert Altman's oeuvre, he was awarded the Palme D'Or at Cannes. When Sherrie Levine made stroke-for-stroke copies of watercolors by Mondrian, postdoctoral students lined up to write dissertations on her attenuated ironies.

... Half of fashion, in fact, seems to owe its professional existence to a single truism: one is as original as the obscurity of one's source.

But isn't this as it should be?

What is originality, anyhow? In spite of the current embrace of sampling and appropriation, "we persist as a culture in our commitment to the ideal of originality. The artist who admits to working in the manner of another artist will likely stand accused of being second rate." Wouldn't it be better to scrap the originality fetish and treat the creative act as "a combination of copyings, various and multiform"?

Virginians soon will be able to sport vehicle license plates bearing the words "Fight Terrorism" emblazoned in red letters ...

Virginians [can] obtain the new plates as a way to show solidarity ... and to demonstrate "a national effort to resist this type of thing from ever happening again."

Joe Sims has responded to criticism from John Gilmore, on Dave Farber's Interesting People-mailing list. Sims states that Gilmore "doesn't have a clue about most of what he is talking about, and thus his views are basically worthless."

Computer networks have been used for years by public health officials to monitor outbreaks of disease. Typically, reporting and compiling can take a day or more ... Public health experts recognize a need for more rapid surveillance and detection ... Systems are being developed to collect and analyze disease data immediately ... One such program, called Real-Time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance, or RODS, is being developed at the Center for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh.