To call Philip K. Dick, whose 1954 story "The Minority Report" is the basis for the new Steven Spielberg movie, a science-fiction writer is to the underscore the inadequacy of the label. Dick, who died of a stroke in 1982 at 53, was fascinated by the scientific future largely as a vehicle for examining his own anxieties, longings and unstable perceptions. It would be more accurate to call him one of the most valiant psychological explorers of the 20th century.

... Thinking about these ideas can make your head hurt, which is true of virtually all of Dick's 36 novels and more than 100 short stories: mind-bending was almost his religion. Calling himself a "fictionalizing philosopher," he began with an assumption that causality is a shared delusion and that even concepts like space and time have a limited basis in reality.

Steven Spielberg decided that there was no better time to release his latest film, "Minority Report," a dark, complex, futuristic whodunit.

Spielberg: "I wanted a movie with layers and with a little more substance. ... The question is, Where do you draw the line? How much freedom are you willing to give up? That is what this movie is about. ... We decided to put the film through a process called bleach bypass. Then we shot some of the scenes on 800 ASA film stock, which creates a kind of graininess that makes it feel more like old film noir."

I walk into the humid goat shed in my Tyvex suit and sterilized boots. I look around the pen. Hundreds of sly-looking, inquisitive goats are staring at me intently. They seem unexceptional enough, but ... this is a so-called "transgenic farm" owned and run by Nexia Biotechnologies.

Nexia CEO: "Oh, it's not that weird. What we're doing here is ingeniously simple. We take a single gene from a golden orb-weaving spider and put it into a goat egg. The idea is to make the goat secrete spider silk into its milk. ... We're going to make biodegradable fishing lines out of it. Or maybe tennis racket strings. We call our product BioSteel."

The first fiber-only Ethernet standard was approved Wednesday, opening the door for a new generation of Ethernet products.

The IEEE 802.3 standards group gave the go-ahead to 802.3ae, a version of Ethernet that runs at 10 gigabits per second.

The government will hold suspected American terrorist Jose Padilla indefinitely and will not bring him before a military tribunal, according to congressional and US officials.

Justice officials made their case in a closed meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, arguing the United States has the legal power to hold Padilla until President Bush decides the war against terrorism is over.

Until very recently, one of the most striking things about our economy was how common it was for young people to make a lot of money quickly. For nearly 20 years, except for a year or two in the early 90's, a college student has been able to gaze out of his dorm-room window and see a well-traveled path to millions. His ability to imagine himself getting very rich very quickly was an ingredient in the modern money culture. ...

That's what 27-year-olds did, strike it rich.

This youthward shift in moneymaking has had all sorts of strange social effects. ...