This is a new century, and the thing to remember is that many people live this way already. Psychologically, every day in Israel is like Sept. 11 in the United States. Every day in Chechnya is like Sept. 11 in the United States. Non-declared non-wars with heavy civilian casualties are the dominant mode, the Next Big Thing.

We have now officially joined the global village. It doesn't look a lot like those Intel ads, does it?

Me: Whoa! Check that out.

Him: Somebody needs to give that girl a sandwich.

Me: What's up, Halter Top? She's definitely wearing last night's clothes. Walk of shame, baby.

Him: That's a total walk of shame. She's even walking sore.

Me: I think her clogs are bugging her.

Him: Or she just stopped having sex twenty minutes ago. Now she has to go to work wearing that. She's looking for a company T-shirt anywhere she can find one.

• Consider making a donation to the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. The Red Cross site is pretty overloaded tonight, so you might want to make the payment via Amazon.com (who are declining their usual cut of payments).
• Reflect upon what happened yesterday. Remember the dead and injured, but remember also that human beings flew those aircraft. You may feel that the people who hijacked those aircraft and killed so many people relinquished the right to be called "human", but ask yourself what would make someone do something like that.
• Beware a backlash. Don't let politicians use this incident, awful as it is, to drive through measures that will permanently diminish everyone's liberties.
• Remember that races don't commit atrocities, individuals and organisations do. Terrorists want to turn Western society on its head: don't do it for them.

Q37. Why is Compaq changing the colors of its ProLiant servers and racks?

A37. Rather than changing colors, we are leveraging a portion of our color palette-which includes Graphite, Carbon and Silver-across our Compaq ProLiant, AlphaServer, Himalaya and StorageWorks product lines. This new consistency is the culmination of our strategy to integrate the three heritage businesses of Compaq, Tandem and Digital Equipment Corporation in the enterprise customer space.

At 9:00, after Pancake Boy had already gone in and ordered, I got out of the car and strode boldly into the restaurant. With a bold flurish of my cloak I struck a heroic pose. Unfortunately I had not sewn my waffle securely enough to my chest, and it chose that exact moment to fall off and plop onto the floor.

Undaunted, I ignored my former ornament, walked over and sat down at the bar and asked the suspicious waitress for a waffle and a job application. After a brief discussion as to wether or not I was serious, she gave me the job application, ordered my waffle, and politely excused herself to the back room before she fell down laughing. I promptly took out my favorite black glitter crayon and cheerfully began filling out the application.

Usenet, with over 500 million messages posted since 1995, is the prototype of the online community model. It is a collection of thousands of groups discussing practically every topic under the sun. Largely unmoderated, often unruly and certainly unprofitable, a financially unviable Usenet was recently acquired by the Google search engine.

And to all of the spammers and database dumpers and multiposters out there, I say this: You want to read that stuff, fine. You want to create a network for such things, fine. You want to explore the theoretical boundaries of free speech, fine. But when it starts impacting *people* trying to *communicate*, then that is where I draw the line. This is not a negotiation and this is not a threat; this is simply a fact. I've been through pain and joy with this network, I've seen communities form and wither and reform, I've met friends and lost friends here, I've learned things and discovered things and created things. I've seen people make a home here when they didn't have any other, not on a newsgroup, not with a bunch of electrons, but with people that they've met and communities that they've found and support that they've received from people who had just the words they needed to hear and would never have known they existed, and by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it.