Harrumph. My quick and dirty search engine fix back in November was a little dirtier than I thought. It left a lot of the pages on the site unfixed. Should be all better now. Sorry about that.

The Hynix saga continues. The company's creditors have agreed to restructure its debt. Again. With three bailouts in two years and no sign of a DRAM price recovery, it's clear that Hynix should be dead by now. Which is why both Micron and Infineon are complaining about government subsidies.

(New York Times link. Free registration required.)

Time has spoken. They declared 2002 the year of the whistleblower, and named Cynthia Cooper, Coleen Rowley and Sherron Watkins their Persons of the Year. These are the women who exposed problems at WorldCom, the FBI, and Enron, respectively.

The sad thing is that the integrity these women showed is rare enough to be noteworthy.

Coming soon to a library near you: Patriot Act compliant signs.

How do you make nearly $2 billion disappear? Lots of telecom bust survivors can probably tell you, but USA Today took a close look at Rhythms NetConnections as a, ummmm, leading example.

I haven't see The Two Towers yet (Give me a break! It's only been out 24 hours!), but every review I've seen has raved about the special effects. Lots of interesting technology went into making virtual armies made up of individuals, not cardboard cutouts.

(Broadband connection essential.)

China's foundries have been busy building capacity for the last few years, making the country one of the few bright spots in the current gloomy outlook for equipment suppliers. As iSuppli analyst Jonathan Cassell points out, though, China's low chip manufacturing costs result from tax breaks, with the country's low labor costs playing only a minor role.

There. Done. The infamous organic semiconductor report is off to my editor, who will hopefully rave about how wonderful it is. With that off my plate, I don't know what I'll do with myself.

(Looks at calendar.)

Oh yeah, Christmas shopping. Eeek!

At least one group of management gurus gets it. Harvard Business School has moved beyond "can telecommuting work" and is now talking about how organizations can make it work. Not surprisingly, communication is the key.

What a week. Flew out to San Francisco on Saturday, only to have my airline declare bankruptcy almost as soon as I landed. Spent Sunday working on my now nearly completed report on organic semiconductors, then settled in to the IEEE Electron Device Meeting on Monday.

So far so good, except then I made the mistake of catching an aikido class and dinner with my local friend Janet. The class was great, but dinner was apparently not so great and woke me up at 5:30 the next morning. I'll spare you the details of my ensuing bout with food poisoning. Suffice to say I crawled out of bed long enough to listen to Andy Grove's luncheon address, but that was about it.

Felt much better by Wednesday, though. Back to eating solid food and everything! So I wrapped up the conference and headed home on Thursday. Both my outbound and return flights were nearly empty. If United is running four cross-country round trips a day with that few customers, no wonder they're in trouble.

Now it's Saturday again and I'm mostly readjusted to East Coast time and mostly done with the trip-induced pile of accumulated mail. I'll be back to being a productive citizen in no time!

Researchers at Harvard Law School have figured out what China is afraid of, with a empirical study of Internet filtering. By Google keyword, the top three verboten topics are "Tibet," "Taiwan China," and "Equality."

A similar study of Internet filtering in Saudi Arabia found the oil kingdom is more concerned about sex, religious topics, and sites of interest to women.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Or at least FedEx thinks so. Seems either Santa himself or some of his helpers can receive deliveries in Colorado.

Computerized clothing is one of the topics of my upcoming report on organic semiconductors. An article in Wired about how lousy most electronic fabrics are caught my eye. A good explanation of why flexible materials are so important for these applications.

The Materials Research Society Fall Meeting has always been one of my favorites. I gave my first technical paper there, so there's the nostalgia factor, plus the meeting pulls together a huge variety of topics. I can't make it this year, but daily highlights are on the Society website.

The thing about declaring war on a concept is that it's very difficult to tell when you've won. A permanent state of war is very helpful if you're trying to get away with infringements of fundamental civil liberties that are otherwise impossible to justify.

Consider the case of Jose Padilla, for instance. Padilla is a US citizen. He is accused of plotting a terrorist act, but has never actually been charged with any crime. The government has maintained that President Bush's decision to detain him as an enemy combatant in time of war "is a military and political judgment not subject to reassessment by the courts."

Read that last sentence again. The US government is asserting the right to detain US citizens indefinitely without charge, trial, or access to lawyers, and without judicial oversight. Now go read the Bill of Rights and see just how many of its provisions are being set aside here.

Steven Den Beste has posted a long article about technology and unintended consequences. I don't agree with everything he has to say, but his points are worth thinking about.