"a security clearance in the Washington area means money."

Spy agencies rethinking use of contractors / Pentagon is training people and then seeing them leave for better private pay

The MVR is a comprehensive 10-year technology forecast and visioning survey of 3D Web technologies, markets, and applications. This includes the convergence of

• Networked video games like Xbox Live
• User-created virtual worlds like Second Life
• Massively multi-player games like World of Warcraft
• Digital maps of our planet like Google Earth
• Artificial life like Darwin@Home
• 3D operating systems like Open Croquet
• 3D animation like Massive Software
• 3D creation tools like 3ds Max
• 3D fabrication like Fab Lab

The Metaverse Roadmap: Pathways to the 3D Web

Vernor Vinge has a new book coming out. It looks like Publishers Weekly didn't care for it.

Set in San Diego, Calif., this hard SF novel from Hugo-winner Vinge (A Deepness in the Sky) offers dazzling computer technology but lacks dramatic tension. Circa 2025, people use high-tech contact lenses to interface with computers in their clothes. "Silent messaging" is so automatic that it feels like telepathy. Robert Gu, a talented Chinese-American poet, has missed much of this revolution due to Alzheimer's, but now the wonders of modern medicine have rehabilitated his mind. Installed in remedial classes at the local high school, he tries to adjust to this brave new world, but soon finds himself enmeshed in a somewhat quixotic plot by elderly former University of California–San Diego faculty members to protest the destruction of the university library, now rendered superfluous by the ubiquitous online databanks. Unbeknownst to Robert, he's also a pawn in a dark international conspiracy to perfect a deadly biological weapon. The true nature of the superweapon is never made entirely clear, and too much of the book feels like a textbook introduction to Vinge's near-future world.

Rainbow's End, by Vernor Vinge

Grand Theft Auto crashes through EverQuest into The Sims! The walls dividing the game universe are coming down.

Wired 14.04: When Virtual Worlds Collide

Back in the mid-'80s, if you thought spies were tailing you, it helped to know a good lesbian bar.

To Catch a Spy

Francis Fukuyama, author of "America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy," will be online Tuesday, March 28, at 1 p.m. ET to discuss his book and his criticism of the war on Iraq, which countered traditional neoconservative thinking.

I question whether this is for real -- I had to correct the copy for my excerpt above, in which the writer wrote "Frances Fukuyama." D'oh.

Fukuyama to appear on Book World Live

Here Fukuyama commits apostasy of a different kind: against the thesis that made him famous. His new rendering of "the end of history" -- of liberal democracy as the culmination of humankind's ideological development -- verges on economic determinism; it is, as he recently put it, "a kind of Marxist argument." Just as he finds the roots of jihadism in the confounding material bounty of the West, so too does he define modernization itself as little more than the longing for "technology, high standards of living, health standards, and access to the wider world." Politics is an afterthought, the icing on the economic cake.

The War Among the Conservatives

In Inside Man, it's hard not to catch how making a fortune from misfortune might also be the name of the game in today's America. In Lee's critical vision, America has become a place where the power structure's greed trumps every human impulse for decency.

Don't believe the heist

For almost two years, intelligence services around the world tried to uncover the identity of an Internet hacker who had become a key conduit for al-Qaeda. The savvy, English-speaking, presumably young webmaster taunted his pursuers, calling himself Irhabi -- Terrorist -- 007. He hacked into American university computers, propagandized for the Iraq insurgents led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and taught other online jihadists how to wield their computers for the cause.

Suddenly last fall, Irhabi 007 disappeared from the message boards. The postings ended after Scotland Yard arrested a 22-year-old West Londoner, Younis Tsouli, suspected of participating in an alleged bomb plot. In November, British authorities brought a range of charges against him related to that plot. Only later, according to our sources familiar with the British probe, was Tsouli's other suspected identity revealed. British investigators eventually confirmed to us that they believe he is Irhabi 007.

Terrorist 007, Exposed

As computer scientist John Seely-Brown has suggested, the best way to predict the future is not to look ahead, but to look around.

Ten ideas coming to a screen near you