"Excite - Country forgets to Take Weapons off Destroyer"

OTTAWA (Reuters) - When Canada sold two old destroyers to a private foreign citizen last year, it forgot to take an anti-submarine missile launcher off one of them and may have left other sophisticated equipment on board, military officials said Wednesday.
The destroyers were sold for scrap to Richard Crawford of Florida. So far, he won't let the Navy on board to inspect the ships and he wants it to compensate him for anything it removes.
The eight-barreled launcher is not difficult to see. It juts up about 10 feet from the deck of the destroyer Kootenay.

"CNN - Dont pick up the phone to ring in the new year"

There won't be significant outages. The biggest fear I have is a lot of the general public is going to pick up the phone just to see if they have a dial tone and call friends. That will be a volume burden. It's probably the biggest threat of all," said Lou Marcoccio, research director for Gartner Group, a U.S. business technology consulting firm.

"Everything you wanted to know about Chat(irc)"

Clients and Software: (http://4chatroom.com/clients.shtml) Real time communication tools that you can download, such as AOL instant messenger, ICQ, Get Gooey and other options. Learn all about IRC (Internet relay chat) from mIRC.

"Excite - Linux not currently a threat to windows"

The Red Hat distribution (currently by far the leader in end user distribution) is horrible compared to other distributions. The layout defies ease of compilation of many open source programs. Their insistence on placing added binaries in /usr/bin as opposed to /usr/local/bin and added libraries in /usr/lib rather than /usr/local/lib does complicate installations of a large number of open source programs. I was successful in installing those applications but I've been using Unix over 20 years. Most required modification of the Makefile and/or header files. Easy for a typical end user? I think not.

"MSNBC - Ukraine restarts Chernobyl Reactor"

REACTOR NO. 3 was restarted at 5:30 a.m. after almost five months of repairs, and was gradually increasing output, said a spokeswoman for the plant who declined to give her name. She would not say when the reactor was expected to reach full power.
Officials at Chernobyl insist that reactor No. 3 is safe and is free of any potential Y2K bugs, whereby a computer might misread the last two digits of a date and mistake the year 2000 for 1900.

"Excite - Microsoft waits for no-one"

Skeptical? Check out the latest keynotes and comments from Microsoft officials speaking at a variety of venues. One common thread that runs throughout: Microsoft is gearing up, sooner rather than later, to sell software as a service.
What this means, exactly, seems to vary, depending on which executive is speechifying. But however you interpret "software as a service," one thing is clear. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for any entity to force changes in Microsoft's business practices via remedies like splitting the operating systems group from the applications group, or opening up the Windows programming interfaces or source code, if software isn't an easily definable, shrink-wrapped collection of bits and bytes.

"CNN - Internet Watch dog could stop Collegiate copycats"

Some students actually research and write their term-papers the old-fashioned way. Others, however, just copy fake ones off the Internet and turn them in as their work.
To prevent collegiate copycats, two graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley have devised a program that compares a student's submission with every other term- paper on the Web.