Government agencies, leading universities and major corporations are rapidly expanding their efforts to design and build machines and structures on the scale of atoms and molecules. This exploding new discipline -- known as ``nanotechnology\'\' -- has become a top scientific priority in Congress and at the White House.

The World Wide Web is one thing, but Planet Earth as one big computer? That\'s the startling thesis of Larry Smarr, Professor of Computer Science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Smarr believes exponential growth in computing devices linked via the Internet is leading us, inevitably, down the road to a planetary, integrated computer.

Technologists are working on what may be a key piece of the next generation of networks -- a ``Semantic Web'' where machines talk intelligently with other machines to solve all kinds of problems.

Broaching a controversial subject that has gained visibility since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison is calling for the United States to create a national identification card system -- and offering to donate the software to make it possible.

In a move that has some privacy rights advocates concerned, the Pentagon is hoping to track down terrorists with the help of a growing battery of computer software developed to combat consumer and business fraud.

Dan Gillmor argues that recent terrorist attacks demonstrate the danger in over-centralizing society in large cities.