Whitley eventually gets up her nerve to ask Daad about Salman Rushdie: "I would like you to explain how that death sentence was given to him."

"We don't allow some person pretending to be creative to insult and make fun of our principles." says Daad. "He has to be punished because of the insult."

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Certainly, the Chilean writer, who stormed onto the literary scene nearly two decades ago with the magic realist hit "The House of the Spirits," does not stifle concupiscence. Her novels abound with secret basement love nests, illicit couples tiptoeing through snoring houses and aching for a hidden corner and the repeated rape of servant girls by a desirous patron. New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani derided Allende's most recent novel, "Daughter of Fortune," as a "bodice-ripper romance"; Allende says her readers were outraged that there wasn't more action.

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The Nader ad is a flagrant parody of what MasterCard refers to as its "famous and renowned 'Priceless' advertising campaign" -- the ads that tempt us with such intangibles as "a day where all you have to do is breathe" followed by the word "priceless," and then drives home our addiction to consumerism with the tag line "There are some things money can't buy, for everything else there's MasterCard."

The Nader ad puts a silly spin, reminiscent of the old "Saturday Night Live," on the concept, by showing George W. Bush enjoying a meal as the voice-over intones: "grilled tenderloin for fundraiser, $1,000 a plate;" then Al Gore takes center stage as the voice asserts: "campaign ads filled with half-truths, $10 million;" and then we go back to a Bush shot as the voice informs us: "promises to special interest groups, over $10 billion." The tag line is "There are some things money can't buy. Without Ralph Nader in the presidential debates, the truth will come in last." Nader is arguing that with his paltry $945,219 in campaign contributions (compared to, say, Bush's $93 million), he can't buy enough TV air time to get on voters' radar and therefore into the debates. Of course, the ad could backfire big time; if MasterCard wins the suit, the campaign coffers will be emptied many times over.

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"It's pretty much acknowledged by Napster that this is infringement, because of the users' agreement which implies infringement and by statements made in their own documents," Patel said, in explaining her ruling -- which, barring last-minute legal maneuvering or reversal between now and Friday, will remain in effect until she reaches a final decision in the case. The "statements" she refers to are early e-mail messages written by Napster's teenage founder Shawn Fanning and others who helped build the business, touting their software as a way to get your favorite songs.

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Yep. It's not exactly New York's Carnegie Deli, which honors the Great White Way with monster sandwiches like "The Egg and Oy!" (chicken salad and boiled egg), "Fifty Ways to Love Your Liver (try chopped!)," "Nova on Sunday" or the "Woody Allen" ("lotsa corned beef, plus lotsa pastrami"). But the new Venture Frogs Restaurant, tucked into a corner of what was once an ornately tiled Cadillac showroom in San Francisco, may be the only place where tourists can actually bite into Silicon Valley culture.

"Each menu item pays tribute to a company that we believe has helped shape the Internet start-up world to what it is today," says the reverential menu -- written by a pair of Netheads who sold their first start-up to Microsoft for $250 million in 1998. Tony Hsieh, 26, and Alfred Lin, 27, two of the founders of LinkExchange, left Microsoft to start Venture Frogs, an investment firm and Internet incubator.

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On Thursday, the two powerful entertainment industry lobbying groups, plus the National Music Publishers Association, jointly filed a lawsuit against the multimedia search engine Scour, contending that the company is "built around the large-scale theft of copyrighted material and trafficking of stolen works." The suit cites the use of Scour to illegally trade digital versions of movies like "The Perfect Storm," "The Patriot" and "Mission: Impossible 2," and popular music, including such oldies as "Zip A Dee Do Dah," the Grateful Dead's "Truckin'," Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady" and quite a few Elvis numbers.

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These are the kinds of questions Microsoft could make us consider with its "Attentional User Interface," which John Markoff wrote about in the New York Times on Monday. The goal of this artificial intelligence software, which Markoff says is "at the heart" of Microsoft's new .Net strategy, is to cut down on information overload; a machine will screen your messages and only interrupt you if it deems the e-mail -- or its sender -- worthy of your time. That way, you can keep your head down and work without distraction!

Sure, e-mail overload is ugly, but do we really want to entrust decisions about who can reach us to an intelligent agent? I assume we'd have to set up a profile to teach this agent who matters to us, and then head to the shrink's office to come to work through the guilt after ranking the priority-level of messages from our colleagues, our friends, our family. Sorry Mom, that hot stock tip beats you hands down!

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We groaned last week when we heard about Virgin Atlantic Airways' plans for "Earth Calling," a service that will let mobile-phone users receive calls while traversing the globe -- a service that could eliminate one of the last oases of unconnected time.

After all, about the only good thing about flying is having a block of uninterrupted hours, during which you can't be reached by phone or e-mail -- or anything. It's the only time some people actually read books or, on international flights, get a full night's sleep. Imagine how hard it will be to rest when your seatmates are loudly conducting business around you at all hours. Look forward to being sandwiched between a start-up entrepreneur interviewing marketing VP candidates and a socialite recounting the gossip from last weekend in the Hamptons. VC phone home! Will you have to pay extra to be seated in a cellphone-free row?

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We could have predicted that the tech sector would reduce a hip music lover's service to vaporous jargon. First there was B-to-C (business-to-consumer), although no one really started calling those companies anything more complicated than e-commerce sites or "e-tailers" until the big B-to-B craze kicked in. (That's business-to-business.) Then the abbreviation mania accelerated, driving business plan scribes to reduce their company descriptions to single-letter catch phrases that defy comprehension. "My B-to-B is gonna eat your P-to-P!"

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We hope that this missive finds you in good spirits, perhaps celebrating Judge Jackson's decision to postpone any forced behavior modifications until another round of judges can examine the whole antitrust case. Surely, you're delighted that this good news should be delivered just as a sea of analysts and reporters arrive on your doorstep to hear about your "Next Generation Windows Services."

We thought this cheery moment might be a good one in which to make a few requests for Microsoft's new "Internet-based platform" you'll be discussing Thursday. You see, we find quite a number of features in your software to be really quite annoying.

Let's start with the Office Assistant, that animated paperclip that inhabits Microsoft Word; it tries to guess what you're doing, but always gets it wrong -- and then winks at you anyway. Around our office, our system administrators periodically receive a message from a fellow staffer that says something like:

"I have to figure out how to KILL THE PAPERCLIP GUY that keeps popping up."

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Some nights before, on the way to an Internet company's launch party to load up on free booze, the Sams had been dismayed to find hundreds of would-be partyers waiting to get into the drinking establishment. "They were lining up like it was a cool thing to do," says Sam. It was but one of the plentitude of daily dot-com affairs that count as nightlife for many young Net-company types. But not for the Sams; they turned on their heels and headed home to drink their own booze and to kick-start "the revolution."

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Computer couture

As we leave the gray depths of the 20th century for the Bondi Blue sky of a radiant future, we'll be thinking really different. Look for beige computer boxes to be replaced by a rainbow of colors, as computer manufacturers partner with candy and cereal makers. Don't be surprised when Dell starts a Froot Loops line and Emachines, furiously looking for the Gen-Y angle, starts selling a Pentium III-powered Starburst line. Big Blue, of course, will launch a new line of ThinkPads in five tangy flavors: blueberry, blueberry, blueberry, blueberry and, yes, blueberry.

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Online, however, there is TRUSTe, a nonprofit organization that, for a fee, will audit a site and issue a seal assuring visitors that the site's privacy policy is telling the truth. As if it weren't strange enough to think that we would have more trust in a site that voluntarily pays a third party to verify its honesty, there is evidence that TRUSTe is less than inclined to let visitors know when a site slips up a bit on promises of privacy protection.

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"Organizations like yours are their targets," it warned. "If your organization becomes a victim, you risk losing your software investment, gaining software viruses and becoming involved in the legal process associated with law enforcement raids and criminal prosecution."

But, wait a minute, how am I -- or my friend's company, for that matter -- a "target" or a "victim"? The nomenclature was confusing, but I think Microsoft was trying to be threatening and opaque at the same time. The company doesn't want to sound mean -- it couldn't very well say, "If you buy illegal software, we're going to hunt you down like a dog."

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It seems a little odd that these messages are more prominent than the portal's services, which include news, chat, metasearches of auction sites and other search engines and an option to call in and listen to a dictation of your e-mail messages. But Myownempire.com has a plan to give free Internet stock to its customers -- and the company is more interested in telling that story.

On Monday, founder Bob Haya spoke at length about how portal members might benefit from his company's growth -- explaining, for example, that Wall Street calculates users of Yahoo to be worth around $1,300 a person. Haya is excited about a complicated stock issuing plan that would allow "qualified users" to receive one share of stock in exchange for making the portal their start page and visiting it for 10 days out of every 30 days for three months. They can receive up to four more shares for referring other people to the site. Haya wouldn't say what it takes to qualify, because, he says, he's concerned that some people would misrepresent themselves to get in on the offering.

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By Microsoft's account, the company is trying to improve life for consumers, by making it possible for people to message each other even if they're not using the same software. "Just as consumers expect different telephones to work with one another, so they should expect different instant messaging services to talk to each other," Brad Chase, vice president of the Consumer and Commerce Group at Microsoft, said in a press release on Wednesday. "MSN Messenger Service is the first messaging application to offer the inter-operability people are demanding."

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Congress -- fired up by constituents' outrage over spam and fear that their online behavior is being tracked -- has made plenty of noise about regulating privacy on the Net, with some politicians suggesting that the industry needs to do what's right by consumers or face regulation. As Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, put it in April: "The last thing you want is for us to come in with a heavy hand ... and that's where it's headed." Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission is currently preparing its Internet privacy recommendations for Congress.

This is the climate in which Microsoft has announced the strategy of pulling its big bucks -- the company spent more than $34 million on Net advertising in 1998 -- from any site that dares mess with consumers' right to privacy. The goal is "to make the Web a safer place for customers," explains Microsoft spokeswoman Melissa Covelli.

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Call me a curmudgeon, but I just don't want to have that much fun with my browser. In fact, before I saw the "Austin Powers"-branded browser -- with Myers' alluring mug and a cartoonish Union Jack dancing along the tool bar -- I just couldn't drum up a whole lot of interest in the NeoPlanet browser.

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"The guy's been in there for something like four years and four months," says Emmanuel Goldstein, editor of "2600: the Hacker Quarterly." (Actually, 2600's Kevin Mitnick Lockdown Clock put it at exactly 4 years, 3 months, 16 days, 11 hours, 19 minutes and 41 seconds at that moment, but who's counting?)

It's a heavy sentence for just looking at other people's software, says Goldstein: "The federal government is using him to send a message."

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