Congressional budget conferees have reversed course, turning proposed DOE cuts into increases. This may be due to thousands of researchers sending letters during the August recess. Recent DOE R&D gains include 14% for the Office of Science and 14.3% for Advanced Scientific Computing. Not that the process is finished, of course. [Michael Lubell, WHAT'S NEW, 06Oct00.]

The US Senate has voted 96-1 in favor of raising the limit on H1B visas to 195K for three years. [Financial Times, 04Oct00. NewsScan.]

The House will consider a bill making it harder to patent business methods such as Amazon.com's "1-click" check-out and Priceline.com's "name your own price" brokering. It would discourage patents where the only distinguishing factor is that a computer accomplishes the task. [Computer User, 04Oct00. NewsScan.]

The US government has chosen (but not confirmed) the Rijndael encryption standard to replace DES for use on unclassified data. NIST estimates that Rijndael will be secure for another 30 years, barring any great advance in quantum computing. A current supercomputer would need 149T years to crack a Rijndael message. [NY Times, 03Oct00. Edupage.]

----- "A large brain, like large government, may not be able to do simple things in a simple way." -- Donald O. Hebb. -----