Are you involved in any nuclear, missile, chemical or biological warfare proliferation activities?

In a second major finding, email recipients are tending not to "unsubscribe" from emails, according to the report, which shows a steady decline in unsubscribe rates since January. Rather than officially unsubscribing, recipients are now more likely to simply delete unwanted emails.

It also means the rest of our December 9th issue's content is online. Here's a snippet of some of the things you'll find:

• A Feature on free and inexpensive IT Tools, aka "Cheapware" - You don't always need the most expensive software to find happiness. There are dozens of cheap or free utilities and programs that our tech editors and readers can't live without. Here are our picks. Plus, check out our reader submissions of their favorite favorite IP scanners, spam blockers, text editors and protocol analyzers.

• Our Workshop on Database Encryption - Are data-privacy regulations and dreams about stolen employee data keeping you up at night? It may be time to protect your data where it lives--in your database.

Plus you'll find our always informative Career Coach, sneak previews, Buzzcuts and more! Just check out our Table of Contents.

As always, you can find these and many more stories via our RSS feed with ease.

Some folks think that computerized voting is a recipie for disaster. Others believe that with the right technology in place, electronic voiting could revolutionize the entire process and hopefully avoid miscounts, cheating and "Chad-tastrophes."

To this end, various high-tech methods are being examined at a national conference headed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Now it's off to the white house to await the Prez's signature, where it's expected to get just that. The law could go into effect before year's end.

It will be really nice to wake up every morning to hopefully a few less sexual enhancement ads, or pleas for help from some government official in Zimbabwe who wants to split some secret stash with me.

For more on the law and its ramifications, check out NWC's Editor Mike Lee's December 9th column.

With low-priced models starting to saturate the market, mobile phones are flying off shelves for the holidays -- fast. The problem is, the makers apparently don't have enough parts in stock to keep up with the fervor.

I wonder if Nokia will start trying to sell a "tin cans & string" model.

We're just about done digging ourselves out of our "Weekend Winter Wonderland." And while we apply heating pads to our backs and pop many a Tylenol, we thought you might like to check out the first half of our December 9th issue. Here's a preview of some of the articles you'll find:

• A Look at Route Optimization and a review of Route Optimizers -- No centralized management or control on the Internet means your critical traffic can hit some serious potholes. But there are ways to ensure a smoother trip. Route optimizers maximize performance, help honor usage thresholds and ensure your providers are living up to their SLAs.

• An Interactive Buyer's Guide: Voice Gateways -- Placing and routing voice calls over a LAN/WAN can be confusing. To help with your product selection, we highlight the differences in various signaling protocols such as H.323, SIP and MGCP, the supported protocols for Voice over LAN/WAN as well as the available LAN and WAN connections.

• A Sneak Preview o fF5 Networks' FirePass Controller -- F5's appliance lets mobile users establish a secure, clientless remote connection to an intranet through a Web browser.

Plus you'll find our always funny Last Mile, columns, Buzzcuts and more! Just check out our Table of Contents.

As always, you can find these and many more stories via our RSS feed with ease.

Whether this movement extends out to the rest of the country, time will only tell. Personally, I've always been bothered by the word SCSI ("scuzzy") - it makes me think of some creepy old guy looking at schoolgirls (and not "Small Computer System Interface").

Yes, I know it's been a while but we've been really busy taking everything apart and putting it back together again.

Finally, we're back up. Still have a couple minor tasks to complete, but you can order those Widgets for Christmas.

I moved to JSP and eliminated the app server for the time being. We'll get back there eventually.

Other fascinating events have had the lab at 85 degrees as a piece of insulation in the air conditioner caused the unit to ice up and stop functioning. Several weeks ago we were freezing at 62 degrees because someone had bumped the thermostat. Our climate controls leave much to be desired some days.

In this case, the government has their sights set on the Segway -- the Human Transporter unveiled a year or so ago that was supposed to revolutionize urban transportation. Surely you've seen the thousands of Segways puttering through your local metropolitan streets? No? Hmmm.

In any event, the Pentagon is exploring the possibility of strapping robots with artificial intelligence to the scooters in the hopes of sending them -- rather than human soldiers -- into battle.

A commendable thought, really. But one has to ponder...didn't "Terminator" start out this way?