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I'd be thrilled to find a place here where small, independent businesses are actually thriving, but one doesn't exist.

Maybe where you live small businesses may be hard to find but not where I am. My sister runs her own business as do others I know or knew. I'm hoping to start my own small business. Now I know it's hard in some places, like Europe, but not in the US. Here's the small business stats from the US Census Bureau. The stats are a bit out of date, the latest numbers are from 2004 but I doubt the numbers have changed that much since then. One thing I find revealing is where it says "Since 1997, however, nonemployers have grown faster than employer firms." Nonemployers are the self-employed.

Also remember the vast majority of air travel is for business purposes, and those people are under the impression that they *don't* have a choice to just not fly.

Then they aren't paying attention. There's GoToMeeting as well as other ways to hold meeting online. Why businesses don't even need permanent offices now, they can rent temporary or shared office space now. Need to meet a client? Rent an office for a day. That is if meeting in a restaurant or cafe will not work. These offices even have broadband access, heck Barnes and Noble book stores have free wifi.

Falcon

My apologies - the result of working in an insular fashion is to rudely expect others to recognize an industry-specific TLA (three letter acronym).

BDM is/was a defense contractor. Here's a quick reference: http://www.business.com/directory/computers_and_software/bdm_international,_inc/profile/

If Cisco were to sue someone for using this, it wouldn't be the cable operators - it'd be Motorola or whomever, their competitors who also offer a similar infrastructure.

Wink! (now "OpenTV") has been doing this for years on cable and satellite. I worked as a customer service loon for Wink! from 2000-2002. You would click on Wink!-enabled ads and get free stuff or coupons in the mail, etc. They even had contests for who could click on the most Wink!-enabled ads in a month.

http://www.business.com/directory/media_and_entert ainment/television/digital_tv/interactive/wink_com munications/profile/

http://www.wink.com/

As an aside, we had one old lady constantly calling us who religiously watched for Wink! ad content (which was only on specific channels) so she could get free stuff. She would call us when her cable went out (which was often), because when we sent a ticket to her provider to check for Wink! service outage, she would get her cable service back on faster than if she called her provider herself. Fun times.

ILEC's are telephone companies that were in service when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was enacted, of which there were more than 100... Link

It is quite true, however, that if you are getting phonelines to your house, you are going to be using an ILEC who provides the copper pair... of course, I have digital phone service along with cable tv and cablemodem, so it's all going thru the nice, fat cable pipeline...

The Audacity team has had a fine product out there for some time; I'm sure 1.2 will be that much better, and will push the level of expectation for "entry level" up for users and software producers alike.

And you of all people should know desktop publishing gave us 'zines, comix, as well as homegrown amateur pornography.

Before the advent of vanity sites and blogs, desktopPub was what certain creative-types used to do with their time to get their bitching and moaning "heard."

Oh, yeah - it also kinda became a multi-billion dollar industry that begat other multi-billion-dollar industries.

yr pal -

s mcnally

"from the crumbling town of Wilkes-Barre"...

Wilkes-Barre is a (dead) coal-mining town; "As the stock market crashed in 1929, the coal industry struggled, but it never recovered after World War II. By the 1920's consumers gradually switched from coal to oil, gas, and electricity. One by one, the collieries were shutdown, and mine operators moved on to other enterprises, leaving the area with an unemployment rate in excess of 12% after the war..." (from this site).

Unfort, I think it's tough to turn towns like this around. Go see Michael Moore's "Roger and Me" (ignore his politics if you disagree with them - the message in the documentary is pretty important). He talks about how Flint tried to revitalize itself after an industry (auto) that it had grown all-too-dependant on shut down.

No they can't, because Nintendo is a limited company (i.e. Nintendo Company Ltd) and so its shares aren't traded on the open market. Thus the only way Microsoft could purchase the firm is to approach the current owners (it's a family owned business AFAIK) with a big pile of cash. Even then I think their answer would be short, to the point, and negative.

• business.com sold for -- I kid you not -- $7.5M US in November of 1999. What were they thinking?

Thus, no one can sell obvious things like "business.com" for $400,000,000,000,000 or whatever.

business.com sold for -- I kid you not -- $7.5M US in November of 1999. What were they thinking?

-Waldo Jaquith

Nooo!

I just spent $10 million on business.com ..