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De Beers will be funding NASA from now on!

On the contrary. I think this will blow the de Beers cartel wide open, assuming that a FTL mining vessel could be equipped.

There's one way to find out.

De Beers, has it been registered?

It's DeBeers http://www.debeers.com/

Free as in beer, right?

I did read that 2 years ago when I proposed and was researching diamonds...but wikipedia says you are right.

I swore it was here: http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/diamond/prologue.htm
but I didn't see it and don't have time to read the whole thing right now.

"Industrial diamonds - In 2004 De Beers pleaded guilty and paid a $10 million fine to the United States Department of Justice to settle a 1994 charge that De Beers had conspired with General Electric to fix the price of industrial diamonds.[24][25]" - wikipedia

There are multiple locations in the us accoriding to: http://www.debeers.com/page/storelocator

Whoops..sorry. But they are certainly a monopoly and and have price fixed and probably continue to do so. And as long as women demand diamonds...noone can stop them...

according to DeBeer's page, since 2003, they do not sell blood diamonds anymore.. or rather, they do not buy bloody diamonds anymore:

http://www.debeers.com/us/diamond_policy.php

It's interesting that their article is written in May 2006...

"We have informed all our trade diamond suppliers in writing that we require them to supply De Beers exclusively with merchandise that complies with the Kimberley Process, which obliges them to issue the following guarantee in writing:

"The diamonds herein invoiced have been purchased from legitimate sources that are not involved in funding conflict and are in compliance with United Nations resolutions. The seller hereby guarantees that these diamonds are conflict free based on personal knowledge and/or written guarantee provided by the supplier of these diamonds."
"

Yes, I promise I won't sell you bloody diamonds.. Promise.. don't you believe me?

And here is what EDS executives got for your 200,000,000

Transparent Graphite already exists too.

[DeBeers has a stranglehold on the world's diamond mines, and as you'd expect, they have plenty of money - so it's privately held.]

As much as I'd like to see Microsoft fall for anti-trust violations... what have they really done wrong?

*They bundled IE with Windows & killed Netscape - yah... the consumer lost by having a browser that shipped standard with Windows. HA. I'm glad things have turned out the way they have. If Netscape and IE had gone toe-to-toe for years... we'd all still be coding two sets of sites: one for each flavor.

As a web designer -simply put - I want my website to work across ALL computers.

(side note... ) AOL has owned Netscape now for how many years? And they still don't use Netscape as the AOL browser? Why's that? I can only venture to guess. :-/

*Microsoft used bully tatics to force hardware manufacturers into complying with shady bundling - Nobody forced Gateway, Dell, Packard Bell, NEC, et al, into a business model revolving around Windows. Microsoft chose to exploit this. Was such exploitation bad?

*Microsoft is a computer monopoly - Spare me the conspiracy theories... but what about Apple, Sun, Linux, SGI... ? Just because the market has adopted Windows as the "standard" doesn't really make it a monopoly, does it?

There are more points... but those are the three that interest me most. If I'm wrong... reply. In a nutshell - I don't think Microsoft is like a true modern-day monopoly... from my perspective.

I have a PowerMac, so don't mod this as flamebait. :-p

NPR's All Things Considered did a segment on DeBeer's single-handed building of a commodity market. Visit the web page, or listen to the segment via RealAudio.

(otherwise known as Fsck DeBeers.

They have said that they do not use conflict diamonds, which are diamonds that have been bought from human rights abusing governments and insurgencies in Africa. I.e. in order to get the mine where your diamond was mined, child soldiers may have been used, civilians killed and tortured, etc.

Not really, though. They allow themselves to be tricked, and their diamond reserves in London, Frankfurt and Tel Aviv are of course full of conflict diamonds.

You can only prevent the use of conflict diamonds in 2 ways. 1 make the diamonds yourself, and 2 get the diamonds from sources you control and make open to the public.

I prefer the first way, really.

We do not need to be mining natural diamonds for gem or other purposes anymore.