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The new twist Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) added several years ago was to deduct from its taxable corporate income the difference between the amount employees paid it to buy the shares and the amount the shares are worth on the open market. The company's employees do get taxed on this amount (when they exercise their options and buy the stock), so according to the IRS they received taxable income from their employer, and the company can deduct it as a salary expense. Even though it wasn't a cash expense, it's still deductible. Issue enough stock, and a company can shift its entire corporate tax burden to its employees and wind up paying no taxes on its own income.

Microsoft was the first company to achieve tax-free status.

Most of Paris Hilton's money comes (I assume) from investments; probably in the real estate, stock, and bond markets. None of them are zero-sum games; all are net wealth creators.

Just because all that money in the market isn't directly employing people doesn't mean it's not doing anything.

You might want to take a refresher course on How Money Is Made In The Stock Market or Why Do Stocks Go Up? (On the latter, go about halfway down the page.)

The stock market is a huge wealth creator, and a whole lot of people benefit indirectly from it and all the companies that participate. The bond market is somewhat easier to understand because the money invested there is actually used by companies and governments to do stuff; it's fundamentally just a loan. Real estate is more complicated, and depending on how you look at it (limited total amount of real estate) may or may not be zero-sum, but certainly spurs development in other areas indirectly.

Most of Paris Hilton's money comes (I assume) from investments; probably in the real estate, stock, and bond markets. None of them are zero-sum games; all are net wealth creators.

Just because all that money in the market isn't directly employing people doesn't mean it's not doing anything.

You might want to take a refresher course on How Money Is Made In The Stock Market or Why Do Stocks Go Up? (On the latter, go about halfway down the page.)

The stock market is a huge wealth creator, and a whole lot of people benefit indirectly from it and all the companies that participate. The bond market is somewhat easier to understand because the money invested there is actually used by companies and governments to do stuff; it's fundamentally just a loan. Real estate is more complicated, and depending on how you look at it (limited total amount of real estate) may or may not be zero-sum, but certainly spurs development in other areas indirectly.

EDUCATE YOURSELF!

$31.5 Trillion Investor Coalition, the Carbon Disclosure Project, Spurs Disclosure of Climate Change Strategies from World's 500 Largest Companies: http://www.cdproject.net/

Learn about how reducing greenhouse gases is GOOD for business! Carbon Down, Profits UP, a report by the Climate Group: http://www.theclimategroup.org/assets/CDPU_2005_v2 .pdf/

Learn about how cap and trade works and how it effectively solved the acid rain problem under the U.S. Clean Air Act - COST-EFFECTIVELY: http://www.epa.gov/airmarkets/trading/basics/index .html/

And most importantly, climate change is inextricably linked to national security and energy independence. A carbon constrained economy equates to opportunites and investments in a host of clean and efficient energy technologies that are good for all. That's why Silicon Valley is saying that clean tech is the best investment of the 21st century! Just do a little research. The stuff we're told about economic impact of GHG reductions is hogwash.

Just a couple recent articles:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2 006/11/04/BUG07M5S481.DTL/
http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2006/commentar y06111704.htm/

I don't have to pay a fee-hungry broker. After all, brokers just make you broker. :p

I use the discount direct access Interactive Brokers (developer note: they have a great API for hooking into their flexible trading platform. Even Python bindings.)

And yes, "constantly trading on these things" is a great idea. It's called active trading. Stocks fluctuate, rise and fall through the day. I can take immediate advantage of multiple momentum movements within the day, instead of waiting (and tying up capital) for months or years for a stock to slowly wind its way up on the long term. And that $500 profit is in my pocket at the end of the day, outside the risk of bad after-market news wiping out my profits during the next morning panic. Plus, compounding daily accelerates my wealth.

Talking about news, I take it with a grain of salt. Usually the market has already corrected from rumours and early birds well ahead of the official press being released. Sometimes a stock will drop on the release of "good" news as the early birds dump the stock and run to the bank with their profits.

Anyway, getting to the article. I use the TraderZone trading system. Full disclosure: I work for TraderZone. Instead of a black box computer generating many complicated rules, we developed the system using the opposite approach. The president of TraderZone, a human being, observed, experimented, and used real money to discover very specific repeatable buy and sell signals. For example, moving average crosses and support and resistance zones are strong indicators. These rules were automated into a computer program, since a computer can scan thousands of stocks in real-time. a little faster than a human. Score one for the computer. Coloured indicators and green arrows show the status of the formulas and make "trading at a glance" possible. The more green on a line, the better the pick. When it's red, it's time to sell. It's not automated trading yet, but when you do what the computer tell you, you WILL make money. These formulas have been market tested since 2003.

TraderZone also provide longer term stock picks, called the BuyZone Review, which are generated by a human-tweaked computer formula.

I still have to glance at the intraday charts to confirm the computer's results and time entry and exit points. But our vision is to change the future of trading.

The biggest problem I see is that the Medical Savings Account provision in the tax law is a "use it or lose it" policy. I'd happily buy an MSA if I could save my deductible portion that way (or one of my deductible portions).

Look into the Health Savings Account. It's similar to the old Flex style savings, but it works more like an IRA. Yearly tax deferred contributions up to the amount of your deductible (although there may be another IRS imposed hard limit that's lower than your $10,000 deductible.

The best part is you can deduct tax free and without penalty from the HSA for any health related expense (including paying the deductible). There's no "use it or lose it" aspect, because it works just like an IRA. If you never touch it, it just keeps accumulating. I also believe the mandatory withdraw after 67.5 (I think?) does not apply to HSAs. Finally, as I understand it, you can withdraw for non-health related fees (taxed) after the retirement age.

I'm VERY happy with mine, although my deductible is only a mere $1800. The way I see it, it's an extra $1800 I'm putting towards my retirement. My old insurance was a copay (80% on most stuff), and was costing me as much each month as my current monthly HSA contribution ($1800/12) plus my current monthly insurance premium. If I have to claim my insurance, I end up breaking even. If I don't use insurance (and I haven't in 10+ years), then I make an extra 1800/year. It's a win-win for me. To put it another way, if I'd been using HSA for the last 5 years, I'd have put over $10,000 into retirement instead of the insurance company's pockets.

Of course, for this to work you have to treat medical insurance like insurance. This won't work for people who go to the doctor monthly. Big expenses only! It helps if you're young, too.

Just FYI, my HSA is through ExanteBankHSA.com. I'm not horribly pleased with their rate structure, but they are the one who was supported directly by my Health Insurance agency. If anyone has a better HSA provider, please let me know!

Motley Fool HSA Introduction

Well at least the author of the story managed to get the video to play. I downloaded "The Enterprise Incident" and have not successfully been able to playback the episode in its entirety. At the 4:12 mark, the window goes black and the progress bar goes to the beginning. Amazon "support" has not been helpful at all. A Motley fool poster seems to have a simlilar problem. The Progress Bar doesn't work to jump to any point in the video.

The Unbox player may not be necessary to play back videos purchased through Amazon. It might just be a "wrapper" around WMP. I was able to play back the episode directly through Windows Media Player, and it stops at the 4:12 mark as well, but with an error message: "Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file." Which is kind of an odd error to get in the middle of playback.

At least I didn't pay for it.

Who'd want such a thing? Quite possibly, you. New UK passports include RFID chips, and future editions of currency might be RFID-enabled too.

The US gov't has already announced they're switching to RFID-enabled passports, which supposedly have all kinds of privacy-related issues.

Will Faraday cages around passport-pouches make the RFID chip unreadable?

This is nothing new, and it's not even something that's restricted to the world of money managers. It's being used by individual investors now, and has been for years; it's called "technical investing". The definitions of combinations of factors (market cap, financials, etc.) are called 'screens', and are a common source of discussion on forums like those found on The Motley Fool. There's software for sale, priced for individual investors, and there are websites that will even allow you to save your screens to use periodically, looking for new possible stocks to buy into (or to check and be sure that your existing portfolio matches the parameters you want).

This is simple. It has been mathematically proved that the best single investment is the market portfolio (please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_portfolio_theo ry )

  What this means is that if you have some money and you can only perform one initial buy and then you have to live with your choice, the best thing to buy will be the more diversified found with the lower comission. Personally I like ETINX (disclaimer, I'm not afiliated in any way with Etrade)...

  Nevertheless the best start is for you to read the documents at http://www.fool.com/school.htm?ref=G02A06

This isn't rocket science, so I would avoid hiring a professional or using one that works off of commissions. If you have a good friend (that's not in college), getting some free advice won't hurt. Here's the process in a nut shell:

1. Avoid credit card debt. If you have any, pay it off. If you can pay off your card every month, then use it, you'll build a nice credit history and get have no problem getting that first apartment. If you can't, lock it away (either in a freezer or cut into pieces) and get a debit card instead. You're better off not closing the account if there's no annual fee since they base your credit rating partially off of how long you've had your accounts open.

2. Save your emergency stash. This is what you're really asking about right now. I recommend this after fixing any credit card problems because credit card interest is pretty bad. And should you get in a jam without an emergency stash, you could go back to your credit cards, but lets hope that doesn't happen. For working folks, this is 3-6 months of expenses to get you through a layoff. For you, you have to plan to get through college, possibly move, get business attire and other necessities, and then find that first job, so start figuring how much you might need for that. This money should be very liquid and not at risk, so something like an ING Orange or CD would be pretty good, or feel free to find higher rate alternatives.

3. With those done, you are really comparing interest rates and risk. The stock market usually returns somewhere in the 6-10% range, but you may have to stay in for 5-10 years for the bumps to average out. When you invest in individual companies, be prepared to lose all of that money because you never know when the next Enron will appear. For example, say you think there's a 25% chance you'll lose 0-20% or more, a 50% chance you'll make between 0-10%, and a 25% chance you'll make more than 10% in the 2-4 year horizon you have set (before your loans start coming due). Do the math to see if it's worth the risk, and check your gut to see if you could stomach the worst option. If you don't believe there's enough upside to beat the 95% chance you'll make 5% in saving or CD, then there's no reason to play the market. Finally, consider any loans or other debt, and determine if you can do better investing your money than you could just by paying off that debt to avoid the interest. If you are determined to go with the stock market, but don't know exactly what you are doing, go with a no-load, low expense ration index fund. Vanguard and Fidelity both come to mind. Avoid the latest fads (.e.g gold, oil, realestate/reits) since by the time you are ready to cash in, the fad will be over.

And finally, I'd recommend Suze Orman (she's on CNBC, has a few of books, and also does PBS fund raisers) and the Motley Fool for the beginners advice. After you get those under your belt, consider moving up to the wall street classics and some of the higher risk folks (the random walk, think and grow rich, robert kiyosaki, and so on). Also, while you're just figuring things out, start watching your credit report. It's free and will hopefully have you making smarter decisions when you know how your score could be effected.

Okay, so it's actually 4 steps to becoming rich. (See below.) Here are basic guidelines to how you should save or invest your money. As always, your own life situation will affect how you save money. Pulling money out early completely destroys the purpose of saving it. If you pull out money early you will also probably get hit with penalty fees and taxes as well. For example, pulling money out of a 401k early will cost you 10%(!) of your funds, and that doesn't even include the taxes you will have to pay.

• Saving money for over 5-10 years? Buy index funds.
• Saving money for 6 months to 5 or more years? Look at Certificates of Deposits (CDs) or bonds.
• Need cash where you can easily reach it? (i.e. less than six months) Put it in a savings or money market account. You can find one that has 4-5% interest so at least your money is outpacing inflation. I personally have a ING Savings Account.

You could go balls out and try to make millions starting a company, playing poker, or saving beanie babies... But follow these steps (listed in order from most important to least) and you will easily be a millionare, if not multi-millionare, by the time you retire. These steps apply to everyone.

1. Live below your means. This means no matter how much you want or deserve something, if you can't afford it you'll have to survive with less. A lot of people have trouble understanding this.
2. Pay off all credit card debt. No matter how good your investments are, they probably won't make up for the 15-25% interest you are paying on your credit card debts.
3. If you have a 401k available, use it! My work matches up to 6% of my pay. This is a free 6% raise, that will multiply into an even greator amount by the time I touch it. THIS IS FREE MONEY!!!
4. After the 401k, put your money in an IRA account. In college you will want to get a Roth IRA. You will be limited to investing only a few grand a year, but max that out if you can!

That's it. If you start following these 4 steps in college, you will have a millionare by the time you are 60.

For anyone who wants to know more about investing, actually picking individual stocks, or just how to become richer in general (there are no quick and easy ways to become rich), I suggest reading the Motley Fool. Good luck!

dsgitl: How many of them do you imagine had financial consultants on payrool?

Edward Jones. Costs me $30/year for my IRA. The kid's college fund is covered by the fund loads (and yes, loads can be better for long term investing). The money market pays me.

They're like the Starbucks of investing, there's one on every bloody corner and my rep has stayed late to explain things like diversification to me.

And I've got friends who worked for Enron, they got suckered. They do have to take some of the blame. Not all of it, for sure, but if they listened to financial advice that was readily available if they'd looked for it (and cheap, too!), they might not have gotten taken so badly.

http://www.fool.com/seminars/partners/resources/be ginvest/markettiming.htm

The Motley Fool is a good place to start if you just can't bring yourself to walk in to Ed Jones, Smith Barney, Fidelity, Chase, or any decent CPA's office.

dsgitl: How many of them do you imagine had financial consultants on payrool?

Edward Jones. Costs me $30/year for my IRA. The kid's college fund is covered by the fund loads (and yes, loads can be better for long term investing). The money market pays me.

They're like the Starbucks of investing, there's one on every bloody corner and my rep has stayed late to explain things like diversification to me.

And I've got friends who worked for Enron, they got suckered. They do have to take some of the blame. Not all of it, for sure, but if they listened to financial advice that was readily available if they'd looked for it (and cheap, too!), they might not have gotten taken so badly.

http://www.fool.com/seminars/partners/resources/be ginvest/markettiming.htm

The Motley Fool is a good place to start if you just can't bring yourself to walk in to Ed Jones, Smith Barney, Fidelity, Chase, or any decent CPA's office.

Not so clever. Fastow merely copied Microsoft's accounting techniques, as several other companies have, but he over-used them. For example: getting a certain sleezbag NC politician to add a sneaky addemdum to an omnibus bill that would require the IRS to "refund" Microsoft every time an employee cashed in stock options given them to them by Microsoft in liou of cash.
http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rule maker000217.htm
Corporations pay taxes on their own income (generally 35%), but money they pay out in salaries to employees is deductible from the corporation's income. Since granting options to employees results in taxable income to those employees, Microsoft gets to deduct that taxable employee income from its own taxable corporate income, and that's where Microsoft got a tax-free $3.1 billion in cash in fiscal 1999: "Stock option income tax benefits."

  Net result: The EMPLOYEE was TAXED when they exercised the option and YOU ended up paying for the development of Microsoft's applications, and Microsoft didn't have payroll deductions, state or federal income tax payments, or FICA shares. Pure profit, against which HONESTLY run companies had to unfairly compete.

Thank you! I was going for a well known case (and trying to document it) but I appreciate the criticism. Some other examples might be comparing JetBlue or SkyWest and United Airlines and other unionized airlines. Albeit there are other obstacles to running an airline business, unions are only one. But these non-unionized airlines are showing consistent profit while their unionized competitors aren't seeing profit even with massive government support (similar non audio link here.)

I might also mention various problems with teachers unions. But that's an entirely different story.

I think most competitive industries that have unions display these tendencies. A government enforced monopoly always seems to be a bad deal for everyone, not just unions. Besides, the main point of my post was not that unions are bad, merely that Carnegie was not an imbecile.

• Bill Parish
• Why Microsoft stock options scare me
• Microsoft's questionable profits

That's not exactly what's happening. The article that you referenced is representative of one MF staffer, and it is posted a rebuttal to a different bullish post. From the article:

"While Google is my favorite search engine, its valuation gives me the heebie-jeebies. Since Rick was kind enough to respond to my original article, I thought it was only fair to respond to his, albeit belatedly. Of course, I still think Google is quite overvalued, but Rick does make a persuasive case for the company to be worth every penny."

That's not exactly what's happening. The article that you referenced is representative of one MF staffer, and it is posted a rebuttal to a different bullish post. From the article:

"While Google is my favorite search engine, its valuation gives me the heebie-jeebies. Since Rick was kind enough to respond to my original article, I thought it was only fair to respond to his, albeit belatedly. Of course, I still think Google is quite overvalued, but Rick does make a persuasive case for the company to be worth every penny."

That's not exactly what's happening. The article that you referenced is representative of one MF staffer, and it is posted a rebuttal to a different bullish post. From the article:

"While Google is my favorite search engine, its valuation gives me the heebie-jeebies. Since Rick was kind enough to respond to my original article, I thought it was only fair to respond to his, albeit belatedly. Of course, I still think Google is quite overvalued, but Rick does make a persuasive case for the company to be worth every penny."

Motley Fool staffers are just now realizing that Google is slowly running out of gas. Perhaps all this clickfraud exposure is leaving people wondering how could they get away with this Internet ponzi scam for so long... Luckily Google got a little smarter and quieted the naysayers a bit by doing the MS thing and buying all the competition around them. Smart move. MS bought all threats and consumed them into the heap of junk calls Windows. Google is doing the same slowly via different angles (Skype, Writely ... which competes with MS' Word, Andriod, etc). Anyhow, since its all opinionated, I wonder when will Google's true adclick fraud will truly come to fruition... Experts estimate the true value of what Google would owe would be a couple of BILLION in clickfraud.

Some other folks question their motives as well:

http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2006/mft06050832.htm? ref=foolwatch

The only reason Peapod still exists is because they sold out to the international grocery giant Royal Ahold in 2001, for the princely price of $2.15 a share -- down from $18.50 at its 1997 IPO. Ahold's investment was the only thing that kept Peapod from folding.

Considering that they never earned a profit as an independent operation and were spending $1.60 to ship $1 worth of groceries, it's probably safe to chalk them up with the dot-bombs, even if the Peapod brand is still around.

See Unit 8200, Check Point, and this article.

Ho hum, they've been doing it since the mid 70's. Everyone knows about this.

Uhm, how does this relate to their core business again? Seems like they're going willynilly all over the place, trying to get into anything that can make them marginal revenue to justify their superhigh stock valuations. I thought they said they weren't going to do that, in their stockholder's manual. Motly Fool had a prescient article on them today.

There are lots of bright, talented designers and developers at Microsoft. Granted, most of the ones in higher management vested their stock options and cashed out long ago (which may partially explain their current inability to ship product on time). Personally, I feel that if they would just let the engineers design a product to meet customers needs instead of having marketing design a product to maximize customer lock-in, they could still come out with some really cool software. Freeing the application developers to write software for non-MS platforms could even improve profitability. But yes, I beleive their current management is acting as an impediment to innovation, rather than encouraging it.

No, news.com is part of CNET. http://www.cnetnetworks.com/. They're their own little company. NASDAQ: CNET

Well no.

The trouble is that so many people bought SCO stock - shorted is the correct term in this case - in the expectation that it would be worthless in the future and they would make a killing. This hasn't happened, the case is still going and SCO are still in existent, so that the buyers are having to front up with the cash to cover the shorts. This explains the price.

Try this link, SCO is briefly mentioned.

linkhttp://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2005/comme ntary05080403.htm?source=eptyholnk303100&logvisit= y&npu=y&bounce=y&bounce2=y

There is another company that has doesn't do stock splits, you may have heard of them: Berkshire Hathaway which is currently trading at about $90,000 per A share.

Exactly (mod parent up please!). I've been to Berkshire Hathaway meetings and it is pretty apparent that Warren and Charlie want a certain demographic as investors. They're not interested in daytrading riffraff screwing with their stock and prefer investors with a long approach to the market.

There's a lot to be said from taking a long-term growth approach. Read The Motley Fool on a regular basis if you're interested in actually making money in your investments.

http://www.fool.com/news/mft/2005/mft05100301.htm? source=eptyholnk303100&logvisit=y&npu=y&bounce=y&b ounce2=y

"Shares surged nearly 30% higher on the news -- and with good reason. The company is experiencing sequential improvement in the current quarter as more corporate customers take a shine to open-source solutions."

RHAT is now at $23.13 a share.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=RHAT&t=5y

Read the Motley Fool

In america on the other hand, people are largely used to the capitalistic way of doing things: i.e. you earn money and you find someone who can sell what you need. Anything new (like GPL) that breaks this line of thinking immediately puts people on the defensive.

Neither GPL nor Linux prevents profits, examples are Redhat and to a lesser extent MySQL. Though it's not in Microsoft's league Redhat is making a profit. Businesses like IBM are moving from selling products to providing a service, they can "give away" software then sale service and support. Though it's a different economy it still offers the possibility of making money.

..and here's the original Motley Fool article that the GameDaily article quotes from (since neither it or the /. post link to it):

http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2005/mft05100306.htm

(And FYI, in Motley Fool speak, when they refer to "Fools", they are refering to themselves and their target audience as investors - it's a gentle self-deprecating reminder that investing is risky.)

For an understanding of why Linus has to do this, read this article at the Motley Fool (registration might be required)

http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rule maker000501.htm

which Microsoft thought was between them and Google.

Where did this come from? It certainly wasn't part of the article. With BAIDU's IPO, and Yahoo expanding its index count to 20B pages (almost 4x Google's count), I seriously doubt that anyone in the search engine business thinks they can predict who will dominate in a few years - it's possible that the next "pagerank killer" is written by some CS grad students or by a search engine company that hardly anyone has heard of (yet).

When President Bush referred to The Internets, many people thought he was mis-speaking. He was apparently foreshadowing a plan to make sure that Europe gets off our Internet and makes their own!

This article states that Apple's target is Dell. You should check it out. I have my little coment about the article on my blog (not that its important or anything).

Throwing more gasoline on the conflagration, The Motley Fool has an opinion piece stating that Apple will eventually ink a deal with AMD, and I have to say that it makes sense. Jobs' bombshell on Monday really sent the message that Apple is willing to jump ship if their CPU supplier can't deliver the goods. Having been burned by their erstwhile AIM partners (Motorola and IBM), His Steveness will not be embarassed a third time by a chipmaker. I'd have paid good money to have heard Mr. Meltdown's tirade when it became apparent that IBM had left them holding the bag.

You're thinking in terms of how $3 million would affect you, with your everyday income, vs. how $3 million would affect Yahoo, with their net sales per quarter at just below $1 billion, and net income of over $100 million. (You may have to enter the specific stock, YHOO, and select Financials - motleyfool is funny about letting people just hop into their website. Login foo@mailinator.com, if they ask for it - thanx bugmenot)

This is like suing you for a can of Coca-Cola for you refusing to take down information that can be used to harass someone. It sounds like a lot to us, but given that requests didn't do anything, I doubt that a smaller dollar amount would have elicited a response. This is a big enough dollar amount to be 'newsworthy', and brings public pressure on Yahoo to do the right thing here.

Oh god... monkey boy was right?

Then they started charging membership fees. Membership #'s dropped, and with the lack of members, the amount and quality of information and oppinions dropped as well. It became basically useless compared to what it once was. I don't know what it looks like nowdays, but I won't be going back there any time soon to find out.

I think you need to bone up on how to read financial statements and pick stocks.

For example, MSFT has a P/E of 24.5. Dor a good explanation of P/E, look here

By comparison, AAPL's is 40 and that other Slashdot darling, GOOG's, is at 88!

DTV is not dropping Tivo. DirecTV was purchased by NewsCorp which is owned by Rupert Murdoch as we know. One of his other companies happened to be working on a DVR already. So yes, they will be offering that as an option as well.

But... the NDS DVR isn't out yet and DTV is still actively promoting Tivo both on-air and through combo deals to sign up for service. DTV's contract with Tivo lasts through 2007, and even then they can't just drop Tivo overnight. By the end of January, Tivo had signed up 3 million subscribers, and approx 2/3 of those are DTV subscribers. DTV would be foolish to drop support for something that 2 million of their customers know and love, especially since even if the NDS box is free, if it has problems or just doesn't live up to Tivo, there will likely be a customer backlash.

Take for example Comcast's own foray into DVR land. Users were less than satisfied [login required] and as a result, Comcast recently struck a deal with Tivo to co-develop a DVR based on Tivo technology.

Meanwhile Tivo has released a SDK and encouraged Java programmers to develop applications to make Tivo even more useful. Imagine shows like Survivor! that auction off props at the end of the season for charity being able to send you directly to Ebay on your Tivo!

There are also rumors of a partnership or aquisition of Tivo by Google for an as yet announced Video search/play on-demand product. Tivo already has a partnertship with Netflix to explore and develop technology for on-demand movie downloads.

Tivo needs to work hard in the coming months, but overall I think rumors of Tivo's imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Yeah, the stock got slammed even though Apple beat earnings estimates by $.10/share (not too shabby). The explanation is that iPod sales are up 16%, but iPod revenue is down 16% (they keep slashing prices)... yes, Wall Street views Apple as the maker of iPod and little else. Apparently the drop is because higher expectations were built into the price at $42/43 a few days ago (when I should have sold).

I'm holding for now and hoping Tiger/mini drives up some revenue in the next quarter or two. Hey, it might even be a buying opportunity. Of course, if you're looking for stock advice, you're reading the wrong message board and especially the wrong poster (my track record is mediocre)

Ask Jeeves what he's worth and you get this article from 2000.

think again

The link below is an interview with Reed Hastings on financial site htp:wwwfoolcom. If your a netflix fan it is a good read. They tend to be a bit softball, but Reed comes across very well. I think that Netflix will be first out with a good video on demand service. http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2005/commentar y05020204.htm/

Who is the third?! Deaths always come in threes.

Well, we have a few candidates: Hunter S. Thompson?(Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).

Or Sandra Dee(also known as Gidget)

Or Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman, The Crucible)

FORTRAN?

SCO?

Delicious Delicacies?

Spreadfirefox.com?

The company project manager?

I would also look for prior art in Alexa's existing patents and public software. In the latter case, I believe zBubbles, Alexa Internet's comparison shopping tool from 1999/2000, did dynamic linking from pages to products, going so far as to insert product links (bubbles) into pages as the user visits them.

Here's a description of zBubbles from the Motley Fool, 3 Jan 2000:

After you download zBubbles, whenever you visit a commerce site that the software is programmed to compare against, a small icon in the corner of your Web browser changes color. Then, next to the product that you're viewing, small Z icons appear. When you click an icon, a "bubble" pops up to cover one-fifth of your screen. The bubble shows you where else you can buy the product, or related products, and it links to websites that may offer a cheaper price or even a better product. The bubble also tells you if Amazon sells the product and, if it does, you can buy the product from Amazon without leaving the site you're visiting. (It also links to customer product reviews housed on Amazon.)

This is the end game.