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Looks like pellets for hydrogen exists from several different companies.

This article: http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumerinfo/factsheets /a109.html

"A company in Utah, Power Ball Technologies, has developed a process in which sodium metal is pelletized and encapsulated with polyethylene plastic. The pellets can then be containerized, transported, and then opened in a patented hydrogen generator to produce hydrogen gas. According to the company, each gallon of these pellets is capable of producing 1,307 gallons of hydrogen gas, which is an equivalent hydrogen storage density more than 7 times greater by volume than a compressed hydrogen tank storing hydrogen at 3,000 psi."

I found another aritcle where pellets go through a chemical reaction to release hydrogen.

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=13355&hed =New+Hydrogen-Making+Method

Not sure if these methods are related to the article above, but may lead to more information

If the telecom's can get the market deregulated ,they should be able to push the smaller guys (vonage) out of the market. The risks are certainly high in the TechCom market pending regulatory approval, but the payoff for those who choose wisely is going to be big.

Of course, a monopoly doesn't like competition.
Even a small company doesn't like competition.
'Everyone' means consumers, the public.

That's a very interesting point you make; however, I could add that although many small companies don't 'want' competition, they don't go out of their way to prevent it like Microsoft does.

And, if companies don't like competition, why do we have conflicting messages from Microsoft that would lead us to believe otherwise?

"Microsoft welcomes competition because it drives innovation which benefits customers" - Microsoft (here).

If Microsoft welcomes (i.e. accepts with pleasure) competition, it should open up its file formats, APIs and protocols. That should certainly drive innovation, and certainly benefit customers.

Or is Microsoft lying?

You jest, but actually China is stepping up efforts due to international pressure.

Iron Mountain..ya, that's safe too... http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=11976&hed =Iron+Mountain+Lost+Worker+Data

But the Real ID Act does not target only illegal aliens (which is IMHO justification enough for this bill to pass). Forcing a common standard across the USA for what is considered to be a primary form of identification (DL), this act also offers some relief from the explosion of identity theft that has occurred in this country.

Do you really think a national id will reduce id theft? If anything it'll make it easier.

2. Stolen Identities.
Our new IDs will have to make their data available through a "common machine-readable technology". That will make it easy for anybody in private industry to snap up the data on these IDs. Bars swiping licenses to collect personal data on customers will be just the tip of the iceberg as every convenience store learns to grab that data and sell it to Big Data for a nickel. It won't matter whether the states and federal government protect the data - it will be harvested by the private sector, which will keep it in a parallel database not subject even to the limited privacy rules in effect for the government.

radio-frequency identification (RFID)
... RFID has several limitations, security experts point out. With some basic equipment, almost anyone can surreptitiously read all the ID Cards in an area, or track an individual as he or she moves throughout the day. The technology makes downloading someone's personal data easy. "Once you have a machine-readable ID, it will be read by machines," said Mr. Schneier. And some of those machines will belong to people you don't want to read your data....

Employers that hire illegal aliens are getting a free ride from the rest of the USA's taxpayers. The public school systems, hospitals and medical centers, fire and police services, and the "social safety net" of government are all being strained by the influx of illegal aliens, most of whom either do not pay taxes, or their taxes are "misappropriated" by those same employers.

Unless they work under the table how is it they aren't paying taxes? They still pay income taxes and social security taxes even though they maybe won't collect social security later, they pay sales taxes and they either pay property taxes themselves if they own property or they pay rent and the rental owner not only pays property taxes but they also pay income taxes on the rent unless it's under the table.

There have been numerous tests (such as this one) trying to see how quickly incorrect information is removed. Those errors were never noticed, while another test says it was only hours before the mistakes were fixed. Here's another article about disputes over Wikipedia entries. I tend to agree that Wikipedia's professionalism might actually make it more dangerous because people are more likely to trust it.

(Note to editors: Please don't mention Wikipedia in the story unless it's actually about Wikipedia. It makes searching very difficult.)

Looks like the first large-scale Huawei ADSL deployment will be in Australia:

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=11321&hed =Huawei+snags+Optus+deal/

Optus will be deplying ADSL 2+ (24/3.5mbps) in 300 exchanges. Nice to see that the Aussies have granted competitive access to their copper. Too bad the fuckwits in New Zealand can't follow a good example.

See the second story here.

Skype is bundled with the latest version of Kazaa, and Skype's CEO was a co-creator of Kazaa who jumped ship after the lawsuits first started. Since Skype is the most popular internet call provider, and there have been some attempts to hamper the progress of VOIP, will Kazaa's bad reputation affect VOIP in general?

BitTorrent accounts for 35% of *all* Internet traffic. I think it's safe to say it's already been adopted by the masses.

The benefit is clear: Solaris would have slowed its death spiral from its great height. Why else do you think they Open Sourced it in the first place? They just miscalculated, manouvered badly, and picked the wrong license. Jeers instead of cheers. Not a good marketing move, and certainly not something to garner the same community fervor as only the GPL-oriented can expend. They would have had a majority of defenders instead of detractors. Not something to take lightly in this slippery market. Public noise can make the difference between being independent, and being a subsidiary.

It may even have split the Linux community into adopters of Solaris in addition to Linux. It would have given Sun breathing space in the market, as even IBM would find it hard to argue the point of using Linux to their customers when another robust and battle-tested GPL OS was out there. But, even more importantly, it could have given Linux a real competitive fight, giving both a chance to evolve and surpass each other. The community could've benefited greatly.

Linus understands Sun very well when he says that:

"...from Sun's perspective, the CDDL had to be incompatible with the GPL. Sun "wants to keep a moat against the barbarians at the gate," he wrote in an e-mail interview. Torvalds said he does not expect developers clamoring to start playing with that source code.

"Nobody wants to play with a crippled version [of Solaris]. I, obviously, do believe that they'll have a hard time getting much of a community built up," Torvalds wrote. "I think there are parallels with the Java 'we'll control the process' model. I personally think that their problem is that they want to control the end result too much, and because of that they won't get any of the real advantages of open source." "

And...

"He contrasted Sun's CDDL with the wide-open nature of the GPL. "One of the beauties of the GPL," he said, is that "you have to totally give up control over the project (because everybody literally has the same rights to the whole project), but exactly because nobody can control it, it makes everybody feel like true owners.""

He's right, and Sun will have to learn it the hard way.

So what you end up as you almost always do is a religious argument based on hypothetical scenarios that have no substance in reality. Fine but don't image that it makes anyone with any sense or perspective think that Sun is out to damage GPL. It isn't and in fact all the evidence is that Sun is out to support GPL where it is sensible.

Any GPL developer would be in danger of contaminating his projects if he were to work on Open Solaris AND Linux due to Sun's questionable patent stance. Yes, witholding patents makes sense if you intend to hurt the users of what you consider a competing community. Why else withold from some and give to others? They've performed an action that doesn't require explanation.

Sun was doing Open Source or something rather like it when the perceived wisdom was that this was a very stupid move commercially.

Let's see, Unix source code was floating around and being shared by various universities and companies. Everyone was sharing their improvements. Now that was enlightenment. Sun relicenses what other people had worked on, decides to close their source and suddenly they were enlightened? Please, it's because of companies like Sun that GNU was started in the first place.

"When the service has established a substantial user base, Mr. Sampath plans to monetize Mercora by charging for premium services or offering paid monthly subscriptions."

From a press release here.

Skype already has plans for SkypeIn, coming in 2005.

Solar energy can power your home even during overcast, so that shouldn't matter for those living in Michigan or wherever. However, besides the fact that Intel isn't doing so well recently, solar panel fabrication costs more energy than they provide before breaking down, so solar panels aren't the way to go if the environment or global heating is your concern. They may be however when we want to prevent economic wars like Iraq, as Nobel prize winner recently said.

According to this Red Herring article, most of the claims were copyright claims.

Now that you mention the three channels of vision, it reminds me on an article I read in Red Herring sometime back about a mutant gene that shows up in some women that that gives them 4 channels of vision. It allows the ones lucky enough to have it to have a much sharper perception of color tones - ironically, most that have it aren't even aware that they see the world any different than the rest of us. Do a google on tetrachromatic women.

The Red Herring article is here but you need to give up your first born to read it.

Acocording to this article, the advert costs only $50,000. We already know that The Mozilla Foundation are getting discounts because of the time window, and also because of their non-profit status.

That kind of money could be better used to finance developement.

They will, according to the interview with Rob Davis at redherring.com:

To date, close to 10,000 people have funneled almost $250,000 through Mr. Davis' campaign into the Mozilla Foundation, the Mountain View, California, non-profit organization that is developing Firefox.

The ad will cost just under $50,000, and the left-over cash will be plowed back into the Mozilla Foundation.

On the guy that came up with the idea, Rob Davis.

Clearly not everyone believes Snopes, because I found both the "pinto/penis" and the "nova/no go" stories mentioned here, here, and here. All cite the same usual suspects, so who can tell which are true, and which are false. However, the BBC does mention the "pinto" story here. We all know the BBC never makes anything up...

As the cost of mass storage and processing are approaching zero, various people are predicting that soon hardware will be free. Only the software and content will cost money. But the shift towards content being the only source of profit will make copyright enforcement more and more important. This will mean tighter copyright laws and ever more draconian restrictions on consumer use of technology.

But there's a much deeper shift going on. It's a transition from paying for things because we can't do them ourselves to paying because we aren't allowed to do them. Supply used to be the other side of Demand. With a limitless supply of copies easily available, Supply will be replaced by Permission. Keeping this system going requires much more granular regulation of individual behavior.

I try to put it in a historical context. Not long ago, North America was a land where if you wanted to you could walk out into the wilds with some tools, build a cabin, put up a fence and start farming. Nowadays every square inch of land is owned by somebody or something, and usually not by the people who live on it. We borrow and pay. Even after your house is paid for you still don't really "own" it, because if you don't keep paying your property taxes you can get kicked out. Sounds like rent to me.

But we've gotten used to all that. We will probably also get used to the notion that other people own everything we see and hear. Within our lifetimes most information and media content will probably be on a pay-per-view basis. It will be editable or removable at any time by the owners. History will disappear unless individual people choose to privately write things down -- paraphrasing of course, not quoting. I think people will tolerate restrictions and loss of privacy for the sake of copyright protection just as we have accepted the authority of planning commissions and building inspectors for the sake of public safety. That's what I think will happen anyway, but somehow I still don't like it.

There is a caveat in the ranking of Linux vendors: Novell is No.2 if you don't count IBM and Hewlett-Packard, which probably sell most of the Linux software going into the enterprise market.

loc. cit.: "If Linux is free, why's it so expensive?"

Good point. Think about it. Think if the system as it works really is a s free as intended.

CC.

http://www.redherring.com/vc/2002/0111/947.html

However that article is now pulled from the redherring.com site. Luckily i was able to restaurate that article :

http://crashrecovery.org/carlyle_group.pdf

Robert

The Heavyweight Sea Snail

Scotland, like many European countries, must comply with regulations requiring that a mandatory percentage of the energy it uses comes from renewable sources. For Scotland, this percentage will be 18% in 2010 and 40% by 2020. In "Tidal farming's new wave," Red Herring explains this why Scotland is very supportive of Ian Bryden's sea "Snail" program. The Snail is a 30-ton anchoring device which uses hydrofoils -- wings that "fly" in the water -- to generate enough power from tidal waves to service 10,000 homes by 2007.

Here is the introduction of Red Herring's article.

After losing the wind wars to the Danes in the early '80s, Scotland is on the verge of owning a small, yet significant new power market -- tidal energy.

Inventors have long dreamt of harnessing energy from the daily ebb and flow of ocean tides using underwater windmills. Yet a large-scale tidal farm has remained elusive -- at least, until now. Making use of Scotland's geographic assets and answering a renewed call for an energy alternative, Aberdeen scientist Ian Bryden is putting his new invention, "the Snail," to work.

So what exactly is the "Snail"?

At Aberdeen's Robert Gordon University, Mr. Bryden has circumvented traditional turbine designs. His brainchild, the Snail, is a 15x12 meter (roughly 49x39 feet) anchoring device that uses hydrofoils -- what scientists describe as wings that "fly" in water -- to generate more than 200 tons of downward force to the seabed. Six dragon-like wings attach the unit to the national grid.

Here is a picture of a prototype of the Snail with its six wings (Credit: Robert Gordon University)

Red Herring also says that the Snail will cost less than traditional technologies relying on turbines. So when will the Snails invade the seas?

The first experimental tidal farm, to be launched in 2007, will yield just 5MW at first, enough for around 10,000 homes. While possessing only enough energy to power less than one quarter one percent of Scotland's population, it would mark a significant first step for the emerging technology.

Scotland has identified Orkney's Pentland Firth and Shetland's Yell Sound -- about 330 miles north of Edinburgh -- as its best sites for harnessing tidal power. Both have sea channels and are exposed to the Atlantic, making the area a prime location for capturing big tidal movements. An energy test site has already been built using a local investment of 5 million pounds ($9.18 million).

Providing that this technology is licensed to one or several developers, other European countries will also be able to use Snails to produce clean energy at reasonable costs.

For more information, you might want to check this news release from Robert Gordon University, "University Research Team Poised for SNAIL launch."

Sources: Red Herring, March 25, 2004; Robert Gordon University

Now, it is starting to be seen at the fringes of management, as seen in the current article below from Red Herring. Yes, this is for the advance guard investor audience, but it is still the begnning of the pendulum swinging the other way.

Top 10 trends: Outsourcing backlash

Yes, the A.C. points to a good article. Now here is link that works.

Not sure about you but the first thing I thought of when reading this headline was that it applies to the RedHerring's mode(s) of commucation as well. phphhhhht! What was that? Smells like a money-grubbing silicon valley "journalist"-come-lately to me.

• Death by Finance
• Toxic Convert A Desperate, Dangerous Instrument

Now I am not savvy enough to know if this deal SCOX made is a deal with the devil and a classic toxic convert or not, I'm not that knowledgable about these things. I do have no idea why private investors are still buying SCOX though.

Note, all this info comes from the Yahoo SCOX board -- fascinating reading, like the below quote from yoyotogoismyname, who has been one of SCOX's biggest long shrills for several weeks now. Soon as he heard about the $50M investment, he dumped his SCOX stock.

Baystar can send this company to bankruptcy and still demand that SCOX pay it back its $50 million. How is that? If the stock price drops to near zero, Baystar makes out OK since they are short SCOX. Plus they get to be first in line to collect from a bankrupt SCOX after the banks or senior bondholders. If SCOX rises, these guys lose nothing since they got the shares for $16 and change. The convertible shares covers any lost from the short. What is worse is there is a built in arb. These guys get to pocket 20-16.5=3.5 per share* 3 million= $10.5 million, INSTANTLY!!!! PLUS that convert pays an interest amount. FU SCOX!!!!!

The company also has a knack for placing good bets when it comes to the Internet. In March SAIC received a windfall when VeriSign (Herring 100) announced a $17 billion all-stock purchase of the domain-name registration company Network Solutions , which SAIC bought for under $5 million in 1995. It will make SAIC VeriSign's largest shareholder, with a 9 percent stake -- worth almost $4 billion at the time of the announcement. That will leave lots of cash on hand for future acquisitions.

Maybe you should check out the site and see what it says.

I think your view of the evolution of the US is unfortunate and at its roots simply pessimistic for pessimism's sake -- or perhaps a little prejudiced? I mean no insult, just my genuine feeling from your post.

You back little of what you say with data, and have peppered your argument with the kinds of 'proletariat overthrowing the bourgeious' Marxist rhetoric that died with, well, a vast majority of the Marxist states. Dialectical Materialism is all but dead, unless you like what's happening in Vietnam and Cuba.

For the middle class, undoubtedly the most powerful entity in the US ecoonomy, to die, and the lower-income segment of the population dominate the population numbers, a huge disparity in wealth would have to occur. Mind you I write 'wealth', not 'income'. Look at the average middle-class American, his/her life is not necessarily so different than that of the elite. TVs, nice cars, vacations, McMansions, all of these things abound. The *relative* cost of material wealth in the US, and for the most part the rest of the capitalist world, is constantly decreasing when compared to income.

It's also pretty easy to find data that debunks your claim that there is a blooming lower-income representation in the US. There is a *huge* amount of mobility in America in terms of income. As long as the lowliest, poor, academically challenged kid can train to become a plumber and make six figures, people in the US will continue to (with notable exceptions) rightly blame themselves when they're unhappy with their incomes/overall wealth. Mobility is alive and well, and small-medium sized mom 'n pop businesses continue to be a backbone for the economy.

Your post was lined with an implicit criticism of materialism in the US. I couldn't agree with you more, there. What famous Marxist said something to the effect that the West would sell the noose to its executioner? Unfortunately, it seems like the charge from materialism leads quickly to religious fundamentalism, a disease that is quickly spreading through all parts of the globe.

Spoken like a person that has not spent years of his life devloping an IP.

Spoken like someone who thinks that their ideas are original, like they didn't get ideas from anyone else. There are plenty of people who spend a lot of time developing something but a lot of them recognize that their work is just like everyone else's--their work is fodder for the next incremental advance in expression. There's nothing new under the sun, as Shakespeare said; no idea comes from nothing and you have no legitimate sole claim to the expressions of your ideas. You benefit from a leaky copyright system--fair use helps preserve freedom of speech. Copyright power is supposed to be limited.

Second, you cannot understand how ideas work by thinking in terms of "IP" (intellectual property). That phrase is prejudicial and a mish-mash of laws that can sometimes conflict with one another. What we're talking about in this thread primarily concerns copyright policy and the anti-social idea that copyright is property (which even the law doesn't completely agree with), so call it by its name.

Ironically, Itagaki's concern would seem out of place in other areas of life, maybe even an outright affront to people's right of expression--nobody would balk at you modifying a recipe to suit your needs (even a recipe from a copyrighted recipe book published commercially), adding a room on to your house, or changing the brake pads on your car without going to the manufacturer's garage. Nor would they balk at helping other people do any of these things by distributing information or kits on how to do it. But modify a videogame? Maybe we should take the lessons from the dojinshi market more seriously. According to the Dojinshi article, artists (who I'm sure "have a financial and emotional investment" in their work) all effectively share with each other and cultivate a comic book market that consumers apparently enjoy.

Lawrence Lessig's comments on lawyers and comics seem relevant here. Or rather here.

In short, Lessig argues that the harm done by fan fiction is at least in some cases a fiction created by lawyers who don't necessarily have their clients' interests in mind.

Can't find the original story I read, but I remember that Lucent once tried to sue a number of former employees who left to join Cisco. IIRC the judge laughed the suit out of court partly due to the fact that he found Lucent's technology to be so far behind Cisco's at the time that he couldn't see any chance of Cisco actually being able to use any of Lucent's obsolete "secrets".

The best reference to the case I could find just mentions that the judge couldn't find any injury to Lucent but also that he found fault the management practices that caused them to leave in the first place. I'm not sure what happened on appeal.

It's also a fine example to set for other businesses whose livelihood does not depend on milking revenue from the last 2 percent of works created up to 120 years before. If more publishers will take this step to restore the original intent and implementation of the Founding Fathers then this can be used as an argument against extending copyright to Life+100 which looks to be the next milestone on the 'Privatize the Public Domain' moebius strip.

Is not! Is so! IS NOT! IS SO!

If you're going to argue this point, you need to do better than reference a couple of the greatest SF books of all time; by their nature, they are exceptions. You're going to need numbers that give us the longevity of the typical work, not the exceptional one.

My numbers:
In 1930, 10,027 books were published. Today, 174 of those books are still in print. Source: a Red Herring article on copyright

The other 9,853 books are not deemed worth the cost of keeping in print, or the rights owner has died and no one knows who has the power to grant permission, or a thousand different reasons, all of which keep the work "frozen", even if someone wants to do something with it as a labor of love, or perhaps in a niche market that doesn't interest the rights holder.

Keep in mind that, for the vast majority of works, the slope of the sales curve is initially very steep; 80% of a typical paperback title's copies are sold in the first 3 months (source). Or consider music; for the last few years there have been about 25,000 to 35,000 new titles released each year, of these about 7,000 are released on major labels, and of those only about 10% are profitable (source). We can safely assume that the unprofitable titles go out of print. A small percentage are re-issued by indie labels, but again, the majority of titles end up in the vault, waiting for copyright to expire, useful to no one.

All this from a guy who couldn't keep his last million dollar investment on the road

But I'm sure he has things figured out this time.

How many people in IT have heard BS like this time after time year after year...?

Its bad enough I have to hear this bullshit at work, 'forecasts' made by a buzzspeaking fuckstick that never ring true, but *please* don't let this garbage take over Slashdot...It may not be much, but this place is all I have left...*sniff*

Seriously, if you want to read garbage like this pick up a Information Week Red Herring or Business 2.0 then look at the people that are reading them.

Dont want to read it anymore do you?

Here's a good analysis on the current state of CPU heat, for those of us who need to be brought up-to-date on the subject to understand the benefits of the new technology...

Take a look at Iceland's initiative to go to all hydrogen powered vehicles. Do a search for "Iceland's Hydrogen Economy" to find all sorts of info on how hydrogen is working for them and their bid to convert their country completely by 2030-40. They'll open their first hydrogen filling station in April of this year, starting with some of their bus lines using it, and eventually plan to convert their fishing fleet, etc. Some amazing stuff really.

Some other good links are:
American Hydrogen Association
and
Fuel Cells Explained

Here

Here

Here

and here.

First two things to learn in journalism school: Behind every newsworthy event, find out who benefits and follow the money. That's where you'll find the REAL story.

Here is a similar story on CNet.

And, for more on the "cell" technology, check out this Red Herring article from last summer, and this Inquirier.net article that includes a picture from the USPT office.

Given all that, I'd still be surprised if this was in US stores in time for XMas. I just don't think they'll have enough time to hype it sufficiently. On the other hand, if the tech is really almost done, do they want to wait until XMas 2004? Hrm....

Nevertheless, I predict that GNOME/GTK will eventually usurp the lion's share of open-source desktops. It all comes down to money. In this case, the money depends upon software licensing.

What I'm really betting on is the Trolltech (www.trolltech.com) GUI programming toolkit, Qt, upon which KDE is based. (Gnome is based upon GTK, aka the Gimp Toolkit).

News as a source of reliable trade information has gone to hell. Once focused on objective reporting of the facts, much of the media is now convinced that what you really want is news analysis. Unfortunately, news analysis is turning out to be nothing more than a reporter's opinion.

I just did and it looks very clued in. If they go, I wonder how The Register is going to survive. Whatever happened to micropayments? I would pay a quarter to get access to many sites for a day, including possibly slashdot. As long as I could really just pay a quarter and not have to subscribe.

If you go to the Red Herringwebsite, please notice the prominent "SUBSCRIBE NOW" button on the left navigation bar.
So if you want to spend $34.95 for a dead magazine, you still can.
But hurry up, the website is supposed to close within two weeks.
Too bad!
Roland Piquepaille (Technology Trends)

Red Herring doesn't even have a story on this major news... Maybe they couldn't afford to pay anyone to update it.

There have been several comments that the BSA claim to represent the copyright owners is false because OpenOffice.org is not a member of the BSA. I wanted to point out that while it is true that the OpenOffice.org is not a member of the BSA and has probably never asked the BSA to represent them, they also still are not the owners of OpenOffice. Rather, anyone that contributes to OpenOffice is required to sign a Joint Copyright Assignment (JCA) which assigns the Copyright to Sun Microsystems. While this might seems like a simple symatics, you should also take not that the JCA does not require that future version be provided under the GPL or even under the SCSL. I raised this issue over two years ago and was told that the JCA would be changed to assign copyright to OpenOffice when they became a legal entity. Since then nothing has changed. While Sun MicroSystems has had a history of avoiding membership in the BSA, they still may change their minds.

On a side note, Santa Cruz Operations (or formally Caldera Systems) *IS* a member of the BSA and therefore indirectly (or directly) contributing to issuing these false positives with strong threatening legal language against Free Software works. As already pointed out the "apology" was not in regards to the claim of infringement being false but rather the apology was in regards to the fact it did not figure out "which property was infringed." Anotherwords, the SCO sponsered group still claims there is a copyright infringement but no longer that they represent the owner. At the same time, the notifiction clearly shows that the site is distributing the source code, thus complying with the terms of the GPL (one of the two licenses which can be used for distribution of OpenOffice). Anyone that does buy products from SCO may wish to let them know that their membership in the BSA helps contribute to activities of threats of legal action against the distribution of Free Software and probably will have a chilling effect on the adopting of Free Software based products if it continues.

You mean that country with this highest rate of broadband adoption? That country where broadband is subsidized in a true socialist fashion?

Yeah, that would be a good idea.

Oh, and if the bells' lines are their "property" then their property is illegally tresspassing on my land. I demand rent starting now at $1000/day, or I'll dig them up. I expect them to also begin paying rent to the government for any of their equipment that passes through public property, under streets that my tax dollars have paid for, for example.

June 1999: CMGI buys AltaVista from Compaq for $2.3 billion in stocks.

"On Tuesday [the day after the sale], CMGI closed at $110.31, up $12.63, or 12.92 percent, with 13,921,400 shares traded.
'It's a great deal for them [CMGI],' says Ullas Naik, analyst with FAC Equities. 'AltaVista is an underappreciated and underused asset. CMGI can leverage that and cross-pollinate it with their existing companies and then they'll probably be able to spin it off as an IPO in six to nine months at a significant premium to what they paid.'"

December 1999, AltaVista files for IPO. (DEC had made plans to have AltaVista go public in 1996, but recanted the following year.)

April 2000: IPO delayed.

"CMGI was enjoying a midday bounce of nearly 6 percent to $55.13 [half of what it was not one year before, mind you]."

January 2001: IPO withdrawn.

"[During 2000, chief executive David] Wetherell's CMGI shares fell from a value of $2.1 billion at the beginning of the year to $100 million at year's end, a 95 percent decline."

I wouldn't worry about Google. It's made grown men cry. All over their worthless stocks.