Some European telecoms groups fear Google will reduce them to 'dumb pipes' because the internet search and advertising company pays the network operators little or nothing for carrying its content.

That's because they *are* dumb pipes. That's their bloody job, moving bits around. That's all I'm paying my ISP for... I don't use their portal or email account or anything. Get used to it... you worked hard enough to become dumb pipes, throwing out services that you could actually provide more efficiently than websites like Usenet... you made your bed, sleep well.

The word "Furtive" is derived from the Latin word for "thief".

That seems about right.

Did you search for "garden lighting" and her local area?

There are 350 "metropolitan areas" in the US, each of which must have at least a couple of shops selling "garden lighting". Let's say only half of them have a web page. At 10 results per page, unless there's something particularly compelling about her particular store, you would expect to find her around 17 pages down.

Where does she come up when people look for lighting and *her area*?

Nice Try, but that's what they said about MS-DOS 4.0, that was supposed to have multitasking and Microsoft Xenix compatibility.

1997: Adobe wants Apple to pay workstation prices for Display Postscript licenses for the new OS, "Rhapsody", which would have completely priced them out of the market. Apple has to rewrite the graphics layer for Rhapsody/OS X, and it's delayed 2-3 years.

2010: Payback is a bitch.

Where's Office 13?

I loved fig newtons when I was a little kid, but I had no idea what they actually had in them, so I called them "squashed fly biscuits".

I've used Yahoo since the mid 90's. Where was Google then?

What part of "Altavista" and "Lycos" did you miss?

Efficiency per unit area?

Efficiency per "swept area"?

Efficiency per surface area?

His construct appears to require more than 2.5 times the material of a flat collector, and generates only about 30% more energy at peak. How does it compare to a flat collector with the same surface area, or to three flat collectors angled for morning, noon, and evening sun?

The obvious next steps below Zepto would be Grouchto, Harpto, and Chicto. If they'd followed the logical course they'd be set for another two orders of magnitude, instead of having to come up with a new name in the middle of a recession. Do they think SI prefixes grow on trees or something?

Has Yahoo EVER been the preferred search engine? By ANYONE?

As far as I can recall the least sucky search choice before Google was Altavista, and before that Lycos.

You (and the article author) are using a definition of "computer generated" that is startling in its obtuseness.

The image is computer generated. Just like those nifty maps of the ocean bottoms that every world map made in the past quarter century seems to have used.

Looking at their web page, you can't run it in a browser from the web, or by downloading it. You have to download it and build it, and people are reporting all kinds of problems getting it to work.

What's actually going on behind the curtain?

I don't want the iPad or cabinet, I just want the game.