After the rise, after the fall, after the ongoing recovery of the dot-com world, quo vadis - where are you going? How do you bag the big fish in your stream? If you don't know that, it's like shooting fish in the Gulf Stream without a pair of sights.

We have always thought the pair of sights required to hit the target of the future are hindsight and foresight. We have sought them out and found them where we could, and where they have been elusive we have tagged onto those who point the way. We started at the beginning, in the audio world...

Our first article, never posted, was a diatribe on MP3, before newly born Napster compelled notice, entitled "MP3:. wavs Break On The Shore, But The Sea Remains." Hey, what did we know? It went like this:

In 1750 B.C., Babylonian lawgiver Hammurabi wrote: "If any one ensnare another, putting a ban upon him, but he can not prove it, then he that ensnared him shall be put to death." Right there - in a hot new medium, which at the time was cuneiform chiseled in basalt - serious overreaction to intellectual property disputes! Well, close...

But sound familiar? As MP3 sweeps the country's imagination if not exactly rolling over the stock market's, the age-old debate about how far to go to protect your tunes once more has proceeded one toke over the line. You wonder how long it will take for the business powers that be to realize that giving rein to new technology, not reining it in, is where the money is to be found...

Let's try printing - the Church tried to restrict it, control it, believing it threatened the proper propagation of God's word, and all to no avail. Books - they were just the information vehicle you could hold in your hand. What did the Church get for its efforts? 500 years later, the Bible is the all-time world-publishing hit. We should all fail so successfully...