Word: silicon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...don’t recall the exact moment that New York City became a part of my cultural consciousness, but for as long as I can remember, it’s existed there as a magical possibility. Growing up in Silicon Valley—where computer chips tend to garner far more excitement than “impractical” things like poetry—the idea of a place in which people gather round the ashtray Saturday nights to discuss Kafka’s lost manuscripts seemed incredible. Sure, that initial perception may have been laughably idealistic...
Looking back 20 years later, however, seismologists say the Bay Area got lucky. The epicenter of the quake was near Loma Prieta peak in Santa Clara County, outside the densely populated urban neighborhoods of San Francisco and Oakland. The destruction missed Silicon Valley - with its tens of billions in economic value - altogether. "If that quake had to happen, that was really the best place," says Yanev. "We were about as lucky as we could get." (See TIME's special report "Where Will the Next Five Big Earthquakes...
...think the billions in government subsidies for automobiles are all flowing to Detroit. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is ready to loan nearly $1 billion to Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive, two fledgling automakers with deep roots in Silicon Valley and Southern California...
...boyish 37-year-old Elon Musk, who made a fortune creating and then selling PayPal to eBay, has drawn support from California environmentalists and political figures such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Barbara Boxer, both California Democrats, while Fisker's owners include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley's most successful venture-capital firms, whose partners include former Vice President Al Gore. "This investment will create thousands of new American jobs and is another critical step in making sure we are positioned to compete for the clean-energy jobs of the future," said DOE Secretary Steven...
Wait a second: eBay bought Luxembourg-based Skype from the Scandinavians for $2.6 billion in 2005 - a lofty sum that made the heads of many in Silicon Valley spin. Can the founders now really hope to block the resale of Skype by pulling the technology on which it runs? "People are puzzled about how this happened," says analyst Stephan Beckert with Washington-based TeleGeography Research. "One thing I can say: You don't want to mess with Zennstrom...