the tindog coffeehouse

Yahoo Finance has a list of 15 companies that might go belly-up before year-end. Some, like Chrysler and Blockbuster, are obvious candidates. But Six Flags?

Six Flags. (SIX; about 30,000 employees; stock down 84%). This theme-park operator has been losing money for several years, and selling off properties to try to pay down debt and get back into the black. But the ride may end prematurely. Moody’s expects cash flow to be negative in 2009, and if consumers aren’t spending during the peak summer season, that could imperil the company’s ability to pay debts coming due later this year and in 2010.

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As much as I try to fight it, I’ve realized I’m well on my way to becoming fully assimilated into the Google empire.

It started innocently enough — as it usually does — with an Internet search. Google.com, the ugly, bare search engine with the stupid name but great search results. I hated myself for using it at first but eventually got over it. Fine, it’s ugly, but it’s just a search engine so whatever.

But then it began to evolve into more. I started using Google Maps after Mapquest let me down once too often. Then I reluctantly began using Google Reader for my RSS feeds when Pluck discontinued its reader. Then at some point I installed the Google Toolbar in IE and later Firefox. And I found Google Earth to be a good tool when doing research for my novel.

All along the way, I justified my actions, insisting that I was simply choosing the right tools for the job, each one filling a specific need and nothing more. I was certainly no Google fanboy.

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Yes, I know I’m getting a little preachy here, but hear me out.

There were a couple of related stories that were published recently that I think are important to mention. One was an AP story about free speech on the Internet and how companies such as Yahoo and Google sometimes impose arbitrary limitations on that freedom. The other was a story on Ars Technica about the recent amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an amendment that not only grants telcos immunity for aiding in government wiretapping, but also gives the federal government much broader eavesdropping powers, allowing them to wiretap at will with almost no judicial oversight.

We’re at a point in history where our desire for certain freedoms and civil liberties and our use of the Internet for the exponential flood of information are often at odds with one another. We want to be freely connected to the world, yet even online, there are limits to those freedoms.

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In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the creation of ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Department of Defense agency that would give birth to what is now the Internet, Vanity Fair has attempted to compile an “oral history” of the Internet, from ARPA to today.

So how’d they do?

Al Gore aside, they did pretty well, at least at a high level, interviewing pioneers such as Paul Baran (the inventor of packet-switching), Vint Cerf (the inventor of the TCP and IP protocols), Bob Metcalfe (the inventor of Ethernet), Marc Andreessen (Netscape), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Larry Page (Google), and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia).

It’s mind-blowing to think that something so basic as a computer network wasn’t always so obvious, and how technology that we use every day and take for granted could very easily have never existed but for a few brilliant minds.

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