It was reportedly the second-most requested U.S. government agency to go online, and now it has happened - the Supreme Court opened up its own website April 17. The site features an overview of the Court, its current docket, calendar, and schedules, opinions, orders, rules, and other points of information on the nation's highest court. Some judiciary watchers hope this means more courts following suit. "An official Supreme Court website is a giant step forward toward judicial branch openness," said Ari Schwartz, a Center for Democracy policy analyst. You can learn more by visiting www.supremecourtus.gov.
NEW YORK - That inflation-triggered temblor among the high-tech stocks last week may have rattled a few cyberbones, but there are still a number of dot.coms willing to take the IPO plunge. A decent number of dot.com and other high-tech companies made their IPOs even as at least a half dozen postponed or pulled theirs. "The IPO market is continuing to trudge along," said Ben Holmes, founder of Ipopros.com, to Wired. He said the more solid deals among them are pressing on, even if performances so far are mixed. Voice integration software maker Nuance Communications stock doubled when it debuted April 13, and the Chinese portal Sina.com saw its shares climb a few. And AltaVista plans to forge ahead with an IPO it hopes to raise some $280 million. Said WorldFinanceNet.com research director Irv DeGraw, "The good quality companies will still do IPOs, and they're still getting valuation, but some of the wilder story stocks are beginning to fall to earth."
NEW YORK - Controversial MP3 music file exchange Napster took a nap April 17 - Web surfers and Napster junkies found the company servers unavailable at around 7 a.m. PDT. The trouble seems to have stemmed from Napster's hosting service, AboveNet, having trouble with its backbone connection to Sprint, according to published reports. AboveNet technician Mike Peyzner confirmed the Napster failure but was unable to say when full availability would come back. Napster servers became available at noon, according to Wired, but service connections remains sporadic throughout the day. Another cause might have been incorrectly rerouted traffic cabling. These Napster outages followed the music file exchange's being hit last week with a copyright infringement lawsuit by heavy metal band Metallica.
--- Compiled by Humphrey Pennyworth
