To the Point

Dot-Com Bomb

The loss of 31,000 high-tech jobs at Hewlett-Packard, JDS Uniphase, and Lucent Technologies mark last Thursday as one of the darkest days in the high-tech industry since it's bubble burst a year ago. In the past six months, the high-tech sector has suffered the loss of 40 percent of its workforce, generating shock waves through an already anemic global economy. We assess the cause and effect of the recession, expectations for recovery, and the erosion of the entrepreneurial spirit itself, with experts from the world of digital communication. Newsmaker: High Profits for Oil Companies - With recent oil prices up, the major oil companies are sitting on some 40 billion dollars in cash from massive profits. Now they have the seemingly enviable problem of figuring out how to spend it. As we hear from John Lichtblau, of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation in New York, the solution is not as easy as it sounds. Reporter's Notebook: NASA Reaches for the Sun - Thirty years ago, the Apollo missions brought back chunks of the Moon. Now, NASA scientists are heading toward the Sun. Cal-Tech's Donald Burnett is chief scientist on the Genesis Project. He fills us in on Wednesday's launch, the cosmic riddle that scientists hope to unravel, and how stunt pilots figure in the extra-terrestrial mission.