The DVD was sitting in Michael Waltrip's house for nine and a half years while the accident churned inside him.
The best of the bunch, Credit Suisse First Boston, had a net gain of 7.6percentt over almost four and a half years, while the worst, the Robertson Stephens unit of the FleetBoston Financial Corporation, had an overall net loss of more than 36percentt.
Its profits, however, are bigger than Bernie Madoff would ever have dared to fake: an improbable 83 percent return over two and a half years, while the markets were fretful and sinking by a quarter of their value.
New data from Beijing showed the manufacturing sector had declined in August by its largest amount for six and a half years while the government has also unnerved traders with a surprise devaluation of the currency earlier this month.
Strength in telecommunications-related issues helped push the Nasdaq composite index to its highest point in two and a half years, while the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index and the Dow Jones industrial average reached peaks unseen in a bit under two years.
Many of the financier J. P. Morgan's favorite medieval artworks -- the ones that he kept in his private study until his death in 1913 and that have since been housed at the Pierpont Morgan Library -- recently went on view in the Medieval Tapestry Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they will stay for at least two and a half years while the Morgan undergoes a $100 million expansion.
So, at the end of the extension, half of them had been taking the drug for three and a half years while the other half had been taking it for two years.
Implementation of the rules, which call for tripling classroom training for screeners, among other steps, was delayed for two-and-a-half years while the F.A.A. tried to figure out how to measure screeners' performance.
But Gleevec, which was derived partly through genetic studies, moved through clinical trials in two-and-a-half years, while the average drug takes around five years.
"There's two sides to every story," said Mr. Chasanoff, who was out of the classroom for four and a half years while he fought the charges.
