But on the hype meter, high-technology trade shows bury the needle.
And out of the wings of the vast auditorium at PC Expo, New York's glitziest high-technology trade show, walked the computer scientist David Gelernter.
While working for Communications Daily, a high-technology trade journal, in the early 1990's, he began writing a column about technology in his spare time and distributed it over the Internet.
Breaking with its previous antiregulatory stance, the association, the nation's biggest high-technology trade group, released a set of guidelines outlining what it would consider to be appropriate consumer privacy legislation.
"The most important vote of this decade is going to be China because it clearly translates into investment, new markets, jobs," said Dave McCurdy, a former House Democrat who is the president of the Electronic Industries Alliance, a major high-technology trade group.
Moscow has agreed to far tighter United Nations Security Council sanctions on Iran's high-technology trade, and it recently refused to sell Tehran advanced surface-to-air missiles".
Along with Enron's gas pipelines and high-technology trading floor, Dynegy will take on Enron's substantial debt and a web of complex transactions that Enron has spun over the last decade.
In comparison to the Japanese financial markets, where HFT traders have been engaged in an arms race for high-technology trading, Hong Kong's regulators have been hesitant to permit the adoption of the same type of competition that drives trading by the millisecond.
Over the past ten or fifteen years, though, Peres's beliefs have shifted; today, he envisions a "new Middle East," a borderless place organized not along the principles of blood and tribe but around high technology and free trade.
The drop in sales has coincided with a reversal in America's balance of trade in high technology, which went negative in 2002 and has stayed there.
With about 815 million people going to sleep hungry, the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says that development experts mesmerized by international trade and high technology need to tackle poverty first.
