An Award for "Best Lead in a News Story Reporting Microsoft's Decision to Award Restricted Stock Instead of Stock Options" goes to Michael T. Bruno of ISS's Friday Report, who began his July 11 story on Microsoft's announcement:

Microsoft Corp. has done what Max Zorin could not.

In 1985, the fictional Zorin tried to set off an earthquake under Silicon Valley by triggering a fault line with tons of explosives -- at least that's the way it played on-screen in the James Bond movie "A View to a Kill." This week in the real world, all it took was Microsoft releasing a press statement.

Speaking of technology...

Rosenholz Stasi

Technology is coming to the rescue of workers trying to piece thousands of torn files from the former East German secret police agency, the Stasi.
For eight years, staff in Zierndorf, a former West German centre in Bavaria, have had the unenviable job of trying to reconstruct 16,000 brown paper sacks of torn files.
The files, from the Stasi's Magdeburg office, were ripped up during the dying days of the communist regime under orders from Stasi chief Erich Mielke.
· A Writer continued to deny this until one incriminating torn Stasi file was pieced together [NZHerald ]