First stop: HP, where Patricia Dunn has been "fired" for instigating an investigation that used "pretexting" to figure out which board members might be talking to the press. Back up--she wasn't fired. She'll be demoted from chairwoman to board member come January. That's punishment? Are you kidding me? That's a slap on the wrist. The leaker,

George Keyworth, got the boot (rightly so), but the woman who started the whole sordid mess still pulls in a paycheck. Sheesh. Dunn needs to be dragged out of the boardroom, shoved in a car and driven up to the Windy Hill Open Space Preserve on Skyline Boulevard, where, on a moonlit night with fog creeping in over the ridge, she will be forced to stand alone in a field and wait until the ghosts of Dave and Bill emerge from the woods and call on the Furies to avenge them. The same fate needs to befall famed Valley lawyer Larry Sonsini and HP general counsel Ann Baskins. Only then will this ridiculous and embarrassing episode fade away.

Every entrepreneur in the Valley who dreams of building a great, long-lasting company must have awakened with night terrors over the past three weeks, thinking, "This is what my toil will bring?"

While we're at it, let's inscribe the word pretexting on a piece of paper and toss it onto a pyre fueled by other politically correct words invented by gutless people to avoid plain speaking. Pretexting means pretending you're someone else to gain access to personal records. It's what investigators did to board members and journalists in the HP investigation. Call it what it is: fraud. Should be punishable by prison terms.

The view from here: Pause along Sand Hill Road. At the peak, you can peer east over Stanford, the Hoover Tower and part of the Valley that is covered with buildings that weren't there 50 years ago. The private-equity movement, straining at its leash, is about to roll over the sun-kissed region. It's probably time. Electronics is a mature business. How many microcontroller companies do you need, really? Flash memory outfits? Even FPGA vendors? It's not like it's 1985 and you need a second source in case your primary vendor's line goes down.

I asked a lot of people last week about the nature of innovation in an era when semiconductor vendors, suddenly private, will have to get even more efficient. At least they'll have the luxury of doing it their way rather than Wall Street's way.

Zilog, one of the first to go private years ago, cut off the innovation tap when it did so. After a year or two, with nothing in the pipeline, it had to rebuild development from scratch--costly and time-consuming. So innovation is still necessary. It's the bottom line.

But what about everything else? Do you need Microsoft and Oracle anymore to run your business? Why not leverage Web services and open software? Do you even need your own servers? Do you need AT&T, or is Skype just fine? As events shake out, engineering will take its lumps, but it won't be eviscerated.

Sad detour: A lousy week inside our shop. We lost a wonderful man and a fantastic editor in Chappell Brown. The world is full of jerks and self-dealers. It doesn't need to lose the few Chappell Browns it has. In addition to our obituary on page 4 of last week's issue and online, we created a brief video slide show in remembrance: http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid= 20467ff00bc003b3ba1ef3e7ead0048e.852902.

Down the road: I almost drove off Highway 280 thinking excitedly about the opening of the nominations period for the 2007 EE Times ACE Awards. We had more than 600 nominations last year for the Valley's version of the Oscars, and we're expecting many more this year. So nominate yourself, your team, a friend's team, your boss. It's a great way to honor those who generally toil anonymously to create the world's future.

To begin the nomination process, go to www.eetimes.com/ace. The submission deadline is Dec. 1.

By Brian Fuller (bfuller@cmp.com), editor in chief of EE Times