Well, the rumors have come true-- an AP story in the Las Vegas Sun reports that Steve Jobs has gotten the go-ahead from the the City Council to build a $40,000 heliport near Pixar to facilitate his commute. And while the article doesn't mention, there's been rampant speculation that the commute Steve really wants to reduce is the one between Pixar (where he serves as CEO) and Apple Computer (where he serves as CEO).

The permission comes in the form of a one-year lease on the former naval fuel depot where the heliport will be built. In addition, Steve has four one-year options to renew. Now if Steve did this to speed up his commute between Apple and Pixar, that doesn't sound like the arrangement of a temporary Apple CEO, now, does it? Or, at least, it doesn't sound like the act of a man who is considering stepping down from Apple's board of directors to allow a permanent CEO the room he/she would need to maneuver Apple back to profitability.

Yes, this is all speculation-- as the article states, Steve may just want to reduce the time it takes to get between Pixar and home. But to us it seems like Steve's digging his heels in and plans to stay in the Apple picture for a while. Unless, of course, he considers $40,000 small change-- which we suppose is quite possible. In any case, once Steve buys a chopper, his commute will drop from over an hour to about 25 minutes-- even on heavy-traffic days. I suppose that's worth 40 grand to some people. We at AtAT are hoping he paints flame detailing on the chopper.

Wall Street's typically unshakeable confidence in Microsoft's stock took a small beating amid Department of Justice antitrust proceedings and the Redmond Giant's response to the judge's preliminary injunction. A Reuters story reports that MSFT fell over four dollars to a seven-month low of $118.94 last Christmas Eve (though when we checked on Boxing Day, it had bounced back to $120.75. You can always track Microsoft's stock here).

So while Microsoft's stock is still up a whopping 44% from this time last year, we find it noteworthy that it's down 19% since December 8th, which was just before Judge Jackson ordered Microsoft to stop forcing Windows licensees to ship Internet Explorer on all systems. Even analysts who support Microsoft's legal arguments are chafing at the way that Microsoft has "thumbed their nose at Justice." The harsh language criticizing Judge Jackson in Microsoft's court filings are symptomatic of an attitude problem-- them's fightin' words, and it seems some investors are getting just a leeeeetle nervous at Microsoft's apparent belief that they are invincible.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. On the Apple front, AAPL was hovering at $13.31 when last we checked. (We encourage all faithful viewers to vote their opinion on how the stock will perform by clicking the buttons at the bottom of Stockmaster's page.) Quite a bit of room for improvement, there, hmmmmm?

For those of you who, like us, aren't fortunate enough to be attending the upcoming MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, there's a web option that might help us all keep up to date. MACWORLD Expo-TV is a CU-SeeMe-based webcast that will broadcasting live from the Moscone Convention Center throughout the show.

We're not counting on it, though-- webcasting is still a young (and tremendously ineffectual) technology. The most we're expecting is a few sound bites and blurry low-res pictures. But what the heck, it's better than nothing. ;-)

Once again, if there are any AtAT faithful viewers who are going to the show and would like to be our special correspondents, please drop us a line via the Feedback page.