Unless you're a deeply geeky watch aficionado, a frequent patron of Barney's or a protesting student during the French labor strikes of the mid-1970s, then you've probably never heard of Lip. Time to get educated. Thirty-five years ago the European watch manufacturer pioneered some of the geekiest tech and most innovative design ever found in a timepiece. But all was not to be well for Lip. A volatile political and labor climate in France shattered the 141-year-old company and led to it being closed for nearly 15 years.

After numerous false starts, Lip was jump-started back to existence in the 1990s. Since then the watchmaker has enjoyed a quiet resurgence by returning to its nerdy roots and hiring back many of the original designers of these timepieces. These reissued watches are both technically and physically identical to their DeGaulle-era counterparts. Here are a few of our favorites.

Left: Originally conceived in 1973 by Roger Tallon, designer of the TGV high-speed train, the Lip 200 "Dark Master" set the design standard that all Lip watches would follow for the next 30 years.

Another watch invented by Roger Tallon in 1975, the Lip Diode featured one of the first digital displays ever found on a timepiece.

A fairly radical departure from conventional design, the Baschmakoff Jump Hour was the 1972 brainchild of Prince Francois Baschmakoff, an illustrator and package designer hired by Lip. The jump hour displays concentric discs, and thin oblong cases have trickled into the design departments of many other watchmakers including Nixon, Diesel and Fossil.

Sure looks like it came straight outta the '70s, doesn't it? Wrong! The Lip Mythic is a new timepiece released in 2008. Don't worry though — it was inspired partially from another watch Tallon designed in 1972.

Also dreamt up by Tallon, the Fridge watch is designed to echo appliances (specifically refrigerators and iceboxes) that he grew up with in the 1930s.

Despite an ominous moniker, the Lip Mach 2000 "Mafia" was designed in 1973 as a more svelte counterpart to the Dark Master.

Don't talk to strangers — scan them instead. That's the idea behind the so-called ShotCodes on clothing by W-41, a Netherlands-based online apparel company. If you spot one of these unique logos in the wild (bar, club, methadone clinic, DMV), you surreptitiously snap a photo of it with your phonecam and a tiny app directs you to the wearer's LinkedIn, Facebook, or MySpace profile. You can then decide whether a "Hello" is in order. To get in on the action, simply visit W-41.com, download a free mobile app, select a ShotCode, and purchase gear from the online store ($50 to $57 a pop). Owners can connect their symbol to any Web site. Beats having to dust off lines like "If you were a phaser, you'd be set on 'stunning.'"*

*Other pickup line options: "Later, when my Facebook page asks me what I'm doing, can I write 'You'?" "You're as curvy as a toroid." "If I said you had top-specced hardware, would you interface with me?"

What it is: Stara Technologies Mosquito

What it's used for: Air-dropping packages to precise coordinates

It's easy to drop stuff out of a low-flying chopper and have it land where you want. But in a war zone, low-altitude aircraft draw attention — and gunfire. To avoid the bad guys, high-flying planes can release Stara's Mosquito. Its customizable cylinder, which can handle up to 150 pounds, contains a GPS unit and servomotor for steering the parachute to a drop site up to 2 miles away. Actuators cut loose the payload at a preset altitude (from 50 to 1,500 feet). This way, anyone tracking the chute will end up as much as a half mile from the goods, which may be camouflaged as, say, a fist-sized rock (like above). The company is promoting the $10,000 Mosquito for special forces deliveries — money, passports, blood packets. Our dream app: air-dropping pizzas to our patio in five minutes or less, guaranteed.

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Jeff Bezos seems to be running out of retail categories to move Amazon.com into. (What's next? Puppies? Frozen steaks? Escort services?), In its latest expansion, the web's largest retailer will become another place for you to not buy wine from online.

The story of the online wine business and the arcane interstate commerce laws that continue to thwart it is a long and boring one, so we'll try our best to summarize. Eric Asimov of the New York Times offers a more detailed examination here.

About half the states in the country allow interstate wine shipments. A 2005 Supreme Court ruling struck down bans preventing shipments from out-of-state wineries, but wine retailers didn't benefit from the ruling.

Online wine merchants face many hurdles. It's still not possible to ship legally to many states, and for others, it requires investment, such as having a brick-and-mortar etail outlet in that state.

Naturally, Bezos is unfazed. Amazon.com is reportedly working with a non-profit group called Napa Valley Vintners that is helping the 315 wineries it represents learn how to sell wine through Amazon.

Given that Amazon will be doing business directly with vintners, perhaps the online retailer could argue that the sales constitute transactions between customers and wineries (rather than a retailer); that would get them around the state shipping bans.

But reports indicate that Amazon.com plans to ship from only 26 states, so it appears that for now at least Amazon is playing it safe.

But all legal issues aside, even if online wine sellers were able to ship to all 50 states unimpeded, Amazon would still have to face the fact that people just do not seem to want to buy wine online.

Reuters reports that e-commerce accounts for only 7 percent of the $2.8 billion of wine is sold through retail formats in the U.S. -- that amounts to a $196 million opportunity right now, split between a number of players.

And it's not for reasons Amazon.com is well-positioned to fix, like pricing, or selection, or shipping speed. Dedicated online wine sellers like Wine.com and Vinfolio.com are sophisticated operations with good execution, and yet they continue to face the problem of courting customers.

Wine buying isn't like book buying, where you're likely to have a specific product in mind from the start. How often, when you buy wine, do you go in looking for a specific bottle? Can you even name three specific vineyards and vintages that you like?

Most of us have little enough wine literacy that the limited selection and personalized service of a neighborhood wine store is an ideal buying environment. We are not sophisticated enough judges of pricing to turn to a Web retailer for better value, and we're more likely to need a bottle of wine an hour from now than to plan the purchase in advance.

Of course, all of this goes out the window in the case of an experienced wine buyer, who may very well be looking for a specific bottle and will be thrilled to let his or her fingers do the walking to find it -- no carrying heavy cases of wine, no calling around to wine stores, easy price comparisons across sites.

But unfortunately for Amazon.com, and fortunately for the rest of us, wine snobs come in limited quantities.

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The Department of Justice is taking the Google-Yahoo ad pact seriously.

Reuters is reporting that the Department of Justice has hired top antitrust lawyer Sandy Litvack to consult on its investigation of the deal between the two Web titans.

The appointment of Litvack, who was the Justice Department's chief antitrust lawyer under President Jimmy Carter, as well as vice-chairman of Walt Disney Co., suggests that the feds are ramping up their case against the Yahoo/Google pact.

In April, Yahoo and Google began experimenting with the deal, which would allow Google -- the web search leader -- to begin to serve ads on sites run by Yahoo, the number two search company. For months, both companies have insisted that the deal is not anticompetitive and expressed confidence that it would ultimately pass regulatory scrutiny. The companies stuck to their guns late Monday.

"We have been informed that the Justice Department, as they sometimes do, is seeking advice from an outside consultant, but that we should read nothing into that fact," Yahoo said in a statement. For its part, Google issued a statement saying, "We think it would be premature for regulators to halt the agreement before we implement it and everyone can judge the actual impact."

Yahoo estimates that the deal could pump an additional revenue of $800 million into its coffers.

Microsoft, the number three Web search company, opposes any deal between Google and Yahoo, arguing that it would make the web ad market less competitive. The Justice Department may be preparing to make that very same case.