Judge dismisses $1B lawsuit against Microsoft

SALT LAKE CITY?? A federal judge on Friday dismissed a Utah company's $1 billion federal antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. after a jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict.

Novell claims Microsoft duped it into developing the once-popular WordPerfect writing program for Windows 95 only to pull the plug so Microsoft could gain market share with its own product. Novell says it was later forced to sell WordPerfect for a $1.2 billion loss.

(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

The trial has been ongoing in Salt Lake City for two months. Jurors got the case Wednesday morning, but by Friday told the judge they were "hopelessly deadlocked."

They had expressed confusion to the judge about the complicated case throughout deliberations, even bringing one question to the court that could not be answered. The judge told jurors to simply disregard the question.

Earlier Friday, the judge denied a request from one juror to be removed from the case.

Microsoft lawyers have argued that Novell's loss of market share was its own doing because the company didn't develop a compatible WordPerfect program until long after the rollout of Windows 95. WordPerfect once had nearly 50 percent of the market for word processing, but its share quickly plummeted to less than 10 percent as Microsoft's own Office programs took hold.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates testified last month that he had no idea his decision to drop a tool for outside developers would sidetrack Novell. Gates said he was acting to protect Windows 95 and future versions from crashing.

Novell could have worked around the problem but failed to react quickly, he said.

Novell has argued that Gates ordered Microsoft engineers to reject WordPerfect as a Windows 95 word processing application because he feared it was too good.

Novell's lawsuit is the last major private antitrust case to follow the settlement of a federal antitrust enforcement action against Microsoft more than eight years ago. The trial began in October in federal court in Salt Lake City.

Novell is now a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group, the result of a merger that was completed earlier this year.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45703855/ns/business-us_business/

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Jury begins deliberations in Mass. terror trial (AP)

BOSTON ? A jury has begun deliberations in the trial of a Massachusetts man accused of conspiring to help al-Qaida.

Tarek Mehanna, a 29-year-old American from Sudbury, is accused of traveling to Yemen to try to find a terrorist training camp with the intention of going to Iraq to fight against U.S. soldiers. Prosecutors say that when he was unable to find a camp, he returned home and began translating and distributing online materials promoting violent jihad.

During closing arguments Friday, defense attorneys said that although Mehanna expressed anger about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he never planned to go there to fight American soldiers. They said he wanted to study Islam and went to Yemen looking for religious schools.

Prosecutors argued that Mehanna "was motivated by and inspired by" al-Qaida leaders.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/crime/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111216/ap_on_re_us/us_massachusetts_terror_charge

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Willie Nelson: Occupy the Food System

Thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movement, there's a deeper understanding about the power that corporations wield over the great majority of us. It's not just in the financial sector, but in all facets of our lives. The disparity between the top 1 percent and everyone else has been laid bare -- there's no more denying that those at the top get their share at the expense of the 99 percent. Lobbyists, loopholes, tax breaks... how can ordinary folks expect a fair shake?

No one knows this better than family farmers, whose struggle to make a living on the land has gotten far more difficult since corporations came to dominate our farm and food system. We saw signs of it when Farm Aid started in 1985, but corporate control of our food system has since exploded.

From seed to plate, our food system is now even more concentrated than our banking system. Most economic sectors have concentration ratios hovering around 40 percent, meaning that the top four firms in the industry control 40 percent of the market. Anything beyond this level is considered "highly concentrated," where experts believe competition is severely threatened and market abuses are likely to occur.

Many key agricultural markets like soybeans and beef exceed the 40 percent threshold, meaning the seeds and inputs that farmers need to grow our crops come from just a handful of companies. Ninety-three percent of soybeans and 80 percent of corn grown in the United States are under the control of just one company. Four companies control up to 90 percent of the global trade in grain. Today, three companies process more than 70 percent of beef in the U.S.; four companies dominate close to 60 percent of the pork and chicken markets.

Our banks were deemed too big to fail, yet our food system's corporations are even bigger. Their power puts our entire food system at stake. Last year the U.S. Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Justice (DOJ) acknowledged this, hosting a series of workshops that examined corporate concentration in our farm and food system. Despite the hundreds of thousands of comments from farmers and eaters all over the country, a year later the USDA and DOJ have taken no action to address the issue. Recent decisions in Washington make clear that corporate lobbyists have tremendous power to maintain the status quo.

In November, the Obama administration delivered a crushing blow to a crucial rule proposed by the USDA (known as the GIPSA rule), which was meant to level the playing field for independent cattle ranchers. The large meatpackers, who would have lost some of their power, lobbied hard and won to leave the beef market as it is -- ruled by corporate giants. In the same month, new school lunch rules proposed by the USDA that would have brought more fresh food to school cafeterias were weakened by Congress. Food processors -- the corporations that turn potatoes into French fries and chicken into nuggets -- spent $5.6 million to lobby against the new rules and won, with Congress going so far as agreeing to call pizza a vegetable. Both decisions demonstrate that corporate power wins and the health of our markets and our children loses.

Despite all they're up against, family farmers persevere. Each and every day they work to sustain a better alternative -- an agricultural system that guarantees farmers a fair living, strengthens our communities, protects our natural resources and delivers good food for all. Nothing is more important than the food we eat and the family farmers who grow it. Corporate control of our food system has led to the loss of millions of family farmers, destruction of our soil, pollution of our water and health epidemics of obesity and diabetes.

We simply can't afford it. Our food system belongs in the hands of many family farmers, not under the control of a handful of corporations.

?

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/willie-nelson/occupy-food-system_b_1154212.html

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Society may get stuck with the bill for expensive higher education

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

The rising cost of a college education and limited access to financial aid may create a less productive workforce and steeper wealth inequity, according to a study by North American economists.

Students with low-income parents are discovering that it is more difficult to find funds to pay for a college education now compared to students of similar economic backgrounds in the 1980s, said Alexander Monge-Naranjo, assistant professor of economics, Penn State.

"The consensus was that in the 1980s, credit constraints didn't seem to matter for those who went to college," said Monge-Naranjo. "But according to the latest data, we see family income and parental wealth are making a big difference in who is attending college."

Monge-Naranjo said there were several reasons for the move away from affordability. Over the last two decades, more higher-paying jobs required a college degree. The higher demand for a college education led universities to increase tuition, according to Monge-Narajo.

At the same time, money available through government loan programs remained flat or, when adjusting for in inflation, declined. During the 1990s, the percentage of undergraduates who borrowed from government lending programs increased significantly. Of those students, the ones at the top limit of their borrowing capacity tripled to 52 percent. Many more students are relying on private lenders for loans, Monge-Narajo said.

In the 1980s, credit constraints -- factors that limit financial access to college funding, such as caps on financial assistance and family income -- did not significantly stop students from attending college, once the researchers controlled for other factors, such as SAT score, age and race. Even poor students who had little financial resources to pay for college, but who were smart, could access credit to pursue an education, Monge-Naranjo said.

The researchers, who reported their findings in the current issue of the American Economic Review, said a shift occurred in the 1990s as more low-income students began to struggle to access credit to pay for a college. During the 1990s, youths from high-income families were 16 percent more likely to attend college than youths from low-income families.

Monge-Naranjo, who worked with Lance Lochner, associate professor, Western economics and director, CIBC Centre for Human Capital and Productivity, University of Western Ontario, used the most recent data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth and the Armed Forces Qualifying Test to examine the relationships between intelligence, family income and college attendance.

According to Monge-Naranjo, constraints on financial aid could have far-reaching economic impacts. When poor but intelligent workers are unable to earn a college degree, their career choices are restricted, Monge-Naranjo said. That could mean less qualified and less productive workers will attain those positions.

"It's a matter of economic efficiency," said Monge-Naranjo. "Are we choosing the best individuals for the job, or just the individual whose parents are wealthy? In the long-term that may have an effect on the economy, although it may take a couple of generations to find out and, even then, perhaps be hard to quantify."

###

Penn State: http://live.psu.edu

Thanks to Penn State for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/116007/Society_may_get_stuck_with_the_bill_for_expensive_higher_education

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Facebook adds suicide prevention tool

How excited are you by next year's royal visit by Charles and Camilla?

1. Extremely - I'm getting ready to wave my British flag
2. Pretty excited - it'll be nice to see a royal here again
3. I'm neutral
4. Not very (I'd have mustered more excitement for Wills and Kate)
5. I'm a republican, send 'em somewhere else

Traffic Update

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Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/connect/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501833&objectid=10773412&ref=rss

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The Increasingly Fraught Position of American Muslims (Atlantic Politics Channel)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, RSS and RSS Feed via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/174214752?client_source=feed&format=rss

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Pearl Harbor: Sailors Who Survived Attack 70 Years Ago Return To Ships After Death

HONOLULU ? Lee Soucy, who lived to be 90 after surviving the attack on Pearl Harbor, is finally back with his shipmates 70 years later.

Soucy passed away just last year. On Tuesday, seven decades after dozens of fellow sailors were killed when the USS Utah sank on Dec. 7, 1941, Navy divers took a small urn containing his ashes and put it in a porthole of the ship.

The ceremony is one of five memorials being held this week for servicemen who lived through the assault and want their remains placed in Pearl Harbor out of pride and affinity for those they left behind.

"They want to return and be with the shipmates that they lost during the attack," said Jim Taylor, a retired sailor who coordinates the ceremonies.

The memorials are happening the same week the country observes the 70th anniversary of the aerial bombing that killed 2,390 Americans and brought the United States into World War II. A larger ceremony to remember all those who perished will be held Wednesday just before 8 a.m. Hawaii time ? the same moment the devastating attack began.

Most of the 12 ships that sank or were beached that day were removed from the harbor, their metal hulls salvaged for scrap. Just the Utah and the USS Arizona still lie in the dark blue waters. Only survivors of those vessels may return in death to their ships.

The cremated remains of Vernon Olsen, who served aboard the Arizona, will be interred on his ship during a sunset ceremony Wednesday. The ashes of three other survivors are being scattered in the harbor.

Soucy, the youngest of seven children, joined the Navy out of high school so he wouldn't burden his parents. In 1941, he was a pharmacist mate, trained to care for the sick and wounded.

He had just finished breakfast that Sunday morning when he saw planes dropping bombs on airplane hangars. He rushed to his battle station after feeling the Utah lurch, but soon heard the call to abandon ship as the vessel began sinking. He swam to shore, where he made a makeshift first aid center to help the wounded and dying. He worked straight through for two days.

The Utah lost nearly 60 men on Dec. 7, and about 50 are still entombed in the battleship. Today, the rusting hull of the Utah sits on its side next to Ford Island, not far from where it sank 70 years ago.

Soucy's daughter, Margaret, said her parents had initially planned to have their ashes interred together at their church in Plainview, Texas. But her father changed his mind after visiting Pearl Harbor for the 65th anniversary in 2006.

"He announced that he wanted to be interred on the Utah. And my mother looked a little hurt and perplexed. And I said, `Don't worry Daddy, I'll take that part of your ashes that was your mouth and I'll have those interred on the Utah. And you can then tell those that have preceded you, including those that were entombed, what's been going on in the world,'" Margaret Soucy recalled saying with a laugh.

"'And the rest of your remains we will put with mother in the church gardens at St. Mark's.' And then my sister spoke up and said, `Yes, then mother can finally rest in peace,'" she said.

The family had long kidded Soucy for being talkative _they called him "Mighty Mouth" ? so Margaret Soucy said her father laughed and agreed. "He just thought that was hilarious," she said.

"So that is what we are doing. We're taking only a portion of his ashes. It's going to be a small urn," she said.

Soucy's three children, several grandchildren and great-grandchildren ? 11 family members altogether ? attended the sunset ceremony on Tuesday. His wife died earlier this year.

Amid overcast skies, a Navy diver took the urn, protected by a mesh bag, and held it above water while swimming toward the Utah. The diver, who was accompanied by three supporting divers, went underwater to the porthole once reaching the ship.

An urn carrying the ashes of Vernon Olsen, who was among the 334 on the Arizona to survive the attack, will be interred in a gun turret on the ship Wednesday. Most of the battleship's 1,177 sailors and Marines who died on Dec. 7 are still entombed on the ship.

Five months after Pearl Harbor Olsen was on the USS Lexington aircraft carrier when it sank during the Battle of the Coral Sea.

"I used to tell him he had nine lives. He was really lucky," said his widow, Jo Ann Olsen.

He passed away in April at the age of 91 after a bout of pneumonia.

Pearl Harbor interment and ash scattering ceremonies began in the late 1980s, and started growing in number as more survivors heard about them.

Taylor has helped 265 survivors return to Pearl Harbor. The vast majority have had their ashes scattered. He's arranged for the remains of about 20 Arizona survivors to be placed in the Arizona and about a dozen to be put in the Utah.

"These guys are heroes, OK. Fact is, in my opinion, anybody that's ever served in the military and wore the uniform are heroes. That's why you and I can breathe today in a free country. So I just appreciate what they did," he said.

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/07/pearl-harbor-sailors-burial-at-sea_n_1133203.html

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