Free Republic

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--The integrity and competence of the U.S. Department of Agriculture were called into question Thursday by U.S. senators concerned with the USDA's failure for several years to investigate anti-competitive cases in the livestock and meat packing sectors. "It is totally unacceptable of our government to conduct business in this way," Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said at a Thursday hearing. He threatened to call USDA officials back up to Capitol Hill again if improvements aren't made. The Senate committee called the Thursday hearing to demand answers from the USDA over a recent Inspector General report charging...

Toyota President Fujio Cho may offer troubled General Motors Corp. help with safety and environmental technology at a meeting with Chairman Rick Wagoner this month, a Japanese newspaper said on Thursday. The report comes a week after Toyota's chairman raised the possibility of raising prices to help struggling U.S. manufacturers, which are losing market share. Wagoner is expected to fly to Japan on May 14 for the meeting, which is also likely to be attended by GM's research and development chief, Larry Burns, the paper said. Toyota's honorary chairman, Shoichiro Toyoda, planned talks with Wagoner in the United States on...

Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, has been talking about the digital future. The other Bill, technology critic Bill Thompson, has been reading between the lines.Bill Gates thinks I'm a communist. Not the old-fashioned state socialist concerned with five-year plans for boot production in the eastern provinces, but a "new modern-day sort of communist", the sort who "want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and movie-makers and software makers". Admittedly, Mr Gates probably does not know who I am and I doubt if he spends a lot of time reading the BBC news site. But he...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. Chief Operating Officer Steve Ballmer on Thursday warned Asian governments that they could face intellectual rights-infringement lawsuits for using rival open-source operating platforms such as Linux. Linux is open-code software that is freely available on the Internet and easily modified by users. Its growing popularity with companies and governments around the world, and particularly in Asia, is a threat to the global dominance of Microsoft's proprietary Windows platform. Ballmer, speaking in Singapore at Microsoft's Asian Government Leaders Forum, said that Linux violated more than 228 patents. He did not provide any detail on the alleged...

<p>Get out your wallet. Big business has found another way to tighten the screws on customers, in league with its new partner: the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act.</p> <p>Just as naysayers predicted when it was enacted, the DMCA's anticompetitive impact is reverberating widely beyond the entertainment and software industries, with potentially devastating effects on consumers.</p>

Microsoft sharpshooter Joachim Kempin, who was convicted of illegally shooting antelope in Montana in 1998, has been turning his guns on a more familiar target: Microsoft's own OEM customers. The States' remedy hearing opened in DC yesterday, and States attorney Steven Kuney produced a devastating memo from Kempin, then in charge of Microsoft's OEM business, written after Judge Jackson had ordered his break-up of the company. Kempin raises the possibility of threatening Dell and other PC builders which promote Linux. "I'm thinking of hitting the OEMs harder than in the past with anti-Linux. ... they should do a delicate dance,"...