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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: omegaman who wrote (25649)	2/25/1999 6:54:00 PM
From: fb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

To all: dailynews.yahoo.com Every little bit helps....I guess. Regards, fb Yahoo! News Technology Headlines Wednesday February 24 7:59 PM ET U.S. Lawmakers Back Bills To Aid High-Tech Firms By Adam Entous WASHINGTON (Reuters) - At the urging of politically powerful computer and software companies, U.S. lawmakers Wednesday rolled out initiatives to boost high-technology research and development and limit lawsuits stemming from the year 2000 millennium bug. Other measures would help high-tech companies train new workers in an increasingly tight job market, and phase out the estate tax for small businesses. Lawmakers said these measures had bi-partisan support in the Republican-led Congress. Pushing for their passage will be powerful trade groups, representing thousands of U.S.-based technology companies. ''We're very optimistic,'' said Anne Gavin, spokeswoman for the Business Software Alliance, which represents Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news), IBM Corp.'s Lotus Development, Network Associates Inc., NOVELL INC. (NASDAG:NOVL - news) and other major software developers. ''This industry has been shown to be a booming industry economically. These are high-wage positions and I think Congress recognizes that,'' she said. In the House of Representatives, Connecticut Republican Rep. Nancy Johnson and 90 co-sponsors from both parties introduced legislation to make the federal Research and Development Tax Credit permanent. Johnson cited a 1998 study by the auditing firm Coopers & Lybrand, which found that permanent extension of the tax credit would lead to a $41 billion increase in U.S. research and development spending through 2010. The R&D credit first was enacted in 1981 to provide incentives for U.S. companies to increase their spending on research and development to spur job growth and provide an advantage against foreign competitors. Since then Congress has passed nine temporary extensions of the credit. ''We need to put an end to the stop-and-go approach by making this credit permanent,'' Johnson told a news conference. If approved, her bill would cost $2.5 billion per year. In the Senate, Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and California Democrat Dianne Feinstein introduced a bill supported by more than 80 industry groups to head off an expected flood of millennium bug lawsuits. The bill aims to limit punitive damages in year 2000 cases to $250,000 for most larger businesses, delay the filing of lawsuits during a 90-day ''cooling off period'', and make it harder for attorneys to bring class-action lawsuits. A similar bill introduced in the House would cap lawyers' fees to $1,000 an hour. But one of its sponsors, Rep. James Moran, a Virginia Democrat, said that provision was likely to be dropped because trial lawyers and the White House objected. The millennium problem arises because many older computers record dates using only the last two digits of the year. If left uncorrected, such systems could treat the year 2000 as the year 1900, generating errors or system crashes next Jan. 1. Also in the Senate, North Dakota Democrat Kent Conrad and eight other lawmakers proposed tax credits for companies that train workers for high-tech jobs as computer engineers, programmers and system analysts. Supporters said the initiative would help companies struggling to find computer-savvy workers in an increasingly tight labor market. According to a recent survey by the Information Technology Association of America, more than 340,000 computer-related jobs have not been filled at U.S. companies because of the labor shortage. Unless workers were trained more quickly, this shortage was expected to grow by 130,000 jobs each year for the next decade. ''It's so clearly necessary,'' Conrad told reporters. ''We're in desperate need for these people, but we can't find them.''