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Think of this as Volume 16, Number 7 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy. That's what was famously said of O.J. Simpson after his acquittal (he eventually became violent again and is now in jail in Nevada).

Open source advocates are giving surprisingly little love to Cisco's (CSCO) appeal of Microsoft's (MSFT) Skype acquisition before the European Commission. Cisco doesn't want to stop the merger. It just wants Microsoft to support open standards after the merger, to make such support a condition of approval.

Almost 20 years ago Texas Christian University (TCU) faced a choice. It was losing the cash cow of the Southwest Conference. It could accept that or double-down on athletics. It chose to double-down. The school now has state-of-the-art facilities, a football coach making millions a year, and additions to its football stadium estimated to cost $100 million.

The cloud computing market is caught between its head and its heart. The head is closed. The head buys VMWare's (VMW) vSphere hypervisor, which is proprietary. The head buys Amazon (AMZN) Web Services' (AWS) public cloud, also proprietary (but with an open API).

It's great news for the whole market that public companies are now willing to do a little financial engineering in order to make their shares more attractive. Making an investment in creating shareholder value, and the success of such investments, is great evidence for a bull market with legs. Consider.

News that EMC (EMC) and its VMWare (VMW) subsidiary have launched a cloud start-up called Canopy in conjunction with Atos, a European services firm (think HP's EDS unit) illustrates that the race to globalize cloud is in full swing. Major computer vendors, like IBM (IBM), HP (HPQ) and Dell (DELL), announced networks of cloud data centers last year.

In journalism, as in investing, it helps to admit when you were wrong. When I took on the health IT beat for ZDNet five years ago, it was with the assumption that this industry would act as every other industry had acted. That is, mainstream tech vendors would gradually take out the specialists.

When I last wrote about Chesapeake Energy (CHK) last month, the company was cutting exploration in the face of a natural gas glut. Since then the problem has only worsened, and Chesapeake is aggressively downsizing with $10-12 billion in asset sales, including the sale of its leases in the lucrative Permian Basin of west Texas, and in New Mexico.

Apple's (AAPL) latest lawsuit against Samsung (SSNLF.PK) -- and by extension Google (GOOG), which is responsible for the Android software -- is its most serious yet. The new case involves three new patents covering such basic smartphone concepts as a voice interface, a data tapping patent linking data across applications, swiping the phone to unlock it and auto-completing search entries, according to FossPatents.

The next leg on Google (GOOG) is very likely to be down. Although you will note I'm not selling. Google shares are bound to come under pressure following completion of its Motorola Mobility (MMI) acquisition.

Features February 09, 2012, 6:00 PM EST If it weren't for Italy, Starbucks might not exist. After all, it was on a business trip to Milan in 1983 that Howard Schultz had the revelation on which he built his global empire. At the time, Starbucks was a coffee roaster-it didn't own a single cafe-and Schultz was its marketing director.

McDonald's Corp. (MCD), the world's largest restaurant chain, said it will require its pork suppliers to get rid of gestation pens that animal-rights groups have long deemed cruel to pigs. "There are alternatives that we think are better for the welfare of sows," Dan Gorsky, McDonald's senior vice president of North America supply chain management, said in a statement today, released with the Humane Society of the United States.

RIM (RIMM) has announced in Europe that its BlackBerry 10 Native Software Development Kit (SDK) is now open source. As someone who has covered open source since 2005, and technology since 1982, this has fail written all over it.

Hello! I just found a handful of wonderful technology in Las Vegas at CES, the country's biggest electronics show. There are over 100,000 people here to see roughly 20,000 gadgets brought to the light of day in less time than it takes for a rattlesnake to shed its skin.

Each day, thousands of passengers are stuck on planes at the airports - Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark Liberty International - sitting in line behind a dozen other planes waiting to take off or circling overhead until they get clearance to land.

Most Recent Articles On Memo Pad BLOOMBERG'S FASHIONABLE PURSUITS: Users of the Bloomberg Terminal are among the richest demographic in the world, and advertisers will soon be able to reach them via a new luxury lifestyle magazine.

By Tom HaberstrohESPN.comArchive Word trickled out during Sunday's game that LeBron James rode his bike to AmericanAirlines Arena. Traffic was backed up because of a nearby marathon and LeBron decided to take another mode of transportation. The ride took 40 minutes and he safely arrived at the arena with plenty of time to spare.

Imagine going into an espresso bar, as I did in Tokyo, ordering a single shot, and being told that it's not on offer. The counter at No. 8 Bear Pond may feature the shiniest, spiffiest, newest La Marzocco, as well as a Rube Goldberg-esque water-filtration system, but the menu, which lists lattes and Americanos, makes no mention of espresso or cappuccino.