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theodp writes "IBM has been temporarily banned from receiving future contracts with federal agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed on Monday. The suspension went into effect last Thursday due to 'concerns raised about potential activities involving an EPA procurement,' the agency said in an e-mailed statement. Under a reciprocal agreement among federal agencies, when one issues a ban, the others follow it. The EPA said it will not comment further on the matter. An IBM spokesman said he had no immediate comment. 'You don't see this very often, particularly for large companies,' commented a stunned industry analyst, mentioning a bankrupt MCI as a notable exception. IBM earned an estimated $1.5 billion in revenue from federal prime contracts in fiscal 2007."

Vermont Department of Taxes writes "The Vermont Department of Taxes Gateway Team is pleased to announce the initial open source release of the gateway on Source Forge. The gateway is a JavaEE application developed by the Vermont Department of Taxes. It provides a web services framework for accepting Streamlined Sales Tax registrations and returns. It also includes a web interface for manually submitting transmissions. The goal is to build an extensible framework upon which future tax services can be built and shared with other states. A press release is also available."
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gateway

The NY Times wants to make a big deal out of the fact that e-commerce growth rates may be slowing, but that hardly seems like much of a story. Note that they're not saying internet growth is disappearing -- just that the rate of growth is slowing. That's to be expected of any market once it goes mainstream, because you simply cannot maintain the same growth rate on such a large base. You hit diminishing returns. Of course, that's a concept that's been around for ages, so it hardly seems newsworthy to suggest that growth rates may be starting to slow -- even as tremendous growth remains. But, these days, it's fun for the press to poke at the internet. However, if the best they can do is to say that growth rates are hitting their expected diminishing returns, it hardly seems like a real problem. Of course, that didn't stop the headline writer from suggesting this was a sign that people were tiring of buying on the internet -- even if the data doesn't support that conclusion at all.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070618/003656.shtml