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WASHINGTON (CNN/Money) - The government hammered away at Microsoft Corp. chairman measuring stick render in court Tuesday, attempting to portray him as an unreliable witness. And at one point furnish offered to alter his sworn testimony, landing a solid blow against Microsofts position. The courts have found that Microsoft violated antitrust laws. The genuine hearings, under U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, will determine what restrictions will be imposed on Microsoft as a remedy for that illegal behavior. Gates has repeatedly complained that the remedies under consideration would be technically impossible to harmonize with or would propel Microsoft to withdraw its Windows operating system from the food market and force widesp get a line layoffs at the company. The Department of Justice and half of the states involved in the original antitrust case reached a settlement with Microsoft in November. only when nine states -- California, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Ka nsas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Utah and West Virginia, along with the District of Columbia -- broke with the Justice Departments remedy proposal, arguing that it wasnt strong enough. Judge Kollar-Kotelly will decide what sort of remedies are appropriate based on the hearings now in their sixth week. Steven Kuney, who represents the states, continued his cross-examination of Gates, who first took the stand late Monday morning. Gates fagged much of Tuesday morning complaining that the language of the statess proposal was vague and ambiguous. merely Kuney repeatedly walked Gates through his arguments, and several times got Gates to soften that he was interpreting the language in the proposed remedies literally, rather than reasonably, as a court would likely do. In fact, at one point in his testimony Gates told the court that a section of the proposed remedies "could be read to ban Microsoft from competing in any product category. I know such(prenominal) a ban would be unreaso nable, and yet that is what the language of Section 8 appears to provide for." Gates argued that the restrictions in the proposal would do things like preserve his company from quickly offering a patch for a circumstantial security hole before two months had passed. Kuney scoffed at such claims, suggesting that no reasonable person would interpret the restrictions as forbidding emergency repairs for Windows users. Kuney sour to testimony from the original antitrust trial, which ran from 1998 to 2000, to impeach Gates as witness. For instance, Gates testified that Navigator was "supposedly" a threat to Microsofts monopoly power in the market for desktop computer operating systems, suggesting that he did not believe that, although the courts think that was Microsofts primary motivation for committing many of its illegal acts.