Cody Taylor

Macworld is reporting that Apple and AT&T are being sued, again, for the lack of delivery on their 3G network. This follows a long line of other lawsuits in San Jose, San Diego, Alabama, Florida, Texas, and New York “The lawsuit charges the companies with Negligence, Breach of Express Warranty, Breach of Implied Warranty of Merchantability, Unjust Enrichment, Negligent Misrepresentation, Violation of the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act and Other Similar State Statutes, and Breach of Contract. Dickerson is seeking to force Apple and AT&T to correct its labeling and advertising, as well as to recover compensatory, statutory and punitive damages.”

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An anonymous reader writes “I hate my career of the past few years. For a long time I’ve wondered what I’d do after I broke even and could get into something new, and I keep coming back to computers. I’d like to get into software, since I always enjoyed coding. I have some background with C++ so I’m not starting entirely from scratch. My problem is my degrees and past employment have no practical application to the field. Where should I start? I have friends in both IT and software development who might be able to pull some strings and get me an interview or two for entry-level positions, but what can I do to make myself hireable in a short period of time? Is it possible to pick up enough of what I’d need within a couple months? If so, what and how?”

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An anonymous reader notes that a legislator in Texas has introduced a bill to require open document formats in all state government business. The bill is carefully worded such that only ODF could pass its test as “open.” The story is covered by the Fort Worth Star Telegram, which is careful to be even-handed, giving Microsoft’s spokesman equal time. A ZDNet’s blogger notes that the bill, introduced by a Democrat in a state whose politics is dominated by Republicans, faces chances that “…fall somewhere east of slim and west of none.”

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WMGarrison writes “US Patent 7453593 claims command-line processing by a web server of SOAP requests, resulting in XML responses, from and to a remote client. The HTTP Common Gateway Interface (CGI) operates precisely as described in Claim 1. If you POST a SOAP document and return an XHTML response or a SOAP document, this infringes Claim 2, since both XHTML and SOAP are XML languages. This patent thus claims to own the processing of SOAP documents by CGI programs.”

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An anonymous reader writes “We’ve all seen processor benchmarks, but how do today’s enthusiast CPUs look when you account for performance per dollar? Using a smorgasbord of charts, scatter plots, and performance tests, The Tech Report attempted to single out the highest-value offerings out of 16 popular Intel and AMD processors. The results might surprise you: AMD’s 45nm Phenom IIs (both triple- and quad-core) prove to be strikingly competitive with Intel’s Core 2 Quads. And, on the high end, Intel’s 6 Core i7-920 turns out to be a compelling step up despite the higher costs of Core i7 platforms in general.”

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Houston 2600 sends along an Ars Technica writeup on the continuing downward trend in the traditional music business: NPD’s annual survey found that 17 million CD customers dropped out last year. Among the good news is that streaming services such as Pandora are growing fast. “While overall music sales were up 10 percent in 2008, the year saw a drop not only in CD sales, but also in the number of customers actually purchasing music. But according to a new report, the act of listening to music is actually on the rise. … NPD’s annual Digital Music Study found that there were 17 million fewer CD customers in 2008 than in past years. CD sales have been dropping for quite some time, and while 1.5 billion songs were sold digitally last year, the number of Internet users paying for digital music only increased by 8 million in 2008.”

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The indispensible jamie found a report out of Kentucky of exactly the kind of shenanigans that voting-transparency advocates have been warning about: a circuit court judge, a county clerk, and election officials are among eight people indicted for gaming elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006. As described in the indictment (PDF), the election officials divvied up money intended to buy votes and then changed votes on the county’s (popular, unverifiable) ES&S touch-screen voting systems, affecting the outcome of elections at the local, state, and federal levels.

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snahgle writes “Mathematicians John Conway (inventor of the Game of Life) and Simon Kochen of Princeton University have proven that if human experimenters demonstrate ‘free will’ in choosing what measurements to take on a particle, then the axioms of quantum mechanics require that the free will property be available to the particles measured, or to the universe as a whole. Conway is giving a series of lectures on the ‘Free Will Theorem’ and its ramifications over the next month at Princeton. A followup article strengthening the theory (PDF) was published last month in Notices of the AMS.” Update: 03/19 14:20 GMT by KD : jamie points out that we discussed this theorem last year, before the paper had been published.

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CWmike writes “GPS device maker TomTom has shot back at Microsoft with a claim of patent infringement, after the software giant raised concerns in the Linux community with a recent lawsuit against TomTom. In a suit filed earlier this week, TomTom alleges that Microsoft infringes on four patents in mapping software Microsoft Streets and Trips. TomTom is asking for triple damages for willful infringement, since it says it had notified Microsoft about its alleged infringement. Microsoft said it was reviewing TomTom’s filing and that it remains committed to a licensing solution and has been for more than a year.”

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pnorth writes “A defunct payment gateway has exposed as many as 19,000 credit card numbers of US and UK consumers in a major worldwide breach. The data, held in Google cache, includes credit card numbers, CVVs, expiry dates, names and addresses. The credit card numbers are for accounts held with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Solo, Switch, Delta and Maestro/Cirrus. Within the address bars of the cached pages are URLs of e-commerce sites that have become victims of the breach. They include clothing, science, health, sports and photo imaging stores. The cause appears to be a known issue with the Google search engine, in which the pages of defunct web sites containing sensitive directories remain cached and available to anyone.”

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