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Android

Submission + - Sprint sued for "Premium Data" charges (topclassactions.com)

Submitted by
wizkid057
wizkid057 writes: "Sprint is once again being targeted by a class action lawsuit for overcharging it's customers.

Since the release of the HTC EVO 4G and, subsequently, the Samsung Epic 4G (Galaxy S) phone, Sprint has been forcing users of these devices to pay an additional $10 per month "Premium Data" fee on top of paying for a plan that already includes unlimited data.

As of January 31st they took this one step further and now require that all new smartphone activations (Android, Blackberry, Palm, etc) include additional $10 fee for unlimited data access on top of their existing unlimited data plan.

Some people, myself included, are obviously taking some offense to this double dipping and have submitted a class action lawsuit against the overcharges.

No one at Sprint can define what "Premium Data" I am getting by paying this fee."
Apple

Submission + - 5 Reasons Why the iPad 2 Sucks (jimlynch.com) 1

Submitted by
JimLynch
JimLynch writes: "Well here are again, a new Apple product has been launched and various presstitutes are falling all over themselves about it. This time around it’s the iPad 2 that has so many journawhores gasping for breath and oozing Apple worship. Ugh. Must we go through this yet again simply because of a new iProduct?"
Government

Submission + - Blogger Fined $60K For Telling The Truth (startribune.com)

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: ""Johnny Northside," a Minneapolis blogger with less than 500 readers a day revealed that a University of Minnesota researcher studying mortgage fraud had been involved in a fraudulent mortgage himself; the blog post was at least partially responsible for the researcher losing his job. The researcher then sued the blogger and won — despite the blogger having his facts straight. Johnny Northside plans to appeal the verdict."
Technology

Submission + - The Coolest Tech Tour Ever: A Look At How SRI Is A (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by emilyann
emilyann writes: SRI International, which employs 1,700 researchers, has been busy on a number of things from radar, ultrasound imaging, remote surgery, and much more. It has also been incubating a few things that have turned into startups. My favorite example is Siri, which is an assistant for your iPhone. Apple bought that last year for a rumored $200+ million and I’ve been hearing rumors that we’ll see some of that work as part of the iPhone 5 launch later this year. More about Siri later.
The Courts

Submission + - LimeWire Has Proof Studios Profit From File Sharin (unitethecows.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "As most of our readers will know, LimeWire was once one of the most used file sharing clients in the world. A few months ago it was forced to cease its operations following an ongoing battle with the entertainment industry. In regard to damages being imposed on LimeWire they have stated that discovery has shown that the entertainment industry has made a profit from file sharing.

Several studios were granted damages for secondary copyright infringement by a federal court in May last year and discovery was ordered by Judge Debra freeman to determine the amount of damages. In February this year, Judge kimba Wood called for the studies to produce further documents to LimeWire which may result in greater support for their assertion.

LimeWire made the request for further information as they claimed Freemans order "indicated (1) that Plaintiffs were attempting to 'blacklist' LimeWire; (2) that certain employees of Plaintiffs had exoressed a desire to work with LimeWire; and (3) that Plaintiffs believed user downloads through LimeWire had actually increased Plaintiffs' revenue"

The order was expanded but the studios stated that to do so would breach attorney-client priviledge. Wood then limited discovery to documents not covered by this priviledge. She then stated it was "reasonable and appropriate" for studios to "minimize the exposure to copyright infringment". Wood also reversed an order by Freeman no longer forcing non parties MySpace, Yahoo! and iMesh to provide discovery.

The trial to determine the final damages will be held on May 2nd 2011.

If your still struggling to find a replacement for LimeWire why not check out our Top LimeWire Alternatives. Otherwise, there's always LimeWire Pirate Edition"

Submission + - Cheap ARM laptop released by Genesi (desktoplinux.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Genesi has been selling a 10.1-inch "smartbook" for a while now. They just cut the price from $350 to $200. This laptop runs Ubuntu 10.10, has 16gb of solid state storage, contains no moving parts, and consumes only 12 watts. Compared to other netbooks, this is less than 2/3s the height while being on the upper end in terms of the other dimensions. It seems to be a decent cheap linux smartbook sold by company that develops linux products and gets the community concept down a lot better than any others I've seen.
Media

Submission + - Virgin Media UK Begins Throttling P2P Traffic (unitethecows.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "UK Internet Service Provider (ISP) Virgin Media has announced that it will begin throttling both P2P and Newsgroup traffic at "Peak" times it has emerged.

The ISP which advertises itself as "The fastest in the UK" and offers speeds of up to 100mb has said it needs to throttle file sharing traffic to prevent slowness in other areas such as online multiplayer gaming.

Trialing of the new traffic managment plans commenced on March 2 and will only apply to Upstream traffic, therefore download speeds will be unaffected. The clamp down will apply on top of the existing traffic shaping Virgin Media has in place and will affect all packages, including the previously unmanaged 100mb deal.

A message on the Virgin Media site read

"After the successful out of hours trial of our combined upstream and downstream file sharing traffic management policy we will be trialling this new policy between 17:00 and 00:00 for one week starting on Wednesday 2nd of March.

Between these times P2P and Newsgroup upstream traffic will be managed in a similar way to our current downstream traffic management. If the trial is successful we'll launch the new policy immediately.

We're interested if you could tell us how this affects your gaming experience over the next few days and if you see any general improvement in latency and ping at peak times."

The move comes as a surprise to many as Virgin already manage traffic between 4pm and 8pm. Virgin Medias website details their file sharing traffic management policy and says;

"We moderate the total volume of file sharing traffic on our network between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends. This policy, which applies to all broadband packages, is restricted to Peer to Peer ("P2P") applications and Newsgroups (which are commonly used to distribute large amounts of data). This policy does not impact any applications other than Peer to Peer and Newsgroups, so things like watching iPlayer, online gaming, making calls via Skype, downloading music tracks from iTunes or streaming them from Spotify and sending an email or normal browsing are unaffected."

So there you have it, Virgin Media ARE the UK's fasstest Broadband Provider, but only because they decided what you can do and when you can do it.

Source: UniteTheCows"
Education

Submission + - Falling Demand for Brains?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Paul Krugman writes in the NY Times that information technology seems to be reducing, not increasing, the demand for highly educated workers (reg. may be required), because a lot of what highly educated workers do could actually be replaced by sophisticated information processing. One good recent example is how software is replacing the teams of lawyers who used to do document research. “From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” says Bill Herr, a lawyer at a major chemical company who used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.” If true this raises a number of interesting questions. "One is whether emphasizing education — even aside from the fact that the big rise in inequality has taken place among the highly educated — is, in effect, fighting the last war," writes Krugman. "Another is how we [can] have a decent society if and when even highly educated workers can’t command a middle-class income." Remember the Luddites weren’t the poorest of the poor, they were skilled artisans whose skills had suddenly been devalued by new technology."

Submission + - ARM Backs Computer Museum for Cambridge (computinghistory.org.uk)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Award winning Red Gate Software and superchip designer ARM Holdings have both donated substantial funding to accelerate the realisation of this groundbreaking initiative.

The Centre for Computing History was established in Haverhill in 2006 to explore the impact and tell the story of the Information Age. Ambitious plans are now afoot to relocate the museum to Cambridge, in the city where so much of this story has unfolded."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - iPad Maker Foxconn Aims to Lower Costs

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: 'I know we can out-compete any other nation on Earth,' boasts President Obama. But Foxconn, which makes iPads for Obama dining partner Steve Jobs, has apparently decided that even Shenzhen workers are too expensive for its tastes, and has set its sights on moving 200,000 jobs to cheaper inland provinces. Which raises some interesting questions: How does one out-compete workers willing to live in corporate dorms on a $300 monthly salary that would be illegal in the United States? Will manufacturing workers eventually be doomed to a Roots-like existence?

Submission + - Japan unearths site linked to human experiments (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by
Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: "Authorities in Japan have begun excavating the former site of a medical school that may contain the remains of victims of the country's wartime biological warfare program. The school has links to Unit 731, a branch of the imperial Japanese army that conducted lethal experiments on prisoners as part of efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction. The site in Tokyo's Shinjuku district is close to another where the mass graves of dozens of people who may have been victims of wartime experiments was uncovered in 1989."

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