ts4z - Slashdot User

CA Stores Can't Ask Customers for ZIP Codes 0

Submitted by Hugh Pickens writes on Thursday February 10 2011, @10:31PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes "CNN reports that the California Supreme Court has ruled that retailers in California don't have the right to ask customers for their ZIP code while completing credit card transactions, saying that doing so violates a cardholders' right to protect his or her personal information pointing to a 1971 state law that prohibits businesses from asking credit cardholders for "personal identification information" that could be used to track them down. "The legislature intended to provide robust consumer protections by prohibiting retailers from soliciting and recording information about the cardholder that is unnecessary to the credit card transaction," the decision states. "We hold that personal identification information ... includes the cardholder's ZIP code." In her lawsuit, Jessica Pineda claimed that a cashier at Williams-Sonoma had asked for her ZIP code during a purchase — information that was recorded and later used, along with her name, to figure out her home address by tapping a database that the company uses to market products to customers and sell its compiled consumer information to other businesses."

Verizon iPhone4 beats AT&T in network speed te-> 0

Submitted by tm21 on Thursday February 10 2011, @09:37PM

tm21 writes "Todd Moore bought a new Verizon iPhone4 today, but before he activated it decided to run a speed test against his AT&T iPhone. It was an informal test comparing latency, download, and upload speeds of both Verizon and AT&T networks. The result produced interesting numbers that even shocked the Apple store manager."
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iPad archaeology - the design was out there-> 0

Submitted by brindafella on Tuesday February 08 2011, @06:21PM

brindafella writes "The Register has found the origin of the iPad, in the sci-fi children's TV show The Tomorrow People from UK TV in the early 1970s. The telepathic teens also use what appears to be an iPad-like portable computer. The Register notes that Apple's British-born stylist, Jonathan Ive, was a sub-teen and part of the show's target audience at the time of the series being aired. Enter, the future."
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Java Floating Point Bug Locks-Up Servers-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 08 2011, @06:19PM

An anonymous reader writes "Here we go again: Just like the recently-reported PHP Floating Point Bug causes servers to go into infinite loops when parsing certain double-precision floating-point numbers, Sun/Oracle's JVM does it, too. It gets better: you can lock-up a thread on most servers just by sending a particular header value. Sun/Oracle has known about the bug for something like 10 years, but it's still not fixed. Java Servlet containers are patching to avoid the problem, but application code will still be vulnerable to user input.

Rick Regan has the story at http://www.exploringbinary.com/java-hangs-when-converting-2-2250738585072012e-308/"
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Boeing CEO Says Outsourcing Didn't Pay-> 2

Submitted by frank_adrian314159 on Tuesday February 08 2011, @04:54PM

frank_adrian314159 writes "The Seattle Times reports that Boeing's CEO is saying that the cost overruns on the 787 "Dreamliner" were greatly exacerbated by the company's heavy use of outsourcing. Although it is now fairly well accepted that outsourcing provides little cost savings and what cost savings there are often get spent in increased management costs and rework, the outsourcing drive goes on. It's nice to see a major industry figure saying that all is not so rosy as the MBAs would have us think."
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Apple Orders 10 Million Tablets? 221

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 04 2010, @02:11PM
from the pricepoint-better-be-right dept.

Arvisp writes "According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year."

Student Orchestra Performs Music With iPhones 65

Posted by samzenpus on Friday December 04 2009, @12:51PM
from the there's-a-symphonic-app-for-that dept.

A course at the University of Michigan ends with a live concert featuring students using iPhones as instruments. “Building a Mobile Phone Ensemble“ teaches students to code musical instruments for the iPhone, using the Apple-provided software-development kit. Georg Essl, assistant professor of computer science and music, says, "What’s interesting is we blend the whole process. We start from nothing. We teach the programming of iPhones for multimedia stuff, and then we teach students to build their own instruments.”

Canadian Blood Services Promotes Pseudoscience 219

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday December 01 2009, @06:49PM
from the type-A-negative-personality dept.

trianglecat writes "The not-for-profit agency Canadian Blood Services has a section of their website based on the Japanese cultural belief of ketsueki-gata, which claims that a person's blood group determines or predicts their personality type. Disappointing for a self-proclaimed 'science-based' organization. The Ottawa Skeptics, based in the nation's capital, appear to be taking some action."