Month: August 2017

Enlarge (credit: game boy band pepino / Flickr)

A federal judge in California has dismissed a proposed class-action labor lawsuit brought in late 2015 by a man who says that he has now worked for more than 20 years as a "judge" in Magic: the Gathering tournaments and demands to be paid.

In the court ruling, which was issued Wednesday, US District Judge Edward Davila sided with the defendant, Wizards of the Coast. The judge noted that, while Paul Yale’s years of experience to master all of the details of the popular card game and to become certified as a tournament arbiter takes time and extensive knowledge, “the complaint makes clear that Defendant’s program is purely voluntary and could be abandoned at any time.”

In other words, this is what Yale signed up for.

Enlarge / An Apple data center under construction in Maiden, North Carolina, in 2010. (credit: Jason Miczek/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Apple is building a $1.375 billion center near Des Moines, Iowa, after having secured more than $200 million in tax credits from local government.

The Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA) said today that Apple will soon purchase 2,000 acres of land in Waukee, a fast-growing suburb of Des Moines. That land will hold two data centers that will serve North American users of iMessage, Siri, the App Store, and other Apple services.

The data center will support 157 jobs paying $7.8 million in wages, according to IEDA. The facilities will run entirely on renewable energy, as do other Apple data centers. (Wind energy is big in the Hawkeye State.)

Enlarge (credit: Waymo)

Google used to keep most details about its self-driving car program under wraps. But in the last few months, the self-driving car team—now a separate subsidiary called Waymo—has been making a concerted effort to open up and share key details with high-profile media outlets.

In May, Waymo revealed key details of its latest self-driving car design to Bloomberg as part of the rollout of a new program that ferries ordinary passengers around in Phoenix. Now The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal has a new piece revealing important details about Waymo's extensive infrastructure for testing self-driving cars.

Madrigal reports on two Waymo projects that haven't been previously made public. One is an extensive virtual city in California, 100 miles east of Silicon Valley. Named Castle after the former Castle Air Force Base, the facility hosts a network of private roads for testing self-driving vehicles. It's a proprietary cousin of Mcity, the open vehicle testing facility we visited in 2015. At the Castle facility, Waymo builds replicas of real intersections—like a two-lane roundabout in Texas—that have given Waymo cars trouble.

Enlarge (credit: David Kravets)

US intellectual property regulators are rejecting General Mills' bid to trademark the yellow background color on boxes of Cheerios cereal.

The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board on Tuesday set aside the cereal maker's two-year quest to trademark "the color yellow appearing as the predominant uniform background color" on boxes of "oat-based breakfast cereal." A contrary ruling could have given the Cheerios maker an exclusive right to yellow, "toroidal-shaped" boxes of oat cereal.

General Mills loses bid to trademark this box of yellow "toroidal-shaped, oat-based breakfast cereal." (credit: Trademark Trial and Appeal Board)

General Mills argued that it deserved to be awarded the trademark status because "consumers have come to identify the color yellow" on boxes of oats cereal with "the Cheerios brand." It has been marketed in yellow packaging since 1945, with billions in sales.

The Confederate submarine CSS H. L. Hunley bears the distinction of being the first submarine to ever sink an enemy ship. But the Hunley, a work of state-of-the-art engineering for its time, never returned from that mission on February 17, 1864. Instead, after exploding a "torpedo" below the waterline of the Union sloop-of-war USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor, the sub was lost at sea. 

Just how the sub was lost had been a mystery for over a century. The Hunley would not be found again until it was discovered on the floor of Charleston Bay in 1995. The sub was recovered five years later—largely intact, with the remains of its crew all at their stations. Based on the findings of Clemson University archaeologists who examined and restored the sub, it did not appear any attempt was made by the crew to escape.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Steven Puetzer)

AT&T is facing a complaint alleging that it discriminates against poor people by providing fast service in wealthier communities and speeds as low as 1.5Mbps in low-income neighborhoods.

The formal complaint filed today with the Federal Communications Commission says that AT&T is violating the Communications Act's prohibition against unjust and unreasonable discrimination. That ban is part of Title II, which is best known as the authority used by the FCC to impose net neutrality rules. But as we've explained before, Title II also contains important consumer protections that go beyond net neutrality, such as a ban on discrimination in rates, practices, and offerings of services.

"This complaint, brought by Joanne Elkins, Hattie Lanfair, and Rachelle Lee, three African-American, low-income residents of Cleveland, Ohio alleges that AT&T’s offerings of high-speed broadband service violate the Communications Act’s prohibition against unjust and unreasonable discrimination," the complaint says.

(credit: Louis Lanzano/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Martin Shrkeli, the so-called "pharma bro" and former CEO who was recently convicted on securities fraud and wire fraud, has been recently buying up domain names of journalists that appear to have written critically about him.

The list includes Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing, Meg Tirrell of CNBC, Maxwell Tani of Business Insider (who reported Tuesday about the domain buys), and our personal favorite: trashythecat.com.

(credit: flickr / deltamike)

The engineer whose blog post kicked off an internal storm at Uber isn’t done speaking up about her former employer.

Ex-Uber engineer Susan Fowler has filed an amicus brief (PDF) with the Supreme Court, weighing in on a case about arbitration and an employee’s rights to file a class-action lawsuit. Fowler’s February 2017 blog post, titled "Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber," described “her futile attempts to address workplace harassment, discrimination, and retaliation on the job."

Fowler’s post led to an investigation by former Attorney General Eric Holder, which has resulted in major changes at Uber, including the firing of at least 20 employees and the resignation of former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.