Talk about a killer app: A recent study, we guess to be filed under Uh Oh, by Michigan high school student Jay Thaker and presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the Heart Rhythm Society in Denver, has shown that iPods alter readings and can affect a pacemaker’s optimum functioning. Testing different iPods – a video iPod and a nano, among others – Thaker held them two inches above the chests of 83 patients with pacemakers and found that they exhibited a few different types of interference. The most persistent types of interference were the completely mystical and largely unknown to us computer geeks oversensing and telemetry interference. The scariest though, complete pacemaker inhibition, happened only about 1.2 percent of the time. But, hey, if it’s your pacemaker? In any case, the population tested in Thaker's study had an average age of 76.1 plus or minus 8.6 years. Consider yourself warned.

The daily iPod lawsuit watch continues: BlueBeat.com, a subsidiary of Santa Cruz, California-based Media Rights Technologies (MRT), has dropped a C+D (cease and desist) letter on Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and RealNetworks for violating federal copyright laws in “actively avoiding” the Digital Millennium Copyright Act “without regard for the DMCA or the rights of American intellectual property owners.” Purportedly by NOT using its product that plugs digital holes, thereby letting even copy-protected music streams be stolen, these companies are trammeling the rights of millions and millions intellectual property holders. When reached for comment, spokespeople at Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and RealNetworks said something largely to the effect of “you gotta be kidding us, right?”

On the up and up: According to Bloomberg, Apple’s laptop retail sales in March stretched the tape at 9.9 percent in the United States, beating out Compaq (at 8.5 percent) while still lagging behind Gateway (at 13 percent). In Apple reported financial results from April it seems that 50 percent of people who bought Macs hadn’t previously owned one. Welcome aboard.

Apple confab gets chippy: Testy exchanges betwixt Steve Jobs and stockholders over the backdating option dust up had proposals a’flying to put tighter restrictions on the stock option policy and executive compensation (quickly defeated) and Steve Jobs exasperatedly opining, "Unless you think there's a conspiracy involving the SEC, too, I don't know what to say." In related news, today Apple’s stock price is $108.42.