Blackhacker

Sahil Malik [MVP C#] : Geek Joke
Programmer 1: Did you two hit it off?
Programmer 2: Define “Hit it off”?
Programmer 1: Did she continue talking to you, after you fixed her computer.

LOL

While on a occasion I do download music from iTunes, I have always thought that $.99 a song, was too expensive. Considering that if i buy a CD it has about 15 songs on it and cost me between $15 and $20, Which works out to about the same as and iTunes download. Being that they should be saving money on distribution I expect saving to be passed on to me.

But what is really crazy and have NEVER understood was that ringtones cost the same as a full song. PEOPLE STOP BUYING RING TONES !!! With a bit of software (that s free software, you can download from the Internet) you can make your own.

Dap:Lynne D Johnson

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House agreed Wednesday to extend the USA Patriot Act for a month while conservative Republicans and the White House work out changes intended to protect people from government intrusion.
(link)

LONDON (Reuters) - A flock of pigeons fitted with mobile phone backpacks is to be used to monitor air pollution, New Scientist magazine reported on Wednesday.

The 20 pigeons will be released into the skies over San Jose, California, in August.

Each bird will carry a GPS satellite tracking receiver, air pollution sensors and a basic mobile phone.
(link)

Dap:/.

Emory University psychologist Drew Westen put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot inconsistency and hypocrisy — but only in candidates they opposed.

When presented with negative information about the candidates they liked, partisans of all stripes found ways to discount it, Westen said. When the unpalatable information was rejected, furthermore, the brain scans showed that volunteers gave themselves feel-good pats — the scans showed that “reward centers” in volunteers’ brains were activated. The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior.
(link)
emphasis mine

Obviously once one has been properly conditioned the state of that conditioning is persistent as the brain rewards itself for efficiently justifying contradictions.

Another study that I think is even more controversial is this one: from the same article:

Another study presented at the conference, which was in Palm Springs, Calif., explored relationships between racial bias and political affiliation by analyzing self-reported beliefs, voting patterns and the results of psychological tests that measure implicit attitudes — subtle stereotypes people hold about various groups.

That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did.

Of course there where detractors:

Brian Jones, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said he disagreed with the study’s conclusions but that it was difficult to offer a detailed critique, as the research had not yet been published and he could not review the methodology. He also questioned whether the researchers themselves had implicit biases — against Republicans — noting that Nosek and Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji had given campaign contributions to Democrats.

feel-good-pat

“There are a lot of factors that go into political affiliation, and snap determinations may be interesting for an academic study, but the real-world application seems somewhat murky,” Jones said.
feel-good-pat

This article only mentioned white people’s attitudes toward blacks. Considering some some of the blogs I frequent I am curious of the results about Blacks and their opinion about Blacks. One has to wonder if the study is true and conservative Whites have a negative bias against Blacks, do Blacks have a negative bias against Blacks?

Best quote came at the end:

“If anyone in Washington is skeptical about these findings, they are in denial,” he said. “We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice predicts voting. Republicans are supported by whites with prejudice against blacks. If people say, ‘This takes me aback,’ they are ignoring a huge volume of research.”

In other news, what goes up must come down.

Dap: P6

Instead of using a ATA box like traditional VoIP companies such as Vonage, EarthLink’s service will plug directly into the subscribers traditional phone lines.

“They will experience their phone service in the same way they do from Verizon, SBC, or other traditional phone services,” EarthLink’s Director of Voice Services Jim Bagnato told BetaNews in an interview. The service launched in San Francisco, Dallas and Seattle last month.
(link)

A museum that supporters say will feature the achievements of African-Americans as well as painful moments in their history will be built on the National Mall not far from the Washington Monument.

The Smithsonian Institution will operate the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The prominent location, announced Monday, promotes the concept that African-American life is a part of mainstream American life, said Rep. John Lewis (news, bio, voting record), D-Ga., who has been pushing for the museum for about 20 years. (Related video: Site for African-American museum)
(link)

Dap: Booker Rising

The newspaper industry, the world over, has decided to come against Google for its free news aggregator service.

DUBLIN (Reuters) - A group representing global newspaper publishers has launched a lobbying campaign to challenge search engines like Google that aggregate news content.

The move comes as the newspaper industry’s traditional business model is under pressure with advertising spending shifting away from print and toward the Internet.
link

The rational of the newspaper industry:

“They’re building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content,” Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview.

“The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article — it’s for the courts to decide whether that’s a copyright violation or not.”

Seems like the same sort of thing when search engines in general became popular. Website owners complained that Yahoo, and other search engines where profiting from the content provided by the sites they indexed. It is amazing that in the with so much content out there site like Google are not just convenient they are a necessity if the user is ever going to be in touch with the information he wants or needs. This is SO early nineties