Sadly, the 419 scammers have also decided to see if they can get a piece of the pie - here's an example of a Katrina-related 419 scam which has been mass-spammed during the last day or so.

Sick, awful, and yet... clever.

Viruslist.com - Analyst's Diary

SMS, Short Message Service, or text messaging, will work over intermittant and often even overloaded connections, to get messages in and out of congested areas to/from mobile phones. It's worked transcontinentally to save lives. Learn it.

Kilo Seven: Communicating with mobile phones in disaster areas despite system overload

The Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones.

Zeigarnik effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Most accounts of the dispute between Apple and the labels have focused on the industry's efforts to raise prices, which are undeniably a big part of their plan. No surprise there. The research we've been doing for the book shows that within the bulk of the online music business--the top 100,000 downloads--only 3.5 tracks on the average CD sell. So the record labels are getting less than $3 in revenue (wholesale) from albums when the music is sold by the track. That's less than half the wholesale price of a CD (although with none of the physical costs of making and distributing a CD). The shift from an album model to a track model is indeed an alarming thing for the labels, and it's easy to see why they'd want to raise retail prices online as a result.

But there's more to the story that that. The labels may be evil, but they're not (all) stupid. They--to say nothing of many of their artists--also see the virtues of dropping the price for lots of their music, too. For decades they've been playing with CD pricing models that range from cut-price classics to top-dollar boxed sets, and when freed of the overheads of traditional retail, they're likely to experiment more, not less. Although some of the more vocal commentators have encouraged Apple to hold the line at $0.99, there's a strong argument that introducing variable pricing might ultimately lead to a more consumer-friendly outcome.

The Long Tail: Could the labels actually be right?

Dick Tracy runs a series on Piracy. Feel is MPAA inspired. Starts 8-14 and the story is still developing.

Comics Page: Dick Tracy

Robert Iger, CEO-elect of The Walt Disney Co., recently suggested the day could come when a DVD is released while the movie is still in theaters. The millions of dollars that studios spend marketing first-run movies would serve double duty promoting the more profitable DVDs, making for a faster and more efficient return on investment.

Studios Mull Changes to Movie 'Windows' - Yahoo! News

Can you create a star rating using only CSS. I’m talking the kind that when you hover over the 4th star, there are four stars that show up on the hover state. Well, I’m glad you asked because that is just the question I intend to answer.

I've had to do stuff like this before. Nice solution.

Creating a Star Rater using CSS » Blog » Komodo Media

The evacuation of the Superdome was suspended Thursday after shots were fired at a military helicopter, an ambulance official overseeing the operation said. No immediate injuries were reported.

Shots were fired.

The Battle of the Superdome is almost lost.

Local News | The Pensacola News Journal

The usual price-setting method is to look at the entire potential market, from the many at the economic lower end to the few at the top, and set a price somewhere in between the top and bottom that will maximize total revenues. But if you cede the bottom to piracy, you can set a price between the top and the middle. The result: higher revenues per copy, and potentially higher revenues overall.

(This is, by the way, the opposite of the conventional economic approach to developing-world piracy, which is to lower the cost of a product closer to the pirate version, closing the pricing gap to try to win customers over to the official version. In practice, however, the pirate price is so low that it's rarely possible to close that gap enough to make much of a difference.)

The Long Tail: 'Just enough piracy'

Redmond (WA) - Putting an end to speculation that Microsoft had indefinitely postponed, or even cancelled, the proposed contextual file system that chairman Bill Gates introduced in October 2003, the company this morning released Beta 1 of WinFS.

Tom's Hardware Guide: Tom's Hard News