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links for 2009-07-18

  • Apple has finally admitted that a British man who left school at 15 is the inventor behind the iPod.

    Kane Kramer, 52, came up with the technology that drives the digital music player nearly 30 years ago but has still not seen a penny from his invention.
    Now documents filed by Apple in a court case show the US firm acknowledges him as the father of the iPod.

    His invention, called the IXI, stored only 3.5 minutes of music on to a chip – but Mr Kramer rightly believed its capacity would improve.

    His sketches at the time showed a credit-card-sized player with a rectangular screen and a central menu button to scroll through a selection of music tracks – very similar to the iPod.

  • resident Barack Obama had a tough-love message for fellow African-Americans on Thursday, urging black parents to push their children to think beyond dreams of being sports stars or rap music performers.

    Obama's election as the first African-American president buoyed the black community. At the 100th anniversary celebration of the NAACP, the country's oldest civil rights group, he urged blacks to take greater responsibility for themselves and move away from reliance on government programs.

    "We need a new mindset, a new set of attitudes — because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way that we have internalized a sense of limitation; how so many in our community have come to expect so little of ourselves," he said.

    ouch.