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The cultural language patterns of "Ebonics" come from a large group of immigrants from northern England/Southern Scotland. They were called "rednecks" and "crackers" before they left Britain and settled in the American South. They had a distinct culture that their slaves adopted. Over a long period of time the southerner's culture changed to become more like the "Yankee" culture they typically despised, but the former-slave black culture in the south didn't change as quickly. (As opposed to black immigrants in the north and the descendants of early freed slaves, whose culture reflected the mainstream northern American culture they joined and who despised the southern rednecks, black or white, even more than the northern whites did.)

Now of course, in the name of "multi-culteralism" blacks are encouraged to stay "rednecks", even though that's not what they are called anymore. The cultural roots are clear and have very little to do with African culture.

You can read details in the book Black Rednecks And White Liberals by Thomas Sowell.

Of course, don't let any scholarly works disturb your worldview if you are one of those that think Kwanzaa is really a traditional ancient African holiday and racism is to blame for every single problem any black person has ever experienced.

The management over at Aluria has become more and more unresponsive in the last couple of months. After this latest news, I've finally had to remove them completely from my brief list of anti-spyware software.

Does anyone have a good free spyware removal tool I can add to my list? Most of the current "free" ones do ok at detection (although many aren't any better than the free tool on the page above), but refuse to remove anything because they want you to buy the removal version instead.

In any case, Aluria's product was fairly easy to use, but dropping the detection of WhenU is just too much. They already were missing a couple of parasites that a better product like PestControl caught just fine, so i wonder if this isn't the first time for something like this.

Try also the list of books (with reviews) at Books Under Review/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Unix/B SD/.

I especially like "Absolute BSD", but then I'm more partial to FreeBSD.

And now with Amazon raising their affiliate commission on used books this quarter, you'll see more of them sold online, too!

Shameless plug for websites with books and reviews, since it's on-topic:

Books Under Review
Author Reviews
Travel and vacation book reviews
Books on Probability and Casino Games
Car Repair Manual
Health Issue Books
Book Thoughts
Financial Books

And now with Amazon raising their affiliate commission on used books this quarter, you'll see more of them sold online, too!

Shameless plug for websites with books and reviews, since it's on-topic:

Books Under Review
Author Reviews
Travel and vacation book reviews
Books on Probability and Casino Games
Car Repair Manual
Health Issue Books
Book Thoughts
Financial Books

[...] he decided to change all of the Computer Administrator passwords on a few of the XP Professional boxes sitting around in the server room. This caused absolute havoc, as Dell had failed to send along administrator passwords for the new boxes. Our company could not make use of these computers for three days. It took Dell that long to get us the administrator passwords.

The problem is that as we allow the government to gain more and more power over our lives, people who want to use that power for something are more and more attracted to controlling the government and it's leaders.

The excuse is always that the government will be able to "help" solve a problem, but just needs to excercise some more power, so that well-intentioned individuals go along with it. Of course, then they go home and those with vital interests at stake take over the power-wielding functionaries.

The only long-term solution is to strictly only allow a government enough power to enforce basic protection of individual freedoms and nothing more. Otherwise, the excercise of power "for good" invariably becomes simply the excercise of power for the highest bidder or the most interested.

See The Road to Serfdom.

You'd be surprised. I've read about 8000-9000 books and still manage to average one or two a day even with working full-time and posting on slashdot. (Ok, sometimes the posting overlapps with the working full-time...)

I also run several book review websites, so may not be a typical example.

Of course, I tend to read in the bath (showers don't work as well), while eating, while exercising, pretty much anytime my mind doesn't have something else to think about.

That being said, I hate reading books on a computer screen and suspect this device won't be much of an improvement.

I routinely see over 10% of windows users show up with spyware on my anti-spyware page, and that's just what can be detected with a simple javascript utility over the web, so the actual total must be even higher than that.

So many IE web users have some sort of spyware/parasite installed (about 10%, based on my web logs) that I finally put up a Spyware Detection and Removal page on an unrelated site, just so I'd have something to refer people to!

If you are serious about privacy, then downloading and installing one of the commercial products (I like Aluria's Spyware Eliminator or the BPS Spyware and Adware Remover the best) is actually worth it. I didn't believe that until I happened to get a free copy of a couple of the commercial versions and found all the features I was missing in the freeware I was using, like a good list of domains and IPs that have been found to have been used by parasites/spyware ready for one-button access denial!

If you just want a "quick" fix that isn't quite as comprehensive (but covers the basics), then hit the Spyware Detection and Removal page above and follow some of the "free scanner" links, or go to one of the commercial sites listed and get their "free" version. I've also tried AdAware, but like most of the other free versions, it didn't seem to pick up as much stuff as my the commercial version of the Aluria software.

Of course, if you aren't running MS Windows, you can pretty much disregard all of the above advice.

So many IE web users have some sort of spyware/parasite installed (about 10%, based on my web logs) that I finally put up a Spyware Detection and Removal page on an unrelated site, just so I'd have something to refer people to!

If you are serious about privacy, then downloading and installing one of the commercial products (I like Aluria's Spyware Eliminator or the BPS Spyware and Adware Remover the best) is actually worth it. I didn't believe that until I happened to get a free copy of a couple of the commercial versions and found all the features I was missing in the freeware I was using, like a good list of domains and IPs that have been found to have been used by parasites/spyware ready for one-button access denial!

If you just want a "quick" fix that isn't quite as comprehensive (but covers the basics), then hit the Spyware Detection and Removal page above and follow some of the "free scanner" links, or go to one of the commercial sites listed and get their "free" version. I've also tried AdAware, but like most of the other free versions, it didn't seem to pick up as much stuff as my the commercial version of the Aluria software.

Of course, if you aren't running MS Windows, you can pretty much disregard all of the above advice.

I wish they had managed to call it something besides "Web Services" when it doesn't have a lot to do with the "World Wide Web". That's been the biggest point of confusion I've found trying to explain web services to semi-technical people.

The services part hasn't been much better than the Web part, but at least it's mostly fitting.

The book reviewed is a pretty good overview. I just wish they had spent more time on typical internal corporate uses and tools to convert/interact with existing legacy software products.

You can find some similar related books at BUR - Web Services/Soap. I am looking forward to the days when standards like this combined with older stuff like XML and CSS make combining and processing data from disparete sources becomes a lot easier than it typically is now!

You may want to consider investing in a good book on basic economics, such as Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.

When you raise the prices of something artificially by passing a law, what happens is that less of that thing is purchased.

The end result in the case of minimum wage laws is that unemployment goes up as people who are only worth less than the minimum wage to an employer can no longer get a job. This mostly negatively affects people new to the work force, teenagers and the working poor.

Your work is only worth what you can convince someone else to pay for it. If it isn't worth "minimum wage", then you shouldn't be paid "minimum wage".

Employers don't continue to operate businesses that aren't profitable. If a minimum wage law is why its no longer profitable, then the employees still don't have jobs.

Conversely, if say, a fast food joint or a grocery store raises its prices in order to make enough to cover its new employee costs, guess who pays for that? How many "minimum wage" style workers shop at a grocery store or fast food joint, as opposed to someone who is rich and shopping at someplace nice enough that they don't pay anyone "minimum wage"?

They don't create wealth out of nothing for people by passing a "minimum wage" law. All they do is keep people who aren't worth the "minimum wage" from being able to get a job anymore, while causing a little inflation for the lower end of economic spectrum.

Unions are fine as long as any employee is free to join or leave them, but they are simply another form of government enforced coercion when the laws are setup to require you to be a member in order to be able to work.

Personally, I prefer freedom to the government or a union running my life.

I've been using their web services for a while now for BooksUnderReview.com to grab review info and while the interface and XML over http are great, Amazon's web services servers have a tendancy to become overloaded 20-30% of the time. I finally had to write into my scripts to do extensive error checking to make sure we really did get a completely valid response before processing any of the info.

There are entire websites based around the premise of using dynamic AWS (Amazon Web Services links), but with the AWS unreliability most of us have found that "local pre-caching" works best. For places looking for product info in an easy to get fashion, AWS works great as long as you plan around it's non-available times.

Some of their restrictions are very annoying (1 second between accesses and content storage time restrictions), but understandable. Still, it's something I'd love to see more and more major sites using.