As is often the case, we need more information. Several here have suggested acquiring facility with IDEs, and I agree wholeheartedly with that. Being an Eclipse wizard will improve your productivity immensely. There are a variety of tutorials that will help you with that, but it may not get you a paycheck tomorrow. You need to do it, though, if you don't want to end up right back here.

One problem you may be facing is that you are unaware of many of the new trends (where "new" may be 30 years or so) in programming languages. Computer Science students are typically required to program in a language like Scheme, Miranda, or Haskell not because anyone expects them to encounter them in a production environment, but because it allows them to design code for optimization and parallelization and other useful, modern features of computing. If you don't come up to speed with these kind of techniques, you will find yourself relegated to an ever shrinking niche of the industry, and a poorly paid one at that. This may be part of why you are having some trouble with your online course. I'm not recommending that you run out and learn those three languages, but maybe try to find a course of study that is a little more basic, even if some of it is old hat.

Also, there is no such thing as needing a paycheck from programming. You may need a paycheck, but as long it is ethicl and legal, it doesn't matter if it comes from programming or not. There are all kinds of oddball things you can do for a paycheck - I retired in 2007, and have been bouncing around among them. Probably the oddest was as Pace Instructor, teaching math on board navy ships. Not much money, and not for everyone, but I had a blast and it's just an example of what's out there.

At least not as far as anyone knows. This is not a scientific question, it is more of a philosophical or even a theological question. If there are deterministic physical laws governing how objects interact, then it is possible to predict anything. Realistically, no one will have the computational power to make such a prediction, so achieving randomness is really just a matter of achieving something close enough to truly random that no one can predict it.

In the Eudemonic Pie, some young iconoclasts managed to predict the "random" behavior of a roulette wheel. Any randomizing algorithm that you can find in a standard library assumes some environmental condition - often related to the time - is unknown. These are probably pretty good assumptions, but the results are not truly random.

The only way we could have true randomness is if there are some sort of measurable phenomena that cannot be predicted. Quantum mechanics dances around this question, and even if there is a state change that is genuinely random, it would be difficult bordering on heroic to measure it in a practical way so as to create a random number generator.

Criminals will not want to use e-money, but I think a lot of people will get creeped out when they buy something, and 10 seconds later they are texted a coupon for a store next door, for something they were Googling about last week. Don't get me wrong - some people will absolutely love that. But not everyone will. I wouldn't, which is why I intend to keep carrying cash.

These cables look relatively safe, but if the trend continues, how long before a virus exploits a vulnerability in the cable? The cyberwarfare guys might be working on that one right now.

You're right, but shortly after that it says this:

"Justice McKinnon said little of what the Americans told Ottawa was true "

Either way, the judge didn't have a very constructive view of US Attorney. It would be nice to see some follow-up, on the US Attorney's "no comment", but I doubt we will.

Does anyone have any idea how much energy these panels will be saving simply by using the sunlight for something other than heating the building? I realize you could accomplish much the same thing with a simple awning, but it seems like it should still be part of the calculation.

Thanks for the reply. I guess I was thinking of API at a lower level than is the general use - showing my age.

I understand and appreciate your answer, but the question still lingers - I'll use Java as an example - it is a bad one since the source is available, but assume for a moment it were not - what if swing (showing my age again) had tests throughout it saying that if the panel/frame/container/whatever was going to appear on wikileaks.org, then abort the program? I mean no one would ever do that, but what if they did? Could they? Has it already happened?

I'm not really feeling paranoid (yet), I'm wondering more about technical feasibility.

Does this sort of thing happen often? If Oracle decides I have too many weeds in my yard, will my Java programs stop working?

Seriously, is the wave of the present/future APIs with all sorts of tests in them so they do different things for different users? Sounds both intriguing and insidious.

The problem with DST is the free lunch mentality that goes with it. It was the first response of Congress to the "energy crisis" of the early 70's, and has remained the solution of choice for similar problems ever since. People genuinely believe they are getting "an extra hour of daylight", and expect other little bonuses to be handed to them just as painlessly. Sorry for the rant, but it's long been a pet peeve of mine.

Maybe if you get it from lightning, then it counts as a fuel?

I was a university CS professor for most of my career, and the easiest things to teach students are the things that they want to learn. What that is will vary, but working in a lab, one on one, you will have a lot of opportunities to find out what the individuals are interested in. Don't worry if it's not the same thing to every student; they will talk and teach each other what you have taught them, and they will learn it better that way

The one thing you can can be certain they want to learn are things that will help them get a good grade in the course. So if it is a programming course, teach them how to login, manage files, and to use whatever IDE you are using for the course, whether it is vi, emacs, eclipse, or something else. While you are doing that, talk to them and see what else they are interested in, and try to run with that.

I disagree with some of the comments here that have suggested philosophy and history. That is great stuff, but do not make the mistake of thinking that just because it interests you, it will interest them. Give them a taste, sure, but dwell on things that will help them get a good grade, and then let them suggests breadth or depth beyond that.

Lots of Californians want to pay extra for green power, but do they really care who gets which power, as long as the green power is generated and used? I would guess that the vast majority of them would be fine with paying more to have green power generated and used elsewhere, but that isn't an option - when you opt into a green power program, it says you are getting that power.

The northwest already has plenty of hydropower that can be interrupted briefly while the reservoirs are allowed to fill, or at least not deplete as quickly. The wind power could be diverted to the aluminum potlines and other big users - there is still a grid issue, but much smaller than getting those big surges down to California.

A lot of this could be solved administratively, if the parties involved really wanted to solve it

This is ironic because Ulysses not only was the cause for stricter pornography laws in the United States, when it was first published not as a book but in serialized form, but it was also the book that was used to get the laws struck down. Although the Ulysses case itself never went to the Supreme Court, it did influence later cases that did wind up in the Supreme Court.

Maybe Apple could have an Ulysses app with all the nasty bits removed. Or better yet, a Bowdlerization filter that would transform any book into something absolutely harmless.