Eh, I've had it happen to me... I won a small paper airplane competition (really more of an art project) years ago, in just one category out of several, and not really anything notable. But all of the news sites ran a little blurb with the headline "Engineer from $AEROSPACE_GIANT (NYSE:$BLAH) wins airplane competition"

I try not to assume too much these days, like that the corporate-controlled media isn't in it for the money if there's money to be made.

Plus, they subliminally put the word "dump" right there in the headline next to the company names, and you know all the robotic stock traders make trades automatically off of the incoming stream of news feeds.

Yeah, sounds like someone is tweaking the headline so they can pick up some cheap stock after it gets dumped.

From actually RTFA, it sounds like VG is just assuming responsibility for further testing. The accident sounds tragic, but it looks like it may have been the co-pilot's ... "fault" is a strong word, but they mentioned he unlocked the stabilizer a bit too early and then it automatically feathered when it wasn't supposed to.

SC may do good work, but these kinds of things happen, unfortunately. But it's really bad press for VG, and I can see their board upset about why they're letting a relatively "small" engineering outfit determine their fate. It sounds like VG should be in charge of this project and their own future now, for better or for worse. Now they're fully responsible for the risks and can certainly handle them differently.

http://fark.com/ is as close to a bipartisan "internet tavern" as I've ever seen. They used to have a "political balance meter" to try to link to a roughly equal number of stories / threads with a "leftist" and "rightist" spin. Anyway, it's useful to (occasionally) see well-articulated thoughts and opinions from "the other side", or even just discussion of news events from different perspectives... stuff that more often devolves into flamewars or gets stuck or pigeonholed on other social media.

That said, yeah, I know next to nothing about Drew, but it sounds like he might be a good moderator of useful discussion. Over beer.

No, they always called it foobies, and moved that stuff to their own domain once they got "serious".

http://foobies.com/

They also used to have a "weeners" tag for the ladies (and dudes of a certain persuasion), but not sure what happened to all that content after they cleaned up.

For personal use?
You don't need an anti-virus program. It's a racket. Use the built-in protections for your OS, and learn some common sense. If you do something that gets you infected, wipe and reload your OS, and DON'T DO THAT AGAIN. Once you have a trimmed group of common, trusted applications and games and settings, you'll be cruising fine. You'll more likely be wiping and reloading your OS due to hardware failures every few years than from virus attacks. Notice that you will need to make backups and treat your computers as disposable. You'll be happier this way.

For work? CYA!
Find out what the company security policy is. Use/Buy one (and only one) that will take the liability WHEN (not if) a virus manages to sneak through. Make sure updates are turned on and up-to-date so they can't weasel out of liability coverage. That is all.

Excellent! Next up: ranking everyone on Facebook from best to worst!

Obligatory XKCD panel #3: http://xkcd.com/451/

Mod AC parent up.

If VB is what the teacher is most comfortable with, and he and the students can do the most impressive "first projects" with it, then by all means use VB6.

I started learning by myself with Turbo Pascal. And ostensibly my first exposure to "programming" was with MS Office macros. Neither were great languages, but I got them to do interesting things, which were motivational. They were also useful, in that in my first temp jobs I could help office people set up mail merges and do stuff to their inventory and things like that. And then, finally I was also motivated to learn other, "better" languages when I hit their limitations. Sounds perfect for a HS course.

Hey, that's pretty cool, thanks!

I also find it interesting that NASA kind of goes off another way, where the only people at Mission Control who are permitted to communicate with astronauts while they're performing a procedure are also former astronauts. Part of the rationale is to serve as a filter, so any conflict or uncertainty on the ground doesn't contribute to the stress of the operator in space. Wonder how they're doing now that there are a few more former female astronauts now than previously...