Programming is a multifaceted activity. Most of these teachers are probably not even qualified to teach programming and you end up getting this hard reliance on a textbook. Not knocking them or their skills, but it's just the nature of what goes into good programming.

Read the Quran and Hadiths. It's written in plain Arabic (or English if you get a good translation).

That headline was incredibly difficult to read. Sue Google sues Google? I need to slow down.

Anytime I read of a "targeted" network bot infestation it just reeks of some spook involvement (a la stuxnet).

A real criminal bot net wouldn't benefit as much from infecting such a narrow group of people and organizations. If anything, it sounds more like a fishing expedition for either industrial espionage or national secrets.

I'll put my money on either the Chinese, Russian, Israelis, or the classic US alphabet agencies.

Shamelessly stolen from Scott Adam's Blog:

What’s is science’s biggest fail of all time?

I nominate everything about diet and fitness.

Maybe science has the diet and fitness stuff mostly right by now. I hope so. But I thought the same thing twenty years ago and I was wrong.

I used to think fatty food made you fat. Now it seems the opposite is true. Eating lots of peanuts, avocados, and cheese, for example, probably decreases your appetite and keeps you thin.

I used to think vitamins had been thoroughly studied for their health trade-offs. They haven’t. The reason you take one multivitamin pill a day is marketing, not science.

I used to think the U.S. food pyramid was good science. In the past it was not, and I assume it is not now.

I used to think drinking one glass of alcohol a day is good for health, but now I think that idea is probably just a correlation found in studies.

I used to think I needed to drink a crazy-large amount of water each day, because smart people said so, but that wasn’t science either.

I could go on for an hour.

You might be tempted to say my real issue is with a lack of science, not with science. In some of the cases I mentioned there was a general belief that science had studied stuff when in fact it had not. So one could argue that the media and the government (schools in particular) are to blame for allowing so much non-science to taint the field of real science. And we all agree that science is not intended to be foolproof. Science is about crawling toward the truth over time.

Perhaps my expectations were too high. I expected science to tell me the best ways to eat and to exercise. Science did the opposite, sometimes because of misleading studies and sometimes by being silent when bad science morphed into popular misconceptions. And science was pretty damned cocky about being right during this period in which it was so wrong.

So you have the direct problem of science collectively steering my entire generation toward obesity, diabetes, and coronary problems. But the indirect problem might be worse: It is hard to trust science.

Today I saw a link to an article in Mother Jones bemoaning the fact that the general public is out of step with the consensus of science on important issues. The implication is that science is right and the general public are idiots. But my take is different.

I think science has earned its lack of credibility with the public. If you kick me in the balls for 20-years, how do you expect me to close my eyes and trust you?

If a person doesn’t believe climate change is real, despite all the evidence to the contrary, is that a case of a dumb human or a science that has not earned credibility? We humans operate on pattern recognition. The pattern science serves up, thanks to its winged monkeys in the media, is something like this:

Step One: We are totally sure the answer is X.

Step Two: Oops. X is wrong. But Y is totally right. Trust us this time.

Science isn’t about being right every time, or even most of the time. It is about being more right over time and fixing what it got wrong. So how is a common citizen supposed to know when science is “done” and when it is halfway to done which is the same as being wrong?

You can’t tell. And if any scientist says you should be able to tell when science is “done” on a topic, please show me the data indicating that people have psychic powers.

So maybe we should stop scoffing at people who don’t trust science and ask ourselves why. Ignorance might be part of the problem. But I think the bigger issue is that science is a “mostly wrong” situation by design that is intended to become more right over time. How do you make people trust a system that is designed to get wrong answers more often than right answers? And should we?

I’m pro-science because the alternatives are worse. (Example: ISIS.) I’m sure most of you are on the same side. But can we stop being surprised when people don’t believe science? Humans can’t turn off pattern recognition. There’s a good reason trust in science is low. Science failed my generation on the topic of food and exercise the same way science failed my parents generation with cigarettes.

Some of the problem is visual, I assume. I can see with my own eyes my fellow-citizens getting fat but I can’t see a scientist making a useful breakthrough in a lab. The successes in science are often hidden from view and the problems are not. So that has to be factored in. While science is mostly good and useful, there’s a tendency to more easily remember the mistakes than the breakthroughs.

And we all know that studies funded by private industry are suspect. There’s plenty of that too.

Science is an amazing thing. But it has a credibility issue that it earned. Should we fix the credibility situation by brainwashing skeptical citizens to believe in science despite its spotty track record, or is society’s current level of skepticism healthier than it looks? Maybe science is what needs to improve, not the citizens.

I’m on the side that says climate change, for example, is pretty much what science says it is because the scientific consensus is high. But I realize half of my fellow-citizens disagree, based on pattern recognition. On one hand, the views of my fellow citizens might lead humanity to inaction on climate change and result in the extinction of humans. On the other hand, would I want to live in a world in which people stopped using pattern recognition to make decisions?

Those are two bad choices.

Scott Adams

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/1...

As a former fat person (6'1, 255lbs, 30% BF), I started loosing weight the second I stopped taking diet advice from "scientists". Instead, I started eating lots of protein, lots of fat, and very little carbs. I then went to the gym and started a compound weight lifting routine. On Wednesday, I did HIIT. A year later, I am a healthy 205lbs at 10% body fat.

You'll find the best weight loss and fitness advice on bodybuilding.com's forum even with all of the "bro-science". The tips given to me by random posters on a bodybuilding enthusiast website have helped me far more than some over credentialed know nothing any day.

We know from experiments here on Earth that if you put water into a low pressure / near vacuum environment that it will boil off. No $hit temperature isn't a factor when the environment is so remarkably light on any sort of air pressure.

This sounds like a bunch of researchers made up some convincing grant to pay their bills for a few months already answering a question we could have easily extrapolated from observable phenomena here on this planet.

They were wrong about the ice caps melting, pretty sure they're also going to be wrong about this one too.

I'll take my chances on nothing happening.

What are all of those birds then? Don't these pension eaters have any better paper to push?

I love the challenge to the environmentalists here. Lower MPG and lower emissions (NOx) or Raise MPG and raise NOx? It's the perfect catch 22. Diesel cars and trucks are some of the best vehicles out there. The engines are built to last longer due to the compression/ignition needs and there's more energy per liter stored than gasoline. Accept the NOx and build more fuel variety vehicles. Why don't we have more Natgas vehicles?

Where in the world are you getting that diesel engines are more complex? All you need for the ignition cycle is fuel and compressed air. Bam that is it. A turbo in a diesel engine Diesel engines only became complicated because of BS emissions requirements levied by do nothing eurocrats.

Diesel cars/trucks are light years better than gasoline on the sheer basis the engines last longer. NOx means nothing when you're gas car dies at 125k and you need to buy a new one. The level of emissions that go into making a car outweigh the small amount of NOx outputted anyday.

Save the environment and drive your car longer!

My entire newsfeed is stuffed with clickbait from places like the Huffpost, New York Times, and the Washington Post. The WaPo just put out an article about an evangelical couple having black triplets. You're telling me that isn't click bait? This sounds like a weak attempt to drown out lesser outlets for established ones.

I like Jackson and the ironic history he brought along with it being on a Federal Reserve bank note and all. They should have brought back the two dollar bill and just had it be an artistic bill where they swap famous figures and landscapes every now and then. Give me my Jackson back!

Gotta make sure comrade Sanders gets his cut!

https://xkcd.com/678/

Fossil fuels will be here for the foreseeable future and then some.

Hey guys! You need to watch out for SARS, H1N1, H151, mad cow, swine flu, Ebola, Zika, etc! It's really dangerous.

When there is a real dangerous pandemic the idiots who cry wolf at the WHO and media will cause the untold deaths of millions.