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A few days ago the prestigious Milan daily, Corriere della Sera, published the translation of an article by Neocon, Robert Kagan. The Italian version of the article bore the title “Trattare Con Teheran? Meglio Farlo Subito” (Negotiate With Tehran? Better Do It Now.) The article was headed by a secondary title written in red: “The Nuclear Threat.”

As I read the four-column article I ticked what for me were dubious or false statements and claims, either of fact or opinion. Kagan’s apparently smooth article is predictably infected with an underlying hypocrisy and well known America-centrism making the writer’s occasional hypocritical attempts at any kind of balance laughable.

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http://www.blender.com/guide/articles.aspx?id=1855

Courtesy of Jax

This article in the Guardian is immensely informative about Facebook and its real intentions. Don’t be out off by the first few paragraphs. Read the full thing here

Another great Dutch photographer. Check his portrait section.

Go to Jan’s website

Very detailed account of how this guy decides to stop paying his TV license and how the BBC kept sending letter after letter to him, the tone of each letter getting more and more aggressive.

Go to website

Top Trends is a blog about trends. The trends are sifted into a number of sections largely based on industry sectors. There is then a category of trends named megatrends, which is a listing of trends that affect many industries or have wider future socio-economic impacts. There’s also a section called columns, which is some of my writings for various newspapers and magazines and a section called predictions. Last but not least there’s also a section about my forthcoming book.

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From thismodernworld.org.

Click on image for full-scale version (or right-click and download).

There are only two coding skills which mostly people who are completely self-taught as a programmer miss out on: proper encapsulation, and unit tests. For proper encapsulation, you should organize your code so that changes which require modifying code in more than one module are as rare as possible, and for unit tests you should write them to be pass/fail so that all unit tests can be run as a comprehensive suite. And now you know everything you need to about those two things. Anyone who is taught the above guidelines, and decides they really want to learn those skills, will with sufficient practice become good at them.

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A book recommended here is Introduction to Algorithms which you can buy from Amazon.