Your revisionist history is another thing that makes me angry. Ruby and Python were getting popular long before Rails and Django came on the scene so before you go running your mouth about core people ignoring the needs of people you should think long and hard about subverting the needs of an entire community just so you can develop another web app.
Ruby is much more than Rails and I think it's a little sad that a large portion of the developer population has no idea that Ruby exists outside of Rails.
Human are associating machines. Learning requires a bit more because if it didn't then the AI problem would have been solved long ago by neural nets. What schools don't do well is teach people about meta-cognition which is how all learning really happens. Anyone can memorize a few facts and regurgitate opinions but few people can connect the dots and see the big picture by collating all the local pieces of information we are constantly bombarded with.
I don't get it. How is the selector relevant to what people choose? You might as well have put a different colored rabbit somewhere on the page and measured responses that way.
No. Stuff like this only comes with experience and it's more important to teach students about the fundamental and overarching themes of computer science than to pester them with optimization issues.
I have no problem with the mandate. It's the clear lack of competence in intelligence gathering that bothers me. Who honestly considers anything said on reddit to be of any significant value to state security matters? They might as well throw a dart on some board and make decisions that way if they are so desperate as to use postings from reddit.
All these goof-ups by the FBI don't paint a pretty picture about the agency at all and I'm surprised some news agency isn't up in arms about their funding and incompetence like they are with the teachers' unions.
I'm not sure how this would be implemented. Where would the blacklist be held and how would it influence the search results? I know that they already do a lot of search customization but most of it is just aggregate statistical computations. It's not that they return results specifically tailored to you but more like results tailored to a very fuzzy average version of you. A blacklist seems way too specific to each user to be susceptible to meaningful aggregate statistical operations like spam filtering which is one of the reasons that spam filtering in google is so good. Each user contributes something and everyone benefits. I don't see that happening with blacklists. I think to make it worthwhile they would need to figure out how to feed the information from blacklists into providing more meaningful results for everyone.