Up until I the last few years, I would have agreed that women programmers are rare (and they are at most companies). However, I now work for a company with a large number of Indian engineers, and about half of them are women. My conclusion is that the lack of women must be largely cultural (in the US) and nothing whatsoever to do with gender differences in ability.

Yep, although I don't go to the gym, I just walk. And not for 3 hours. I walk 15 minutes before work, 45 minutes at lunch and another 15-30 minutes after work. And I stopped overeating. That's all it takes. I lost 90 pounds in the last 6 months and feel so much better. Really, it just takes a little discipline. Also take a walk around the floor at work every 2-3 hours, not good to sit for extended periods.

Well I've been programming for 40 years (since I was 14), and resisted IDE for a long time until I realized that I was being an idiot and embraced Eclipse. It's a tremendous productivity booster, I can't imagine not having the wonderful refactoring tools it offers, and I have no interest in navigating folder hierarchies. But it's a personal choice, use whatever you prefer and don't worry about what others are using.

So even if Hal 9000 were here, we'd still not have a computer that could fool someone into thinking it was human. At least not with the voice they were using. Also, it was far too polite, while it was killing you.

No. Learn as many languages as you can. You're less likely to believe that one language fits all needs that way. Java isn't going to suddenly drop out of use, there is too much investment in it.

I believe they actually meant U+00A1 (hex for 161):

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00a1/inverted_exclamation_mark.png

Are the Allusion Islands located in the Straits or Allegory?

My time is also valuable to me. That's why I take the train. Although my commute is about 15 minutes longer each way (45 minutes vs. 1 hour), I actually end up ahead, because 45 minutes of that hour I'm sitting on the train reading (which is not wasted time to me like sitting in the car listening to the radio is). Some people use audio-books, but I prefer to read.

I'm paying $60 a month for 1Mb/s down and 256Kb/s up. Pretty steep for the speed, but at least I can work effectively from home and VPN works well. It's been pretty reliable, though there are occasional outages for a few hours once every few months.