The problem is not that these body images are harmful, but that girls are trained to think that their appearance is their most important attribute.

This is not improving, this shallow culture is being promoted to men and boys as well, perhaps in order to stave off charges of sexism, but more likely it's just a realisation within these cosmetic and fashion industries that they are missing out on a potential market.

C++ and Python aren't even remotely similar to C#, Java is. Java is a far superior cross platform language than C#, which only has decent performance under Windows.

So what you're saying is, sales and marketing need an image boost?

A simple trick for doing a hash map for integer keys is just to modulus each key into the size you want the hash map. So if you want to chuck a bunch of values into an array, you just go:

array[key%array.size] = value

Only problem is that I often forget what year it is when I'm under stress.

The candidate who invents as he goes and has algorithms named after him is the one you want. But the guy who hacks together a quadratic time algorithm when Google can give him a perfectly good linear one certainly isn't.

Probably still not specific enough.

Wow, Apple charges you $99 a year subscription, and then gives you the access to their API's, the free software GCC toolchain and an IDE for free. Then they only take a 30 percent cut of everything you sell on top of that. How generous.

Yeah, we should stop using the French as poster boys for fission, they have a terrible track record.

The problem with the social sciences, and especially psychiatry, psychology and economics, is the massive amount of influence they have over public policy. They may have good and repeatable studies that completely contradict each other, from which politicians and appointed officials then cherry pick the studies that align with their viewpoint. Don't like social welfare because of your Protestant values? Lets go with the Chicago School economics. Control freak? Lets justify increased economic control with Keynesian economics. Bigoted against Homosexuality? Let's not forget that it's a "paraphilia". We mustn't forget that moral preconceptions can and do constantly reflect in the conclusions drawn from the social sciences, far more so than any other academic area.

Perhaps we should add another dimension to the categorisation of sciences alongside the soft/hard category; hot/cool, as in headed.

QtCreator is an excellent C++ IDE in my opinion. Geany is by far what I spend most of my time using for Java and Python, it's a really good balance between full featured IDE and a text editor + console setup. I started out programming C with gvim and gcc under cygwin, at the it seemed much more intuitive to me than Visual Studio, but that was probably because it was nice and simple, and didn't hide any details from me.

The Brits generally use the short scale billion now.

import sys
print eval(sys.argv[1])

I'm sorry, but you just failed the Turing test.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_science

How the tables have turned since the middle ages. I'm pulling this out of my ass, but I would say that the percentage of Muslims that believe in evolution are similar to Christians, Jews etc. It's just that the idiots are the ones that shout the loudest.

Don't you think that it's a cruel God that has created so much human suffering? Obviously he can't/won't prevent the harm caused by other humans like wars, genocides and famine. But how can he morally justify the famine, plagues, parasites and all the other natural abominations he has created? If I believed that the Christian God existed I would surely foresake him for all the evil he has created. The Abrahamic God behaves like a child burning ants with a magnifying glass. Jesus seems cool though.