Wooosh!

You can program your phone, you just need a Macintosh, Xcode and a developer certificate to do it.

Absolutely not true. You can also get Xcode through the developer centre.

True, but in Mavericks, Software Update did nothing more than open the App Store on the Updates tab.

Yes, he's trolling,

Wrong

If you turn the seats around, they have to be much stronger because the force of the impact will be transmitted through the whole seat back instead of just a couple of hard points where the seat belts are bolted on. Undeniably, this would be more survivable, in an accident but the seats will have to be much stronger and more securely bolted to the air frame meaning they will be heavier meaning fewer of them in a plane meaning more expensive flights.

Given the probability of ever being involved in an air crash, it's a risk I'm happy to take.

Well, I suppose in a roundabout way...

Gen. Jack Ripper salutes you, sir!

(This message sent from my CRM-114 Discriminator)

It comes from all kinds of things, but nowhere int he amounts and strengths found in birth control pills. The pill is *far* worse than even regular hormoe replacemtn therapy, since the dose has to be strong enough to swamp the body's normal hormonal actions and responses. This type of overloading always produces very high levels of excreted chemicals - far more than you'll find from almost any other source.

And keep in mind, these are more dangerous for people than other environmental estrogens, since they're *designed and intended* to work most effectively on humans.

Still, won't someone think of all those poor, chemically gay fish? They didn't choose to be that way... :-)

Try buying food that isn't packaged, cooked, or served in materials that are well-known to leach xenoestrogens... From bottles to juice boxes to plastic/vacuum bags to polymer coatings in almost all modern cans and coffee and drink cups - you're getting bathed in this stuff unless you can afford to buy everything you eat at the farmer's market, and even them it's almost impossible to avoid the various pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, etc., many of which are loose in the environment themselves.

No, the EPA is worried about the natural non-pollutant CO2 rather than the clear and present danger of concentrated chemicals from city water treatment plants. Do you really expect the Feds to attack their urban power base? As another poster mentioned, the urban hipsters would scream bloody murder if they had to pay to have their effluent treated to eliminate these extraordinarily powerful chemicals...

I've yet to see any that correlate estrogen in contraceptive pills with the quantities of estrogen in waste water. Modern contraceptive pills use minute amounts. Additionally, our bodies produce estrogen in the liver,adrenal glands, breasts (in women), and fat cells (are increased obesity rates producing more waste estrogen?). We put far larger amounts into some cosmetics and shampoos. We also use synthetic estrogen compounds in substantial amounts plastics in our food packaging and containers. They've long been known to leech into our food and are harmful endocrine disruptors which can have effects that are passed on to our offspring, including infertiility and cancers

Or maybe, just maybe, the right solution is to start eliminating *all* of those sources - sounds to me like you're trying awfully hard to defend birth control hormones for reasons other than the provable scientific fact that environmental estrogens and xenoestrogens are wreaking havoc on our entire ecosystem, people and animals.

The thing that differentiates hormones from other kinds of chemicals is that a tiny amount produces an enormous biological response. The smart thing to do is to quit acting like bathing our bodies and our environments in this stuff doesn't matter... (The studies you seek are out there and numerous - use Google yourself, dammit.)

BTW, I'm far from a green weenie (I strongly support fracking and nuclear, and believe the science shows that man made global warming is complete and utter BS), but I do believe that there are two very large, very real technological dangers to our biology that will finally become recognized in the coming decades - environmental sex hormones (far more often female than male, but both are troublesome), and modern digital wireless communications with sharp square-wave edges which are more and more proving to affect biology through methods other than heating or ionization.

People interested in programming in high-school probably had some nerdy interests as adolescents. Interests that weren't squashed by teachers, peers, or parents as so often is the case.

By the time they are 16 or older it's probably too late. Granted there are certainly exceptions, but don't look for a shift in numbers so soon. It takes a concerted effort over at least a decade to begin moving the needle, then a slow ramp up over the following decade to shift the cultural pressures and expectations. Look at how long it took for geekdom/nerdiness to become accepted.

There's also the whole unique snowflake issue where the first girl to show up at the clubhouse is likely to attract a lot of attention, which can go in a negative direction fairly quickly because young kids are so scared and unsure of themselves (on both sides). Once you regularly have girls/women in programming meet ups, comp-sci courses, etc it becomes much less of an issue.

We know this is just cultural and not some bullshit "maybe girls don't like programming" garbage because the ratio of women in the field was much higher in the past.

They missed a trick with Objective-C. In Smalltalk the binary operators are messages just like anything else, but in Objective-C you can't use the binary operators as messages.

It actually wouldn't have been that hard for the language to define the binary operators as syntactic sugar for messages e.g. you could have * being syntactic sugar for multiplyBy: when it appears in the context of a message selector, so your above example would then be:

Vec4 *result = [matrix * [[a * [b / @(10.0)]] + @(0.5)]];

@(...) is the modern Objective-C syntax for boxing a literal as an NSNumber.

It's still not as readable as your first example, but it's an improvement on the normal syntax.

No they are not, they denote the beginning and end of a compound statement in a nice explicit way that the the human eye can see and the compiler can parse.

But normalisation of indentation is not a solved problem whereas pretty printing of blocks delimited by braces is.

In both of the editors I currently use frequently, typing an opening brace also puts in the closing brace nicely aligned and places the caret between them indented the correct amount ready for some code. How does that work in Python?

If I copy a piece of C code (or move it) from one place to another, my editor correctly indents it for the new context. How does that work in Python?

I do like Python, but its indent rule coupled with the rule that stops you from breaking long lines anywhere you like is a bit of a pain. However, it's pain I'm prepared to live with because of the other nice features.