The point is that very few engineers currently want or need this functionality -- if they did, the Mathworks folks would surely be on to it. The native type is defined, abstract methods are waiting there to be defined, and someone who needed it has implemented it and made it available. Incidentally, that package has had 38 downloads since july, perhaps indicating the level of demand. From this thread, it looks like the company is waiting for the demand before implementing it themselves.

If you really want this support, get the user contributed package from matlab central. That wasn't too hard was it?

The guy doesn't need to prove causation to give up coffee, he just needs to show strong correlation with what he want's to achieve an giving up coffee. The actual, physical cause may be interesting to find but is not what the guy is aiming for -- he just wants to concentrate better. In many cases correlation provides a very good proxy for causation.

First, there isn't around 10000 barrels of oil coming out of the Mississippi every day in any sort of concentrated form. Second, 5000 barrels a day for 30 days is 150,000 barrels, comparable to the 250k barrels spilled by the Exxon Valdez. Finally, they've no idea how much oil is really coming out (the wsj says today possibly 25000 bpd are coming out) and BP says it will take between 55 and 90 days from now before they can attempt to plug it, even then it is only an attempt. So this is quite likely going to be the worst oil spill ever in the USA. I'd say it'll make quite a significant difference to quite a large area for quite a long time.

because your ipod only has 8gb of memory.

It's not just lisp. From a paper describing the language: "Church is based on the Lisp model of lambda calculus, containing a pure Lisp as its deterministic subset. The semantics of Church is defined in terms of evaluation histories and conditional distributions on such histories. Church also includes a novel language construct, the stochastic memomizer, which enables simple description of many complex non-parametric models." This extension is the crucial part, as it makes it easy to encode probabilistic statements and do probabilistic inference.

It's very accurate for all sorts of subjects. Look at the article about the Israel-Palestine conflict or articles about political figures. It's great how these things often reach an equilibrium where both sides of a debate or opposing views are presented.

At least read the summary - Gattaca was based on the idea that phenotypes (physical traits) can be extrapolated from genotypes (the genetic code). The genotypic information stored under this proposal is virtually nil (counts of repeats in "junk" DNA) and the amount of phenotypic information that could be inferred is exactly zero.

Sure, the housing bubble burst, that caused a massive financial crisis because banks had heinously overexposed themselves to unsustainable risk, credit stopped, people and companies stop spending. Recession. Government spending is not trying to reinflate a bubble. It is ensuring that the economy returns to producing somewhere near its capacity. The important number to look at is the cost of debt repayment as a proportion of GDP. While borrowing is quite high at the moment, interest rates are very low, so the cost of servicing the debt is not prohibitive. And if the economy returns to full production soon (eg, those unemployed return to employment), we'll see a quick growth in GDP so the ratio of debt to GDP will quickly reduce (see what happened to the massive public debt after WWII). The whole point of fluctuating exchange rates are to stimulate production where necessary - a weak dollar would be very good for the economy right now. And to answer your question, can I afford a $130k debt? Well, seeing interest rates are around 1-2%, I could easily pay off the required interest. But public debt and personal debt are different - I dont personally owe a portion of the public debt and neither do you. Start worrying about real things like lack of public services and unemployment rather than macro-economic measures like public debt.

Stopping spending is exactly what caused the that massive recession that may or may not be over. Right now, we and the government need to spend. The government spending is replacing spending that should be happening anyway but is not because businesses have stopped. Ever notice that there is 10% official unemployment out there? Why do you think that is?

The telegraph is a conservative paper, there is nothing impartial about it. If you look at the coverage of the US election campaign over there, you'll find people were taking sides just like anywhere else.

We form tribes of relatives, neighbors, classmates, co-workers, etc. Anthropologists/sociologists have discovered there is an optimal tribe size of around a hundred (plus-minus fifty) before it becomes unwieldy, bifurcates or dissolves. The internet allows us to construct social and commercial "tribes" from across the planet.