I've worked in Matlab (doing DSP), but it's one butt ugly language. It's like FORTRAN with braces, and "global" only works sort of half. And its symbolic manipulation feels like an afterthought. Even Javascript is a better language. And for statistics, why not use R?

Pro tip: if you want to try your hand at Matlab: it's horribly expensive, but there are free clones available: Octave (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Octave) and Scilab (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scilab). I prefer the latter, but be sure to check the list of differences with Matlab.

Article is bad and doesn't give any conclusive physical reason why cold fusion is impossible. It only says that one possibility is unlikely, and the rest is hand waving and guilt by association. What a bad link.

What's the max amount of disk space anyone needs then?

I think you can trust them a bit. They're not constantly lying to you about everything. At least, not the higher quality outlets. You do have to consider that often only partial information is available, and that they want to sell ads, so it's almost never the final word. But with that restriction, there are quite a few reliable news outlets available. Perhaps the best idea is to read everything two weeks later, so you can compare it to recent reports...

It's dubbed "astroturfing": a form of propaganda whose techniques usually consist of a few people attempting to give the impression that mass numbers of enthusiasts advocate some specific cause. They are also completely ignoring the fact that nobody else wants it to be legalized. That /. publishes it, is the result of a lousy, commercialized editorial policy, and another illustration that you cannot trust sources that offer you new for free.

You are completely right. I came here to say something to similar effect. The "share economy" is just shifting the employer's risk from employer to employee, almost returning labor to hour or piece wages. It's not sharing, it's another way of getting profit. So if Uber wants to sell taxi rides, they can get a license like everybody else.

Did England land a man on the moon? I had no idea. Typical of them not to boast about it. Jolly good, carry on.

Remind me to put a copy of <insert horrible title> on your book shelves next time you leave the door open. It's not a crime, but it is annoying.

I expect a bit better from Apple. After all, you pay a ton of cash for their hardware. It just shows that the corporate culture at Apple is moving further and further away from computing and more towards low cost media sales and commission on payments. Too bad, cause I really like OSX.

> in all my classes, students from Asian and African education systems beat my native born Americans. This has been the case ALL the time.

That might be (selection) bias. Asians and Africans that go the US, have received proper education, better than average. They're probably from relatively wealthy parents. The other Asians and Africans did not get such a good education. The Americans (although probably not natives!), on the other hand, are in your classes after receiving common education, and --unless you teach at an Ivy League university-- are not the best of their generation. So you might be comparing apples and oranges.

The eye is bigger than the stomach. That is certainly part of the MOOC "failure". However, I don't consider it a failure. They have hundreds of thousands of students that finished a course. Is that failure? In comparison to the 8 million enrollments perhaps, but in comparison to the zero that would have done the course without MOOC, it isn't. I did a course. Followed all classes, didn't bother to get a grade or certificate, because (a) I couldn't put in the effort in the single week there was to do the project, (b) I didn't care about the certificate. It was just to learn something new. And I'm grateful to coursera that they offered this possibility.

> The obvious poor quality elementary and post elementary pupils western countries produce compared to kids from the Asian subcontinent

I think you might be ever so slightly mistaken there. If you're referring to the PISA or OESO scores, they are heavily biased. And many Western countries have quite decent elementary education, thank you very much. I agree the effort could be improved, but you can't call it poor.

Yup. Reddit's admins cannot claim a moral ground for their decision if they leave all that shit untouched, and even (shadow)ban people that criticize you for it. I've deleted my reddit account. They can circlejerk themselves without me.

And the fact that APL evaluates from right to left. APL is QBASIC on LSD.

But wouldn't that create a "wiki" by professionals for professionals? It's hard to get a significant part of a research community to agree on a long, detailed text with loads of footnotes, so trying to write a concise entry on important topics like obesity, climate change, religious violence, etc., could result in similar endless battles of opinion, only this time between academic schools.

An ideal encyclopedia, IMO, can deal with such fights because the editor-in-chief is a bit of a Renaissance man (man in the sense of person, but the fixed expression is like this), with the authority, diplomatic skill, and good sense to make a final decision, and to reopen a "permanent" article when there is a real change. He/she will probably need a bit of equally minded staff to help with that.

As for other languages: many of the longer articles are factual and have the same relevance in all countries, especially when properly reviewed, so a translation would suffice. The rest, well, might not benefit from this approach, since it would cost quite a similar amount of money to support such a process for languages with a much smaller reach than the main, English wikipedia. Bad luck, I guess.