In case anyone is interested, here's the link to the NPR review of 'Into Darkness'. That reviewer seems to echo this review's sentiments pretty closely; it's different from the old Star Trek, and doesn't have much thought to it, but is entertaining nonetheless.

You are likely referring to the Boston bombings; as I understood it, Obama didn't use the term "terrorist" specifically ON the day of the bombings, and has ever after. I'd say this is simply him doing his due-diligence in not jumping to conclusions, as at the time no one knew if the explosions weren't simply a gas line exploding. If anything I'd want more of politicians and news stations taking a deliberate and thorough approach to things, rather than going all reddit on us and pointing fingers and making sensationalist claims. Each to their own eh?

Students have it good when it comes to matlab -- you can get a student version of matlab + simulink (with 10 or so toolboxes) for $99. The people who are really hurt by matlab's pricing schemes are the hobbyists who don't qualify for a student copy. There's this huge price dichotomy; when you're a student it's $99, after you graduate it's $5000+, and that's without any toolboxes.

However, for academic use it makes perfect sense for scientists to use matlab over the alternatives. At least in the UC (university of california) system, a department will have some (large) number of licences for it's faculty to use, and so professors and their student (who commonly won't have much coding experience) will have what's essentially free access matlab and it's associated toolboxes. From their perspective, they want to run their experiments and write their papers, not learn how to code and be a pseudo-sysadmin. They want to use the simplest environment that stays out of their way, and not have to deal with installing various libraries. Say what you will about matlab, its support and documentation is very good.

I'm aware your comment was mean facetiously, but lambdas were also added to C++ in C++11

This is a major improvement for GPGPU, not game playing. Memory throughput is often the bottleneck in applications, as computational throughput improvements has greatly outstripped memory throughput improvements. To give you an idea about the importance of memory bandwidth, if you have a GPU with a peak arithmetic throughput of 1170 GFLOPS (this is how much a Tesla K20 gets for double precision floating point) performing FMA (fused multiply add, so 2 floating point operations for 3 operands), then to sustain that level of throughput, you would need roughly 13 TB/s*** memory throughput (this is assuming 8 byte operands and that each of the 3 operands of the FMA are unique). Of course you can't reach those levels with global memory, but any sort of improvement helps.

*** required memory throughput per second = 1170 * 10^9 ops * (24 bytes / 2 ops) = 14040 * 10^9 bytes ~= 13 TB

This Volta sounds pretty exciting, DRAM bandwidth is commonly a limiting factor in GPGPU applications, so if it can get 1TB/s, it'll be more than 3x faster for memory bound kernels than the current high-end scientific computing cards (e.g. the Tesla K20). With that said, I'm a bit apprehensive about how much it'll cost; Tesla K20's currently cost over $2k per card...

It's also possible to build boost using cmake

seriously? The getting started guide is really straightforward, and even has examples embedded into it to let you know if you've set everything up correctly. I can understand someone griping about the build process, but that's hardly specific to boost. Your inability to get started with it might reflect more on you than boost....

There's actually a huge gap here. Having robots perform tasks autonomously in anything other than a very narrow, constrained environment would require semantic understanding. We've had robots that can go through the motions while being controlled by humans for decades (telerobotics), but developing machines with deep understanding on a semantic level has been something of a holy grail in AI, and is still as far-off as ever. While I agree with you that we'll have to undergo a dramatic cultural shift if we ever create a legitimate AI, that is still many, many years off.

CUDA has been out for a couple of years now, and has gotten to be quite stable and has grown a good ecosystem of tools. As for python? Knock yourself out

I wouldn't be too sure; from the article "Lecerf said that it wasn't the first time his speed dial had jammed but that Renault had looked at the car and assured him that it was fine." (emphasis mine) whether or not this makes them liable is another matter, but they apparently did have some involvement with his vehicle

From the article: "A Renault technician had been on the phone with police throughout the chase trying to help but couldn't come up with a solution." Of course I can't say with 100% certainty, but I'm guessing the Renault technician would have thought of all of your proposed solutions and more. It's important to note that his car had been "adapted for disabled drivers", which likely played some role in its malfunction, so conventional wisdom about cars may not be as applicable, depending on the modifications made. Also, he likely has various disabilities, given that his car is for disabled drivers, and that he "had two epileptic seizures" during the drive, so it's likely not necessarily a matter of him failing "to understand his vehicle's operation" as you say, so much as him being physically and/or mentally unable to take action. One last interesting note from the article: "it wasn't the first time his speed dial had jammed but that Renault had looked at the car and assured him that it was fine." That's probably where the legal complaint comes into play

Then I'm glad to report that things are different nowadays (at least at my university). I went to a large public university with a sizable foreign student contingent, and saw none of this. There were ethnic cliques, but if you tried talking to them they would be very accommodating. In fact, I found the foreign students to be among the most friendly, at least when the language barrier wasn't an issue.