There are a few things keeping me from Chrome as well.

• Firebug. The dev tools for chrome are nowhere near as good - the features that I use anyway.
• It's really a nit, but I cannot stand applications that don't at least look like they're using the standard window decorations. I want it to match the rest of my OSX, Windows, KDE, Gnome apps, whether it's skinned qt or gtk, I don't care, but it needs to look like it's supposed to be there.
• I'm used to Firefox. On my mb pro, there is no noticeable difference in performance between Chrome and FF.

If Chrome at least had good enough developer tools, I'd be willing to give it more of a shot and see if I get used to it, but for now, it just gets in the way.

I, too, haven't had good luck with MacFUSE. It crashes all the time and just doesn't work well in general. Still not as bad as CyberDuck though. I realize they are for different purposes, but click and drag actually moved something off the server and to my computer, instead of copying. Then it crashed and I lost all my data. It was not a good day.

Well, I once took a class that was IE only. It was the dumbest thing I'd seen in my whole life, but hey that's college. You can expect 60 percent of things to be done well and 40 to have been bureaucratically broken.

R is for statistics. Matlab is for numerics focusing on matricies. There is overlap, but they are good at two different things.

Have you considered using sage (www.sagemath.org)? It is FOSS and has highly active community and developer support. I'd suggest reading the tour http://www.sagemath.org/tour.html and seeing what you think.

What do you mean? Just too many bugs?

If they had the text of this 'civic test' available.

Good thing too, spiderman is getting bored.

Yes, this test is terrible. Also, the interpretation of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is "life, liberty, and property". I would imagine that many people got that wrong. Question #33 - D. tax per person equals government spending per person This is obviously not true. The government has lots of things they can sell, buy, etc.

I think he meant 'marginalized'. Look at women's history in the United States.

is where to start when it comes to deriving PDEs. The heat equation and the wave equation fall easily out of vector analysis, as do a number of other familiar PDEs. I'd start with a vector analysis book.