Dude, that's not a philanthropist, that's a sociopath. Let's see, I am super rich but I have a rare terminal disease, but maybe I can cheat death if I purchase all the world's best scientists to work on *my* health problem. Never mind if they were previously occupied trying to save sick children. Fuck those kids, I'm rich and therefore I'm a higher priority.

I hope your benefactor enjoys his or her remaining time on Earth, because Hell is going to be a real bitch.

Well said. I look around at the endless swamp of copycat startups and wonder why I am in this ridiculous industry. At one point I thought the world was changing, instead of the same tired advertising cliches wrapped up in shiny social apps and glittering cloud storage. The fact that a stagnant stock price is used as evidence of Bartz' failure is itself part of the problem. Haven't these short term metrics already been thoroughly discredited? Then why does the financial press keep returning to them?

FTLOG people, please innovate. The internet right now is a thick wasteland of d-baggery without a soul. Every other site serves stealth cookies and multiple MBs of javascript code all trying to figure out more ingenious ways to take your money. I miss 1995, I'd give anything to complain about someone's use of the blink tag or tables used for layout.

I'm glad they didn't decide to record the brain waves of a young *man* in love... those would certainly make the aliens skeptical about ever visiting us.

"What did we learn from this Golden Record?"
"From what we can tell, we're dealing with a race that can't concentrate, constantly listens to The Smiths, worries about its hair looking right, broods pensively throughout the day, and fears never knowing the right things to say."
"On second thought, let's head out to Ursa Minor and see if we can find any intelligent life over there."

Dude, let me clue you in here. Science *is* the box that everyone tells you to think outside of. Science teaches you a rigorous methodical approach to data collection and analysis; science is about hypothesis testing and repeatabillity of results. Scientists have to live in this box, otherwise they'd just be mad scientists. For inspired thinking, don't read Karl Popper, read some Hermann Hesse. That will blow your little scientific mind. Too bad that you would consider literature the biggest joke on the planet. Enjoy your sheltered life, bro.

It's too bad your prestigious education hasn't taught you to avoid sweeping generalizations. To say that one package is "better" or "considerably more powerful" in all cases, is not a good argument.

Why would anyone use Oracle when MySQL is free, open source, and of course "better"?

R is an excellent platform for data analysis and modeling, with a great deal of traction in the academic community which means that cutting-edge statistical techniques are ported and/or implemented in R very quickly.

But, R is not a magic bullet. It is very inefficient to run complex data management routines in R, it is simply not optimized as well as some of those (gasp!) commercial packages. In addition, R loads its entire dataset into memory, providing a strict limit on how much data you can work with.

Good luck with school, and try to learn something. You might try opening your mind.