VC will think twice about investing in copy-cat startups that are on legally shaky ground.

I have no idea what "Fast Company" is, but according to wikipedia it's a printed magazine.

My understanding is that radio waves can't penetrate water very far (if at all) and that it's impractical to drag a long cable down.

"Matrix Analysis and Applied Linear Algebra"

http://www.amazon.com/Matrix-Analysis-Applied-Algebra-Soluti...

It's very clearly written and all the proofs are not too long nor too short. It pretty quickly goes through all the stuff Strang covers and moves on to more difficult things.

Also it seems very similar to this famous paradox: (from 600BC btw.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides_paradox

The way he did it is nice and minimal, and in 2 months when you go back to change something you will have no idea what you did.

I've had to do a few things in R and I always dread revisiting my code. Half the time it's easier and faster to just rewrite everything.

I personally don't know anyone who actually pays for more space. Most people that use it are not tech savy and I don't think would take the leap to start paying monthly for virtual space. If I had to guesstimate, I'd say maybe 2% of users pay; but that's purely on gut feeling.

I feel like their business model is like Youtube: ie. provide massive amounts of storage and make very little money per GB stored (last I heard Google isn't making much money off of that). It's the "new" traffic + users = success. Not profits - costs = success.

The fact that they didn't sell themselves to Apple seems to suggest that they have higher hopes... Or maybe they're waiting out for a higher bid.

But some glaring omissions

1) You can compile Matlab to C++ code which is much faster.

2) With respect to Portability there is the glaring omission of Octave (nor to mention there is MATLAB for unix systems). (I guess that also counts for the price issue). I'm not a MATLAB guru, but in the couple of times I've used it, it seems like MATLAB minus the handy dandy documentation and IDE.

3) Debugging in Matlab's ID is so easy a 5 year old can do it. The variables are all there; you can double click on any to see their contents. Debugging in a shell in my experience is a much bigger PITA.

4) I didn't look at their documentation, but I honest really doubt it's better then MATLAB's. I've never seen documentation so well written in an open source project.

I've taking classes like this. You learn a few useful tricks, but when shit hits the fan in the real world and your tools are not enough you're left floundering. You can't prove things, you can't develop your own methods because you don't understand the principles they're based on.

This would probably be a cool class to take freshman year so that you can figure out for yourself what you'd like to study.

How about flywheels?

Take for example the Taiping Rebellion which was from 1850 to 1864. Described by wikipedia: "About 20 million people died, mainly civilians, in one of the deadliest military conflicts in history."

Yet according to that graph is had little to no effect of the per capita GDP.

for those curious http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_from_ultrasound

First he gets all pissy about stereotyping nerds as having pocket-protectors and then in the next sentence regurgitates his one dimensional view on what "frat-house culture" is and bros' attitudes towards women.