I had a neutered male cat who from about 9 months old spent all day, every day, killing gophers. Within a few months he'd completely exterminated them within about half a mile of my house. He only ate part of the first gopher of the day, far as I ever saw.

Most predators kill for fun as well as for food and for training their young; it's not at all unusual. -- That's the real problem with wolves vs domestic sheep; it's so much fun to shoot fish in a barrel that they wind up killing a whole flock just for jollies.

That, and the other question I had -- are these metabolites *unique* to cocaine? Cuz if not, cue the false positives.

I don't, but I use music to "fill up the cracks in my brain" that would otherwise be full of distractions.

An implementation of R is GPL, but that doesn't extend to all independent implementations, such as the one MS is writing to do this.

SQL Server 2016 will have a Json column type, so its most of the way there.

I can think of a reason: The good of the country and its peoples are best served by having a long copyright.

Of course, I'm not saying I agree with that reason, or that it is true in any way. However, if it were true, then a politician would be doing exactly the right thing in supporting it.

You realise that Ireland received a massive bailout from the ECB, right? That's spending EU money right there...

Actually, there are written procedures for removing a member country voluntarily or involuntarily from the Eurozone (the ECB can simply stop dealing with that country), but there (deliberately) isn't any procedures for removing a member country voluntarily or involuntarily from the EU. The issue resides with the fact that (apart from countries with a written opt out), EU countries are required to be part of the Eurozone, so leaving or being forced to leave the Euro raises fundamental conflicts with EU membership.

Concrete is often deliberately cracked to allow for thermal expansion and contraction. That's why we have lines on the sidewalks and joints in the roads. These bacteria would fill those in and cause heaving.

It's an object lesson in using pure assembly. By the time you get anything useful done, technology has moved on.

But here's no outrage activism available if it's due to a fungus and virus. How can you have a good outrage if the cause is something natural and not *gasp* the fault of man??

I've pointed out that same research IDing the fungi/virus cause multiple times here, and been pooh-pooh'd every time. This last time, I was informed that neonics had to be the cause even when the nearest use of same is hundreds or thousands of miles away, because, ya know, pesticide.