For me, at least, driving is exhausting. I'm driving a large kinetic weapon bent on self destruction, so I take the responsibility very seriously*. I find myself as tired at the end of a day of driving as if I had been working in the yard the whole time.

If I could instead relax and read a book like I were on a train, I'd take that in a heartbeat.

*I've never been in an accident in my 18 years of driving--excepting a fender bender in a parking lot as the other party decided to back into my stationary car out of their parking spot.

Thanks for playing along. I guess sarcasm isn't received too well around here...strange...

Thank you Mr. Anonymous. Are you sure you know what AA stands for?

So THAT's what a DDoS is. I'm so glad Slashdot is here to hold my hand through the hard terminology. I was almost confused that it had something to do with a Microsoft Operating System (here's a link to what an Operating System, since the Slashdot community may not already know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...). But since everything was made clear, we don't need to worry about anyone writing uninformed posts, especially about our beloved M$.

It is a terrible thing for the drug company to force this switch.

But doesn't this imply that the first drug can be created generically now? Can't we take Actavis out of the equation entirely by having Alzheimer's patients switch away from the company? Why must they take Actavis' new drug?

I know Slashdot hasn't been as popular these days and it's cool to hate on beta, but it seems like a ghost town now. Where did everyone go?

Pure water does taste a little off, which is why bottled water companies add minerals to their product.

If this is a big concern for athletes or anyone else using this system, they could easily transport a very small amount of mineral mix to dissolve in the water to fix the problem.

Personally, I'd be shocked if this was the biggest problem. Athletes require far more fluids than this will be able to provide. I don't see this being practical.

Of course we all use available code. I would be very disappointed if my colleagues were all writing their own sorting functions when that problem has already been solved a million times.

But that's not what school is about. You need to go through the process of understanding how these algos came to be understood--not so that you can re-implement them in your job--but so that you can do two things:
1. Know which algos will work when you do have a real world problem to solve
2. Use the same process that helped you solve for a known algo when the time comes to solve for an unknown one

Please, use available libraries and stack overflow on the job. But let's not pretend that we're trying to accomplish the same things on the job and in the classroom.

1. Quantum fluctuations are not nothing, but I guess we have to sell headlines here
2. Inflation Theory seems faster than "exponential" expansion. We're talking about a theory that went from the size of a singularity to something bigger than the visible universe in 10^-32 seconds. Exponential is quite pedestrian compared to what is theorized.

I agree with you, but I also think the following is true too: :%s/Republican\|conservative/\={'Republican':'Democrat','conservative':'liberal'}[submatch(0)]/g;

They will make all of the roads toll roads.

Thank you. I was wondering what the heck "Downtown Canada" meant.

In all my years of reading and thinking about black holes, one question I've got about HR his how it would actually end up causing the decay of a black hole. From what I understand, HR is the spontaneous creation of matter and anti-matter in space that would normally annihilate itself (allowed by QM theory)--the key difference is that this event can happen at the edge of the event horizon. With some positive probability, the anti-matter will be created within the event horizon radius, but the matter will remain outside and escape. When you look at the whole system then, the anti-matter will annihilate matter within the black hole (causing it to "dissolve") and the matter will remain outside the clutches of the black hole.

I'm sure I'm describing it very simplistically, but I believe my question after that should work for all systems that are analogous:

How is the HR process not symmetric? Whatever would cause the dissolution of the black hole--how would the same process happening in reverse (matter falling into the black hole and anti-matter escaping) not cause equilibrium to be maintained?

How do you keep your keys from scratching your smartphone?

Do Euros smell the same as USD?