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Comment Re:Laughably wrong. (Score 2) 386

Why does everyone want to not drive? I find driving to be a particularly enjoyable task, hell I don't even mind being stuck in traffic as long as I have NPR/CBC or decent podcasts to listen to.

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.

Comment DDoS .. in which attackers flood (Score 0) 360

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$.

Comment Re:Doesn't distilled water taste horrible though? (Score 3, Interesting) 167

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.

Comment Re:Or just practicing for an actual job (Score 1) 320

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.

Comment Okay, but (Score 4, Informative) 429

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.

Comment Re:I'm I smart? I guess I'll never know. (Score 1) 306

That said I typically stand back aghast at today’s Republican conservatives – I may be wrong, but in general they seem mean and – yes I’ll say it – bigoted. Of course that could just be Dunning-Kruger blinding me to the brilliance of the current Republican vision.

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

Comment How Would Hawking Radiation Dissolve a Black Hole? (Score 2) 66

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?

Comment 20k shipped? Doubt that. (Score 1) 67

There is a lot of dissatisfaction from many people over on the Oculus forums due to lack of information and shipping delays. Many who ordered within the first 48 hours after orders opened on March 19th have not received units or even an update other than "we're working real hard to ship orders as quickly as possible".

Based on comments from the forums, information given about how many were sold how quickly and feedback from the oculus forums, about the only way they could claim that 20k were shipped is if they were shipped from the manufacturer to the distribution centers, not the customers.

Oculus has had my money from March 20th and I'm yet to receive any kind of shipping confirmation. They did not sell 20k in the first 24 hours.

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