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Comment Re:This is pretty common. (Score 4, Interesting) 193

by Smauler (#49296925) Attached to: Microsoft Says Free Windows 10 Upgrades For Pirates Will Be Unsupported

I gave Microsoft about £100 8 years ago for this PC I'm writing on's operating system. Now, you can claim I'm stupid and clueless enough to have paid that money if you like, but you'll have to show me how I would have played all the games that I have done since without having bought the operating system.

Comment Re:I'm one of those engineers... (Score 1) 341

Weird, I've never seen it with an S in there, only as LOC and xK LOC. I though maybe it was something different than the LOC counts I'd seen before. Of course, I've never dealt with projects that were in the millions either, so maybe that's why I've never heard the S variations.

Comment Re:I'm one of those engineers... (Score 1) 341

Let's take the simplest of all the detection problems. How many lines of code does it take to reliably and safely detect the lane markings of a road? Nobody knows, because nobody has done it yet. Yes, there are prototypes that can handle some sub sets of all cases. The best I've seen handles 90% of the cases. That takes 1 MSLOC and still counting.

What's an emslock?

Comment Re:Erm (Score 1) 9

by insanecarbonbasedlif (#49292581) Attached to: Verbiage: 42 is here

Inertia mainly - I stopped writing JEs regularly, and lost the drive to write them. Not sure what (if anything) would kick me back into any kind of regularity on them again. Though I suppose once every 18 months isn't too aggressive of a schedule to shoot for!

Submission + - The first stars in the Universe were invisible

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: You'd think it would be enough to form some stars, and "let there be light" would be a reality. But these stars don't become visible for literally hundreds of millions of years until after they form. It's not that they don't emit light — they do — but rather that the Universe is opaque to that light for up to half a billion years after those stars form. While modern telescopes like Hubble are inherently limited by this fact, the James Webb Space Telescope, which will observe in wavelengths that these dusty particles ought to be transparent to, might be able to finally probe the true light from the very first stars.

Submission + - A fish makes a tongue out of water (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Using a group of high-speed cameras and x-ray videos, the scientists observed the strange way mudskipper fish feeding in the laboratory. Their analysis showed that the fish carry mouthfuls of water up onto the land and then expel the water at the moment they lunge at their prey. The water allows the fish to form an airtight seal and generate enough suction to move the water and their meal back toward the esophagus. Furthermore, the motion of a bone in the fishes’ throat, known as the hyoid, closely resembles that of other terrestrial animals, especially newts, which use true tongues to eat. The authors suggest that the mudskipper’s “hydrostatic” tongue may serve as the evolutionary bridge that allowed our aquatic ancestors to begin feeding on land.

Submission + - Methane leak unlocks potential for revolutionary graphene production (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Caltech scientists have published a new technique [http://www.caltech.edu/news/caltech-scientists-develop-cool-process-make-better-graphene-45961] for producing graphene at room temperature — ushered by an accidental methane leak — which could be critical for future commercial production of the material. Manufacturing graphene has often been problematic, with scientists required to ‘grow’ the material in furnaces reaching 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, frequently resulting in strain and deformation. Today researchers at the California Institute of Technology have revealed a method which will enable a faster and cooler production of high-quality graphene sheets. David Boyd, who developed the technique following a 'lucky' failed experiment in 2012, said of the technology's potential: “You could imagine something crazy. You could wrap a building in graphene to keep it from falling over.”

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