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Comment Remarkable transparency... (Score 1) 31

From the article: "Its remarkable transparency, transmitting 98% of light..."

On a simple read, the article's phrasing would suggest graphene is very transparent. However, graphene is an exceedingly opaque substance. It's"remarkable transparancy" is remarkable primarily because it's really not very transparent at all.
That 'transmits 98% of light' is what happens when sending light through just a single-atom-thick layer of graphene.
Photo of single atomic layer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Graphene can be roughly described as a single layer of graphite. Many folk are aware of graphite being very opaque - it is used as a pencil 'lead' in normal wooden pencils. Its stunning opacity is one reason that it works so well to leave visible marks on paper.

More detail if interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Comment Re:Word has it that Microsoft used Perforce anyway (Score 3, Informative) 29

Not so much a correction as simply continuing the story from where you reached!

Microsoft moved over to using git quite some time back - and updated git to handle the vast amount of files that compile into Windows.
See https://devblogs.microsoft.com... for a readable writeup on this (from back in 2017)

Comment Re:appalling (Score 1) 159

The question states as a precondition that getNextLoc will never be called for the bottom right corner.
Also that it will always be given a valid row index, and a valid column index.

Therefore, regardless of all other sane considerations, within this question the students explicitly don't need to validate inputs, and shouldn't.

...which isn't really a great way of teaching programming :(

Comment Re:When does it hit the upgrade servers? (Score 1) 34

...in about three months, when 24.04.1 comes out.

Some references will suggest using the '-d' flag to do-release-upgrade, but that has a very limited window (weeks) where it may do what you want it to.
If interested in more details, see the accepted answer to https://askubuntu.com/question...

Comment Re:Cloudtastrophie (Score 1) 26

If they've any sense (and I'm explicitly not claiming that they do), a system such as this will run in a cloud of privately-hosted servers in multiple separate bases, secured by the military.
Or they may just host it on AWS or Azure, as some consultant somewhere will indicate "that will cost less".

(Narrator voice in 2033) "It didn't cost less."

Comment Seems an odd route... (Score 2) 78

Litigation against the act of recommending the videos seems an odd route to me.
- If the videos on YouTube were not permissible* they should be, or should have been, taken down promptly.
- However, if the videos were permissible, how can there be any case to answer in recommending them?

* I'm using not permissible to cover the range of "in breach of YouTube's conditions" and/or illegal**
** Yes, that raises the question of "illegal where, exactly?"

Comment Re:European Space Ambitions (Score 1) 100

Western Russia makes up about 40% of Europe's land mass on its own, and 15% of Europe's population. Oddly, that makes Russia both the largest and the most populous country in Europe ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )

Sadly, that doesn't stop Putin from trying to steal ever more lives and land...

Comment Re:Uuh? UK, Italy, France all launched in the 60ie (Score 1) 100

What's unclear to me is whether Russia's Dombarovsky launch facility is in Europe or Asia. If it's in Europe, then this becomes more of a political claim rather than a geographic one.

As far as I can tell from Google Maps, Russia's Dombarovsky facility (the air base, at least) is just a smidgen to the east of the Ural mountains ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), although it's also significantly further south. So I'd lean towards "Dombarovsky launch facility is in Asia".

Comment Re:At last (Score 1) 150

Start with a goal - fly an airplane, then break it down into manageable sub-goals

Hmm , perhaps the Great Leap Forward will come when the ask is literally akin to your goal "fly an airplane".

With much hand-waving as I have no idea what it would take to design an aircraft - When the 'AI' is knowledgeable enough in physics, material science, currently available parts, manufacturing technology, aerodynamics, weather patterns and so on and so forth, we don't give it little requirements like "mask the password characters with asterisks"

Rather we just ask it "design me an aircraft that can autonomously fly passengers across the Atlantic both safely and economically."
And we remember to add in requirements like "which will also let the passengers disembark after it lands." etc. :)

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