Comment Re:Imperial vs US Gallon (Score 1) 417
In the UK we still use Miles per Gallon to measure fuel consumption, but buy our petrol in litres!
Spam Flood Unabated After Bust 188
AcidAUS writes "Last week's bust of the largest spam operation in the world has had no measurable impact on global spam volumes. The spam gang, known by authorities and security experts as HerbalKing, was responsible for one-third of all spam, the non-profit antispam research group Spamhaus said." The article speculates that the operators of HerbalKing simply passed on to associates the keys to the automated, 35,000-strong botnet, and the spam flow didn't miss a beat.
Number of ET Civilizations In Our Galaxy Is 37,964 544
KentuckyFC writes "The famous Drake equation calculates the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy right now. But the result is hugely sensitive to the assumptions you make about factors such as the number of habitable planets that orbit a host star, how many of these actually develop life and what fraction of these go on to become intelligent etc. Disagreements about these figures leads to estimates for the number of advanced civilizations ranging from 10^-5 to 10^6. Now an astronomer in Scotland has worked out how to make the calculations more precise so that different theories about the origin of planets, life and civilizations can be compared. His calculations say that the rare-life hypothesis predicts only 361 advanced civilizations in the Milky Way now. However, the so-called tortoise and hare hypothesis predicts 31,573 and the theory of panspermia says that there ought to be 37,964 extraterrestrial civilizations more advanced than our own in the Milky Way."
Feed Science Daily: Bacteria Successful In Cancer Treatment (sciencedaily.com)
Bacteria that thrive in oxygen starved environments have been used successfully to target cancer tumours, delivering gene therapy based anti-cancer treatments. For about half of cancer sufferers our traditional treatments such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy are ineffective, so alternative techniques are being developed to target their tumours.
Comment Re:You should always... (Score 1) 1422
LOCAL variable names should be short, and to the point.If you have some random integer loop counter, it should probably be called "i". Calling it "loop_counter" is non-productive, if there is no chance of it being mis-understood. Similarly, "tmp" can be just about any type of variable that is used to hold a temporary value.
I'm sorry, but I have to say bollocks to the last clause there. Calling a loop counter "i" means then that it is next to impossible to find out where it is being used.
Instead of using "i", I would use "index", for a generic case, as usually we're talking about indexing into some array or other data structure. The use of single letter variables names gets even worse when you have nested loops, I've lost count of the number cases where somebody using "i" and "j" as their loop variables have accidentally transposed the references, espcially when we're talking about code that gets changed over time. (i.e. real code, not an example
It's far better to spend a extra few seconds in giving a meaningful name to a variable, rather than spending hours, debugging some strange intermittent memory overwrite! Let alone the cumulative numbers of hours spend trying to undestand a piece of code when frobnicating it a year later.
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