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Comment: Re:Estate has authorized some of these before... (Score 1) 426

by Number14 (#29948336) Attached to: Asimov Estate Authorizes New <em>I, Robot</em> Books

Hmm, have to disagree there... while I rather liked the two Renshai trilogies, the Bifrost Guardians was pretty crappy. In fact, enough elements turn up in both the Bifrost books and the first Renshai trilogy that I decided it was likely that the author wanted a second go at the cooler concepts in a better work.

Spam

CAN-SPAM Act Turns 5 Today — What Went Wrong? 301

Posted by kdawson
from the calling-mister-hormel dept.
alphadogg writes "Five years ago, the US tech industry, politicians, and Internet users were wringing their hands over the escalating problem of spam. This prompted Congress to pass a landmark anti-spam bill known as the CAN-SPAM Act in December 2003. Fast forward five years. The number of spam messages sent over the Internet every day has grown more than 10-fold, topping 164 billion worldwide in August 2008. Almost 97% of all e-mails are spam, costing US ISPs and corporations an estimated $42 billion a year. What went wrong here?"

Comment: Re:About time! (Score 1) 392

by Number14 (#26068539) Attached to: Black Hole At Center of Milky Way Confirmed

The thing that is still "theoretical" isn't so much that black holes exist- it's pretty clear that objects with their gravitational influence on the universe exist- but whether they have all the properties that we ascribe to black holes. Most importantly, whether or not they are true singularities. The singularity, if it's there, is truly unobservable, hiding behind its event horizon. An object that is just extremely dense and massive would look identical to us from the outside as an object that is infinitely dense and massive. By current understanding of the nature of the universe and relativistic and QM theories, that level of "extremely" dense is impossible (it has to collapse further into a singularity)... but if those theories someday get revised, we may find that the black holes all over the universe are not actually the mathematically ill-behaved singularities we currently think they are.

It's the same old story; boy meets beer, boy drinks beer... boy gets another beer. -- Cheers

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