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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.
Power

Successful Cold Fusion Experiment? 387

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the so-cold-it's-hot dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The italian economic journal 'Il sole 24 ore' published an article about a successful cold fusion experiment performed by Yoshiaki Arata in Japan. They seems to have pumped high pressure deutherium gas in a nanometric matrix of palladium and zyrcon oxide. The experiments generates a considerable amount of energy and they found the presence of Helium-4 in the matrix (as sign of the fusion). I was not able to find other articles about this but the journal is very authoritative in Italy. Google translations are also available."
Networking

"Evolution of the Internet" Powers Massive LHC Grid 93

Posted by Soulskill from the throttle-this dept.
jbrodkin brings us a story about the development of the computer network supporting CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which will begin smashing particles into one another later this year. We've discussed some of the impressive capabilities of this network in the past. "Data will be gathered from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which hosts the collider in France and Switzerland, and distributed to thousands of scientists throughout the world. One writer described the grid as a 'parallel Internet.' Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid, which oversees the US infrastructure for the LHC network, describes it as an 'evolution of the Internet.' New fiber-optic cables with special protocols will be used to move data from CERN to 11 Tier-1 sites around the globe, which in turn use standard Internet technologies to transfer the data to more than 150 Tier-2 centers. Worldwide, the LHC computing grid will be comprised of about 20,000 servers, primarily running the Linux operating system. Scientists at Tier-2 sites can access these servers remotely when running complex experiments based on LHC data, Pordes says. If scientists need a million CPU hours to run an experiment overnight, the distributed nature of the grid allows them to access that computing power from any part of the worldwide network"
Robotics

Robot Composed of "Catoms" Can Assume Any Form 168

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the come-with-me-if-you-want-to-live dept.
philetus writes "An article in New Scientist describes a robotic system composed of swarms of electromagnetic modules capable of assuming almost any form that is being developed by the Claytronics Group at Carnegie Mellon. 'The grand goal is to create swarms of microscopic robots capable of morphing into virtually any form by clinging together. Seth Goldstein, who leads the research project at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in the US, admits this is still a distant prospect. However, his team is using simulations to develop control strategies for futuristic shape-shifting, or "claytronic", robots, which they are testing on small groups of more primitive, pocket-sized machines.'"

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