Comment Re:Great step forward (Score 1) 252
A mach here, a mach there and soon you are talking real machs.
Old McDonald had a scramjet?
EI-EI-LEO.
Comment Re:No answer is sort-of an answer (Score 1) 248
If the general population has a 1% chance of getting a specific type of cancer over 20 years, and a study found that people using cell phones seemed to have a 2% chance of getting cancer, then that group is twice as likely to get cancer as the general population and that would be huge news that consumers would want to know.
On the other hand, if it were reported in terms of your chances of not getting that hypothetical, specific type of cancer being reduced from 99% to 98%, everyone would conclude that there was nothing to worry about.
Comment Re:Doesn't matter what country you are in... (Score 1) 667
Thankfully, health care is one of four things that Canadians love so much that they're willing to stand up and fight for it
...
Yet we under-fund it. It's also not as comprehensive as we pretend that it is (no coverage for prescripton medication outside of hospital, and no dental or optical). Stephen Harper is, in a sense, correct that we're more proud of it than we should be. I wouldn't go so far as to endorse any of his solutions.
Plenty of the problems with the Canadian health care system could be solved by throwing money at it, but Christ forbid that anyone do that — it'd be like throwing water on a fire. Or something.
Comment Re:Environmentalism is a religion (Score 1) 474
Commercial organizations
... tend to have a higher regard for logic...
[citation needed]
Comment My rule of thumb. (Score 4, Interesting) 148
I know nothing about this story, but I just always assume that anything built on Facebook is a scam, whether for money or ID theft. Go sell your virtual cheese elsewhere, vampire gangsters.
Comment Re:Why not? (Score 1) 710
especially with advances in fuel cell and solar technologies
How would fuel cells have anything to do with keeping nukes unpopular?
Thorium, the Next Nuclear Fuel? 710
mrshermanoaks writes "When the choices for developing nuclear energy were being made, we went with uranium because it had the byproduct of producing plutonium that could be weaponized. But thorium is safer and easier to work with, and may cause a lot fewer headaches. 'It's abundant — the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff — and doesn't require costly processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind. Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab's finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.' So why are we not building these reactors?"
Comment About your hangup... (Score 4, Interesting) 349
I'm very hung up on spending more for less.
Stay away from "enterprise solutions," then — or, rather, make very careful comparisons between the cost of buying a ready-made thing and a DIY effort.
Am I missing something here?
That the thin clients you've been looking at are priced for fat organizations (with, possibly, thick decision-makers).
Comment Re:No, and I won't (Score 1) 263
How would that work with trusted partners who may send mail on your behalf?
There is no such thing (unless you're in the business of spamming people).
I guess my work does its own on-line order processing. I could've sworn that we outsourced it, and that I'd set up our SPF record to allow it, but I must be wrong.
Comment Re:SPF is good stuff. (Score 1) 263
DKIM and it's variants is, IMHO, useless because it only allows you to prove that e-mail came from an authorized sender for a domain, it does *NOT* allow you to tell if e-mail came from an UNAUTHORIZED system for a domain. You cannot use DKIM to tell if a sender address is forging the domain.
Someone who really cares about DKIM can check your domain to see if it publishes a key and reject messages that lack a valid signature. I don't see how that's much different from SPF; I do agree that it's not necessarily better.
Comment Re:Yes! Prevents forged Froms (Score 1) 263
...3rd-party mailers, etc, can still function as intended with proper SPF records, as long as the MAIL FROM SMTP command from the sending MTA software doesn't misrepresent itself.
They can still function as intended, but the chance that they've been developed by someone who both knows and cares about the difference between the RFC 2821 envelope sender and the RFC 2822 To: line isn't terribly high. The "send an e-mail" function of the library they're using probably doesn't even let them set the two separately. This is no great loss with e-cards, but some "send this story to a friend" features of news sites operate the same way.
Even the forwarding features of real MTAs don't get this right; SPF promoters recommend SRS, but unless your whole business is forwarding mail, you've probably never heard of it.
To answer the article's original question, I use SPF on some of my own domains and implemented it at work years ago. It's not a foolproof barrier to spam or to backscatter, but it mitigates the risk of a joe job.
Are You Using SPF Records? 263
gravyface writes "I've been setting up proper Sender Policy Framework records for all my clients for past year or so, hoping to either maintain or improve their 'reputation' in the email universe. However, there's a lot of IT admins I speak with who either haven't heard of SPF records or haven't bothered setting them up. How many of you are using SPF records for your mail domains? Does it help? How many anti-spam vendors out there use SPF records as part of their 'scorecard'?"
Comment I literally cannot tell if they are serious. (Score 3, Insightful) 106
I'm sorry, this looks like something that was thrown out of an early draft of Johnny Mnemonic:
adiabatic quantum algorithm by magnetically coupling superconducting loops called rf-squid flux qubits.
Not only can I not tell if they're serious, I can't even tell if that means anything.
The math they present, or even the math on the Wikipedia page for Grover's algorithm, is also completely beyond me. I blame Alan Turing for all of this: if he'd cracked Nazi codes with poetry instead of with math, I'd probably be able to understand computer science.
As it is, I have to assign a probability p=0.5 to Google posting another blog entry tomorrow in which they admit to making the whole thing up and being tempted to include a reference to "Cookie Monster's postulate" along side "Grover's algorithm".
Google Demonstrates Quantum Computer Image Search 106
An anonymous reader sends along this quote from New Scientist:
"Google's web services may be considered cutting edge, but they run in warehouses filled with conventional computers. Now the search giant has revealed it is investigating the use of quantum computers to run its next generation of faster applications. Writing on Google's research blog this week, Hartmut Neven, head of its image recognition team, reveals that the Californian firm has for three years been quietly developing a quantum computer that can identify particular objects in a database of stills or video (PDF). Google has been doing this, Neven says, with D-Wave, a Canadian firm that has developed an on-chip array of quantum bits — or qubits — encoded in magnetically coupled superconducting loops."
Comment Re:LA may NOT be better (Score 1) 339
I work in south LA and in my experience, there are just as many people talking directly on their handset and checking their Blackberry, if not more. I just don't think it's being enforced. But really, it seems nearly impossible to enforce that law with any sort of efficacy. Just another useless law brought on by populist politicians...
