Remember that not every non-spam email originates from a perfectly-configured self-hosted SMTP server. Many organizations outsource their email, spam filtering, compliance filtering, notice / statement delivery, etc. While it's easy to posit that the IT departments in such organizations have a duty to maintain reverse DNS records for all their partners' servers, don't fall into the trap of thinking that every organization has a fully-staffed, knowledgeable IT department... or an IT department at all.

Have you ever seen SMART perform in a useful way on a mechanical disk? At work and at home, I've gone through a crap-ton of hard disks in the last decade or so that SMART's been prevalent and never have I seen SMART flag a drive as problematic before I already knew I had a serious problem. More often than not, I've had systems slow to a crawl due to massive numbers of read errors and sector reallocations while the drive firmware actively lied to me about the drive's condition. Only looking at the raw SMART stats and watching the counters increase wildly reveals the truth.

Yeah, it's because the IT staffs are inept and brainless, not because IT training, culture, and best practices center around what actually works in business where most of these oppressed students will spend 50 years of their adult lives. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of clueless losers in IT who don't even know what Linux is, but if you're looking at entering any non-tech field and think your college Linux experimentation and personal rebellion against Microsoft's evil empire will offer you any advantage in the business world, you're in for disappointment.

I, and many truly high-end users do not. "Power Users", however, absolutely live to clean caches and temp files, scan their registries, and defragment their geometry-obscured hard drives. You can bet they're aching to save the 25 milliseconds it takes the OS to choose which cached app to dump before loading the newly-opened one, even if they waste 10 seconds manually killing a task each time.

Exactly... It would seem likely that Chinooks were sent in only after a delay and after the Pakistani authorities knew something was amiss. By that time, the raw power and performance of the Chinooks would be far more desirable than stealth. The stealth-modified helicopters almost certainly perform more poorly than unmodified versions of the same aircraft.

Boy, have I been there... That phone was almost entirely unusable on iOS 4.0. I actually missed calls because it wouldn't respond to my touches fast enough to answer. It was incredibly frustrating to deal with crap like that and the keyboard literally hanging for 15 or 20 seconds with one key highlighted. It improved with 4.1 and 4.2 but it's still ridiculous. Thing is, it's not just CPU horsepower or memory at work. Those make it more noticeable on the 3G, but since upgrading to an iPhone 4, I still notice tons of latency. Sure, apps load like lightning compared to the 3G, but stuff that should always be instantly responsive like navigation bar buttons, scrollviews, and the keyboard simply aren't. Latency is a far bigger issue on an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3.x than it was on an iPhone 3G running OS 2.x. (its release OS version)

Interesting... If only we could develop some kind of cheap technology capable of storing this 50 - 100K of infrequently-changing guide information so we wouldn't have to wait every single time we wanted to look at it. Even if this theoretical technology lost the information every time power was removed, it would still be a massive improvement over what we have now.

II agree to a point, but I think an even larger problem for Microsoft is that they wholeheartedly believe the Windows brand has value. One has to wonder why they'd think that the typical customer's experience with "Windows" would impart goodwill and loyalty to the architecturally and visually unrelated Windows Phone when they decided to name it that. I doubt they would have been on track to take a meaningful share of the smartphone market in any case, but I can't help but believe their sales would be better had they just dropped the "Windows" BS and called it something else. For that matter, they might do well to drop the Microsoft name altogether for consumer products and market them under a subsidiary.

I love this statement. I can't tell you how big my smile is right now. I work in corporate IT and I can give you some insight on this. You see, Microsoft's business customers don't give a damn about using IE6. What they care about is not having to re-write or re-purchase software every couple of years when it's been implemented at great expense. They also don't like being forced into an OS upgrade just to run a newer browser. Remember that insanely-long stretch where XP was supported, got browser updates, and retained meaningful compatibility with new releases of other Microsoft software, particularly corporate IT freebies such as management tools? Yeah, those of us who bought the Windows 2000 spiel got dumped in something like 18 months. Plan the project, buy PCs, roll out Windows 2000 and by the time you're done, it's a XP world according to Microsoft. Expect a service pack for your three year old OS? Are you crazy? Want to upgrade the "integrated" browser after 18 months? No way! Expect new management tools to run on your 18 month old machine? Screw you! Even now that it's largely a XP and 7 world, many customers don't want to spend the money to upgrade software that, had Microsoft not been trying to embrace and extend the browser, should have survived a simple browser upgrade without issue.

Really? You actually believe that's what they're trying to do? Again, Really? Even if you think that at least trying to stabilize the situation by cooling the fuel is the wrong choice, just how would you approach burying four (or six) multi-story buildings in concrete in an area with no infrastructure? Given that starting the process would require you to give up on cooling, how could you even mix and place that much concrete before the cores completely melted, likely blowing-open their pressure vessels and containment like popcorn kernels? If you found a way, how comfortable are you that concrete, which would be wet (not merely uncured) for weeks or months in that amount, would contain everything as the cores melted?

No doubt, however you segment society, be it by political party, social group, race, gender, sexual orientation, or feelings about anchovies on pizza, you'll find that any group you can define will include some number of hate-mongers or bigots. Absolutely, those people exist in the democratic party too. I wouldn't say that I support democratic candidates in general, but when I look at the party's record for hateful rhetoric, I see democrats who have exclusionary and bigoted opinions. Certainly, I see it in the behavior and actions of many. When I look at the republican party, I see candidates actively campaigning on those stances. I see them stirring anger by convincing their base that they are oppressed essentially because people with dissenting views, lifestyles, or orientations are allowed to walk among us. They campaign on fear of people who are different and instead of it being just a few politicians on the fringe, it's nearly across the board. The fringe is outright scary.

I read about this when I was growing up. My family had an outdated (even then) encyclopedia that I would regularly flip through in fascination. If I remember correctly, what you're describing is is called "science".

No, it was Obama's fault for being naive enough to think the Republicans were capable of negotiating and making compromises to serve the interests of the American people as a whole. In batting his head against the wall for two years trying to work with them, he wasted time, what some might have called a mandate, and ultimately, the opportunity to get anything meaningful done not only during that period, but for his entire presidency. Listen, both parties suck. They both cater to the extreme because mobs of raving mad lunatics make the news and frankly, screaming tends to get you heard. Both are happy to take a shit on our freedoms at every opportunity and neither regards us as anything but a mass of easily-manipulated dimwits good only for our votes. Pork and back-room deals that sacrifice the good of the country for the benefit of one legislator's district (or his pockets) abound in both parties. However, nobody caters to the rich at the expense of the lower and middle classes like the republicans. They are experts at stoking the fire within their base on issues that are ultimately not consequential to our country. They draw voters out of every crack and crevice with bigotry and holier-than-thou God hates fags and brown people rhetoric while they meticulously disassemble the checks and balances that make it possible for those they court to succeed.

Sir, I think you've just described inflation... and how it's being used to somewhat mask the siphoning of wealth from the lower and middle class to the super-rich. It's the reason that even with "good" professional jobs, my wife and I both have to work just to afford a modest home in a neighborhood with a decent school system and relatively few Camaros rusting into front lawns... all while, managing to save very little for retirement. As robotics and various forms of automation have made manufacturing far more efficient, somehow families have gone from needing not one bread earner per household, but two. That's kept families afloat for a while, but even it's not enough and the decline is accelerating.