We use all kinds of contextual queues...

Hah! Well done.

When one of the questions is "Are you empathetic?" and the answer "yes" results in your being scored as empathetic, the test is, as others have noted, unlikely to provide any insight. The only way this little test works is as a sort of meta-test: if you can't pick a result and get it on the first try, you're not very good at imagining what the person who designed it was thinking.

Just by answering each question by giving the strongest response in what I judged to be the appropriate direction, I was able to score 70/70 on the empathy scale on the very first try. For my second trick, I successfully scored the minimum possible, an angry red 1/5 on each question. I didn't even bother to systematically check my previous friendly green 5/5 answers and reverse them.

For what it's worth, I then made a half-way honest attempt, without any real soul-searching, to pick responses that I felt described me fairly, picking the middle of the scale on the most egregiously ambiguous statements, and I scored bang in the middle: 51/70. I think it's safe to say that the results mean nothing, alas, so I still can't settle the question of whether I'm an android or not.

This particular catastrophe is nothing on the geological time scale.

What a pointless truism that is. The worst atrocities in human history, combined, are "nothing on the geological time scale."

It would have been correct if he had said "many more datum", but that's just weird.

No, that would be like saying "many more apple" — "datum" is emphatically singular; it's "data" that people like to play fast and loose with.

The opposite case of "dice" might be of interest to ESL learners: the singular form is "die," but many people say "a dice." Are they ignorant of their mistake or are they speaking a newer dialect of English? Probably.

A mach here, a mach there and soon you are talking real machs.

Old McDonald had a scramjet?

EI-EI-LEO.

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.

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.

Commercial organizations ... tend to have a higher regard for logic...

[citation needed]

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.

especially with advances in fuel cell and solar technologies

How would fuel cells have anything to do with keeping nukes unpopular?

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).

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.

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.

...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.