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.

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".

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...

Exactly. Very repetitive music that covers much of the spectrum can be seen as a more enjoyable form of pink noise. The effect is to mask all other sounds you receive and to create an environment where no aural cues interrupt your attention. Once your brain has realized it's not going to receive interesting data from your ears it stops wasting focus on interpreting it.

There are very good reasons why people would need this. The "uniform noise environment" point has already been made. One poster noted that tinnitus sufferers need some kind of aural stimulus or they get hit by a distracting high-pitched squeal. Then there's a condition called hyperacusis - the sufferer is overly sensitive to sound, being easily distracted or perceiving sound as too loud earlier than most. A variant of this makes it hard to ignore any sound, even quiet ones - they automatically command the sufferer's attention. You can imagine what this does to the sufferer's concentration when someone nearby talks.

Developers need to dedicate as much mental capacity as possible to a given task, especially since they need to keep many different bits of information in their head at any time. This makes noise insulation a good idea. Noise-dampening headphones (in-ear phones or the big earmuff-types) can reduce reasonable external noise to a point where music or white noise at a sane volume will completely cancel most of it.

If music privileges are to be taken away, I recommend issuing passive noise-canceling gear to focus-oriented workers or installing pink noise generators to provide at least some form of noise suppression.

I recall a story that the ill-fated solid booster rockets could have and should have been built in one piece near the launch site, but they were farmed out to Hatch's home state of Utah for political reasons. Transportation from there meant that they had to be built in segments joined with O-rings.

Is my memory correct?