Why not just install Sophos' free version for Mac?

Are they talking about confidence games? As in, ``It's called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine''?

I'm not sure why Cisco feels the need to invent a new term for something that has been commonly understood since 1849...

The infanticidal tendencies of dolphins have been well-known for a decade. If a human did that, we would be forced to lock him up. Does the fact that it's a non-human dolphin make any difference?

It's worth repeating here.

I think the first steps should be pretty clear:

(1) New internet over old internet. Like IPv4 over IPv4, we should be able to connect to the new network over the infrastructure of the old. That doesn't mean that we have to use the old infrastructure, but that we can if we have the capability and inclination. This is necessary for mitigation and/or migration.
(2) Tor-ified e-mail. It should be a simple matter to set up a mail client that works over Tor and that incorporates full public key encryption. It might take some jiggering, but you should at the very least be able to set up a makeshift listserv that has RSS feeds that update with the latest messages. Publish it on your computer in an RSS feed the listserv is set up to check, cryptographically sign it and encrypt it with their public key, and the listserv decrypts it, reencrypts it with each recipient's public key, and the recipients retrieve it via RSS password protected by HTTP basic access authorization. You now have a message that you can be sure came from the sender and has not been tampered with--so if it's spam, you know who the spammer is, and you do not know who is sending messages unless you're the recipient. You would probably also want a list of message-IDs for the messages downloaded to be kept on each recipient computer, so that the messages can be removed from the queue once the other computer receives them. I'm sure this could be streamlined, but this method works now.

(Please do not construe this opinion as representing that of my employers)

Well, the article in the New Yorker is not a research article. Apart from that, the article that the title refers to, ``Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,'' probably would include itself in the list of possibly wrong articles.

Huh. Your argument is well-reasoned and compelling. I guess I'll have to go back to the permittivity and permeability of free space (the product of which is the inverse of the square of the speed of light in a vacuum), Coulomb's constant, the gravitational constant, the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, Planck's constant...

Why, I was accused of rape *and* murder. As a result, I can never got to Thailand for fear of winding up in a Southeast Asian prison based on mistaken identity.

Would this be effective proof of punctuated equilibrium? I don't think many seriously doubt that today (unless they doubt evolution completely), but proof is always cool.

I don't know about this system, but there was another very similar system system (punchscan) that explained how it worked. Essentially, you generate something like 100 times the number of ballots you need. The ballots are chosen randomly, and you can audit both the receipts of the ballots cast and the receipt/candidate list pairs of the other 99% of the uncast ballots. Since you don't know which ballots will be cast, you'd have to manipulate all (or at least a lot) of ballots, and if they turned out to be manipulated, you'd know something was up.

Want to show me an ad in exchange for watching something online? Fine. They're paying for the things I'm watching, and I'll give them the common courtesy of watching them. But making me enter crap into fiddly little boxes during time that I just want to veg out? Sorry. Not watching.

Part of being an effective employee of those companies is not believing them, but stating publicly that you believe them. These companies don't care if it's goodthink or doublespeak, so long as you say the right things.

So...the placebo effect has a 60 percent success rate (in the case of Marburg)? I still see your point, and await further studies.

No one has spoken ex cathedra about it. Ex cathedra statements are exceedingly rare. One pope has written in an encyclical (that's like, the best thing a pope can do on his own without being declared infallible) that there is nothing preventing belief in evolution, one has written official statements in praise of evolution, and one has made an ad hoc statement about it. Nothing infallible, which is as it should be. What if the pope declared ex cathedra and infallibly that it is the eternal and unchanging truth that Darwinian evolution was true. Does Stephen Jay Gould get burned at the stake, then?

How about the books that people write and spread around to friends or books published by small in-house printshops, often as promotional material? Books written before ISBN that are still in libraries but no longer published (Bodoni's type specimens come to mind, though it looks like some of these are indeed catalogued by WorldCat)? Books that were printed years ago that we know we lost to the ages (the lost Gospel of Barnabas--not the forged Gospel of Barnabas--comes to mind). What about the books that we never knew existed?

This estimate isn't bad for published works, but it does not adequately answer the question posed, ``Just how many books are out there?''

I was reminded of a similar story, the one where a guy wanted his drawing of the spider back.