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.

Yes, but eight minutes they spend with you are eight minutes they don't spend with half a dozen other people. Plus, I lower their call volume, making the company less profitable, and hopefully sending it into a decline. If enough people torment, these companies will have no choice but to disappear.

I forgot to put myself on the do not call list when I moved, and thus far, I have found it preferable to remain off the list. I can stay on the line for quite some time, refusing to give the TM any basic info.

One recent call ended after eight minutes of questioning whether she had dialed the right number, whether I was the person on the screen, whether I lived at the address suggested, and whether I had diabetes (I don't). I did find it mildly ironic that I can find out someone's name, address, phone number and health conditions from a telemarketer just by claiming that she called a wrong number.

My record was the half hour call from the satellite company that wanted to sign me up for the Indian service (presumably because Gill is an Indian name). I got transferred to a supervisor for that one. I just kept playing Beneath a Steel Sky while talking to them.

No, I don't value my time very highly.

I hear it works faster if you add --funroll-all-loops to CFLAGS in your make.conf.

But for most people, the slight difference in speed is probably unnoticeable, and worth the increase in privacy. If you really care about the slight difference in speed, there are probably better things to fix before you start working on your encryption settings.

``This Firefox extension was inspired by the launch of Google's encrypted search option.''

Unfortunately, Google still has a way to go before it can do that. Google still has not secured Google Products, Images, Maps, Finance, Translate (now, there's something that should be secure), Scholar, Custom Search, Earth, Directory, Patent Search, iGoogle, GOOG-411, Alerts, Knol, Sketchup, and I don't know about Talk.

Still, it's only been a few days. I'm sure they'll have those up in no time.

That renders the definition useless. By that logic, unpatched flaws that have existed for years could be called zero day.

I hope the term zero day does away, or at least that someone defines the word day in this context.