Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you but... honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know its not cause at night there's voices so... please please can you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman, or...
Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.

New. Bill. Whittle. Post.

Must read.

No - need sleep!

Read first! Then sleep!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:04 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 18 words, total size 1 kb.

racist scum, crusaders and wierods!!!!!!!!!!!!11

LGF gets email.

Satirists get depressed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:30 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 16 words, total size 1 kb.

Argumentum Per Absurdum

The argument from authority is a well-known logical fallacy. It goes something like this:

A: ... and so, from samples returned by NASA and spectroscopic analysis, we have determined that the moon is made of green cheese.
B: That's total nonsense. The spectroscopic analysis data is available here and chemical and physical analysis of the returned samples is here. And here is a bibliography listing over 700 studies of lunar composition, based on physical, chemical, spectroscopic, gravitational, electromagnetic, and visual data. Not only is the moon not made of cheese, it's not even organic. Oh, and it's not green.
A: What do you know about it? Professor Frink proved all of this in his book, La Lune Du Fromage. And he's got a PhD.
B: Yeah, Frink has a PhD. In medieval history.

But to take it that step further, what you need is something like this:

C: You "skep-tic" morons are alike. Professor Frink is a scholar and a gentleman, and his views on lunar composition are the talk of Helsinki.
B: Yeah, right.
D: Did anyone notice that C only joined the forum today, has made only one post, and is using the same IP address as A?
B: How about that. And get this - the IP traces to Frinktown University's Medieval History department!
B&D: Bwahahahahaha!
E: Having fun, skep-tic morons? Can't address the issue, so you resort to ad-hominem attacks!

The circle is complete.

No links. But you know what I mean.

Update: Okay, I said no links, but this theory needs to be brought to wider attention.

Update: Further philosophical insights into this vital topic of the day from WuzzaDem (thanks Steven!) and Riehl World View.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:58 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 283 words, total size 2 kb.

Yuck

Last October/November, I built a statistical trackback spam filter called Snark. It worked very well, blocking about 99.8% of spam without requiring any attention from me, until its data files got wiped by accident during the DDOS attacks last month.

When I got Snark up and running, we were getting on the order of 10,000 trackbacks per day. Almost all spam, obviously, but Snark made short work of those.

In May, the last full month of Snark operations, we received nearly two million trackbacks.

So far this month, we have received four million trackbacks. It's gotten so bad that at the peak of a spam flood, just firing off a CGI script to log the requests was enough to melt Apache.

Yergh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:37 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 124 words, total size 1 kb.

Banned In India!

And Saudi Arabia. And Pakistan. And at one point, South Korea. As Vinnie says:

Why couldn't we have been banned in Turkey instead? It would have saved alot of headache.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:45 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 35 words, total size 1 kb.

Word of the Day

Condemnuum, n. A spectrum of activities which at one end would hardly raise an eyebrow at a debutante ball and at the other would make a hyena blush.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:23 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 36 words, total size 1 kb.