Internet Laws

A friend of mine just fell prey to....well, actually, I didn't remember the name of the Law she stumbled into, but I remembered there was one (the only one I could recall was the frequently cited Godwin's Law, which wasn't the one I wanted), so I took a deep breath, centered my chakras, assumed the appropriate stance, and activated my google-fu:

Internet rules and laws: the top 10, from Godwin to Poe

For those too lazy to click through (just taking the first quote from each, original gives you more background):

1. Godwin’s Law "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."
2. Poe’s Law “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.”
3. Rule 34 “If it exists, there is porn of it.”
4. Skitt’s Law "any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself"
5. Scopie’s Law “In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses the argument immediately, and gets you laughed out of the room.”
6. Danth’s Law (also known as Parker’s Law) “If you have to insist that you've won an internet argument, you've probably lost badly.”
7. Pommer’s Law “A person's mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”
8. DeMyer's Laws (2nd) “Anyone who posts an argument on the internet which is largely quotations can be very safely ignored, and is deemed to have lost the argument before it has begun.”
9. Cohen’s Law “Whoever resorts to the argument that ‘whoever resorts to the argument that... …has automatically lost the debate’ has automatically lost the debate.”
10. The Law of Exclamation "The more exclamation points used in an email (or other posting), the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters."

Frank Lloyd Wright or Wrong....

Cute bit on architecture and arch parody.

And then you have the mavericks....

Like the ever-so-popular-with-the-press Sheriff Arpaio of Phoenix. Yes, you've heard about him, the tough sheriff that makes sure that jail is no country club, at least for Mexicans.

Makes an orderly bureaucracy sound almost tempting!

If you think *I* hate bureaucracy....

Penelope Trunk really takes it to the limit.

Well....as close as you can get to the limit without risking arrest too much, anyway.

For those who think bureaucracy is new....

...another extract from The Inheritance of Rome:

Being a tradesman in Constantinople around 900 was by no means a straightforward process. According to the Book of the Eparch (or the Prefect), a set of official regulations from this period, merchants, shopkeepers and many artisans had to be members of a guild (systma) to operate, and had to sell their wares in specific places, the gold- and silver-dealers in the Mese, the merchants of Arab silk in the Embole, the perfumers in the Milion beside Hagia Sophia, the pork butchers in the Tauros. Ambulant sellers were banned; they would be flogged, stripped of guild membership, and expelled from the city. Sellers of silk could not make up clothes as well; leather sellers could not be tanners. Some guilds, such as the merchants of Arab silk or the linen merchants, had to do their buying collectively, with the goods then distributed among guild members according to how much money they had put in, to keep down competitive buying. Sheep butchers had to go a long way into Anatolia to buy their sheep, to keep prices down; pork butchers, by contrast, had to buy pigs in the city, and were prohibited from going out to meet the vendors; so also were fishmongers, who had to buy on shore, not on the sea. The eparch, the city governor, had to be informed if silk merchants (divided into five separate guilds) sold to foreigners, who were prohibited from buying certain grades of silk. He determined all bread prices, by which bakers had to sell, and the price of wine the innkeepers sold; and he also determined the profits that many vendors made - grocers were allowed a 16 per cent profit, but bakers only 4 per cent (with another 16 per cent for the pay of their workmen), over and above the price they paid in the state grain warehouse.