gingermangiant

Comment Threads

• bellinghman commented on Egypt
  Ooo, it looks like the spammer took a bit of a previous comment (#11 in this case), then followed it with some Markov chain generated extra verbiage. I was recently wondering how soon that would happen. (Or perhaps how soon it would happen again - no, no, I'm sure that ARCHAEOPTERYX is genuine.)...
• bellinghman commented on Egypt
  In Opera, I just mouse-hover over it, and the link appears in my status bar. But yes, same idea. The comment content is the kicker though - if it's comprehensible, apposite to the existing content and original within the thread, then it can link where it likes. xkcd (as so often) made the only comment required....
• bellinghman commented on Looking under the street lamp again
  Hmm, getting more comprehensible. Now it's the fact that we recognise the spammer that's the clue....
• Charlie Stross commented on Looking under the street lamp again
  Spammers nuked. I think, however, that I will close comments on this thread (seeing the last significant one came up five days ago)....
• Charlie Stross commented on Egypt
  David, I suspect you over-estimate the power of individuals to affect institutions. Put it another way: if Bashar al-Assad stood up and announced that he thought real democracy and human rights were a good idea, how long would it take before a bunch of Baath party ministers arranged a convenient accident for him? Or, at best, a bloodless palace coup, for the unforgivable crime of rocking the boat and jeopardizing the combined set of all their personal fiefdoms. There's also a flip side, as the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated: if you parachute somebody into a role, and surround them with...