Notice the one at the bottom.  I looked back in the last year and  five other people searched for “how to commit arson without getting caught” Doing a traceroute on all six IPs shows that proxies were not used during the search.

Here’s a pro-tip for all six of you.  If you think it’s a good idea to search the web for this without using some kind of blind proxy, then you are not the type of person that will succeed at this particular endeavor.  Think about hiring a professional.

Don’t know where to find one?  Just Google it.

Edit: This is better than I ever could have imagined.  Since posting this, 11 more mental midgets have visited to find out how to torch something without becoming the latest sausage recipient at the local prison.

Thanks for the smiles.

Oddly absent in his how-to  is the suggestion that they do something productive. But then again, we are talking about the Twitter crowd.

• 85% follow friends
• 54% follow celebrities
• 29% follow family members
• 29% follow companies

Keep in mind that that last number is the only thing Twitter really cares about.  They need companies with deep pockets to want to use Twitter, if they’re going to stay in business. If nobody is there to follow a business, the business has no reason to be at Twitter.  Unfortunately for them, 12 year olds aren’t a great demographic to dominate, since allowances can only go so far.

This was my favorite part of the article, however:

“Twitter dominates the news, but clearly we’re only touching the surface of its potential as a marketing vehicle,” Participatory Media Network co-founder and chairman Michael Della Penna said in a release. “This is a classic ‘glass half full’ scenario for Twitter because it’s clear that Gen Y has an appetite for social networking, but still hasn’t fully embraced micro-blogging. There is a tremendous opportunity now for marketers to develop strategies to get this important group active on Twitter too.”

I want to try my hand at this.

Give me a second.

Ok, I’m ready.

“The Edsel dominates the roadways, but clearly we are ready to carry actual passengers that purchased the car,” Schwim Dandy, the head public relations consultant for FoMoCo-Edsel Division stated in a release. “This is a classic ‘can’t lose’ scenario for Edsel because it’s clear that the public like to drive, but still haven’t fully embraced the toilet seat on the front of our car.  There is a tremendous opportunity now for us to develop strategies to get this important group into our cars.”

Well, maybe I need to work on it a bit.

Well, as I stated in the previous post, it’s definitely not just the OS developers that find this to be a powerful attribute of FOSS.  Count the DB devs in, too! After Oracle’s purchase of Sun, shit hit the fan in regards to MySQL and offshoots appeared overnight.  If you think it’s because of Oracle, you would be wrong.  Listening to the lead developers that are jumping ship to develop their own version, they were unhappy even when Sun was in the captain’s chair.  This was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

If that isn’t enough asininity for you, one of the key developers of MySQL has announced the formation of the Open Database Alliance, a “vendor-neutral consortium” whose stated aim is to become “the industry hub for the MySQL open source database, including MySQL and derivative code, binaries, training, support, and other enhancements for the MySQL community and partner ecosystem.”

These egoists require so many forks, they need a fucking “alliance” to keep track of the different versions.

It’s become so hard to keep a straight face when I find threads from linux users that are truly perplexed as to why the operating system hasn’t spread like wildfire and overtaken Microsoft.

It’s because the developers are too busy forming alliances and consortiums.

Well, first you ease into the letdown, making sure that you phrase it in such a way that it’s ambiguously insinuated that the risk is still lurking around the corner.  Then you begin ridiculing the hordes of people that fell for your bullshit.

You see, the death toll for the swine flu currently stands at 19. The average number of deaths annually from standard influenza?  36, o00.  While you can creatively adjust numbers to make the word “epidemic” fit, it seems that the disparity between these two figures are too great for even the US media to stretch.

Now, I’m not blaming the news agencies.  They’re no better than spammers.  They’re in it to make money and everyone knows that fear sells.  The mental defects that watched the news and immediately donned paper masks while wrapping themselves in cheesecloth deserved every minute of anguish that they endured.

I’m just sorry that I didn’t have the forsight to buy stock in dust masks.

First off, Never video tape it.  That’s just asking for trouble.

If you video tape it, make sure that you don’t post it to Youtube.

If you do post it to Youtube, do not, under any circumstances, place credits at the end of the video, listing all of the people involved in the crime.

These people should have talked to me before burning down a building.

Scamming pieces of shit would send out mail to publicly available registered owners of domains with what looked like a legitimate renewal bill for their domain.  You would pay them money and your domain wouldn’t get renewed.

Because, you know… they weren’t really your registrar.

They were scamming pieces of shit.  We had already established this.  Try to stick with me, mkay?

Well, the long, atrophied arm of the law came down on them and they got in big trouble for doing that.  The number of mails received went down drastically.

But the allure of an easy buck was just sitting there.  They didn’t want to do fake renewals any longer, since it was already skylined and therefore subject to the law of diminished returns, but they knew that there was some way to continue on in the same tradition.

Enter these geniuses:

If you look at the top half, it’s intention is to look like a bill.  However, since the last time they made it look like a bill went so poorly, in the bottom half of the solicitation, they’ve told you that it wasn’t actually a bill.

What do they do for $65.oo?  They submit your site to 20 search engines.  You of course can do this for free by simply visiting the search site in question.  They will also send you a report of search results.  You can also get this for free through Google Analytics.

That’s all.  Expected more?  Very sorry to disappoint.  What did you expect for $65.00?  Something you couldn’t do yourself?  What do you think this is, the Salvation Army?

I get the mails all the time.  Last night, I had too much time on my hands and decided to respond:

I figured it was only fair.  They send me what looked like a bill but wasn’t, so I sent them what looked like a check but wasn’t.  I pulled out all the stops too.  It’s actually a separately printed paper, taped to the center of the page.

If anyone could appreciate the effort I went to, I imagine it’s them.