Bad Thoughts
I just came across a great article on the techniques people use to bend a conversation, typically an arguement, in their favour. It’s appropriately called, Conversational Terrorism.
But it reminded me of a book I read, which goes into much greater depth about the underhanded ways people try to win arguments. The book is Bad Thoughts by Jamie Whyte. It’s a must read if you get into a lot of arguments with dimwits. 
Disclaimer: Just in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m experimenting with referal links to Amazon. But don’t let that put you off getting the book.
February 21st, 2006 at 9:57 am
One thing that bothers me is that if you sign up to amazon.co.uk, you don’t have something for amazon.com, so if you use amazon.com and someone from the UK visits the link, they are likely to change to amazon.co.uk and you won’t earn a referrer’s fee. I suppose the solution is to use a nasty hack to check the source IP address and use the right referring link based on that.
February 21st, 2006 at 10:02 am
Is that true? What a pain. amazon.com and amazon.co.uk are drifting further apart, which is a real shame. I hate how you can no longer change ‘com’ to ‘co.uk’ in an Amazon URL and get to the equivalent page on the UK site.
February 21st, 2006 at 11:04 am
Can you not? Well that’s annoying then.
I was pondering having an apache module to redirect to the right one based on a Geo::IP lookup, but it would probably involve telling the system in advance what items to refer to. Of course they could be less of a hassle if you have a script to do AWS checks against each of the sites you are interested in. Need to see if they include more countries than they did 18 months ago. Think they only had .com, .uk and .jp.