The London Telegraph has a list of “10 of the most important” immutable laws of the internet. Some, like Godwin’s Law, we all know about. Check out the rest—if you’ve ever engaged in online discussions, you’d surely have come across them all.
I particularly liked 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.
I’ve long believed that Indians are irony deficient, but perhaps I was being unfair—maybe it holds for everyone. The earliest example of satire being mistaken for the real thing that I can think of came from Ireland, after all: Jonathan Swift‘s awesome essay, “A Modest Proposal.”
(Links via email from Deepak Iyer and Arun Simha.)