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I read all the way to the bottom, and got stumped by this statement in the footer:

    256,026,015 people think stopping SOPA will change anything.
What do you suppose that means? That he has 256M hits on this page? Is he missing a "not" in the sentence?


Maddox writes the footer's himself (check other pages in his blog).

It's an arbitrary number he put up to make a point.


He writes the descriptions, but the number is a hit counter. You'll notice that it increments over time.


It's not an arbitrary number - it is the hit count.


The fact that it increments over time doesn't mean anything, he could use some server side script to randomly increment the value.

Are we supposed to believe he has had 256,056,823 (current value) visitors to his one-day-up SOPA page?

Or is it the aggregate for total visits to his site, ever?


There has always been a counter on his home page, so I'm guessing aggregate total visits over X period of time. The majority of his 'articles' have one.

Of course, he could just randomly increment the value using a script, but Maddox has been around a long time (I've been reading his site on and off for around 10 years) so I doubt he has need to.




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