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Good gosh! I never stopped to think that my little posts might be bringing down the Board. Sincere apologies to Lucky and to any others who were similarly put off. As it turns out, December is shaping up to be a fairly busy month, so I'll be just an occasional lurker for the next little while anyway. Can't wait to check back after the holidays and see what you've done with the place!

Per this old chestnut from Harry Hershfield, the posts here are just horrible to read. And not nearly enough of them!

Cheer up. Maybe the website won't be any better in December, and he'll decide to bomb them instead.

Up to 3gpm! power-reverse for quick tidy up! free gallon of Rush™ if you order today!

I always check out these too-good-to-be-true stories, but not this one. I wanted to enjoy it for a little while. I had a good ten minutes until NCBored did the needful. During that time, it occurred that Apple hasn't caught many breaks lately. Twenty billion nickels in the driveway would have been a kick in the iKeister.

A pretty good one, if you ask me!

From FourAces' article: McClendon said replacing the image will take about eight days and that Google has spoken to the Barrera family "to let them know we're working hard on the update." From MsGuy's article: It said replacing the image could take eight days. . . . Google Maps vice-president Brian McClendon said: "Since the media first contacted us about the image, we've been looking at different technical solutions. Perhaps they need the extra week for the blur-filter to kick in.

First they have to find out what server it's on. The article FourAces linked was interesting. Sounds like the Germans got Google to agree to blank out the houses of all the folks who requested it.

Following my own advice, I tossed my boytoy cookies (three of them) and can sign out again. Oddly, a few seconds after I erased one, it would show up again in my cookie list, as if OZ had told the programmers to keep shooting them out again. Anyway, I finally got them all removed and can now log off from time to time. So to speak. PS: Good gosh! OZ and I hit 'post' in the same minute. That means it's noon in India and OZ is already up and at 'em. No wonder we're not getting any progress reports from India.

I liked the pictures but, not speaking Spanish, I can only wonder what they got up to. If there's any info you're able to share on this guy, I'd be much obliged!

If it's scat you're after, you might want to hold off till AdamSmith drops by. This thread's got fruit, fiber, and drugs. It shouldn't be long now.

Perhaps you pissed him off or something. My ex-proctologist once told me that dietary fiber was highly overrated, but that was before I found out he was moonlighting as a mortician.

Hey! Was that a shot? Swap poem for theorem and get rid of the Almost and you sound like my freshman physics TA.

In case it helps, I just tried signing out and got this message: Safari can't open the page Too many redirects occurred trying to open “‎www.boytoy.com/index.php?mdf=logout”. This might occur if you open a page that is redirected to open another page which then is redirected to open the original page. Needless to say, I'm still signed in.

You were the one who nailed it, MsGuy. Best I did was pile on. My irritation with writers who go out of their way to make their ideas impenetrable goes back fifty years to the books I had to "ingurgitate" during my days as an engineering undergrad. As soon as an academic had come up with the least understandable way to describe a complex phenomenon, he'd set the type, print the book, and make it required reading for one of my core classes. I don't mind someone embroidering their prose for fun, or to put a feeling across, but to do it just to show that he can cobble together a cornucopia of convolution crimps my conviviality. So, AdamSmith, please excuse my popping in precipitously and putting Lucky to sleep. And thanks for the S. J. Perelman. It was a gem! And now I must be going. "I was on a coach trip to the rapturous intersection of medieval chiliasm and . . ." Ooops, let me see that map again.

I tossed my cookies, created a new password, cleared my browser, logged off, shut down my computer, left it in a 350° oven overnight, changed my name, moved to Somalia, got a new ISP, booted up and I'm still signed in. I think maybe this website is in ROM.

Honestly! I know I should be deferring to my betters here, but this kind of writing gives me the pip. I'm not allergic to looking up a word here and there, but "having been almost accidentally ingurgitated"? If he were talking about a guy who wandered into a bathhouse with his pants down, I could see why only that exact wording would do, but he's talking about Muslims who drifted into France over a period of years. At least I think he is. ". . . part of the colonialist couscous"? The guy seems to be writing without a net. Implicitly. Explicitly. Ineluctably. Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe I should go and read it again.

Actually, I usually eat only the skins and leave the white part of the potato for the curly-tailed piggies. Though they won't get any of the butter or sour cream, I've been known to let a chive or two get through.

So what's next? Potato skins??

That may well have been the question on von Neumann's mind as he gave his advice. The question on Szilárd's mind was could there have been no more corpses at all if the power of the bomb was merely demonstrated. The question for me is what separates those who think about saving lives from those who don't.

I'm with you. I'm not as widely read on this stuff as AdamSmith but, from what I have read, the folks who knew that nuclear weapons were likely possible and had the smarts to build them seemed to fall into several different camps. There were a very few who did not want to go down that path at all. There were those who figured we better do it before the Germans did. There were those who looked at it as a scientific exercise and could not resist seeing if they could turn theory into practice. And there were those who were interested in having and using the weapon. These latter folks either justified it on the basis that it would shorten the war and save lives, or else they didn't trouble themselves at all with the ethics of its use. I also believe that the borders between these groups were crossable and some did switch camps, especially as 'progress' was made on the scientific and engineering challenges. I think, by the time the Trinity test was conducted, there wasn't anyone who didn't want to see if the bomb would work. When word filtered out about the extent of the blast, some of these folks moved from one camp to another. And the path to the hydrogen bomb was similar, although not everyone lined up as they did on the path to the first weapon. My take was that the span of ethics for these scientists wasn't much different from the span of ethics for the rest of us, other than that they had much more insight as to the likely numbers of people who would be killed. The guy who draws me in is Leó Szilárd. He was the first person who conceived of the idea that a nuclear chain reaction could form the basis of a bomb, and got Albert Einstein to co-sign a letter to President Roosevelt urging that one be developed, which led directly to the Manhattan Project. From the beginning, he saw it as a demonstration weapon to show the Germans and the Japanese that they could not win the war. He was especially distressed that Truman actually decided to use it after Germany had surrendered. I can identify with him much more easily than I can with someone like Johnny von Neumann, another Hungarian and another fascinating character. But he seemed to relish his role as a macher and appeared little troubled by a hundred fifty thousand crispy corpses lying in the streets of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We humans seem to have this amazing ability to compartmentalize, and to dissociate ourselves from the human consequences of our actions, especially when our actions and their consequences are separated by space, by time, by distance of relationships, and by intermediaries who convince us that we are merely 'following orders'. I think it may be the unusual human who can keep track of the direct links between what we do one day and what tragic results may follow the next. And I doubt that scientists are necessarily more likely to have stronger ethical links than the rest of us.

I apologize for concentrating solely on the fun part of this thread, as I didn't realize how important this issue is for some posters, as well as for TY and OZ. Thank you all for thinking this through and sharing your thoughts and solutions. It also got me thinking about what I'd do if I got into a dustup with a poster here. My first inclination would be to ignore him. Not put him on ignore, but just not engage him on the Board. If the person had some redeeming features, it's possible I'd send a PM to figure out if a rapprochement were in the cards. But if I got back a rude response, I'd be done. If it seemed threatening, I'd probably forward it to OZ and TY so they knew who they had on the Board. But I wouldn't ask them to ban the poster or take any action on my behalf. I'd just never engage the person again. I hope we continue to keep our social skills on an upward arc and resolve our differences ourselves. It would be a shame to harsh TY's mellow or interfere with OZ's continuing Search for Enlightenment.

Thanks but I'd have to be crazy, or on the take. Where do I sign up?

I once had a cute young twink put his head on my shoulder and fly all the way from Philadelphia to San Francisco. He was supposed to get off in Chicago, but I thought it would be a shame to wake him.