Aye. And I'll raise a Mumbai Sapphire martini to that!

Thanks.

I once got regular mod points. I think if you cross an invisible "Troll" achievement threshold, you get blocked.

Burma Shave?

Be Low.

Below

Below...

Below

He's gone where the goblins go,

The Wicked Witch is dead!

http://dan.hersam.com/tools/smart-quotes.html

'Zactly. There are PILES of PHP and Perl snippet that filter quotes, or allow Unicode.

I have tried typing Russian (Cyrillic) and Persian (Arabic-derived) into the site in the past. Ouch.

...is that our selfies are safer.

This is not, nor has it ever been a central tenet of Islam. This cannot be viewed in political or historical isolation.

"Convert to Christianity under Papal authority or die by red-hot poker" was a governing principal of church and state - at the center of Europe's most powerful empire, for nearly 200 years. It was never the message of Jesus, regardless of your belief in Christianity. But scripture and political expropriation of pseudo-theology made that it seem so.

I hope someday you have a daughter who marries a an African Muslim. You might be forced to reconsider many of the things that you "know" so assuredly.

It's so much EASIER than THINKING!

I keep thinking that if an ISP really wanted to cut costs, they could proactively monitor their network for problems:

• Provide the CPE preconfigured, at no additional cost to the customer. (Build the hardware cost into the price of service.)
• Ensure that the CPE keeps a persistent capacitor-backed log across reboots. If the reboot was caused by anything other than the customer yanking the cord out of the wall or a power outage, send that failure info upstream. Upon multiple failures in less than a few weeks, assume that the customer's CPE is failing, and call the customer with a robocall to tell them that you're mailing them new CPE to improve the quality of their service.
• Detect frequent disconnects and reconnects, monitor the line for high error rates, etc. and when you see this happening, treat it the same way you treat a CPE failure.
• If the new hardware behaves the same way, silently schedule a truck roll to fix the lines.

If done correctly (and if clearly advertised by the ISP so that users would know that they didn't need to call to report any outages), it would eliminate the need for all customer service except for billing, and a decent online billing system could significantly reduce the need for that as well.