Not at all.

It's BT then. If turning off and on at the wall gets you back then it's BT's fault. Your modem has a permanent address which is hidden behind a published address picked out by your ISP provider and generated when your modem declares itself online. If the BT line drops your published address becomes "available" to someone else, meaning that you have to restart your modem to get it to announce itself again to the network and acquire a new published address. However this site doesn't know that was the reason, and never got a logout request from you, so it behaves as if you have simply accessed the site through another machine. After a while it will realise that one address isn't registering any activity and end the status to "logged out". You will remain displaying as a "guest" for another while and then eventually disappear if you haven't logged in on another address of course.

This changing of addresses in the background is also what happens when people lose their posts on sending. If, while composing your post, the address dynamically changed itself on the ISP side then you are effectively typing your message in the browser's cache and the request for submission (made when you start typing in the message frame) is no longer valid. This can happen without even a requirement to restart the modem so it is almost always undetectable until it is too late. If you read the fineprint in the BT contract you'll see it's one of the first things in which it absolves itself of all culpability, even though it's BT that's doing it. ISPs are evil liars.

And sneaky - they pass info on to the authorities, save records of your traffic for years, and facilitate spamming by building up profiles of your internet habits and making them available to third parties. In fact they compete with each other to be the most sneaky - they know that keeping in with the authorities is worth mega-bucks. This is not paranoia speaking - I have worked for them.

Nordmann,

"And sneaky - they pass info on to the authorities, save records of your traffic for years, and facilitate spamming by building up profiles of your internet habits and making them available to third parties. In fact they compete with each other to be the most sneaky - they know that keeping in with the authorities is worth mega-bucks. This is not paranoia speaking - I have worked for them."

"I have worked for them"

Say once what you have "not" done?

I remember that you once told us about your time in Belgium. That the boss in one of the places where you were then located had the habit to shake hands each morning of his employees. Obviously it was not your best friend and one morning you had your hand full with grease...If I recall it well, you succeeded and he never shook hands again with you?

I have even a vague rememberance that you told us something related to Greece as if there too you resided in "one part of your life"?

During our BBC time I recall from some contributors as Islanddawn and others that they didn't always stay at the place, where they were born, but you, perhaps apart from Tas, seem to have changed places quite a lot?

Nordmann, feel free to ignore all this impertinent questioning, and go on with our daily business!

Kind regards and with esteem for all what I read from you on the different boards that we both frequent.

Paul.

Hi Paul - yes I have worked at different times in Ireland, England, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Germany, Ukraine, the USA, Canada, Japan and Norway.

Am presently learning Chinese (that bit's not true, but actually maybe we all should be!)

What would I like to see as a feature of this site? More life - the way we used to be. What on earth is going on?  I know Caro, ID and Priscilla are on holiday/tied up with family, but where is the rest of our merry band? Is the site being run down in time for Christmas? Have we all offended one another?

Hope we are not going the way of all history sites...

Controversy, that's what we need, something that we can argue about rather than,as I often do, log in, read posts, nod silently to myself and move away to somewhere else. We really do, at least in general terms, tend to agree about most things and that might well explain why some have stuck around and some wandered off over the years.
Where have all the useful idiots gone?

ferval wrote:

Where have all the useful idiots gone?

Well, I'm still here - just.

Is it my computer - nothing for today is showing up on "Shortcuts", and, although I'm logged in and posting this, my name is not on the Who's Online? bit. No one's name is showing, and in fact no one has been "online" all day. It's all eerie and silent. Don't like it. It's ominous.

What's going on?

If you are online just now, you aren't showing up as logged in - are you sure you are?

Oh - you are now!

No I'm not, but I am.

This is worse than the Marks and Spencer website.

ferval wrote:

Where have all the useful idiots gone?

Some on we am still ere.

It's OK, I've found them. They're all wittering on about creationism on the Points of View message board.