Please do. Will stand by with baited breath next to my computer for your full report........

I saw an ad for an all Platinum cable with gold connectors on the net and it was quoted as only $999.99 per linear foot. The connectors are separately priced but it seems to me to be a small price to pay for such expensive cables so I can brag to my friends that I have purchased the most expensive poorly designed cables in the world. They will be Sooooo impressed.

It is with a sigh and sadness that I read, once again, that some of our members have such a shallow understanding of digital information.

Simply: if all the little ones and zeros are recognized properly by the receiving equipment in the proper order and are ‘captured’ within the ‘windows of time’ allotted, it matters not how pristine the actual electrical signals were or whether they arrived via gold, silver, copper, plastic, leather or horsehair. That is one of the basic reasons behind, and the concept/design of digital information, in the first place.

Let me put it to you another way: can you tell, by studying the quality of the text now displayed before your eyes, whether the data that created it arrived via a barely maintained, slow dial-up connection, an average dsl/cable broadband connection, a home-based FIOS connection, or an even faster ‘more direct’ commercial connection? Would the text be more crisp, clear, even ‘stellar’, if my computer were connected directly to yours, now, ‘live’, via a million-dollar high-end cable?

bb4tb has summed up what my ill intentioned post was meant to infer in excellent prose worthy of an outlaw.

Judging by the aliasing in the text, I can tell with certainty that it is from a DSL line. No other method makes text look like that.......

Do you need silver bullets to hunt trolls or do the usual lead hollowpoints do the trick?

I knew there was a reason I was glad to have altec back in the forum. I initially thought it was his extensive knowledge, but maybe it was simply a fondless for his style of sarcasm.

Anyway, since the thread is well and truly 'jacked...
...I wonder if dad still carries that old silver bullet he cast back in the 80's? He cast a number of them (.45's, I think) for some buddies in his RC flying club due to some weird discussion they all had one day. They didn't actually load any of them, as far as I know, and for a number of years he kept it in his pocket with his keys - sort of a good luck charm. I think it's been sitting in an old mug on his dresser for a number of years now, though.

As for the question itself, I'm fairly sure the only way to kill a troll is a profound, cleansing flame. Of course, the collateral damage from said flame tends to be quite high - often killing the troll hunter as well and leaving many bystanders with headaches. Depending on the troll, an alternative is that most devastating of tools: the ignore list, or the conscious act of ignoring.

Is that kind of like zen archery?

As my fiance likes to point out after I've shouted at some driver with poor manners or poor driving skills or both that I'm not very good at just shrugging it off and ignoring it.

A zen warrior I will be someday, but a lot of people will have bought useless expensive clocks by then.

"Zen archery" is a good way of putting it, actually. Much more elegant than "don't feed the troll" - and it suitably describes the underlying challenge of actually doing it when faced with certain trolls (especially those bearing jars of rocks and crazy clocks).

Is it something about August that does weird things to the minds of electronic toy junkies?