Eric

Is there anything math can't solve?   

Downgrade your computer to Windows XP, prior to Service Pack 1 Disable all antivirus and security software Using Internet Explorer 6, browse high risk websites heavy with flash and java applets Make sure to open all suspicious emails.  If an email has an attachment in EXE format, make sure to execute it.  Multiple times. If the error persists, take your PC to the bathroom and plug it in.  Fill your tub with water, get in, and with your body submerged, quickly lower the tower into the water. These steps may or may not fix the problem, but at the very least it'll give you lots of other things to worry about, and hopefully keep you from calling us back for a while.   /s

Marilyn, who did you talk to?

Thank you Terry and Marilyn for the recent donations, and to everyone else who has donated. I'm looking forward to getting and installing the big upgrade in the next few months... but I'm one of those people who looks forward to big software changes--I know some of you are probably less than enthusiastic, but I'll make the transition as painless as possible

Last time I checked, you didn't need a PayPal account to make a donation through PayPal, just a credit card.   Near the bottom of the PayPal Donation page, there are a couple lines of text     Click the Continue link.   Thanks!

Well... I was going to wait and do all of the forum changes at once, but since I don't have any time frame for the software updates, I figured I should put the new forum up early.   I'll likely make changes later, I just put this together quickly to have something available.  

Nobody wants a club full of flatulating mathematicians. 

  So... you're expecting new skin cancers? /s

Mr Curly makes me wish I knew how to play a clarinet.

  I'm a private person, so I'm hoping that keeping the new forum locked down is something most people will agree on.  I do have some good photos from our camp; I'll post a few to get things started once the new forum is in place.  I wish I had taken my whole camera bag full of lenses with me--the one lens I had is better suited for portraits.  Even so, I got a decent photo of a bald eagle grabbing a fish out of the water right in front of the camp.         My thought is that new members won't know about it until they hit the magic post count, which wouldn't be very high.  I'd prefer not to have any trace of it visible to the public.    Personally, I don't care if there are a few NT posts mixed in like they currently are, so we'll have to figure out if it'll stay that way or not.

Also, I plan on having a post count requirement to view the new forum.  It will be invisible to the public, and even new members won't see it until they have created a few posts.   The Off Topic forum will therefore not be crawlable by search engines or spam bots or anything/anyone else that isn't a contributing member of the community.

I'm just going to jump in here to share some internet wisdom. Adding /S to the end of a line or a post indicates sarcasm.

I've been away on vacation for a while, in a place with no cell phone service or internet connection.  Just a lake, kayaks, hammocks, and books. It's been a nice break. KC and Judy and I had discussed closing down the politics forum some time ago.  Now it's gone (I'll delete the forum itself soon) but I'd like to replace it with something else eventually. I thought it'd be more beneficial for this community to have a place to discuss more no-tax topics.  Right now, I think General Chat has a comfortable balance of Tax and Non-Tax related posts... but that balance is what keeps me from posting much, since I don't have anything tax related to contribute.  My feeling is that I would share more NT stuff if there were a dedicated forum for it and I think other people might too. I'd like to shoot for an Off Topic forum that focuses on more personal/friendly threads.  Talk about your kids/grandkids.  Post photos.  Post articles / videos about subjects that you find interesting.  A recent example I really enjoyed was Catherine's post about Fibonacci numbers / the golden ratio.  There are plenty of places to argue about politics.  We have a good community here and I would personally prefer to grow this community in a more positive way.  I'm really hoping that our members have more varied interests than just politics, and I'm hoping that people will share those interests here so that everyone can get to know each other beyond their political views. I don't have a timeline for these changes.  There is a very big forum upgrade on the way--I've been doing beta testing on and off for the past few months, reporting bugs, and testing fixes.  The changes will be significant, and so I'd like to lump that upgrade with the forum changes and do it all at once.  There is no timeline for the release of the new version, but it's looking pretty polished at this point and I can't imagine that it'd be more than a few months away. Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

I'll close this and create a new thread.   New thread is here: '?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>>

I've been away on vacation for a while, in a place with no cell phone service or internet connection.  Just a lake, kayaks, hammocks, and books. It's been a nice break.   KC and Judy and I had discussed closing down the politics forum some time ago.  Now it's gone (I'll delete the forum itself soon) but I'd like to replace it with something else eventually.   I thought it'd be more beneficial for this community to have a place to discuss more no-tax topics.  Right now, I think General Chat has a comfortable balance of Tax and Non-Tax related posts... but that balance is what keeps me from posting much, since I don't have anything tax related to contribute.  My feeling is that I would share more NT stuff if there were a dedicated forum for it and I think other people might too.   I'd like to shoot for an Off Topic forum that focuses on more personal/friendly threads.  Talk about your kids/grandkids.  Post photos.  Post articles / videos about subjects that you find interesting.  A recent example I really enjoyed was Catherine's post about Fibonacci numbers / the golden ratio.   There are plenty of places to argue about politics.  We have a good community here and I would personally prefer to grow this community in a more positive way.  I'm really hoping that our members have more varied interests than just politics, and I'm hoping that people will share those interests here so that everyone can get to know each other beyond their political views.   I don't have a timeline for these changes.  There is a very big forum upgrade on the way--I've been doing beta testing on and off for the past few months, reporting bugs, and testing fixes.  The changes will be significant, and so I'd like to lump that upgrade with the forum changes and do it all at once.  There is no timeline for the release of the new version, but it's looking pretty polished at this point and I can't imagine that it'd be more than a few months away.   Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

If you want to consume information (books, photos, social networking, websites, documents, etc while in bed or on the couch, I find the tablet form factor is more comfortable than a laptop.   Some people attach keyboard covers to them and use them as laptops, but as someone who types about 90 wpm on a desktop keyboard, and 70 wpm on a good laptop keyboard with decent key travel (like a mac or a thinkpad), I find doing anything more than a quick message on a tablet/phone to be a horrible experience.   So, for me, a tablet isn't so great for creating content, but it's fine for reading/researching/learning.    Catherine, as to your worries about privacy: You're screwed.  Not just with tablets, but anything digital.  No doubt you're using Windows, and Microsoft has most likely added a backdoor.  I'm pretty sure I saw some headlines over the past week or two about Apple and the backdoors they've added to their devices.  I doubt the NSA has to work very hard at all to access whatever they want.   You don't sound interested in having a tablet/smartphone, but if you were, this is how I would go about it to maximize security/privacy: Get an Android device with a big developer following.  Any Nexus device, for example. Replace the pre-installed OS (Android) with CyanogenMod, which is still Android, but built from AOSP (Android Open Source Project).  The source code is available for all to scrutinize.  Cyanogenmod also adds additional features. Disable GPS and other Location services. Note that every time you install any app, you are told exactly what access to the system the app is requesting, whether it's your contacts list, location info, local storage, etc.  So pay attention to that and don't install apps that ask for more access than they need to do their task. Cyanogenmod has features that allow you to block app access to the system, so even if you installed an app that wants access to your contacts, you can choose revoke that permission.

When it comes to my day job, the next full-site redesign (within the next six months) I'll be doing just that.  But with freelance work, I don't have that kind of control.  You have to figure that a Business who is paying for a website wants to reach as many people with that investment as possible.    I can build a responsive mobile-friendly site that works in IE8, but bloating up the site with all of the extra stuff to make it work drives me nuts.

IE 11 is a fine browser.  IE 10 is decent too.   My only problem with IE is that there are various reasons that people tend to linger on old versions.  Sometimes it's because people just don't want to or know to update their software.  Sometimes it's because Microsoft will tie new versions of IE to new versions of Windows so that you can't upgrade it unless you upgrade your OS first.  Whatever the reason, the current situation is that there are more people using IE8 than IE11.    From your perspective, Jack, that doesn't matter.  You have control over what version of IE you have installed, and it works great.  From my perspective, I still have to include all kinds of hacks (bloated javascript) in my sites if I want them to render somewhat correctly in IE8 because IE8 doesn't support HTML 5, and that's only one large issue out of many.   At any rate, thanks for keeping your browser updated and not being one of those IE8 statistics I hate seeing in my logs.

KC, I turned the feature back on so that you wouldn't have to clean up duplicate posts.   Does it happen every time? I would assume that it only happens in whatever browser you're using and not in any other.   Cleaning cache/cookies might help, but that's just a stab in the dark.

Ahh, that's interesting.   KC, any changes that you know of that might have coincided with the start of the error message?  I'll enable the feature again to stop the double-posts, but we should try and figure out the cause.  

  It was set to 15 seconds before, and then I reduced it to 8.  I have no explanation for why it started, nothing has changed on the site.   The flood control feature has been disabled now, though.

I'm going to disable the feature, but I'm still really curious about why it's happening.  How long have you had the problem?   It's set to 8 seconds, so it obviously thinks 2 seconds have passed since some event to say that you're posting too quickly.

Guess I'm late to the party here.   KC: I've cut the limit in half, and I'd be curious to know if you still receive the message.  It may be that we don't need any limit at all.  The spam prevention question (what four digit number is associated with a federal income tax return?) seems to do a good enough job of keeping spammers out.  If you still have issues, KC, I'll remove it.   Jack: I know that 8mb is a pretty pitiful limit.  I may increase it when I do the big forum upgrades this year.  Image hosting isn't a bad idea, though.  I might suggest imgur.com as a good service that's easy to use, and isn't totally cluttered with ads (i think every page has a single ad on it).  In addition, it doesn't require an account to use the service.  If you do create an account, you gain the ability to manage your uploaded images.     Even if you don't create an account, imgur provides you with a unique image deletion URL when you upload an image.  You can save that link so that in the future if you want to delete the image without having an account, it's as simple as going to that website address and agreeing to delete the image.