Erik

Well then with all due respect you're drawing the wrong conclusions about my position. I am in no way condoning illegal immigration. I thought you wanted to debate the subject but sadly it's just turned into a rant.

My apparent "train of thought" or Ruggs? Public assistance abuse is a serious issue. E

I don't disagree. I am not a bleeding heart liberal. I have my ideas and I enjoy hearing the ideas of others on how to fix the problem. Problem I find is that solutions are in short supply and not very clearly thought out. This includes the current ones now in place and being enforced. My biggest concern is what happens when you take HOPE and FREEDOM from the American People. Can I get an Amen? E

Would it be fair in summation to say you can boil all those "reasons" down to HOPE and FREEDOM?

So let me ask this. Why does anyone leave their country to go to another country legally or illegally?

I can offer more sections (read: top level categories or sub categories) for posts to go into but a drop down wouldn't be a practical solution. Stickies are to me promoted posts that are important. When you get enough stickies on any one subject you promote that subject to a category or sub category depending on visually what is easiest to find. The knowledge base is a keen tool for developing a one stop place for FAQs or solutions. There is an OFF KB and I'm not sure how or if it's being used. The OFF Developers and Moderators manage everything OFF related and I tend to stay out of things here except where it might be globally site related or software related. I'll defer to whatever decisions the OFF leadership decides. Erik

Seriously there are millions of people who can share their discomfort about immigration issues and they are not specific to any one country. If we employed the same zeal offering up solutions to the problem that we do in sharing our discontent we might actually get somewhere. No offense intended but I think it's important to remember that not everything is as cut and dry as we'd like to make it nor can it be so neatly packaged into points of view that allow us to rationalize the problem into black or white. Your position can be debated from the stance that we're all illegal immigrants, at least from the view point of the Native American Indian. Globally similar circumstances exist on every continent and it's a battle that's been waged from the beginning of time. Where does your position take us? More laws, more fencing, or more shooting?

Second degree burns? I've had hot wings that give 2nd degree burns. mmmmmmm

Don't you just love the crispy sizzle you hear while getting third degree burns? MMMM. Seriously though couldn't you just rub some dirt on it?

If the stickies are becoming too big you could always opt for something like: OFF General Forums -- Important Information (Sub Cat) -- OFF Community Shared Content (Sub Cat) -- Whatever Else Is Important (Sub Cat) I guess since it's the OFF'ers who ultimately use these boards and the OFF Staff who moderate them it would be up to you guys how to create your filing system. If you want to see how sub categories work you can look at the Spanish Forum. They have tutorials as sub categories to their general discussion board. That should give you an idea what I'm talking about. Erik

Just an FYI kind of thing. The beauty of things around here is that they can always be changed to accommodate the growing needs of the OFF community. If for example the General Section needs to have subcategories assigned to it so it is easier to read we can do that. That way the section can still have stickies but it can have subcategories with stickies of their own. While I won't suggest how to best organize things for the OFF guys I will suggest that it can be done to make things easier for everyone. E

Whadda ya mean dead is dead?

That's just cool!

Maybe recently you've installed some software that removes your browser cache including cookies or it's not allowing the cookies to be saved on your machine anymore? Just a thought because nothing here has changed in the last 7 months or so but will in the near future. E

There's some aircraft maintenance reports that this is a tribute to. Problem occurs about 75% of the time when opening threads ... Please only use those buttons the other 25% of the time. Now for the serious stuff. It's all a function of the cookies we store on your machine and what we store in the database. This is confused more by the fact that you're using two machines which each get different cookies and the site just doesn't know what you've read and what you haven't. The jumping around happens when you enter a thread with a lot of images that need to be resized. There's another software update coming that will address some of these concerns but I don't think there's any software that will fix the multiple machine issue. Sorry about that. Erik

You know I keep hearing more and more about the "wall" between Mexico and the USA. In fact I just saw a John McCain ad about the "fence", as he calls it. I'm sure he's hoping that it's going to help him get re-elected. I have to think to myself are people really that stupid that they don't learn from past mistakes? It didn't work for Germany and it didn't work for China (the only man made structure that can be seen clearly from space) why do they think it's going to work now? Real solutions for real problems are what we need. I guarantee a solution costs less and is more effective.

It's always about money I don't care how you cut it. If I can't work at home to feed my family I will do what it takes to work somewhere so my family can survive. If I can make thousands shipping illegal drugs into a country to fill a market demand, why not? If I can extort money from a country or it's people by any means that I otherwise couldn't do from home, why not? and the list can go on and on. Sure there are always a few in any circumstances where they are fleeing their country because of personal reasons, prosecution, or conditions political or economical. I will concede that not all solutions fit every need BUT building a fence is not the answer to any of these problems.

It will eventually fill up.

Yeah I'm definitely not speaking in favor of the wall idea. The real problem is that the fence or wall when complete as designed will have miles of holes in it and non existent in some places. A lethal electric fence that is complete from end to end and provides perimeter detection as well as ground detection and defenses I might support but not this public placebo they are force feeding the public. All I'm saying is embrace the problem with real solutions don't cling to some fantasy "I'll protect you" idea sold to you by a politician.

I stand corrected. http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/workinginspace/great_wall.html I never knew it was a myth. Regardless it's frikken huge. <laughs>

Okay lets break this apart because it's a lot to answer all at once. The topic says "site bandwidth problems" but whose bandwidth are you testing, yours or ours? What tests have you used specifically? This has nothing to do with our bandwidth but everything to do with your resources. When you view a page with images and text like our front page your browser uses memory and processor resources to display it. As you allocate machine resources to do one thing it stands to reason it has less resources to do others. The front page itself has no flash running but if it did it's still part of the equation where the flash would be using more resources on your machine. This doesn't relate to our bandwidth. By tests do you mean what you've related here? There's nothing running in the background costing us more to run the site than is necessary. Nothing here can compare to the terabytes of transfer we provide to facilitate the file downloads, that's our main expense. That's what Google made their name with I would hope their searching is fast. Our bandwidth and your bandwidth are two different things.

Here! Here! Have a great one!