In a message dated 11/22/2004 12:06:08 PM Mountain Standard Time, joshua@hutchinson.net writes: Rather, he explained the fallacies he saw in your argument. I have no objections to having fallacies pointed out; however, I had made no assumptions. I had made a SUGGESTION and ASKED FOR COMMENT. I had thought about the situation for some time before I was ready to put forth the suggestion. Therefore, condescendingly telling me I had made incorrect assumptions was maddening. I shall now explain why I almost never make assumptions. When I first became a crime scene technician, my boss would never allow me to say a substance was blood. I had to say "a red fluid which appeared to be blood." Even if somebody is lying on the floor with a shotgun blast through his chest, he is lying in a pool of "a red fluid which appears to be blood." I couldn't understand why I had to do this, until the day that my boss and I were trailing an injured murderer down an alley by the places he had stopped to bleed. The last blood spatter was in the middle of a blind alley with no doors opening onto it and a wall too high for an injured person to climb. This made no sense at all to us. There was nowhere for him to go from there. Nevertheless, a sample was taken from each splotch. When the lab report came back, we learned that the last spatter was brake fluid. We had lost him on the street, at the end of the alley, where he apparently got into a car. I don't KNOW that he got into a car. He might have gotten into a truck or onto a motorcycle or bicycle. He might have gotten into a flying saucer. It APPEARED that he had gotten into a car. I cannot ASSUME what he did. I wasn't there. I didn't see it. Therefore I rarely make assumptions. I asked whether my suggestion would work. I have no problem at all with being told that it would not work. It was the condescending attitude, in this case and in the "old Tom Swift books," post, that was like a red flag to a bull. And you have apparently missed some posts, because this is the third time in less than a month that Carlo has dropped on me like a ton of lead, assuming I have assumptions that I do not have. The first two times I laboriously explained what I was saying and why and how I had not meant what he assumed I meant. This time he got me on a day when I was ill and already crabby, and I bit back. I wished that I had not done so two seconds after I sent it, but I couldn't unsend it. As to ISPs and programs, you explained without acting as if I had an IQ of minus thirty. Thank you. Anne