I agree, Nausheen.

Bill, that was a glorious, liberating read, wherein you addressed most of my misgivings. I still feel for your granny, but now for different reasons, though I think her box's nemesis is Sinon rather than Ephialtes.

We do live in different worlds, you and I, but now and again it's really worthwhile (and fun) shaking hands through the ...er...Window, though neither of us is prepared to step through the door. Respect, and thanks.

Mary - I am shocked! Et tu, Brute? (I'm laughing like a drain, though. You eternal Eve, you!)

Golly, I didn't realise my little problem with email indentation would cause the digital deep to moan round with so many voices. Well, not moan exactly.

All very instructive and entertaining. I sympathise with Ann's desire to keep it simple. Bill has terrified me into vigorously and rigourously backing up my pathetic 20 gigs (half the hard drive of my eleven year old Targa Visionary, Lidl's finest, which survived the spilling of a glass of Rioja into its keyboard in its first week of operation.) The beginning of a long and possibly winding road towards modernising before Targa the Rotter's visions become a bit too apocalyptic, but having endured so much together it's a bit like the situation with the dog in Of Mice and Men.

I shall ponder. Perhaps an Apple a day would keep the virus away?

OMG, here is the thread addressing all my current woes.

I too am a Granny and using what I've always used, IE and Word.

But sensitive to what the younguns advise, I've also added Foxfire and Google Chrome, and I have recently discovered that most of my woes stem from that.

No matter how many times I try, a download of Adobe Flash will not let me play videos on IE. I have to go to Google effing Chrome to see them.

And Google elbows its way into what I am viewing to suggest that I look at something else, when the mouse passes over certain underlined words in FB or accessed sites, I get messages to read something else.

It is, at the least annoying and breaks into my thought when I'm trying to get a handle on some issue, and at the most, soberly frightening, when I realize that all this interchange is being saved somewhere to monitor and define me, and to tailor my access to information by channeling me to purchase something or give up thinking entirely.

As far as I can figure out, Google has purchased Adobe Flash. Is that correct?

So they control what I can see, and what videos I can watch.

Also they keep asking me via a "poll" for "people in my area here in Sweden" how often I use effing Chrome and other questions. I always answer it differently, because I can't use the flash player without answering it.

And if this were real life I'd be tempted to put a log over the tracks to derail them. Obviously no people would be hurt, there are no people on board that train, only the wallets of one-percenters.

I'd be very surprised. Adobe's a publicly traded company, and a stock buyout would make major news.

My father used to say if you could put a penny in front of every wheel of a train, the train couldn't move. Not sure if that's true or not, but I'm pretty certain logs wouldn't help much either... ;)

Thanks,

Bill

Q&A1. OK what do Grannys know about who is doing whom? I can't download for IE anyway.

Q&A2. A really, really, BIG log? Stacked on some pennies? All virtual, of course.