I also participate in some other digest, list forums, whatever name you can say. In all of them you can see Out of Topic subjects. Some lists are controlled by iron hand, and they have very low traffic. It is the human nature to disagree, and this is how we grow, develop new ideas, new solutions. This is also how we lead to wars, mostly about the millenary religion problems or political, also racial, subjects we need to avoid discussions at any cost. You don't learn how to write without discuss the best way of sharping your pencils, or where to buy the best paper... you end up talking about the rules and measurements about the letter size or why in Europe they use A4 sizes instead Letter size. This is common, and somehow productive, but I agree that there is two options in life; you participate or you do not participate. If there are tools that make you see or not [OT] posts, I think you can use them, if you don't know how to do it, lots of members can help you. You don't talk only about food in a restaurant, or religion in a church, or fish while fishing, or beer at the bar, but as a rule of thumb, everyone needs to remember the use of the "ridiculousy_meter". People who pays per minute of 'net access will always have this problem, but everyone needs to find a way to save his own money. There is an imbedded cost in using the Internet facilities, it is not free. I don't see any sense in ask people to not call my cell phone (cost me $0.40 per minute), rather than I just turn it off, right? I must not transfer my own problems to somebody else. Thinking about bandwith I always try to make short posts, it is not my nature, I just can't. What we will do if we start to have 2,000 posts (On Topic) daily? narrow the On Topic subject? Probably a good solution was to implement a filter at the list server, so everyone could program this option to receive or not [OT] messages. Like "SET PICLIST [OT] ON/OFF. I guess 96% or more will chose to receive OT's. I enjoy to receive OT's, it is a free way to learn about human nature and different cultures, technologically or not. The "thousand millions" in UK for example was one of them. I Thank you for it. I believe that lots of members readers are not here strictly to read about PIC, but for general knowledge, for them, this list is a door to the world, and sometimes they prefer to read a discussion about "k's and K's" between me, Gehrard, Andy and others, rather than try to find it somewhere else. For some this was fun, for others just waste of time. I am quite sure that lots of readers never heard about SI, because they are newbies or other reason, right now we must be proud that our "out of topic waste of time and b.s. discussion" brought this great and productive information for them. Otherwise I don't see how or where they would learn about it. Jory and Mark job in here is the best I ever see around, they have the wide open wise mind necessary to control such complex list and its problems. This is not b.s., just the truth. Thank you guys. Wagner.