Andy:
Without yet commenting on the content;-
you need, I think, to fix your character set.
Note the various "?"'s sprinkled below in your quoted article ...

I think a clue may be found in your headers, which show:
: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
and (irrelevantly except it indicates ...)
: User-Agent: G2/0.2

I assume the latter is just Google groups beta, which you are using to
post (AOL having dropped newsgroups lately!) so perhaps the answer is
within your PC, or web browser settings, specifically ... I have not
seen this random? "?" effect in other beta Google groups posts.
I don't know what utf-8 is & am too tired to look, but the effec? ...

Try to arrive at
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
(which you have used just previously, without the "?" effect)
or even the very plain
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
presumably somehow within your browser?

Antipodean ... ? Would be in Spain ... and'd love to visit!

Regards,
RdM

"Andy Evans" in
ooglegroups.com:
: But the more society itself is escapist, the more this shifts the ways
: we escape from it. Let us take, for instance, the example of a city
: dweller tied to a mobile ?hone, a banking job requiring eight hours a
: day looking at figures on a computer screen and then most evenings
: chilling out watching TV with a movie or two at weekends plus a few
: computer games. Almost the whole of his existence takes place in a
: virtual world, yet to him it is his ?eality? He experiences a
: pressing need to work at a computer screen, get emails, phone people
: all day and receive calls, track the latest episodes of a couple of
: soaps and see a movie representing some violent outdoor action scene in
: LA. He considers this his real life routine, his ?eality? So what,
: then, is ?scapism?for this person? We could choose a few likely
: examples from our list above ?fishing, gardening, lifting weights and
: hill walking. And joining a health club to lift weights could cost a
: week? salary or more.
:
: But wait a minute ?what is ?ork?to an impoverished peasant in some
: contemporary third world country? Fishing, gardening, lifting weights
: and hill walking. For that peasant, escapism would be taking time out
: to chat to friends on a mobile phone, watching TV instead of working in
: the fields, sending emails or playing games on a computer or hill
: walking to the local town to see a movie. Too much of that and his
: subsistence farming would not even feed his children. So the actual
: application of the term ?scapism?depends heavily on the context of
: ?eality? In an urban world ever more dominated by virtual media,
: escapism may take us back to a kind of half way position between
: subsistence and culture, where subsistence is too rough but culture is
: too smooth, and the place escaped to is somewhere in between. This
: intermediate place is what geographers call the ?iddle landscape?
: (Evans A, "This Virtual Life" 2003)

: I don't know what utf-8 is & am too tired to look, but the effec? ...
:
: Try to arrive at
: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
: (which you have used just previously, without the "?" effect)
: or even the very plain
: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
: presumably somehow within your browser?

I've just "clicked" that it may be in the copy/paste operation from the
original document ... try copying to an intermediary text/word processor
and saving as plain text first, *then* copy/paste in the browser ... ?

(I'd neither encourage or disencourage (or disparage) the OT commentary
in itself;- it's just that the formattin? was starting to bug me;-)

(The Cervantes and Evans work as intermissions, at least; the relevancy
of the former has appeared a little obscure to this reader at times, but
some potential discussion points have? cropped up with the later ... ;-)

Ross Matheson

: : too smooth, and the place escaped to is somewhere in between. This
: : intermediate place is what geographers call the ?iddle landscape?
: : (Evans A, "This Virtual Life" 2003)

On Mon, 28 Mar 2005 07:41:21 +0000 (UTC), Stewart Pinkerton
wrote:

On Mon, 28 Mar 2005 06:56:55 GMT, burbeck wrote:

im glad that you know who im talking about,
now play nicely or else

Or else what, exactly? :-)

ill give you what exactly stewart my lad, you are confinrd to the
house for a month and im takin your toys off you. and just wait till
your father gets home, YOU WILL BE SORRY

RdM helpfully stated - I assume the latter is just Google groups beta,
which you are using to post (AOL having dropped newsgroups lately!)

Exactly so.

so perhaps the answer is within your PC, or web browser settings,
specifically ... I have not seen this random? "?" effect in other beta
Google groups posts.

Yes - intersting. When I noticed it I deleted all the quote signs which
as you say come out as question marks. I myself get some text in blue,
and the paras are disconnected. also, text blocks which are quoted come
out as simply the words text quoted. Anybody know any fixes to this -
obviously a tick box somewhere in the works? Andy

"Andy Evans" wrote in message
oups.com...
RdM helpfully stated - I assume the latter is just Google groups beta,
which you are using to post (AOL having dropped newsgroups lately!)

Exactly so.

so perhaps the answer is within your PC, or web browser settings,
specifically ... I have not seen this random? "?" effect in other beta
Google groups posts.

Yes - intersting. When I noticed it I deleted all the quote signs which
as you say come out as question marks. I myself get some text in blue,
and the paras are disconnected. also, text blocks which are quoted come
out as simply the words text quoted. Anybody know any fixes to this -
obviously a tick box somewhere in the works? Andy



Sort yerself out Andy, me old china!

You have replied to me and I've *no* bloody idea what you are going on
about!!

"Andy Evans" goes on, in
uk.rec.audio1112101238.371107.161710@l41g2000cwc. googlegroups.com:

: RdM helpfully stated - I assume the latter is just Google groups beta,
: which you are using to post (AOL having dropped newsgroups lately!)
:
: Exactly so.

But the point was the *character set" you had in use on those posts...

I did note as an aside that the Google groups posting implied that you were
using a web browser (the proprietary AOL one perhaps?) to interface with it
and thus that the fault may lie within that or your other software's
interaction with it; ie when you paste sections of "text" [which, if it is
coming from a word processor or any form of "Rich" text, which it most
assuredly is if it has COLOURS associated with it, is NOT plain text] you have
these character encoding effects which do not transplant well to plain text.

Newsgroups are a plain text only medium (apart from binary groups) ...

: so perhaps the answer is within your PC, or web browser settings,
: specifically ... I have not seen this random? "?" effect in other beta
: Google groups posts.
:
: Yes - intersting. When I noticed it I deleted all the quote signs which
: as you say come out as question marks. I myself get some text in blue,
: and the paras are disconnected. also, text blocks which are quoted come
: out as simply the words text quoted. Anybody know any fixes to this -
: obviously a tick box somewhere in the works? Andy

THIS post (ie yours which I am replying to) has in its headers;
: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
and has NO "?" problems ... whereas ALL your [and "enough is indeed enough"!]
b book quotes have been encoded in "charset="utf-8"", sooo ... it seems QUITE
clear that the character encoding for those is the problem in the news posts.

"Sort yourself out" is perhaps not bad advice ...

I did suggest trying out an intermediary saving-as-text step, but ...


Others advice MONTHS ago has been to get a decent newsreader ...

In the face of this, we have forlorn oblique badly formatted postings of
obscure literature, and no evidence of any comprehension of the advice ;-)

Try out Agent www.forteinc.com ... as a possibilty.

IMO you'll need help setting it up to optimum use (the defaults purge all
unread on every use, and have an annoying [IMO] 3-pane view) but if you
explore the options/preferences carefully you might do OK on your own...
Sing out if you do and want some input though ...

Others have suggested 40tude Dialog http://www.40tude.com/dialog/ , but I've
found I prefer Agent - perhaps being used to it - after a brief look at it.
Perhaps I didn't spend enough time with it. YMMV. I might even look again.

Others might even have other, renewed, suggestions to follow ...

Whatever; get a decent newsreader that attributes quotes correctly and doesn't
spew badly formatted text, even if it has a wee learning curve, is my advice!

Oh! ... Perhaps then, you'd need to change ISP's, since AOL doesn't support
news at all any more? Not necessarily .. you could use a free news server, or
the recently free but now slight (10 euro/yr?) www.individual.net 's server...
in Agent or etc; OTOH, why is a psychologist in London clinging to the use of
the almost universally derided AOL, AMERICA ON LINE, simply because it was
easy back then, or whatever the reason ...it's an abberation and oddity IMHO!

Changing ISP's may imply giving out a new email address to all your friends
and associates, but these things happen, just as with postal addresses ...

It might represent a new step in personal independence ... it's not impossible
.... and then you could use a standard (and standards observing) web browser as
well instead of proprietary AOL software and internet interface ... why not?

Forgive any residual semblances of irritation if you can; it's been a bad day!

[AAARRGH!!! ;=})] Ah, that feels better ...

RdM

insert witty reflective quote here

Changing ISP's may imply giving out a new email address to all your
friends
and associates, but these things happen, just as with postal addresses
....
It might represent a new step in personal independence ... it's not
impossible
.... and then you could use a standard (and standards observing) web
browser as
well instead of proprietary AOL software and internet interface ... why
not?

Well - clearly I've thought about it, especially as the cheap AOL price
just went up. A new email isn't a problem. The three things that keep
me with AOL are sloth, ignorance, my address list, and an almost
fanatical devotion to the Pope.