If anyone's seeking an excuse: Rule 6. [...] Do not use this bulletin board as a vehicle to promote your own website, product, or forum, nor to sell merchandise.

They're counting on search engines finding their profile page and logging the link from the upstanding, popular bautforum.com to their product site, enhancing their standing. Don't know if it works.

But, if you do a Google search for the user's home page domain with the word profile, you'll find quite a number of members of various fora, with names like "! !", "! ! !", "! !!", all employing the same tactic. (Here, "! ! !!" misses the home page link, but does have the "templates" link signature.)

But, I don't know if it's worth banning this/these as it's so easy for them to create another such member. If they're smart, they automated the task.

User "! ! ! ! !" is probably worse. That home page points to adult movie ads.

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

Well, maybe the mods will see your post (or this post) and get rid of them.

It is?!?!!!1!? Oh, oh.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

I can solve the problem for you!

The "!!!" is really NOT a user, in the normal sense, anyway. It's an artifact of the quantum mechanical echo of the last thing Carl Sagan said before he died, and - miraculously - it wound up being electromagnetically re-expressed near a computer that not-coincidentally was pointed to this forum at the time they emerged back into Threedy space from Endy Space. (there are no coincidences in a deterministic quantum-mechanical world that produces entropy through compensating for the difference between 220v and 110v currents surging in alternating 24 hour cycles offset by 5.5 hours (on average).

His last words, prophetically, when speaking about how he saw the internet beginning to evolve, "...and there'll be Astronomy websites where the users will number in the BILLIONS and BILLIONS...." but he never quite got the three exclamation points out, and they've been lost in the quantum foam of timespace, WAITING PATIENTLY for the moment when, by some freak quantum event, they could re-emerge into the universe - together, and in the order they were intended originally to be expressed (now, that's pretty hard to prove - exclaimation point particles are generally pretty identical, right down to their quantum states, but they're entangled in such a way that THEY know. Not surprisingly, it's something WE can never know, as knowing the quantum state of any one of the three immediately (and spookily) throws that of the other two in doubt...at the very least).

That freak quantum event has apparently now happened.

Here's a link to a Wikipedia article about the the Quantum Punctuation Principle (QPP) and Quantum Exclamation Mark phenonomenomenon (QEMP):

http://lv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izsaukuma_z%C4%ABme

(I supplied the link to the Latvian page, as it seems that's the only language in which quantum punctuation seems to be used. Spanish uses a form of "Punctuational Complementary Symmetry" (PCS), but it's a Classical usage, and not generally of great interest in astronomical contexts).

You can thank me later.

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"...wait for the ricochet."

my explanation is; they are the shifty ones.....





do you get it?

Oh, just in case someone notices an apparent discrepancy in my last post, to wit, "How do Latvian quantum exclamation marks, which were intended to be expressed (via vocal intonation) by Sagan, who WAS speaking English at the time, come into the picture?"

Well, the short answer is, I don't know.

The less short answer is, well, Carl was a complex man. Who can explain everything such a person does?

The slightly longer, but still not TOO long answer is: hey, we're talking quantum punctuation here...any such punctuation mark (or combination of two or more) can show up at any time in any language, by virtue of the inherent quantum uncertainty of language, through with the indeterminate mental state that arises during the delay in between the instant when one decides to say something and that time at which the utterance is uttered (or written). I won't bother to do the math here now, it's pretty elementary, anyway, and you can work it out for yourself.

The REAL answer is: it was just too late when I wrote the post, and I've been up too long. I'm barely conscious, and the coffee I'm drinking has been reheated three times, and one of those times via nuking.

So shoot me.

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"...wait for the ricochet."