Rebecca said:
Indeed, that's what I'm asking for. A choice as to whether to download them - an acknowledgement that the image is likely to be offensive, and then a *choice*. You, on the other hand, seem to be demanding that I either be forced to download them, or to go the ridiculous extreme of turning off all images.
Not at all. Do you use Internet Explorer? 95% of people do. The other day I gave a step-by-step demo of how to make that browser replace all pictures by placeholders, so you have fine control over the download of images on an image-by-image basis. This is the way I normally browse WWW when I'm in a situation where I either am not interested in looking at pictures or know that some images may be unwanted for other reasons. It's much nicer than having your browser download everything, especially if you're on dial-up. Most other browsers can also do this.