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Good luck ordering POTS nowadays. Everything is going VoIP. I mean in MA you can't get POTS service anymore from VZW. Cellular has come quite a way. Yes, it may not be foolproof, but you may not be at home when you keel over from a heart attack, what good is your landline going to do when you can't reach it?

If that's the case, why isn't every Starbucks shut down for facilitating CP downloads?

So very public.

Surveillance cameras are a given.

What could possibly go wrong?

MBTA Transit Police report a man trying to hold up the Dunkin' Donuts at 99 Cambridge St. in Charlestown yesterday had his plans foiled by a T cop in search of a cup of coffee.

T cop foils spoonpoint robbery of Dunkin' Donuts

These are the same guys who arrest people who videotape them misbehaving in public on "wiretapping" laws.

Are you SURE you want there not to be oversight of them? Because I don't trust the local cop as far as I could throw his donuts.

Actually, the post linked here on Slashdot was the second post in this ongoing drama. The first post was an annoyed look at how the new website was rendered on my home XP box running Opera. It featured links to about 10 or 12 full-size screenshots of the drop-down menus all staying open and preventing me from accessing other parts of the UI. I wasn't actually ranting with a full head of steam at that point; I was just cranky at the T. I've seen the MBTA's quality steadily decline in the past 10 years, devolving into a transit system plagued with cost overruns, maintenance issues, horrible customer service and an amazingly botched roll-out of a brand new smart-card fare system. For example, on its first day of official use, the networked vending machines refused "CharlieCards" to those paying with credit or debit cards -- but charged them anyway. There were reports of folks trying three or four times to purchase a CharlieCard, and getting charged three or four times in quick succession. It's a minor inconvenience if you're trying to purchase one or two rides, but some of these people were buying monthly passes at around $40 a pop or higher, and a few days before the first of the month when rent's due.

Boston deserves better, especially since we're due for a fare increase at the end of the month. Given this stellar track record, finding that the T's brand-new website that refused to play well with my browser (or is it the other way around?) wasn't much of a surprise, but a real annoyance. I was worried that if the site wasn't working correctly on my browser, how many other people were having troubles and had any disabled users encountered accessibility problems with the UI too?

I got responses from Opera users on other platforms who said they weren't having problems, and I did get one response from a blind person using a screen reader who said sie could use the site actually better than expected, but a text-only or lite version would have been a better alternative.

Mac Daniel of the Boston Globe picked up on the post after it was featured on Universal Hub, and posted a quick one-liner in his "Starts & Stops" MBTA/Boston travel blog. He's not a T employee, he's not a representative of the MBTA, he's a contributing writer for the newspaper and I've been reading his stuff for quite some time now. The post quoted at the top of the comments was a knee-jerk, heated reaction to his knee-jerk, one-shot reaction, written without counting to ten. I'd been trying that day to figure out the problem between my browser and the new website, because I really wanted to get the site to render properly (and if it was a problem on my end, fix it up right.)

Once the T site reverted to its previous version I couldn't continue to play around with it, which was frustrating, and Mac's comment unfortunately just pushed the right buttons at the wrong time. I flew off the handle and I freely admit that. Who hasn't done similar in times of annoyance? I hadn't wanted to start a browser war when I was pointing out the problems I was having with the T site, but the curt "Don't use Opera" dismissal stuck in my craw and we all know how much fun it is when your craw has something stuck in it.

Suffice to say, however, the subsequent snowball effect has been a major ego check right into the boards, and yesterday morning I had a heapin' helping of a Morning After Remorse along with my breakfast. So it goes. You shoots your mouth off, you deal with the cleanup. So I'm cleaning up, making my peace, etc.

I didn't think the giant cartoon fight cloud would've reached Slashdot, but some of the points being raised right now in the midst of the typical digressions, AC shenanigans and car metaphors are pretty valid. How far should a web developer go in the name of compatibility? What standards should web design be held to? What constitutes a compliant web browser if W3C and MSIE's design standards don't get along? Is the MBTA, as a government agency, beholden t