Slashdot Mirror
Write Your Congressman -- If You Use IE
inonit writes "Well, geez -- after all this US election talk, I got inspired to write my congresswoman. But as a good Slashdotter, imagine my irritation when I found the following note in the "Contact" section: 'In order to send an e-mail to Congresswoman Tubbs-Jones, please complete this form using the Internet Explorer browser. If the Internet Explorer browser is not available, please mail your correspondence to the listed postal mailing address above.'
I don't really have the time to check all 435 Congressional sites to see if this is widespread, but it gives me some insight into why all those <sarcasm>foreigners</sarcasm> are complaining about having their governments be beholden to U.S. technology companies. Can someone running IE write my congressperson and ask her to let me write her? Does she only accept phone calls from AT&T customers?" I just tried filling out the form with Mozilla, and ended up at a page notifying me of a search error. (Huh?)
...that Micro$oft has our Government in its pockets...
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand
Which you CAN read with Mozilla"
-- John
a million teenagers calling her offices at 3pm...
I feel for the receptionist
I live in a giant bucket.
So, I guess snailmail isn't even an option!!
-Derek
Submitting the form in Mozilla fails because there is a Search form earlier in the page, but that form is never closed. The submit button at the bottom of the email form is in a different form, but since the first one was never closed, the browser submits the FIRST form.
If the form were closed properly, I bet this would work fine in ANY browser.
-------------------------
A person of moderate zeal
My rep (Wolf/Virginia) says this on his contact page:
Whatever. He has a link to a generic form that seems browser-agnostic and uses a numeric code instead of an email address in the hidden fields.
My message was thus: "It is pathetic that you require Internet Explorer to submit e-mail messages. Aren't you aware the Microsoft is a convicted monopolist? The Internet runs on open protocols. Your eMail should be the same." I clicked submit, and even with IE I got an error message: "No records found with Please enter another Search Phrase." Looks like a paper cert is employed in the halls of congress...
Who wants to bet this page won't pass this requirement? I'm wondering if the user's assistive technology warns them to use IE.
It's been a law for a few years now, for government pages.
Opera IMO works better then mozilla and has an option to identify itself as MSIE. Normally when I find a site that requires IE I flip opera to identify as IE and it all works :-)
Awesome Browser
Hmmm. I guess now you know who not to vote for in the next election...
What a beautiful rebuttal to all those people that claim statistics lie :-)
Use Phoenix then you can set you useragent type to IE.
It isn't that they prefer Microsoft products, they are technically challenged.
"tannaz.haddadi@mail.house.gov"
Who is Tannaz Haddadi? Does he work for al Quaeda or Saddam Hussein, intercepting all the mail? You send mail saying Saddam is a bad guy, and the message received says good guy?
You would think that mail to Stephanie Tubbs would go to stephanie.tubbs@mail.house.gov, even if that is not the address used for her normal messages.
Perhaps the web page in question is intentionally broken in order to avoid overloading the staff.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Many federal laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Civil Rights Act, the OSHA laws, to name a few, explicitly exempt the US congress and their staff. :)
Congress doesn't have to follow that law... because Congress passed a law that says so
When I try to write my Representative, I am directed to http://www.house.gov/writerep/
which works fine with Mozilla.
No funny IE tags, no funny forms, just a classic, simple webform.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
"As American as apple pie"
Mmmmm... nice warm apple pie.
I got the same result with IE. (I'm at work, I don't get to pick my browser...)
I think their form submittal confirmation is just mis-routed.
The unusually bad example of incompetence shown by the technical staff of the congress is just a small line in the long, long history of incompetent affirmative action employees hired by leftist cranks like the aforementioned congresswoman.
And MS gives most of their money to Republicans, too...
May we never see th
There is a generic email form for all house members. It doesn't say anything about needing a certain browser and I'm pretty sure that I've emailed my congress critter through this form several times.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Why, *every* self-respecting contituient downloads WINE, installs it, downloads IE, installs that in WINE (doing whatever hacking is necessary to get it to work), and then uses that to contact their representative. They aren't forcing you to buy the products of the (by far) largest donor of government funds from the tech industry at all! They certainly aren't trying to quell the voices of the people that oppose it.
May we never see th
I am writing this while on hold with I was answered politely but the receptionist who politely put me on hold for the person who could answer the question of why i needed Internet Explorer to email Ms Tubbs-Jones. Ms Sheila Harvey answered and then asked for my personal information and they "appreciated me bringing this to their attention" They are going to look into this and call me back I will post the results of this call as soon as they call me back as a reply to this message. It was suggested I fax them or send them postal mail ... where i pointed this out on teh page ... "**NOTICE: Due to recent anthrax cases, mail delivery to the Washington office has stopped indefinitely. Please utilize e-mail, fax, and phone when possible to ensure timely receipt and response."
Interestingly ( or not so much so) her page was created by frontpage 5 and the charset is of course windows-1252. There is no doctype or anything else to make this page apply to any normal standard. - more when i get called back.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
... I sent an email to the webmaster (really content manager, as she had to consult the "techs") of my rep's (Robert Wexler, whom I have greatly tormented over his support of the P2P hacking bill and other idiotic anti-consumer, anti-tech legislation) site about a bug that made it only viewable in IE. She was very accomodating and informed me that a fix was in process.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
How does a true statement and a joke get modded "Flamebait"?
The problem is a coding error. The page does not work in IE, either. The Slashdot story is wrong.
When a moderator cannot comment on a story and also moderate it, that assures that much moderation is done by bored moderators, who are only looking at a story because they want to get rid of their moderation points.
I'm turned on, tell me more.
As has been pointed out above, the form doesn't really require IE. The form is broken for all browsers. If the form(s) were fixed, I suspect all browsers would work fine. The note about using "The " Internet Explorer Browser is a red herring.
-------------------------
A person of moderate zeal
you need to move.
BC
Go to the house.gov link above the statement and contact her that way.
This sig no verb.
I'm sorry. That was meant as sarcasm. Looks like people didn't take it that way ;)
Hey, it got written up, it might as well get posted somewhere. Maybe her staff will decide to start reading Slashdot today...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Http://www.congress.org allows you to use one form to send email to all of your senators and representatives and the president. They seem to have worked their way into the webforms too.
I tell ya, you just don't get what you pay for anymore these days...
She had one of those speeches that provided absolutely nothing to the debte. Sadam is bad/evil..blah blah blah, but her main points: How much will the war cost, How long will it take, exactly how many on our side will perish and Have we finished the war on terrorism.
No set of answers to any of these questions would change her mind, so why ask them?
Cost should be a basis on whether or not we get into a war? Now that is immoral.
If a war was known to take only 1 day, as opposed to 1 year, then it's some how better? What if in that 1 day 10x the number of people died hastily as oppose to 1/10th that number over a year?
How many will die? There's never a way to figure this out. We estimated what now seem to be pretty big loses on the original, yet never came close to that amount. We did the same thing on peace keeping missions. While life is extremly valuable, this metric and this resolution is useless.
Have we finished the war on terrorism? I guess she doesn't beleive this has any impact on that war.
anyhow, i wish her form was working now, i wouldn't mind sending her mail i'm sure she wouldn't mind deleting.
-malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
And... just because some "flock of narrow-minded OS zealots" says something's good, it must really be bad? After all, enthusiasm itself is a bad thing, right? I agree that many times people blatantly bash non-OSS products just because source code wasn't included, but have you (Coward) ever tried a different browser? Or are you too narrow-minded to try out other products?
So, IE is better because it does not include tabbed browsing, excellent cookie management, selective/smart/total pop-up ad blocking, mouse gestures, customizable default stylesheets, different themes, image loop control, smaller memory footprint, faster rendering (in many cases), and many other features?
I refer you to (available in Windows and Linux):
Phoenix
Mozilla
Opera (by the way, proprietary, but good just the same)
personally handing over cash and/or showing them pictures of them in bed with three midgets, two underage kids, a great dane and a defrocked nun. Both is best. You'll get what you want.
normal hard money campaign contribution
soft money campaign contribution
well written short to the point snail mail letter, 1 page tops
fax
telephone call
do nothing, watch sports, wrestling or sitcoms on tv
spend all your time downloading mp3's and mooovees
take part in protests carrying signs and whatnot
e-mail
Don't be so serious. People joke about the Irish, for example. If we treat middle eastern people differently, we are dicriminating against them.
Unlike most people, I have Saudi and UAE and Iranian friends. They are not fragile.
If you want the writerep page for a rep who isn't yours, all you need is the state and the zip+4 of some address in his district. (Or just a zip, assuming USPS's zip+4 lookup works. It tells me I don't exist.) Conveniently, every rep has an office in their district, and makes its address easy to find.
At least someone on Wolf's staff knows the difference between email and webforms. Everytime I see a rep's "email me" link lead to writerep, I want to flood them with messages saying "WEBFORMS ARE NOT EMAIL!"
As much as I would really truly love to say she is a tool for Bill Gates it honestly looks like she is NOT. According to Open Secrets she didn't get any money from Microsoft. Just to be sure I went ahead and went through all the pages of the Microsoft donations and I could not find her listed anywhere. Looks like the bulk of her money comes from labor unions. Also if you look at the source it was created with Frontpage 5.0.
So my guess is the whole "Use Microsoft Internet Explorer" bit is more of a lack of knowledge in creating web forms, so they used a tool that generated stuff for Internet Explorer only. My advice, pen a nice letter to her explaining and possibly offering to help, if will go a lot farther then hate and spit, especially since it looks like NONE of her money comes from Microsoft, hence this is NOT a conspiracy, I repeat NOT a conspiracy, simply a honest mistake made by someone who probably doesn't know better.
In order to send an e-mail to Congresswoman Tubbs-Jones, please complete this form using the Internet Explorer browser.
Why does it say 'in order to send e-mail'? If I cannot see the email address that I am sending my message to, and I am not using the program/site that I use to send and recieve email then I am clearly not sending email. Sure, it may be sent as an email message eventually from the server that receives the form submission, but this is totally hidden to me as a user.
It really should say 'In order to send a message to Congresswoman...'
I sent e-mails Tom Daschle and Tim Hutchinson using Galeon and it worked fine. I think that each Senator is responcible for his own website, so maybe whoever designed that particular site didn't know what they were doing.
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
The Mozilla Prefrences toolbar (which you can set your user agent in and stuff) is availible at www.xulplantet.org its cool!
This is a bad thing happening in the U.S. culture. People are too serious. I didn't assume Tannaz is a male. It was just a sloppy joke. Anyhow, I don't speak Farsi.
The big issue is that the U.S. senators and representatives have not bought themselves some good programming for communication. Why are things still such a mess?
My middle eastern friends and I joke about the U.S. government's love of bombing:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
By joking about the U.S. invading the island of Kiribati, the New Zealand publication Spinner has delayed a plan by the U.S. government to invade every other country. The U.S. military forces plan to start with the small countries first, then work their way up to the larger ones.
The U.S. government has invaded 14 countries in the last 33 years, and has found it so profitable that it decided to invade all the others.
U.S. Army General Mayhem said yesterday that the military would delay the invasions while they investigate the possibility that Spinner's story was prompted by a security leak.
General Mayhem said that the U.S. would not actually invade every other country. There are no plans to invade France. "We wouldn't want to seem arrogant", he said.
Use the Useragent Toolbar for Mozilla and set it to show you as being on Internet Explorer on WinXP for when you come across these sites which hate Leenooks and Netscape.
Following the fine example set by others here, I figured I'd go to my Congressman's official website and "send an e-mail." Being lazy, I simply took the link to Rep. Tubbs Jones (http://www.house.gov/tubbsjones/) and changed the name to holt.
Of course, I expected that to work. (And, of course, I was wrong.) Rep. Rush Holt's (NJ) official website is at http://holt.house.gov. Doesn't seem to be any consistency in anything on the House pages!
In a recent 'Ask Slashdot' the president of a university student society complained that the university had blocked access to Kazaa and was complaining it was censorship, and asked what the slashdot community thought of this. To my surprise, there was a chorus of people saying "Stop whining... these are university resources, file sharing is pointless, takes huge bandwidth, etc...". I think the same thing applies here. When you have 90~95% of people using IE, why should your congress(wo)man have her staff spend their time testing the site with every freeware/OSS/weirdo browser. Personally I love Mozilla/Phoenix, but that doesn't mean that the government should necessarily support any whim I may have. There's no reason she should even take comments through an online form. There are many other channels, that worked perfectly well for hundreds of years before the internet to contact your elected officials. So really, be thankful there is any online form at all, and, if you really don't like it, write a letter :)
This post cannot be rebroadcast without the express written constent of Major League Baseball.
Really, she is your congresswoman, so any comments should come from you. There is probably just some IE geek out there who designed a nifty little form retrieval for her that only runs in IE, without thinking about the implications and those who would not be able to use it. Similar to those who write pages in FrontPage then don't think to test if other browsers can view the page.
Actually, IE is better because I say so. Mozilla / Open-Source is better because you say so. We can go on like this forever. Better = subjective. It means different things to different people.
Microsoft rules, linux sucks donkey cock.
I agree with 1 and 2. A good test of a joke is if people find it funny. This one people did not find funny.
But atleast the melissa-joan-hart.com site is validated as html 4.01 according to validator.w3c.org
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Why am I not surprised. I guess we know just how much M$ has contributed to her campaign.
FYI,
m l
A requirement that "all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress" was the first line-item in the infamous Contract with America that was a cornerstone of the Republican election campaign circa 1994. Most slashdotters probably aren't old enough to remember the Contract with America. Incidentally, the new Congress did follow through with this commitment, and all of the currently existing unfunded mandates, including I believe OSHA, various anti-discrimination statutues, and AWDA were made to apply to Congress through new Congressional Rules. The web site requirement was enacted after Newt Gingrich left office and I don't know whether Congress excempted themselves or not.
In fact, all of the legislation that was proposed under the Contract with America got a fair hearing, except for the Term Limits proposal.
-Matt
http://www.house.gov/house/Contract/CONTRACT.ht
as someone who has worked in the office of a US Senator, I can assure you that the program the press people are trained on and use to make office websites IS Frontpage-- which probably helps account for why Mozilla doesnt work so well with them.
9. That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. 10. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. 11. For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. 12. For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. 13. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.
9. What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin; 10. As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: 11. There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. 12. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. 13. Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: 14. Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: 15. Their feet are swift to shed blood: 16. Destruction and misery are in their ways: 17. And the way of peace have they not known: 18. There is no fear of God before their eyes. 19. Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. 20. Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin. 21. But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; 22. Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: 23. For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; 24. Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: 25. Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; 26. To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. 27. Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. 28. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. 29. Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also: 30. Seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith. 31. Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.
8. For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: 9. Not of works, lest any man should boast. 10. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. 12. For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law; 13. (For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. 14. For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: 15. Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;) 16. In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel.--The law that is established, is the law of FAITH! works by the law will get you nowhere!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!