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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
And what makes you think it's just teenagers?
I hope some 20/30/40-somethings who read slashdot (ESPECIALLY all you Ohio citizens!!) DO pick up the phone and call. While I doubt the IE-Only problem
is deliberate, there are plenty of form mail scripts that work in .
It is genuinely possible that the representitive in question doesn't know about this problem (do you REALLY think they read all the mail themselves?), so the best way to bring it to her attention (or at least her staff's) is to deluge them with POLITE requests that they fix the form so it works in all browsers.
Think about it.
/~mikeg
Hmmm. I guess now you know who not to vote for in the next election...
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
Making an association between an middle eastern sounding name and a terrorist organization clearly demonstates not only your depth of ignorance but also your biggotry.
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.