Actually, that just changes the attack point and complicates the construction engineering. If you can get a catastrophic bomb into or onto the climbing elevator you just blow it at the appropriate point (whether by pressure switch, remote control or timer). There is no engineering solution other than make it so cheap and profitable that we can easily put them up faster than the terrorists can take them down and we have enough security that such events happen infrequently enough that each elevator before it dies is profitable. The 1st one is likely to be much more expensive than any other as subsequent ones can be droped down into the gravity well (parts having been elevatored up beforehand) instead of pushed up out of the gravity well.
The expensive part is getting the material up. The first cargo up should be several spare reels so you can drop a full sized replacement down. Sure you might lose the cargo and the elevator car but dropping a cable down in one step is going to be much less expensive (and much quicker) than shooting a cable up and then building it up in many stages.
You could probably just have a control cabin attached to the bottom end with small rockets/jets to move the cable in place when it's lowered.
Then the control cabin crew could play the ultimate game of moon lander.
The PRC is nothing like pre-union America. The PRC is highly corrupt (on the level of you can't go about your normal life without regular bribes), they think forced abortion, sterilization, and infanticide are useful ways of solving their inability to supply enough material goods to their population, they have a prison slave labor system that is absolutely huge, and they have an illegitimate government that rests on violence, not the consent of the governed.
Yes, this is a repeat, and they pretty much have determined that this stuff will break up into small pieces with the biggest problem being breathing it in when it lands.
Yes, yes, the entire issue is much more complex in the general case but for the actual issue at hand, resolving the lawsuit, if SW had just filled in their alt tags *to standard* this lawsuit would never have happened. They didn't need to hire an accessibility guru, they didn't need to wade through the ADA, they just had to fill in their alt tags.
What's wrong with talking about Section 501, ADA, accessibility/usability guidelines et al is that it makes a mountain out of a molehill and makes it less likely that people are going to even try for compliance until forced to. If they know that a normal designer, with normal common sense just has to fill in these normal parts of the spec and he's likely to be ok with the blind textreaders and the lynx crowd, incrementally increasing the audience for almost no extra expenditure, a lot of people are going to do it.
Don't make big things out of simple things and you get more voluntary compliance. That, not some slavish worshiping of Tuftee (sp?) et al is what's needed.
I happen to agree with you that the ADA should be changed. Until it is, people should comply with it. Southwest should have complied with the request in any case because
1. They have a duty to maximize profits. By turning away text browsers like lynx and blind people who can't use their textreader browsers, they fail in that duty
2. They have a duty to create a positive image for the company because that affects point 1 above. Being mean to blind people in a petty way when they could have just developed to international standard and have everything just work is also a disservice to the shareholders.
3. The problem is that today, shareholders have such little practical control over their corporations that management is being reigned in by less efficient methods like the ADA which is constitutionally dubious at best.
The solution is to fix shareholder oversight. Then the ADA can quickly fall into that category of law that is bad but irrelevant. I can live with that.
No. a cut space elevator cable wouldn't maintain its structure but would break up and flutter down like a bunch of black confetti. The worst that would happen is you might breathe in some of this stuff and trigger an asthma event. It wouldn't be pleasant but it wouldn't be catastrophic.
The elevator car, on the other hand, probably shouldn't be made over a certain weight because if the ribbon is cut over the car, bad things could happen.
Southwest airlines has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to maximize its customer base so that every profitable customer who's going to behave responsibly (no terrorists please) gets served.
This maximizes profits and makes the shareholders happy. If Southwest management had either followed w3c standards and filled in their alt tags or Southwest airlines legal had put a requirement for their web consultants to follow best practices or at least current law, none of this would have happened.
In short, there's a perfectly free market way of looking at the situation and coming to the conclusion that Southwest has screwed up.
The major problem is that Southwest management (and every other corporate mangement under the sun) has decided not to make use of technology so that shareholders can exercise meaningful control over their companies. Thus you end up with an expensive, embarrassing lawsuit that would have been much more quickly, efficiently resolved if the owners could meaningfully manage their employees.
In this case, it seems like its just filling in alt tag values for the relevant images. This is almost tailor made for a victory as we're not really talking about a redesign. Coincidentally lynx users would also be thrilled.
When I went through the site, I couldn't find any pages with alt tags at all. Perhaps we're looking at different pages?
How hard is it to run every page through an html validator?
The company has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to maximize long term profits while staying true to the company charter. Management, when it fails to do that (and I think they are in this case) is not just serving customers poorly but their shareholders as well.
Actually, the true free market solution is for communications between customers and shareholders to be so easy that the shareholders would simply kick the idiotic manager in the tail for not just going back and filling in the freaking alt tags. The lawyer fees and bad pr from this is going to far exceed any cost of remediation whether or not Southwest airlines wins.
This is a slap in the face for shareholders by a generally well run company.
The web designers who created the website seem to have no understanding of either DTDs or image alt tags. If they went back and filled in those values, I think SW wouldn't be inaccessible to the blind.
It's just a very dumb situation that never should have gotten to the lawsuit level. SW's shareholders are being ill served by the situation.
call centers are more expensive and therefore charge more money for the identical trip. I believe that they (SouthWest) are just using graphic links without alt tags. This is just stupid design that can be easily fixed. I'm not too fond of using the court system to enforce good judgment but SouthWest decided they'd rather go to court than increase their revenues by filling in their alt tags.
Hello, in this case we're most likely talking about image links with no alt tags. In this particular instance, following w3c standards would likely have solved the whole issue without having a PR black eye and running up legal bills.
Go to the southwest site and just look at the code or run it through the w3c html validator.
I reviewed a couple of pages in the site. The main issues seem to be that there's no DTD (not a blind issue) and no image alt tags for navigation (very much a problem for the blind and for text browsers). SW hired bad web designers and they had clueless lawyers review the design contract. A simple clause requiring compliance with all relevant legal standards would have done the trick.
I think that the problem with the SouthWest site is simply that they use graphics links that don't specify their alt tags. At least when I ran it through the w3c's HTML validator that's the main complaint. This isn't rocket science, nor is it very hard to comply with. We're not talking about a lot of money and if their web guys had followed standard industry best practices there wouldn't have been a problem.
As a bonus, you make your site accessible via Lynx so it wouldn't just be a benefit to the blind.
I don't know who did the SW airlines site but they weren't served very well.
If you comply with W3C standards, you're going to be ADA compliant (AFAIK, IANAL). Most pages are already compliant because they (more or less) follow the standards.
Anybody who has been hiring professional web talent to do their commercial site should have been warned about this ever since the ADA was passed. There are legal obligations for any commercial communication, print, radio, TV, or web. If corporate legal passed on it they were very much in the wrong. I've been on projects where I've brought this up and was told "screw 'em, we don't care".
Now personally, I don't think that the ADA is particularly good law (partially for the compliance costs) but it *is* the law. The people who wrote the sites and maintained them had an obligation to be compliant. Lots of people have managed to do it just fine. Either get the law changed, comply with the law, or just be prepared to get legally screwed as part of civil disobedience. Contributing to the breakdown of the rule of law is just not an option as far as I'm concerned.
As airlines are moving to e-ticket and internet ticketing savings it's not a good commercial idea to shut out the disabled from those discounts and it's not legal in the US and many other countries.
OK, so we should immediately replace our current fossil fuel with a non-greenhouse gas emitting energy source, right?
Go Nuclear Power!
Everything else is just code for "make do with less energy useage" right now. Hydrogen is going to eventually be there, so will orbitally generated microwave beamed solar, as well as microturbine generators and a dozen other sources but none of them are here today. When it makes economic sense to switch, the US and the rest of the world will switch. Until then, hooray for oil!
The fact is that switching uneconomically shrinks our surplus. So what say the economically illiterate enviros. The problem is that this surplus is what is used to feed the starving, educate the poor ignorant, and various other good works (along with the usual self-indulgences). If you take away the surpluses, it's the hard up 3rd worlders that end up getting hit the hardest.
Actually, at ANWAR, they're projecting only using ice roads so, you don't even get to count the road area as 'despoiled'. The roads melt away during the non-winter months.
I suggest that you look inside some program bundles. There's a great deal *more* tweaking capability available than previous versions of the Mac OS allowed.
Speaking as an admin whose first mac was an original SE in 1987, I can tell you that Apple has always had people messing around with their undocumented internals and they've always punished them. They don't want people to get the idea that it's safe to muck around in the internals because if any significant dependencies develop, they lose their portability.
Why was the 68k->PPC transition so smooth? Because for the several years prior, Apple was doing exactly the same thing, changing their undocumented code around so that people wouldn't create a large installed base of code using undocumented APIs. Or, if they persisted in that foolishness, to create the expectation that every major OS upgrade was likely to cause a temporary break in this code until they re-did the reverse engineering to make it work again.
With Interface builder and the package standard for software, software is becoming more, not less modifiable. You used to have to download ResEdit to mess around with a dialog in an app, now you can open up the nib in Interface Builder and fairly easily add options, menus and commands. You can even add entirely new languages as the strings are supposed to be kept seperate. That creates an entirely new category of software tweaking as people can add Romanian or Urdu whether the original app maker has a clue about these languages or not.
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Actually, that just changes the attack point and complicates the construction engineering. If you can get a catastrophic bomb into or onto the climbing elevator you just blow it at the appropriate point (whether by pressure switch, remote control or timer). There is no engineering solution other than make it so cheap and profitable that we can easily put them up faster than the terrorists can take them down and we have enough security that such events happen infrequently enough that each elevator before it dies is profitable. The 1st one is likely to be much more expensive than any other as subsequent ones can be droped down into the gravity well (parts having been elevatored up beforehand) instead of pushed up out of the gravity well.
The expensive part is getting the material up. The first cargo up should be several spare reels so you can drop a full sized replacement down. Sure you might lose the cargo and the elevator car but dropping a cable down in one step is going to be much less expensive (and much quicker) than shooting a cable up and then building it up in many stages.
You could probably just have a control cabin attached to the bottom end with small rockets/jets to move the cable in place when it's lowered.
Then the control cabin crew could play the ultimate game of moon lander.
The PRC is nothing like pre-union America. The PRC is highly corrupt (on the level of you can't go about your normal life without regular bribes), they think forced abortion, sterilization, and infanticide are useful ways of solving their inability to supply enough material goods to their population, they have a prison slave labor system that is absolutely huge, and they have an illegitimate government that rests on violence, not the consent of the governed.
Yes, this is a repeat, and they pretty much have determined that this stuff will break up into small pieces with the biggest problem being breathing it in when it lands.
Yes, yes, the entire issue is much more complex in the general case but for the actual issue at hand, resolving the lawsuit, if SW had just filled in their alt tags *to standard* this lawsuit would never have happened. They didn't need to hire an accessibility guru, they didn't need to wade through the ADA, they just had to fill in their alt tags.
What's wrong with talking about Section 501, ADA, accessibility/usability guidelines et al is that it makes a mountain out of a molehill and makes it less likely that people are going to even try for compliance until forced to. If they know that a normal designer, with normal common sense just has to fill in these normal parts of the spec and he's likely to be ok with the blind textreaders and the lynx crowd, incrementally increasing the audience for almost no extra expenditure, a lot of people are going to do it.
Don't make big things out of simple things and you get more voluntary compliance. That, not some slavish worshiping of Tuftee (sp?) et al is what's needed.
I happen to agree with you that the ADA should be changed. Until it is, people should comply with it. Southwest should have complied with the request in any case because
1. They have a duty to maximize profits. By turning away text browsers like lynx and blind people who can't use their textreader browsers, they fail in that duty
2. They have a duty to create a positive image for the company because that affects point 1 above. Being mean to blind people in a petty way when they could have just developed to international standard and have everything just work is also a disservice to the shareholders.
3. The problem is that today, shareholders have such little practical control over their corporations that management is being reigned in by less efficient methods like the ADA which is constitutionally dubious at best.
The solution is to fix shareholder oversight. Then the ADA can quickly fall into that category of law that is bad but irrelevant. I can live with that.
No. a cut space elevator cable wouldn't maintain its structure but would break up and flutter down like a bunch of black confetti. The worst that would happen is you might breathe in some of this stuff and trigger an asthma event. It wouldn't be pleasant but it wouldn't be catastrophic.
The elevator car, on the other hand, probably shouldn't be made over a certain weight because if the ribbon is cut over the car, bad things could happen.
Southwest airlines has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to maximize its customer base so that every profitable customer who's going to behave responsibly (no terrorists please) gets served.
This maximizes profits and makes the shareholders happy. If Southwest management had either followed w3c standards and filled in their alt tags or Southwest airlines legal had put a requirement for their web consultants to follow best practices or at least current law, none of this would have happened.
In short, there's a perfectly free market way of looking at the situation and coming to the conclusion that Southwest has screwed up.
The major problem is that Southwest management (and every other corporate mangement under the sun) has decided not to make use of technology so that shareholders can exercise meaningful control over their companies. Thus you end up with an expensive, embarrassing lawsuit that would have been much more quickly, efficiently resolved if the owners could meaningfully manage their employees.
In this case, it seems like its just filling in alt tag values for the relevant images. This is almost tailor made for a victory as we're not really talking about a redesign. Coincidentally lynx users would also be thrilled.
Sometimes blind people do hire cabs.
When I went through the site, I couldn't find any pages with alt tags at all. Perhaps we're looking at different pages?
How hard is it to run every page through an html validator?
The company has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to maximize long term profits while staying true to the company charter. Management, when it fails to do that (and I think they are in this case) is not just serving customers poorly but their shareholders as well.
Actually, the true free market solution is for communications between customers and shareholders to be so easy that the shareholders would simply kick the idiotic manager in the tail for not just going back and filling in the freaking alt tags. The lawyer fees and bad pr from this is going to far exceed any cost of remediation whether or not Southwest airlines wins.
This is a slap in the face for shareholders by a generally well run company.
The web designers who created the website seem to have no understanding of either DTDs or image alt tags. If they went back and filled in those values, I think SW wouldn't be inaccessible to the blind.
It's just a very dumb situation that never should have gotten to the lawsuit level. SW's shareholders are being ill served by the situation.
Actually what wouldn't be available is Southwest's web only specials (most airlines have them).
call centers are more expensive and therefore charge more money for the identical trip. I believe that they (SouthWest) are just using graphic links without alt tags. This is just stupid design that can be easily fixed. I'm not too fond of using the court system to enforce good judgment but SouthWest decided they'd rather go to court than increase their revenues by filling in their alt tags.
That's just dumb.
Hello, in this case we're most likely talking about image links with no alt tags. In this particular instance, following w3c standards would likely have solved the whole issue without having a PR black eye and running up legal bills.
Go to the southwest site and just look at the code or run it through the w3c html validator.
I reviewed a couple of pages in the site. The main issues seem to be that there's no DTD (not a blind issue) and no image alt tags for navigation (very much a problem for the blind and for text browsers). SW hired bad web designers and they had clueless lawyers review the design contract. A simple clause requiring compliance with all relevant legal standards would have done the trick.
I think that the problem with the SouthWest site is simply that they use graphics links that don't specify their alt tags. At least when I ran it through the w3c's HTML validator that's the main complaint. This isn't rocket science, nor is it very hard to comply with. We're not talking about a lot of money and if their web guys had followed standard industry best practices there wouldn't have been a problem.
As a bonus, you make your site accessible via Lynx so it wouldn't just be a benefit to the blind.
I don't know who did the SW airlines site but they weren't served very well.
If you comply with W3C standards, you're going to be ADA compliant (AFAIK, IANAL). Most pages are already compliant because they (more or less) follow the standards.
That wouldn't necessarily trip up a text reader if they properly put in 'ALT' tags.
Anybody who has been hiring professional web talent to do their commercial site should have been warned about this ever since the ADA was passed. There are legal obligations for any commercial communication, print, radio, TV, or web. If corporate legal passed on it they were very much in the wrong. I've been on projects where I've brought this up and was told "screw 'em, we don't care".
Now personally, I don't think that the ADA is particularly good law (partially for the compliance costs) but it *is* the law. The people who wrote the sites and maintained them had an obligation to be compliant. Lots of people have managed to do it just fine. Either get the law changed, comply with the law, or just be prepared to get legally screwed as part of civil disobedience. Contributing to the breakdown of the rule of law is just not an option as far as I'm concerned.
As airlines are moving to e-ticket and internet ticketing savings it's not a good commercial idea to shut out the disabled from those discounts and it's not legal in the US and many other countries.
Actually, there's been a braille edition of Playboy available since at least 1970. At least Playboy says so.
OK, so we should immediately replace our current fossil fuel with a non-greenhouse gas emitting energy source, right?
Go Nuclear Power!
Everything else is just code for "make do with less energy useage" right now. Hydrogen is going to eventually be there, so will orbitally generated microwave beamed solar, as well as microturbine generators and a dozen other sources but none of them are here today. When it makes economic sense to switch, the US and the rest of the world will switch. Until then, hooray for oil!
The fact is that switching uneconomically shrinks our surplus. So what say the economically illiterate enviros. The problem is that this surplus is what is used to feed the starving, educate the poor ignorant, and various other good works (along with the usual self-indulgences). If you take away the surpluses, it's the hard up 3rd worlders that end up getting hit the hardest.
Actually, at ANWAR, they're projecting only using ice roads so, you don't even get to count the road area as 'despoiled'. The roads melt away during the non-winter months.
I suggest that you look inside some program bundles. There's a great deal *more* tweaking capability available than previous versions of the Mac OS allowed.
Speaking as an admin whose first mac was an original SE in 1987, I can tell you that Apple has always had people messing around with their undocumented internals and they've always punished them. They don't want people to get the idea that it's safe to muck around in the internals because if any significant dependencies develop, they lose their portability.
Why was the 68k->PPC transition so smooth? Because for the several years prior, Apple was doing exactly the same thing, changing their undocumented code around so that people wouldn't create a large installed base of code using undocumented APIs. Or, if they persisted in that foolishness, to create the expectation that every major OS upgrade was likely to cause a temporary break in this code until they re-did the reverse engineering to make it work again.
With Interface builder and the package standard for software, software is becoming more, not less modifiable. You used to have to download ResEdit to mess around with a dialog in an app, now you can open up the nib in Interface Builder and fairly easily add options, menus and commands. You can even add entirely new languages as the strings are supposed to be kept seperate. That creates an entirely new category of software tweaking as people can add Romanian or Urdu whether the original app maker has a clue about these languages or not.